At that moment, Tom, his face flushed, hauled himself out of bed, crawled into the bathroom, and vomited. He reemerged, put on a sweater, and got back into bed. “Don’t worry about me,” he grunted. “I’m grand.”
No one, of course, mentioned the A-word. Until, that is, Catherine and I went to Macy’s on Monday. In the cab on the way back to 666 Greenwich Street, the Muslim driver, who was surrounded by every conceivable kind of patriotic “USA” merchandise, including a six-foot Old Glory flag tied to his radio antenna, was listening to a news show. An item about anthrax came on. “This just in,” said the announcer. “Yet another New York Post employee has contracted anthrax. The male victim, who has not been named, works in the mail room of the tabloid’s Sixth Avenue headquarters. A spokeswoman for the Post said the worker tested positive for the skin version of the disease after noticing a blister on his finger.” Outside the window of the cab, Midtown Manhattan dissolved into a blur. I felt a sharp pain in my lower abdomen. Surely this could not be happening.
I looked at Catherine.
My sister looked at me.
We were both thinking the same thing: Had spores of anthrax from 1211 somehow infected my future brother-in-law?
Jesus Christ: Had I killed Tom?
The worst-case scenario was entirely plausible. The day after Tom and Catherine arrived at JFK, Thomas Morris Jr., a fifty-five-year-old parcel handler in Washington, died after failing to convince anyone that he had pulmonary anthrax. The day after that, another postal worker died, this time Joseph Curseen, forty-seven, also based in Washington. Over the same long weekend, another two Postal Service employees were hospitalized with anthrax, and nine others were wheeled into emergency rooms with anthraxlike symptoms. The authorities, in a panic, tested twenty-two hundred people who handled mail for a living. The FBI, meanwhile, in an effort to hunt down the bioterrorist, put photographs of his, or her, letters online. But some of the more disturbing aspects of the anthrax attacks would not emerge until November. For example, the fact that a sample taken from the plastic evidence bag containing an unopened letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy contained at least two lethal doses of anthrax. Scientists believed the letter itself contained enough spores to send one hundred thousand to the crematorium. Then, of course, there were the unsettling cases of victims killed by minuscule traces of anthrax cross-contamination. These included Ottilie Lundgren, a ninety-four-year-old retiree from Oxford, Connecticut, and Kathy Nguyen, sixty-one, an office worker at the Manhattan Eye, Ear, and Throat Hospital.
It was probably just as well that I didn’t know anything about all this as Tom lay flat-out in my bed, his sweat seeping into the mattress. Catherine and I tried hard to pretend it was just another normal flu season. Our efforts to convince Tom to see Dr. Ruth, meanwhile, were futile. “Not going… bloody doctor…” were the only words we could make out from within the sopping bedsheets.
I spent hours online reading about the latest anthrax theories. The most convincing explanation was that the bioterrorist was a Timothy McVeigh–style right-winger who wanted to scare the American public into enforcing racist anti-immigration laws. The first batch of letters, according to this theory, were sent to The Sun and NBC to create public hysteria (and to make a link with September 11, because The Sun’s office was near where the hijackers had taken flight lessons). The second batch was probably a reaction to the muted news coverage of the first. After all, most news channels initially blamed Bob Stevens’s death on him catching anthrax outdoors. But whoever was sending the killer dog food shouldn’t have worried so much. They certainly had the full attention of this particular media representative.
By the end of the week, Tom wasn’t dead. For the first time in his life, it seemed, he had come down with a hospital-grade upper respiratory infection, probably brought on by working sixteen-hour days, then spending seven hours in Virgin Atlantic’s economy class. Exhausted and disappointed with her ruined holiday, Catherine hauled Tom back to JFK and boarded a plane to London. By the time their Boeing 747 reached Heathrow, half the passengers probably had Tom’s hypervirus. Perhaps some of them thought they had caught pulmonary anthrax in New York.
The second New York Post employee to get anthrax turned out to be Benjamin, the messenger in the cubicle next to mine, who had started appearing at 1211 in a homemade biohazard suit. His kitchen gloves, apparently, were not enough to protect him. Luckily, he contracted only cutaneous anthrax. There was also a third skin anthrax victim at the Post: Mark Cunningham, an editorial page editor. All three recovered after taking Cipro. By the end of the year a total of twenty-two Americans, from Florida to Connecticut, would develop anthrax infections. Five of them, all inhalation victims, would die horribly from the wormlike bacteria. I went back to the veal-fattening pen only once, to find that my desk had been virtually destroyed by a cleanup crew from the Centers for Disease Control. The Aussies, who had refused to budge from the fourth floor of 1211, told me that “the decontaminators” had turned up looking like Apollo 13 astronauts. At least, I thought, the veal-fattening pen might have been vacuumed for the first time in a decade. No one else from The Times had been to the office either: James Bone worked from the United Nations building, and Nick Wapshott, who had eventually turned up in New York after being diverted on the QE2 to Boston, preferred to work from home. By December the New York bureau had been closed.
The weeks leading up to Christmas were the lowest I had ever been. Alana and I decided to go ahead with a long weekend in Miami we had planned for late October. At the airport, thousands of cars stood unrented in the parking lot: It was the first time I really understood the scale of the damage caused to the economy by September 11. Getting through security took hours. The plane journey itself—my first since the trip from London to JFK on September 10—was awful. For a start, the stink of jet fuel took me right back to Murray Street. Once on board, there was no food or drink. Everyone was popping Xanax and looking at each other with unapologetic fear and discrimination. Indians and Mexicans had a hard time; as for Arabs, they might as well have just driven. The newspapers were full of reports about airline passengers refusing to get on planes if anyone on board looked even vaguely Muslim or Middle Eastern. Alana, of course, was outraged. When the wheels of our Boeing 767 finally smoked onto the runway at Miami—a few yards from one of the flight schools where the September 11 hijackers learned how to fly the same kind of planes into tall buildings—the entire coach-class cabin broke spontaneously into weepy applause.
Once again, however, I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time: Hurricane Michelle was blowing in from across the Straits of Florida, having already wreaked havoc in Cuba. Miami went on high storm alert, and Alana and I climbed back on a plane headed in the opposite direction.
Barrow was right: I was cursed. Then, finally, I snapped: at thirty-five thousand feet, somewhere above the eastern seaboard, amid turbulence caused by crosswinds from Hurricane Michelle, post-traumatic stress kicked in. I started having a full-blown panic attack. I had never before been scared of flying. But there I was: gulping in oxygen, sweating and shaking, my head wedged between my knees and the tray table. The delayed stress of September 11 and anthrax hit me harder than I ever could have expected. Back in New York, I tried hard to convince myself that life would return to normal. But there was more to come: On November 12, American Airlines flight 587, carrying 260 people, nose-dived into Rockaway, a part of Queens where many of the fire fighters who died on September 11 had lived. Fear flushed through my body as I watched early reports of the crash on a local news station. Could things get any worse? I was dispatched to cover the story, and, for the second time in two months, I got to smell burning flesh and spilled jet fuel. By the time I reached Rockaway, the streets were an asphalt graveyard of black body bags.