War Reporting for Cowards

5 FIGHT OR FLIGHT

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you,” said the female voice from an unusual position behind me. I felt an index finger slide out of a place it definitely didn’t belong and heard a latex snap. “Done,” the voice said. “You can pull your jeans up now.” I bent down and wrestled with my Levi’s.

As I fastened my belt buckle, I turned to face Jeane Ruth, my local Greenwich Village doctor. She was a short, crumpled-looking woman in her forties who always dressed for extreme comfort. Today she was wearing red tracksuit bottoms, hiking shoes, and a hand-knitted cardigan in Christmas tree colors. I wiped a film of dirt and sweat from my flushed brow. Outside, the amplified squawk of an NYPD squad car competed with a fire engine to drown out the throb of the heater, which was wedged underneath the only window in Dr. Ruth’s tiny clinic.

“Bet you love doing this first thing on a Monday morning,” I said, in an effort to unwind the awkward tension. I couldn’t, however, look Dr. Ruth in the eye. She had, after all, just pushed her finger up my anus.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Christopher,” sighed Dr. Ruth. Her use of my full name, as it appeared on my health insurance card, reminded me of visits to my childhood doctor in Wooler. It was strangely comforting. “There’s nothing unusual up there as far as I can tell. Y’know, stress can cause a lot of phantom symptoms. There’s certainly nothing to suggest colonic cancer. It would be unusual for a twenty-six-year-old with your health to have colonic cancer. Very unusual.”

I suddenly felt winded with guilt. Since arriving in New York, I had visited Dr. Ruth’s clinic almost every other week. Each time, I was convinced I would leave in an ambulance, doomed to spend the rest of my tragically short life in the death-watch ward of St. Vincent’s Hospital. My symptoms were varied, exotic, and, from Dr. Ruth’s point of view, maddeningly nonspecific: My right leg keeps shaking; I need to urinate all the time; I feel dizzy; my back is sweaty; my skull bone aches. With the help of the Internet, I would always self-diagnose in advance of my appointments. Once, I had diabetes; another time Parkinson’s. Then, of course, there was my near miss with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, caused by eating a hamburger made from mad cow. I later decided it was the premature onset of Alzheimer’s.

In three months Dr. Ruth had literally got to know me inside out. On every visit she would give me a weak smile before setting to work on me with her tools. Once her tests were complete, she would take notes in a pretty longhand, then declare me to be in unusually excellent health. At first I didn’t believe her. I demanded blood tests, urine samples, MRIs, and CAT scans—the full hypochondriac’s boot camp. I consulted arm specialists, leg technicians, ear-nose-and-throat experts. I received diagnostic bills from laboratories as far afield as Alaska. Before long, however, Dr. Ruth’s verdicts started to act as their own medicine. I would stride out of her clinic on Fourteenth Street feeling suddenly symptom-free. Sometimes I would smoke an ultra-light cigarette in celebration. But within days, they would start again. The symptoms would return, this time in a different combination. A long, sweaty session on the Internet would confirm the very worst. Then it would be time to see Dr. Ruth again. By the time I got to her clinic, I would have already planned the music for my funeral.

“So I’m okay?” I asked, looking at the heavy white plaster cast on Dr. Ruth’s leg, which she had broken on a skiing trip to Vermont. Of the two of us, I internally conceded, Dr. Ruth probably had the more serious medical problem. In fact, I wondered whether she resented the whole colon thing.

“Yes,” she said, wearily. “You’re okay. Absolutely fine.”

“What about you? That leg looks painful.”

“Fine. It’s an inconvenience, that’s all.”

She threw the used latex glove into the bin with only slightly more force than necessary, then hobbled across the room using the windowsill for balance. Her metal crutch, I noticed, was propped up by the door. Dr. Ruth really didn’t look very well at all. She coughed into her hand, picked up a tissue, and emptied her nasal passage. I noticed that her nose was raw with blowing.

