In Rockefeller Plaza, bemused tourists were staring up at the gigantic video screen on the side of the NBC building. It was spewing out headlines, including one that read “Anthrax in New York: Suspicious Package Found in Rockefeller Center.” Office workers, who clearly knew nothing about the story, looked confused as they strolled out into the gentle autumn sun for lunch. They were greeted with somber news anchors clutching branded microphones. Sixth Avenue, meanwhile, had become gridlocked with a motorcade of exhaust-belching satellite trucks.
I approached a man in a gray polyester suit who was pacing inside NBC’s lobby. His eyes widened as I told him about the disease—he hadn’t seen the video screen. “I can’t believe that my mother is sitting in Atlanta, probably watching this on television, knowing that her son is in the Rockefeller Center meeting his brother for lunch,” he said, wiping his brow. It was strange, I thought, that the image of his mother watching him at the site of an anthrax attack was more scary than actually being at the site of anthrax attack. I asked for his name, but he waved me away. “Shit,” I heard him say to himself as he fumbled with the flip-top of his mobile phone. “Anthrax. Shit.” I lingered for a few seconds. “You know what the crazy thing is,” I heard him stage-whisper into the phone. “In the Marines, NBC stands for ‘nuclear, biological, and chemical.’ Yeah, dude, no shit. How about we do lunch in Atlanta?”
I was thinking about how surreal it was to be covering a story only a few yards from my own desk when I heard the voice of Rudy Giuliani behind me. I spun on my heels but couldn’t see the New York mayor, who since September 11 had become a global celebrity with his pale, corrugated forehead, pinched features, and circular professor’s spectacles. In the world’s imagination, Giuliani’s brow would forever be coated with the fine white dust of ground zero. The mayor, I soon realized, was inside the NBC building giving an impromptu press conference. I probably should have been there—not, of course, that I would have dared venture any further into the building. I could hear his voice coming from a speaker somewhere inside one of the satellite trucks. “What I’m going to do now is from an excess of caution,” the mayor’s voice echoed. “One floor of the building is going to be closed down.” Rockefeller Plaza emptied. Even the Japanese tourists understood that something was very, very wrong. They, of course, had already experienced their own domestic terror: the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that killed 12 and injured another 6,000.
I started speed-walking around the building’s perimeter, hunting for someone to interview. Inside a doorway I saw a man in his twenties wearing baggy Ralph Lauren jeans and smoking a cigarette. His name was Scott Bueller and he worked for the wardrobe department of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. A week earlier Giuliani had been the show’s celebrity guest. “I’m here to give you permission to laugh,” Giuliani had said. “And if you don’t—I’ll have you arrested.”
I wondered if we still had permission to laugh.
“What d’you think about the anthrax?” I asked Scott, lighting my own cigarette. As I did so, I was reminded of a comment once made by the late comedian Bill Hicks, after someone told him that smoking would ruin his sense of smell. “I live in New York City,” Hicks scoffed. “Why the hell do I want my sense of smell back? Yeah, great, I can smell a dead guy!” After September 11, of course, New Yorkers could smell three thousand dead guys. And jet fuel. And now anthrax, too.
“They’re trying to play it down big time in the building,” Scott confided as I scribbled in my spiral-bound reporter’s notebook. He seemed relaxed, but I noticed that his hands were shaking. “They’re saying that there’s no danger… but I don’t think anyone’s buying it. It’s kind of hard on Miss Barrymore because she’s not from New York and she hasn’t had to live with this shit.”
My pen slid to a halt in a blue puddle.
“Miss Barrymore?” I asked.
“Yeah. She’s our guest this week.”
“Drew Barrymore?”
Scott nodded, then sucked hard on his cigarette.
In an instant I stopped worrying about contracting anthrax. This was a good story: An A-list Hollywood star was in the NBC building at the time of an anthrax attack. Somehow it made me feel better that a celebrity was going through the same thing that I was. Surely this would be front page.
“Is she recording a show right now?” I asked.
“No… she’s rehearsing,” came the slow, deliberate response. “It’s called Saturday Night Live. That’s because it’s, er, live.”
I winced, but pressed on.
“How did she react?”
I raised my pen, hoping Scott wouldn’t decide suddenly that talking to me might put his wardrobe career at risk.
“She kinda freaked out.”
She freaked out!
“It freaks me out, too,” he added. “I’ve only been to the mail room once and it was two weeks ago. Now I’m asking myself: Why did I go?”
I hurriedly thanked Scott and started running back toward my own mail room, aka The Times’s bureau. I knew what Scott meant: Part of me wished I’d never gone back to 1211 after September 11. What if there was anthrax in the veal-fattening pen, hidden in an envelope addressed to the editor? Perhaps I would end up becoming America’s second bioterror fatality.
As I was about to cross Sixth Avenue, I noticed another smoker outside the NBC building, this time an older woman with unkempt hair and deep welts where nicotine fumes had freeze-framed her laughter.
“I’m not talking to any fuckin’ reporters,” she said.
“Aren’t you scared?” I asked.
“Oh, honey, come on,” she laughed, flicking ash in my direction. “I’m a smoker. Do I look as though I care what I inhale?”
Only in New York, I thought, would someone standing outside the scene of a confirmed bioterror attack give that response.
Later, I wondered if war journalism was really as bad as I had imagined. Buzzing from the Barrymore scoop, I didn’t really feel nervous about anthrax anymore. It seemed as though the real world, even the real world in a biowar zone, felt safer than it looked on dramatically edited twenty-four-hour news footage. Or perhaps I was just losing my war virginity. I called the foreign desk and told them about Barrymore. I listened to more Chopin as they disgested the news.
Then: “Chr-is?”
“Yes?”
“Thousand words please on ‘I saw anthrax scare celebrity.’”
The phone went dead.
I closed my eyes, grimaced, and felt cold plastic enter my right nostril.
“This shouldn’t take long,” said Dr. Ruth.
“When will I find out if I’m dying?” I asked.