“Business new-ews?”
This was how Martin Barrow answered the phone. He would often claim that he was the world’s best-paid receptionist.
“Martin?”
“Hello Chris. Having fun?”
I marveled at the power of Barrow’s sarcasm, and at the fact that it could travel thirty-five hundred miles down a telephone line and emerge, with 100 percent of its original force, into my right ear.
“Martin… they’ve found some spores of, erm, anthrax in the Rockefeller Center.”
“Really? Wow…”
I could hear Barrow’s keyboard clacking. He was distracted. It was close to deadline; Barrow was shoveling hard.
There was a fuzz of transatlantic static, then more clacking.
I tried again. “Martin: the Rockefeller Center in New York. On Avenue of the Americas. Where I work.”
The clacking stopped.
“N-ohh—really?”
There was a pregnant silence as Barrow decided how best to respond.
“Chri-is,” he began. “Wherever you go, bad things seem to happen.”
Now I could hear chuckling in the background.
Barrow was on a roll. “First it’s falling buildings; next it’s biological weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “Next time you come to London, Chris, could you, like, let us know in advance. We might all take a holiday.” He let out a delighted nasal yelp followed by a schoolboyish giggle. I could hear the other staff on the business desk guffawing in the background. It was like listening to the “morning crew” on a radio talk show through my telephone’s earpiece.
“Martin. This isn’t fucking funny.”
I knew, of course, that this was Barrow’s way of trying to calm me down. But it wasn’t working. Nothing, in fact, would work.
Barrow coughed.
“Sorry, Chris. Where has it been found? Anyone infected?”
Me: “It’s in the NBC building, opposite 1211. The victim’s name is Erin O’Connor, she’s the assistant to Tom Brokaw, the news anchor. CNBC is saying she got the skin version after opening a letter.”
I glanced around at the landfill of mail surrounding me. I felt a shudder. Some of the New York Post’s messengers were watching the television over my right shoulder: they looked blank; uncomprehending.
“Anthrax in New York,” was the CNBC screen caption.
“Okay, Chris,” said Barrow. “Hold tight.”
He hung up.
Perhaps Barrow was right. Perhaps bad things did happen to me. For a journalist, of course, this could be considered a good thing. Take the film Bruce Almighty, starring Jim Carrey. The hero is Bruce Nolan, a hapless television reporter for Channel 7 news, who is dispatched by his editor to cover a dull story about the biggest cookie ever to be baked in the town of Buffalo. Bruce curses God and, in a curious form of revenge, God gives Bruce divine powers. So what does Bruce, the failed hack, do with his powers? On his next assignment, during an interview with a contestant in a fancy-dress “chili cook-off,” Bruce summons an asteroid to fall out of the sky and land in a blazing fireball yards from where he is standing, turning his report into an “eyewitness” scoop. Bruce becomes “Mr. Exclusive” and is promoted to anchor.
This, of course, is a perfect demonstration of the inverted logic of the news reporter and, even more so, the war correspondent: Safety is bad, danger is good. It was a good thing I was nearly killed by the falling south tower of the World Trade Center, and a bad thing that Wapshott was trapped on the QE2. This much was clear from the gloating of The Times’s archrival, the Daily Telegraph. “The new New York correspondent for The Times spent the first week of the crisis chugging around the Atlantic on board the QE2, arriving in America just as the story moved to the Middle East,” the paper sneered in its Media Diary column. “Last week, his byline appeared on only three stories, leading some to worry about his current whereabouts. We can only pray that the cruise wasn’t a round trip.”
There was, I suppose, some logic to the antilogic of wanting to be near “the story,” even when the story involved mass destruction, some of which might destroy you. But it didn’t feel like a good thing to be in New York on, or after, September 11. After all, there were nearly three thousand dead; the world’s most powerful economy was crippled; and the War on Terror had begun. As I sat at home, spitting out the carcinogenic dust that had cartwheeled upwind from ground zero, being stranded in the choppy waters of the Atlantic seemed like a good idea. Besides, what little journalistic capital I had earned with my “I saw people fall to death” story, I immediately spent with a second one, wrongly identifying the impact zone of the south tower as the offices of the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Then, of course, there was the state of my mental health. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the father and his little boy, sitting on the curb. They were reading nursery rhymes together, black shapes falling behind them. And I heard the police officer shout: “How do you know it’s over?”
Perhaps it wasn’t over.
At least my friend Karen had survived. She was, as I suspected, late for work. She ended up getting off the subway before the World Trade Center stop after being warned of delays. She emerged into the sunlight to see her office, along with her computer and Palm Pilot, destroyed by a terrorist who lived sixty-seven hundred miles away. Within a week her company had relocated to New Jersey.
For the first two weeks after September 11, adrenaline kept me going. My adrenal glands, useful for the first time in my adult life, had given me an almost transcendental energy. I felt superhuman, better than I had since leaving London. My body had finally disengaged from “flight” mode. I was borderline cheerful. Then, inevitably, it ended. Sleep became a wrestle with soaked bedsheets; I developed a terrible bowel pain. Wearily, I resumed my Dr. Ruth habit.
It was October 12 when I called Barrow to tell him about anthrax. There were, I suppose, two ways to look at it: first, as another huge story on my home turf; second, as another way in which I could die horribly. I veered, inevitably, toward the latter view. And, to be honest, I’d had enough of nearly dying horribly. It was, after all, only a month and a day since the twin towers had been demolished, not, as it turned out, by Saddam Hussein, but by a Saudi terrorist, Osama bin Laden. And I wasn’t in the mood for any more terror. Or for any more war reporting.
I already knew all about anthrax. In Florida it had killed Bob Stevens, a sixty-three-year-old photo editor at The Sun, a supermarket tabloid. That gave him the unhappy distinction of being the first American anthrax fatality since 1976, and the first person on U.S. soil to die in a bioterror attack (Stevens was actually born in Britain, but had emigrated to the U.S. in 1974). His terrifyingly swift deterioration from feeling fluey to lying in the Boca Raton morgue was a result of him contracting the inhalation, or pulmonary, form of the disease, as opposed to the less dangerous skin variety. I knew from my extensive Internet-based research that skin anthrax, also known as cutaneous anthrax, could be treated effectively after infection with Cipro, a powerful antibiotic. Inhalation anthrax, however, seemed to be in a disease-league of its own. Its mortality rate of nearly 100 percent was right up there with AIDS, late-stage bubonic plague, or marsh fever. It operated, however, on an even more hectic schedule: It could have the whole thing wrapped up in ten days. Anthrax was a hard worker. There just wasn’t much work for it to do. Until, that is, Bob Stevens was wheeled into the emergency room of the JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, Florida, at 2:00 A.M. on October 2. The chart clipped to his stretcher described him as “not oriented to person, place, or time.”