“Stress can do a lot of things to your body, Christopher,” she croaked. “And I think your body is susceptible to it right now. Moving from London to New York is a big change. I know you’re used to dealing with stress with your job, but you can’t underestimate the effects of culture shock. You probably have an intestine that reacts badly to anxiety, which is causing you to experience the symptoms you describe. Try not to panic so much. It’s just anxiety.”

One intestine? Surely, one broken entrail couldn’t cause me so much discomfort. Then another thought struck me.

“But how can I be stressed? I have nothing to be stressed about! I have a nice apartment, I have a girlfriend, my job’s going well. It’s not like I’m being sent to war, for God’s sake. I’m a spoilt yuppie. And I don’t even feel all that stressed. It’s just that I feel so so… bloody wretched all the time.”

Dr. Ruth sat down heavily. “Christopher, listen to me. Anxiety doesn’t work like that. It can just build up in your system without you realizing it. That’s what’s happening to you right now. Your mind is channeling all your stress into phantom symptoms. Think about it: You need to pee all the time. Anyone can convince themselves they need to pee all the time—just like anyone can convince themselves they want to throw up. I can give you something for it if you want. It depends on how bad you think it is. I have no problem prescribing you some Zoloft.”

The thought of taking antidepressants depressed me. “No, absolutely not,” I muttered. “I’ll be fine. I’ll deal with it.”

“Zoloft isn’t only for depres—”

“No, no. Really, no,” I said.

Dr. Ruth gave me a long look, then shrugged. “Oookay,” she announced before hauling herself out of her chair and limping toward the door. “Here, take this with you,” she said, picking up a leaflet entitled Facts about Irritable Bowel Syndrome. “You should also try this.” She handed me a square paper bag of brown gunk labeled “Fiber Supplement.” “Just add water and drink it in the morning,” she said. “It’s unpleasant, but it might help.” She gave me another low-wattage smile as she leaned on the doorknob. “Good luck, Christopher. And come back if you need anything. Not that I need to tell you that, of course.” I walked out with a worried grunt, signed insurance documents at the reception desk, then jammed myself into the creaking elevator with some of my fellow patients, all of them toothless and geriatric.

They all looked so damn healthy to me.

So how did I end up in New York? The nib I completed for Barrow on that traumatic Friday was followed by more nibs, then, in a profound development of my Times career, some “lead” nibs. Eventually I was trusted with a few proper news stories, which carried my name at the top of them. My copy of How to Read the Financial Pages, meanwhile, became ripped and bent with heavy consultation. By August, Barrow had agreed to pay me thirty pounds for a nine-hour shift. I soon became fluent in finance, able to riff confidently on price/earnings ratios, dividend yields, “Pac-Man” defense strategies, stock option trigger prices, and “discounted cash-flow” balance sheet analysis—as though I knew what it all meant. I watched and rewatched Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, with Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko, in the hope of eventually understanding the plot. Then the lunches started. My first was with the chief executive of Treatt, a fragrance manufacturer. The lunch wasn’t held in a restaurant, but in the catered offices of a PR firm. I followed Robert Cole’s advice to the word. As homework, I read the novel Perfume, by Patrick Suskind, so that I would have something to talk about over the appetizer—after, of course, I had discussed the weather, the traffic, and the route my cab had taken. It worked flawlessly, as Cole had said it would. By the time the fish course arrived (“Hope you like skate,” whispered the PR woman), my nerves and nausea had gone. I had, however, drained half a bottle of Cabernet by then.

As the weeks passed I became a veteran of the business lunch. Cole’s tutorial had liberated me from the nervous dyspepsia that had ruined countless social occasions since I’d left home at the age of eighteen. Now I had some catching up to do. I consumed fields of lamb shanks, oceans of lobster tails, and pints of gazpacho. I snacked on blinis and shards of parmigiano reggiano. I scarfed steak tartare, with fried, garlic-soaked bread, for breakfast. In short, I became fat. My head, with its permanent sunburn and sheen of boozesweat, inflated. My waistline bullied my trouser seam. By the time a new business editor was appointed, I had become a restaurant snob, never to be tempted again by the color photographs in a Pizza Hut menu.

