Later, my mobile phone managed to connect for the first time since 9:00 A.M. I talked to my dad, who told me I was lucky to have witnessed such a historic event: I could tell, however, that he was just trying to find something positive to say. He was also trying to hide the fact that he was hugely relieved. My mother said that she and my sister had cried all day. I spoke briefly to Alana, who was still with her own dad. She said she would come over to the apartment later. Then I got through to James Bone, who had written the day’s lead story. I found his cheery tone both hugely reassuring and unbearably irritating. “This reminds me of Afghanistan,” he said casually. Bone, of course, was a real war correspondent. He hadn’t legged it.
After another few restless hours in the apartment, I decided to take a walk, but there was a police blockade at Fourteenth Street. No one without ID was being allowed in or out. On my way home I saw a Vietnam veteran draped in an Old Glory flag standing on the corner of Seventh and West Thirteenth. He was shouting; crying; pleading—I made out something about God and the “fucking Arabs,” but his words didn’t form coherent sentences. It didn’t matter: Words had been put out of business on this particular day. I headed south and the terrible fog thickened; my walk broke into a run. A light rain of ash made my contact lenses sting. American flags were draped over the brownstone buildings on Charles Street: Christ, I thought, I’m in a foreign country in a time of war. The U.S. had never really felt foreign to me: It did now.
The same thought had clearly struck others: a Muslim cabdriver, who had probably escaped his own war-torn country to come to New York, was buying an I LOVE THE USA bumper sticker from the Asian-owned newsstand on Hudson Street and West Tenth. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.
The Italian restaurant on Christopher and Washington Streets had wrapped its outdoor tables in plastic and put its winter snow canopy over the front door—but there were still people inside, eating and drinking, as ash rained against the windows. It seemed odd to order pasta and swig Chianti with a blazing mass grave only a dozen or so blocks away. But then, what else were we supposed to do? Sit at home, sober and hungry, waiting for the next jetliner to hit? I ducked into my monolithic redbrick apartment building and felt relieved to be inside.
Back in the apartment, I logged on to The Times’s website—I couldn’t stand another second of television. It was about 3:00 A.M. in London, and the first of tomorrow’s articles were going online. The September 12 edition was turning out to be an almost unbearable mix of the world as it was, and the world as it had become: “Clingfilm Attack Lover Jailed for Five Years” was next to “She Sat at Her Desk and Watched an Airliner Flying Straight at Her.” I skimmed through several other articles—all probably written before lunchtime on Tuesday in London—but developed a fixation with a single item, halfway down the nib column. It read:
Some like it hot: Thousands of volunteers from the Women’s Institute and Women’s Royal Voluntary Service have knitted the world’s longest scarf—22 miles. The scarf, which would cover two football pitches if laid out, took five years to make and involved 500 million stitches.
How long would it be, I asked myself, before another story like this makes it into The Times? Weeks, months… years?
It’s 11 P.M. I’m lying on my mattress, sweating and tangled in the blue cotton sheets, waiting for Alana to arrive. I would phone, but the phones don’t work. Nothing bloody works, apart from cable television. All 897 channels have become one: the terror channel. I don’t want to watch it. Not again—not ever. My apartment looks much the same as it did yesterday; nothing else does. Outside, there are pedestrians wearing gas masks. The amber fuzz of the streetlamps through the terrible, stinking fog makes Manhattan look like Victorian London. The fog, with all the microscopic particles of horror within it, is being carried up the wind tunnel of Greenwich Street from downtown, which has today been renamed “ground zero” by the news networks. That, apparently, is what scientists used to call the impact zone of a thermonuclear bomb. Perhaps, as the skateboarder said, this is World War III.
Today Manhattan became a target in a war no one knew had been declared. And today I became an accidental war correspondent. I can’t get the smell out of my clothes. And the NYPD officer’s words are still trapped in my head: “Get the fuck out of here!” His handgun was raised and his face was stretched and twisted into a drenched mask of panic. But his scream was silenced by the tsunami of smoke and debris crashing toward Chambers Street. “How do you know it’s over?” he mouthed. “Go home! Go home!” There was a gunshot, or perhaps the sound of steel and glass hitting concrete, and then the simultaneous realization of several hundred people that they were about to die. That was when the running started.
I keep having to wash my face and spit gobs of grit and dust and God-knows-what-else into the sink. I snapped and bought a carton of cigarettes an hour or so ago; cancer can try as hard as it wants, but it’s not going to scare any New Yorkers today. Let’s see if civilization survives tomorrow first—then the cigarette smokers can start worrying about their ruined lungs.
Still no word from Karen. I reflexively dial her home and mobile numbers, but it can’t or won’t connect. I call her office again and listen to a cheerful recorded voice telling me the number’s temporarily unavailable. How about permanently unavailable, I think, along with an entire zip code of southern Manhattan? I imagine Karen’s melted desk in the inferno still blazing less than a mile and a half from my bed. From Greenwich Street, the floodlights erected by the rescue workers look like a distant rip in the space-time continuum, a blinding white doorway to another dimension. Even from this distance I can hear the groans of the machinery. Karen would probably have been late for work, I reassure myself. She always was—is.
Alana is on her way from Midtown: Fortieth and Lexington. It’s close to Grand Central; I hope she’s okay. Maybe that’ll be next? It’s hard not to speculate. I haven’t seen her since I left for England two weeks ago. I can barely believe I landed at John F. Kennedy Airport last night. Alana must be walking or taking the subway: The cabdrivers have all gone home, and who can blame them? Who’d want to be an Iranian or Afghan—prayer beads hanging from the rearview mirror; the Holy Qur’an on the passenger seat—picking up angry Americans on the streets of Manhattan tonight? There’s a gospel song playing on the clock radio next to my bed: “I keep on falling,” goes the lyric. The bass notes make the radio’s casing rattle. I close my eyes and think of black shadows against blue sky and reflective glass.
7
BACILLUS ANTHRACIS