I was glad they were coming. I didn’t, however, enjoy the thought of having to give up my studio apartment, which was kept so fastidiously clean and tidy it was clearly rented by someone with an advanced-stage anxiety disorder. The thought of it being cluttered with three people was too much to handle, so I had arranged to stay at Alana’s two-thousand-dollar-a-month wardrobe next to Grand Central. The biggest downside to Alana’s place, aside from its size, was that it was literally built on top of a waste disposal plant. This meant that garbage trucks regularly dumped three-ton loads down a circular metal chute that fed into the basement. The noise was just about bearable during the day; at 3:00 A.M., as I tussled with the sheets, it nearly killed me.
My relationship with Alana, meanwhile, had become strained after September 11. Alana, a zealous liberal, seemed more angry with the Bush administration’s response to September 11 than the attacks themselves. I, on the other hand, saw nothing wrong with the war in Afghanistan, the X-ray machine outside 1211, and all the other borderline-paranoid security initiatives. After seeing what Osama bin Laden had done to Lower Manhattan and the workers in the World Trade Center—not to mention the fact that the bastard had nearly killed me—I wanted Bush to “smoke him out,” and I didn’t care how cheesy or uncool his cowboy talk sounded. Perhaps this was just another manifestation of my cowardice. But wasn’t it insane to carry on as normal, knowing that the September 11 hijackers had used every flaw in U.S. security to kill three thousand people? Alana didn’t agree. “If we change our lifestyles, it means the terrorists have won,” she said. But if we didn’t change our lifestyles, I thought, and we were attacked again, wouldn’t that also mean that they had won? And, unlike our imperceptible loss of liberty under the Patriot Act, it wouldn’t be an intellectual or metaphorical victory. It would be a stolen Soviet nuke taking out Boston, or a 747 flown into a reactor.
As for anthrax, I wasn’t entirely convinced that it had anything to do with Osama bin Laden. It was the victims, as well as the way the attacks were carried out, that were suspicious. Would the al-Qaeda chief really choose NBC, or a tawdry Florida tabloid, as his first targets? His attacks, as revealed on September 11, were more cinematic than that. He would have released a billion spores of anthrax into the New York subway system or pumped them into the ventilation ducts of Congress. Anthrax, I feared, was the diabolical crime of an all-American lunatic.
On the morning of Friday, October 19, the day before the family visit, I was in a better mood than usual. The whole anthrax business, I thought, would soon go away. Dr. Ruth’s nasal swab had turned up negative, and no one I knew had died. How bad could a few stupid anthrax spores be anyway? The fact that Catherine and Tom hadn’t canceled their trip made me feel even more confident. On Sixth Avenue, I bought a Starbucks cappuccino, a Danish pastry, and an armful of newspapers, then dumped them all on the X-ray conveyor belt outside 1211. After a security guard nodded at my passport, I pushed myself through the revolving doors, picked up my breakfast and reading material on the other side, and headed for the office.
By the time the elevator reached the fourth floor, however, I was paralyzed. The doors opened. “You gettin’ off here, honey?” sang the black woman behind me. Through one of the glass office doors I could see the white-gloved receptionist starring at me. The elevator doors clattered shut. “No,” I croaked. “I’m not.” We pinged upward to the seventh floor, and the black woman squeezed past me.
The doors closed.
I stood by myself, the elevator not moving. I was transfixed by the front page of the newspaper in my hands. The overhead fluorescent lamp burned into my flushed forehead. I gulped back a mouthful of salty vomit.
The front page of the New York Post featured a picture of a woman I recognized, making an obscene gesture with a bandaged middle finger. The headline above her head read: “Anthrax This.” The woman, Johanna Huden, was a New York Post assistant. She had become infected with anthrax and was displaying her diseased finger. “When you work for a newspaper, you’re part of the story, but not too close,” she wrote. “This morning I am the story… I’m a victim of germ warfare. Anthrax is in my blood. Thanks, Osama.” I knew what she meant about being too close to the story. The accompanying article said that Huden had caught the disease from a letter mailed in New Jersey on September 18. The letter contained brown gunk, along with the following message: “09-11-01, This is next, take penacilin now, death to America, death to Israel, Allah is Great.” The letter would have sat next to my desk, possibly for days, before being taken upstairs by one of the messengers. Perhaps it was one of the letters I had rummaged through every day, looking for my own mail. Perhaps I had anthrax. And what about the mail room workers who sat next to me? I thought about Bob Stevens. I wanted to cry.
I thumped the G button and closed my eyes as the elevator sank downward. I stumbled out into the lobby still clutching the Post, my stack of other newspapers, Danish pastry, and cappuccino. Outside, I glanced upward and saw a terrifying headline scrolling across the news ticker: “Post Traumatic Stress?—Fourth City Anthrax Case Hits New York Post!” That’s it, I thought: I could never go back to the veal-fattening pen again. If I survived anthrax, I would work from 666 Greenwich Street. I would become a terror telecommuter.
Catherine and Tom touched down just before midnight the following day. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them about the attack on the Post; the other eleven anthrax cases in the so-called “media mailing”; or the twenty-eight workers in the U.S. Senate who, tests confirmed, had been exposed to the disease. Neither did I mention the nasal swab that Dr. Ruth had given me. My sister and her fiancé both looked tired as we drove from JFK Airport back to Manhattan in Alana’s battered, turquoise Dodge Neon. I could hardly imagine the culture shock they must have felt as we turned onto Greenwich Street, ashes still blowing upwind from the eerie white glow of ground zero. In spite of their jet lag, however, Catherine and Tom managed to enjoy a cheeseburger and a couple of glasses of beer in the White Horse before going to bed.
The next morning, Tom was off-color—quite a feat, given that his skin is usually a pale shade of very white. We bought a pricey brunch in the meatpacking district, but Tom had no appetite. Dismissing his malaise as jet lag, Tom, who prides himself on never getting ill or seeing a doctor, went to bed. By Monday he was still there; moaning, sweating, and coughing up blood and phlegm. Catherine, who had never seen her fiancé so ill, acted as though it was nothing but a normal bout of flu. I contemplated calling Dr. Ruth, decided against it, then looked up the symptoms of pulmonary anthrax on the Centers for Disease Control’s website.
This is what it said:
Inhalation: Initial symptoms may resemble a common cold. After several days, symptoms may progress to severe breathing problems and shock. Inhalation anthrax is usually fatal. Direct person-to-person spread of anthrax is extremely unlikely to occur.
Then I consulted my notes on Bob Stevens:
The couple were driving to North Carolina when Bob started shivering. His face was flushed. The next day Stevens and his wife drove back to their home in Lantana. He wore a sweater all the way. Mrs. Stevens was woken up in the night by her husband vomiting, and she took him to JFK Medical Center. Stevens fell into a coma. Three days later, he died from inhalation anthrax.