Cook’s replacement was a redoubtable woman named Patience Wheatcroft, a middle-aged mother with a teenager’s figure who had previously worked at the tabloid Mail on Sunday. Her wardrobe was sensational. She would click into the office on Manolo Blahnik stilettos, wearing a short leather skirt and checkered red-and-black Chanel jacket, accessorized with oversized gold buttons. Her stilettos, the office soon learned, came in a variety of violent shades: blood red, furious purple, and death black. Once she turned up in the office in a cowboy jacket with tassels. She reminded me of one of Donald Trump’s ex-wives: a flamboyant eighties anachronism in the sleek, monochrome nineties. From the day she was appointed (she introduced herself to her subordinates by asking them, in turn, “What exactly do you do here?”), Patience was known only by her first name: She was too terrifying to be dismissed as “Wheatcroft.” She did, however, earn an unofficial nickname—Margot—which was whispered only after particularly heroic lunchtime boozing sessions. It came from the 1970s BBC sitcom The Good Life, in which Margot Leadbetter (played by Penelope Keith) is the prim Little England conservative who lives next door to two hippie-ish, downwardly mobile neighbors who are earnestly trying to opt out of the rat race by raising their own livestock and growing vegetables. Some on the business desk also liked to joke that when Patience went home at night, she swapped her aristocratic warble for an un-fashionable Birmingham drawl—switching back into character at ten o’clock the next morning.

I liked Patience a lot, even though she made my palms sweat. She, in turn, saw me as cheap and motivated labor (that is, poor and indebted), so she gave me a temporary six-month contract worth nine thousand pounds. I was immensely grateful. Unable to get excited by banking, insurance, or heavy industry, I suggested stories on media and technology companies. Barrow, who had made his name in business journalism by covering the oil industry during Gulf War I, was not very impressed. “But Chris, they don’t make anything,” he said with a pinched face.

Regardless, the media beat was a good way to get invited to parties in Soho with B-list celebrities and “it girls.” In the technology industry, meanwhile, something very curious was happening. I began writing features on the wildly out-of-proportion stock market success of firms such as Yahoo!—whose young founders had made millions each after going public. It seemed as though the Americans were getting excited over nothing. At the time, I used the business section’s computer to go online; it had a dial-up modem the size of a concrete block, which downloaded web pages at a rate of one frame per day, making it a useless research tool. How could this be the future? As the dot-com boom started to echo across the Atlantic, however, I became converted, and my contract was upgraded to a staff position. Patience eventually gave me a technology column, and, as the speculative bubble inflated, some of my stories started to appear on the front page. On a few occasions PR firms flew me first-class to Silicon Valley to interview the billionaire chiefs of Oracle, Intel, and Cisco Systems. I even met Bill Gates. (So did Patience. “Not even $45 billion can guarantee freedom from dandruff,” she clucked on her return.) By 1999 my responsibilities had been expanded to cover media and telecommunications, and by 2000 I was also editing a weekly section on “e-business.” My career, like that of so many other young and hopelessly inexperienced dot-commers, had been built entirely on the funny money of the hyperinflated Internet economy. I was, in short, a fraud. But when the position of Wall Street correspondent became free in late 2000, I was in the ideal position to seize it.

“You’re probably too young for this job,” Patience told me. “But it’s yours. Just don’t muck it up. I’ll be watching you.”

I had lobbied Patience for the New York job without really thinking about what would happen if I got it. And so the enormity of my move to Manhattan only really sank in as I stood outside my new office at 1211 Sixth Avenue, or, to use its official name, Avenue of the Americas. The building is one of several imposing skyscrapers that make up the Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan. The seventies-style behemoth, which looks like a scaled-down version of the former World Trade Center, is also the headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in America. The Fox News studio is on the ground floor, the New York Post’s headquarters on the ninth and tenth, and Murdoch’s executive suite somewhere in between the two.

