“In twenty-four to forty-eight hours, probably: after we’ve analyzed the cultures from your nasal bacteria. But you have to remember, Christopher, that a negative swab doesn’t mean anthrax exposure hasn’t occurred.”
“What?”
“The test isn’t necessarily reliable.”
“Oh.”
“But unless your symptoms become more severe, and less nonspecific, I don’t see any need for a blood test.”
“Rrr-ight.”
“I’m going to put a swab stick in your other nostril now.”
There was a wet, sticky sound.
“Urgh…”
“Done,” said Dr. Ruth. “You can open your eyes now, Christopher.”
I opened them. Dr. Ruth, her leg still in plaster, was looking particularly bedraggled today. She probably saw it as one of the upsides of her job: not having to look good in front of ill people. She certainly didn’t have to look good in front of me. Terror had taken its toll on my appearance: I had gained weight from boozing in the White Horse, and my skin was popping and bubbling with stress-acne. I was drenched in sweat. I blamed it on Osama bin Laden.
Dr. Ruth dropped the swab sticks into a plastic bag, then put the bag into a tub labeled Special Handling for Anthrax.
“So, I’ve taken a culture from each naris,” she explained. “If you’ve inhaled anthrax we should see it in the results. Unless, of course, the test fails. But at this stage we probably shouldn’t worry too much.”
“Jolly good,” I said, with a frown.
“Don’t forget to call tomorrow,” she said, hobbling out of the room.
“Not much chance of that,” I replied.
When I got home, I decided to file a Times expenses form. At the top of it I wrote ANTHRAX TEST: $100. Then I consulted a separate booklet to find out the correct “cost code” for the item. I considered putting it under “Postage: 7231,” but decided instead on “Other Office Expense: 7299.” Perhaps I’d get a pay raise, I thought, out of pity. I should have known better, however: Editors don’t reward journalists for being in danger, on the assumption that they enjoy danger because it produces better stories. It was the Bruce Almighty syndrome. And I was Bruce.
Time passed, and anthrax refused to go away. It soon became clear that whoever was sending it in the mail had something against journalists as well as politicians and postal workers. Anthrax-infected letters turned up at CBS, ABC, the New York Times, the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and in random postal facilities up and down the eastern seaboard. The bacteria itself wasn’t the cocainelike white powder I had imagined. Maj. Gen. John Parker, an army bioweapons specialist, described the substance sent to NBC as coarse and brown, “like Purina Dog Chow.” I almost wished it did look like cocaine. It seemed a bit more glamorous than being killed by ordinary dog food.
I decided to take practical measures to protect myself. On the advice of Ken Alibek, a former Soviet germ warfare scientist, whom I saw interviewed on Fox News, I started ironing all my mail. This, according to Dr. Alibek, would kill any stray anthrax spores. The decontamination procedure didn’t go well at first. In fact, I ended up setting my phone bill on fire, triggering the elaborate smoke alarm system at 666 Greenwich Street. Eventually I perfected the technique, putting a damp cloth between the envelope and the iron. This, Dr. Alibek said, would kill even more germs. Unfortunately, I couldn’t iron the parcels that surrounded me at 1211.
The first anthrax-tainted letters, it emerged, had been mailed in Trenton, New Jersey, on September 18, exactly one week after the World Trade Center’s destruction. Another batch, containing higher-quality “weapons grade” spores, had been sent on October 9. Even James Bone, who had remained annoyingly composed during September 11, started to sound worried: They might have had burning buildings when he was a war reporter in Afghanistan, but they certainly didn’t have any weaponized anthrax. The fact that Jack Potter, the postmaster general, had held a press conference to announce the creation of an anthrax task force and to claim that 680 million parcels were being tested every day was hardly reassuring. The postal workers at 1211 had taken matters into their own hands. Benjamin, the messenger who sat next to me, started showing up for work in a homemade biohazard suit, black Wellington boots, and kitchen gloves. My Sixth Avenue office began to feel more like a laboratory than a news bureau—with me being the unlucky chimp. Finally I went online to buy Cipro. I abandoned the idea, however, when I saw the price: sixty pills were now $3,999. That was when I decided to ask Dr. Ruth for a test. The Times agreed kindly to pay for it.
It all seemed so… unfair. While Dr. Ruth was shoving plastic swabs up my nose, my friend Glen was standing on the deck of the USS Enterprise, somewhere in the northern Indian Ocean. He had been sent there by The Times to watch American warplanes launch their first attacks on Afghanistan. I imagined Glen, his sunglasses on, white shirt unbuttoned, and cream linen jacket flapping in the breeze, taking notes as the F/A-18 Hornets howled overhead. It seemed both glamorous and acceptably safe. Part of me wished I could, for once, be on the giving end of an attack.
I should have been more careful about what I wished for.
What with the burning skyscrapers at the bottom of my street, the carcinogenic fumes in my apartment, the biological hazard at my office, and the adrenaline seeping out of my pores, late October wasn’t a great time for me to be entertaining visitors from England. Nevertheless, my sister and her fiancé had bought tickets to New York long before September 11, and nothing short of a fifty-megaton nuke going off in Times Square was going to make them cancel. I was, in fact, deeply impressed with their bravery. If it had been me, I would have begged Virgin Atlantic to reroute my ticket somewhere warm, safe, and as far away as possible from Lower Manhattan: Hawaii, perhaps. Yet Catherine and Tom were due to land at John F. Kennedy Airport on October 20, just eight days after anthrax was found in the Rockefeller Center. They would stay a week. Neither of them had ever been to the United States before, and both were looking forward to the trip as their last holiday before getting married.
Since September 11, I had become dangerously fixated with America’s hysterical twenty-four-hour news channels—in particular, the scrolling headlines that CNN had started to display at the bottom of the screen—and so I was looking forward to some relief in the form of my sister, a down-to-earth schoolteacher, two years my senior. Of the two of us, Catherine had shown the most early promise. She was incandescently bright; got straight A’s for everything she did; and also earned money throughout high school with a grueling hotel job. My idea of a hard day’s work, meanwhile, was getting out of bed. Catherine, who is tall and slim with an explosion of dark curls that make her look like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, graduated with a degree in Victorian English literature, the ultimate antivocational qualification. Then she moved to London to work for a record company. It didn’t take long, however, for my sister to realize that a life of champagne and limousines wasn’t for her, so she moved back north to do a “real” job: teaching. It was in Alnwick, the town where we both went to high school, that Catherine bumped into Tom, the teenage rebel she used to sit next to in math lessons. Tom, it turned out, had skipped college and gotten a job in a fish factory. By the time my sister met him, he was running the fish factory. Needless to say, Tom, a physically imposing Geordie who negotiated with North Sea fishermen all day, was way too macho to cancel a trip to New York City over something as trifling as germ warfare.