On any given day, even during the most violently cold weeks of December, there is a crowd of woolly-hatted tourists and hot dog sellers outside 1211—partly because of the celebrities being escorted in and out of the Fox studio and partly because of the “news ticker,” an LED display that wraps around the front of the building and displays scrolling news headlines twenty-four hours a day.

I felt like a celebrity myself as I pushed my way past the gawping and munching throng and through the revolving doors to the security desk. As the elevator pulled me up to the ninth floor with a metallic whine, I concluded that it made sense for The Times, one of News Corp’s most prestigious properties, to open its New York bureau at 1211. I pictured myself, white napkin tucked into my shirt collar, at weekly power lunches with “Rupert” and his inner power circle. Just in case The Boss was in the office, I had worn my least-stained tie and business suit.

Although I had never been inside 1211 before, I had formed an impression of it from the weekly column of Joanna Coles, The Times’s sassy and witty New York correspondent. It appeared under terrifying headlines such as “Englishmen v. American Men: Good Fun But Better Sex”; and “It’s Official: Men Are the New Single Women.” Joanna’s weekly missive was accompanied by a picture of what looked like the star of several Hollywood romantic comedies: She had a knowing, skeptical pout (she was from Yorkshire) and an immaculate blond hairdo that undoubtedly cost several hundred dollars a month to maintain. I secretly fantasized that Joanna might be single and interested in a younger, slightly overweight reporter with receding hair (she was, in fact, engaged to a world-renowned author).

Joanna was infamous in Wapping for having negotiated a contract with the editor, Peter Stothard, that prohibited her from the menial task of writing news stories. The deal, envied by almost every journalist on Fleet Street, meant she could concentrate exclusively on her column and splashy features for the tabloid section. It was like a flight attendant refusing to serve drinks to anyone other than first-class passengers. I could only imagine how bored she would be by the prospect of working with someone who wrote about Wall Street mergers and acquisitions.

In the elevator, I imagined the glamour that awaited me: the huge Times logo above the reception area, the pristine glass walls, the splatterings of modern art, the chic office assistants, and the Conran furniture.

With a mechanical clank, the elevator’s chrome curtains opened. There were two smudged glass doors to either side of me; one leading to an open-plan work area and the other to a reception desk with a New York Post sign above it. The Post’s logo—slanted sideways, as if it’s in a hurry—made me feel like Clark Kent reporting for work at the Daily Planet. Behind the reception desk sat a stern African-American woman wearing white surgical gloves. I approached, scanning the walls for the distinctive royal insignia of The Times. There was none.

“Hi,” I said, rather breathlessly. “I’m the new man at The Times.”

“The what?” The woman didn’t look up. She appeared to be using a machete to open mail. There was ink on her white gloves.

“The Times,” I repeated. Then, unnecessarily: “The London Times. The Times of London. The Times—erm, newspaper.”

The knife continued its work. The woman’s frown deepened. I noticed a television set hanging from the ceiling, blaring out the military-sounding theme for the Fox News channel. I felt suddenly self-conscious and dizzy, like a schoolboy sent to the principal’s office. Did she not understand my English accent? Was it that strong? My God, I thought, maybe no one in New York—or the United States—would understand me. Perhaps I’m doomed to failure.

“Fair and balanced!” declared the television.

“The Times’s bureau is on this floor, isn’t it?” I asked as politely as I could.

Still no reaction. A muscular Fox News anchor began talking over the clatter of drums. Had I offended her somehow?

“Excu—”

“I don’t know, sir.” She dropped the knife, threw open a drawer, and thumped a telephone directory down on her desk—all in one flawless angry motion. “Times?” she said accusingly.

“Erm, yes.”

“Not listed.”

“That can’t be right.”

“Who is it, Sir, you wish to see?”

Finally, a chink of light in the dark. “Adam Jones,” I blurted. Adam was the Times reporter whose job I was taking.

“Oh—you mean Adam!” The trenches in her forehead disappeared and her barbed sneer became a gleaming wall of enamel. I felt an inappropriate amount of relief. “Let me call him for you. Please, take a seat.” One white glove picked up a telephone handset and the other keyed in an extension number. The woman gestured toward a cheap-looking black leather sofa. Next to it was a plastic potted plant. I was too nervous to sit. Perhaps, I thought, I had made a terrible mistake.

Eventually Adam appeared from behind the reception desk. He was a bookish man with angular spectacles and an overnight growth of stubble. “Welcome,” he said, shaking me firmly by the hand. I thought I could detect a hint of irony. Adam produced an electronic swipe card and used it to take me through the second glass door and into the office area. “This is it,” he said flatly.

The office looked like the set from an old episode of NYPD Blue. Its negative aura would have been enough to put a feng shui consultant in the hospital. Underfoot was a sticky, matted carpet on which had been placed brown metal-and-plastic office furniture. The air held a strong whiff of burned percolator coffee and pretzels as a handful of plants wilted under fluorescent strip-lights. I saw no sign of a Times logo anywhere—or, indeed, any staff, apart from a couple of young, bored-looking African-American messengers and an ancient mail room worker who was coughing violently while sorting grumpily through envelopes. His coughs were punctuated by the occasional “GodDAMNit!” followed by self-pitying groans. Bundles of mail—everything from handwritten letters to bulky, brown UPS packages, most of them addressed to The Editor—were stacked everywhere.

Adam winced.

I had known Adam in London. During my hellish first week as an intern there, he had reminded me of an intimidating third-year student at the university who occasionally handed out insider advice to freshmen. Because he seemed slightly distant and phlegmatic most of the time, I was immensely grateful whenever he warmed up and gave me one of his fireside chats. After a two-year stint in Manhattam, Adam seemed ready to leave, and I got the impression he was puzzled that I would want his job. I was surprised, however, that he’d agreed to go back to London to take my old position on the business desk. In fact, Adam had been secretly offered a job at the Financial Times and had no intention of returning to the Wapping printing plant.

Adam escorted me to my “office,” which turned out to be a cubicle cordoned off from the empty cubicles next to it by a brownish plastic-and-cork wall that also doubled as a bulletin board. This is what Douglas Coupland had meant when he talked about “veal-fattening pens” in Generation X, I thought. Behind the cubicle was a long tabletop covered in yellowing copies of English and Australian newspapers. “The loo’s that way,” said Adam, pointing toward an LED display hanging from the ceiling. It read: “31 calls waiting.” I peered over the plastic-and-cork cordon and came face-to-face with a woman sporting a New Jersey perm and leather miniskirt. She was painting her nails. She looked up and smiled. This surely couldn’t be… Joanna? I felt as though I had stumbled into an episode of The Twilight Zone. “No, Julie,” came the nasal reply, followed by a squawk of laughter.

“Oh, right,” I said, offering a pale, trembling hand. “Chris. The Times man.”

She gave me a blank look.

“Ad sales,” explained Adam. The New York bureau of The Times, it seemed, was this single cubicle wedged between the mail room and the advertising sales department of the New York Post. In fact, The Times’s bureau was actually in the mail room. And no one seemed to know it existed.

Adam hadn’t yet cleared his desk (which was meticulously tidy, in maximum contrast to the surrounding chaos), so he showed me to the spare cubicle next to it. I lifted a pile of undelivered mail from the broken swivel-chair and sat down. “This is your computer,” said Adam, pointing to a device that looked as though it predated the vacuum cleaner. I had to kneel down on the sticky carpet—avoiding someone’s dusty, half-eaten croissant—to locate the “on” button. “Don’t look at the keys,” came Adam’s voice from above. He made an “ew” face.

I looked.

The keys had turned almost black with newspaper ink from hundreds of deskless IT support staff, freelancers, and secretarial temps. The gaps between the keys, meanwhile, served as gutters for spilled drinks and crumbs. The desk was slick with rings of congealed coffee and grease from countless lonely takeout lunches. I would later learn that my deadline was 3:00 P.M.—which made lunch breaks almost impossible, unless they were taken at 4:00 P.M., as the waiters cleared the tables around you. I noticed that in Adam’s cubicle there was a heavy, thirty-eight-inch Sony television set—a late-1980s model, tuned permanently to CNBC, the American business news channel. I wondered how Adam had time to watch television during the day.

“You’ll find that the Aussies sometimes use this desk,” said Adam, plucking an empty can of Foster’s from behind my computer monitor and dropping it in the bin. “They share the New York bureau with us.”

The Aussies, I later learned, were two New York reporters for News Corp’s Australian papers. The brutal thirteen-hour time difference between Manhattan and Sydney meant that the Aussies kept very odd hours. Sometimes, clearly, cans of Australian lager were required to keep them motivated.

Before my spirits had time to sink any further, Adam offered to introduce me to Joanna. I stood up and turned around, catching a glimpse of blonde through a glass office door. Thank God, I thought: the bureau is larger than one cubicle. I wondered if Adam had also fantasized about having an office romance with Joanna. Then I remembered that he was married. Adam swung open the door to her office, which had little more charm than my cork enclosure, “Joanna, this is Chris,” he said, then jogged back to his desk, where his phone was ringing.

“Hiiiiiiiiii,” said Joanna with impressively feigned interest. I noticed that she was also watching television—CNN—and had a copy of the New York Times open in front of her. She was wearing stretchy trousers, a heavy sweater, and no makeup, but she still looked glamorous. “So, you’re the new Wall Street guy,” she said in an enthusiastic but motherly tone that reminded me of my old high school English teacher and immediately destroyed any serious notion of a Mrs. Robinson affair.

“So, I expect you’ll soon be getting used to lift and view,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

Why was she talking about the lift? And there was no view—we were a long way from the window and, besides, we were on a low floor.

Once again, I felt like a schoolboy.

“Lift and view, Chris, is what we do here.” Her sentences, I noticed, were emerging fully formed from her mouth, as though part of a prewritten column. Had she researched this speech? Or was she as intimidatingly bright as I feared she might be? “We lift from the New York Times.” She held up the copy on her desk. “And we watch the news.” She pointed to CNN. “We lift… and view. If you can get the hang of that, you too can be a foreign correspondent.”

Her blue eyes bored into me.

Was this a test? Was she serious?

I laughed and said something about exclusives and “off-diary.”

“Good luck,” she said.

The next few months proved Joanna’s point. Foreign reporting from New York, it seemed, involved an awful lot of following-up stories from the New York Times and watching CNBC. I had imagined something more glamorous. Given the number of stories I had to write, and the wide range of subjects to cover, it was almost impossible to make insider “contacts”—the PRs, bankers, and analysts who usually supply journalists with scoops. Joanna, of course, had been deliberately provoking me with her lift and view comments (she had, after all, managed to get the first interview with O. J. Simpson following his acquittal), but I wondered how Adam had found the time to leave the office and profile everyone from Donald Trump to Jeff Bezos, the nerdish founder of Amazon.com. Patience and Barrow, however, seemed impressed with the hasty, robotic rewrites I produced for them every morning. Meanwhile, I tried to distract myself from work by creating a social life. My initial attempts at meeting women, however, didn’t go well: My first date was with an Upper West Sider named Sadie Smith who spent the evening quizzing me about Prince William and telling me about her plan to produce a stage adaptation of a porn film (it later became an off-Broadway hit). Meanwhile, the dizziness I had felt on my first day in the office kept returning. That was when my sessions with Dr. Ruth began.

By spring I had found a girlfriend. Her name was Alana, a tall, graceful Midwesterner with a concave stomach and hair cut into a Cabernet bob. She voted Democrat and wore pointy-collared shirts with pin-striped pantsuits. For a girl who’d grown up in rural Ohio, she’d adapted well to city life. For a start, her apartment was so small it barely had four walls. And then there was her New Yorker attitude: On one of our early dates, at a West Village pavement café, she had warded off an abusively drunk hobo by picking up a heavy ashtray and threatening him with it. The hobo fled. I found Alana’s confidence reassuring. She was, in fact, the alpha male in our relationship. Not that I would ever have admitted that.

But I still wasn’t happy. I couldn’t work out what was wrong with me. Why, for example, was I was so frazzled by nerves? After all, my generation—the fat, spoiled offspring of the seventies—have nothing, or at least very little, to be nervous about. Take disease: We’re so doped up at birth with flu-jabs and pox-shots that the only life-threatening illness we’re likely to get is a self-inflicted one. As for hunting and gathering, the nearest we get is the remote control and the takeout menu. Then there’s our day-to-day safety: Last century, a car crash at anything over thirty miles per hour would be a guarantee of death—or at least of a coma and an off-switch. Today you can lose control of a cheap Korean saloon traveling at 110 miles an hour, down a hill, in a monsoon, and suffer only minor airbag bruising. We’re virtually indestructible.

Then, of course, there’s war. The children of Reagan and Thatcher—my generational brothers and sisters, on both sides of the Atlantic—are war virgins: never drafted into military service; never invaded by a foreign army; never expected to defend their countries with their lives. The few conflicts we’ve lived through—the Falklands, Gulf War I, Bosnia—lasted a few days, or weeks, and were fought by volunteers, not school-yard conscripts. The Allied forces, it seemed, could win any war with a few Stealth bombers and an A-10 Warthog. Air offensives could be conducted online, like banking: One click of a mouse in the Pentagon, and a Kosovar village disappears. Casualties, on our side at least, were extraordinarily low. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme the British lost 19,240; during the entire Gulf War, the British death count was 47. As teenagers watching television at home, it was tempting to regard these latter-day conflicts as entertainment; real-life video games. Perhaps it was because we had grown up being told that a proper war would involve fifty-megaton nukes. The Soviet arsenal alone, we learned in the eighties, could kill 22 billion—and yet there were only 4 billion people in the world to kill. Back in the winter of 1991, it was almost a relief for us to discover that war was still possible without Armageddon.

So why, as a generation, are we so drenched in adrenaline? What could explain the $3.4 billion that Pfizer made in 2004 by selling its antianxiety drug Zoloft? For the war virgins, the adrenal cortex should be an obsolete piece of biotechnology. Our lives are safe, pampered, and free from almost every kind of stress that troubled our ancestors. Perhaps, I often wondered during my treks to Dr. Ruth’s clinic, the human body will produce adrenaline regardless of the circumstances. And perhaps, without mortal danger, our adrenal glands get bored and start firing at random. It’s not so much a disorder as a malfunction—a trip to the mall becomes as fraught as a tiptoe through a minefield, a new job as terrifying as trench warfare.

There is, however, a more troubling explanation: that the adrenaline is coming from our subconscious. The war virgins, after all, know that our lifestyles can’t last: that our comfort and safety is unsustainable. At school, our teachers were the first to break the news—about the dwindling oil reserves; the leaking ozone layer; the Third World. Even rock stars, those icons of the short term, started lecturing us about starving Ethiopians and disappearing rain forests. Our parents, it seemed, had not thought things through. In fact, they’d really fucked up. Cheers Mum; thanks Dad. And so, as much as we enjoy our modern invincibility, we wait for it to end. We wait for the inevitable. Even war, we know, will eventually come—probably from those at the wrong end of the First World’s consumption binge. Technology will one day turn against us. The Moore’s Law that gave us cheap PCs, video games, and iPods will also make possible the homemade atomic bomb, detonated in Trafalgar Square.

The nineties, of course, were an attempt at denial. With our graffitied chunks of Berlin Wall on the mantelpiece, we stopped worrying about global politics. The Cold War was over and, as one of the most influential books of the decade said, it was The End of History. Our Greenpeace subscriptions lapsed; we bought luxury German SUVs. As for our unsustainable lifestyles, we convinced ourselves that the New Economy would solve everything. Oil? It was so Old Economy. We took jobs in advertising and marketing, and tortured ourselves with images of the nearly, but not quite, obtainable. We blamed our anxiety on money, or sex. We stopped thinking; we bought shares in dot-com companies; and we skimmed through the stories about missing suitcase-sized nukes and titillated ourselves instead with Bill Clinton, the intern, and the cigar. We were distracted, borderline delusional. But it wouldn’t last.

“It’s fight-or-flight,” Dr. Ruth told me during one of my hypochondriac workouts. “It’s also called the ‘acute stress response.’ You’re a journalist, you should look it up: Walter Cannon, born in Wisconsin in 1871, went to Harvard Medical School. He said animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system: in other words, with the release of epinephrine and norepineprhine from the medulla of the adrenal glands. So your muscles tighten, the heart rate increases, and blood vessels constrict. Young men used to need that on the battlefield, Christopher. And as much as your problems might seem, well, completely trivial, they are still causing the same animal fight-or-flight response. We call it an anxiety disorder. Which is why you come here so often. And why I tell you to take Zoloft.” The word “trivial,” I remember noting at the time, was emphasized rather too heavily.

My malfunctioning body, concluded Dr. Ruth, was permanently stuck in “flight” mode. It was telling me to empty my bowels, turn on my heels, and run as fast as possible: away from the West Village.

I was a clinical coward.

While we’re on the subject of war and virginity, I should probably tell you about my other granddad, on my mother’s side. Ross Selkirk Taylor was a smart and particular young man with black-rimmed spectacles and rather too much Brylcreem in his hair. His idea of a good time was a pack of full-strength Players, a date with my future grandmother Florence (or Flo, as he sometimes called her), and Tommy Dorsey on the record player. Unlike my father’s father, granddad Taylor had no problem gripping a rifle. And so, at the age of twenty-one, he was drafted into the Royal Army Service Corps and handed a rifle, six rounds of ammunition, and the keys to a three-ton Bedford truck. The first order given to 121357 Dvr. Ross Taylor was to drive to Boulogne, northern France, where he would help the British army fight off a German invasion—if one ever came. The date was February 1940. My grandfather had never been abroad before. That might explain the entry he made Saturday, March 2, in the brown leather Automobile Association diary that my grandmother had given him as a Christmas gift: “Not very impressed by France at present. Although it may get better.” He wrote this in pencil, being careful not to make a mistake or use up more than the square inch of space allocated to each day. France, of course, did not get better. It got a lot worse.

In the diary, Driver Taylor went on to disclose that he had tasted his first glass of champagne in France and was “confined to barracks” for smoking Players in the Bedford’s cab. In fact, Driver Taylor’s incarceration in the barracks was ended only by compassionate leave, when he was ordered home to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to visit his dying mother. “Doesn’t seem much hope for mother,” he wrote on the weekend of March 23, “said nothing to nobody though!” Two days later, my great-grandmother, Margaret Taylor, died from a kidney infection.

After returning to France, my grieving grandfather was cheered up by good weather and a football match with the French, which, against all the odds, the British won. He even spent a day at the Berck Plage seaside resort—later to became the subject of one of Sylvia Plath’s bleakest poems. Looking back, the day at the beach was a terrible omen. That night there was a terrifying air raid. Then, on May 15, Driver Taylor was ordered to drive southeast to pick up the 7th Battalion Royal West Kents, an infantry unit. That was when Hitler invaded. My grandfather and the West Kents were ordered to meet an advancing Nazi panzer division, head-on.

These were Driver Taylor’s diary entries after leaving the Boulogne barracks:

Saturday: Set off at 1.30am to proper hellhole. Found we were in front line. Machine gunned. Discovered we were surrounded all night. Enemy know nothing of us. Luckiest people on Earth to get out.

Sunday: What a morning. Expecting enemy to move in on us any minute. Retreat 3.30am, 20 miles back.

Monday: Moved up to Albert. Got blasted to hell. Captured in Afternoon. Rode on horseback to village.

Each diary entry, of course, tells only one square inch of the story. The West Kents had met the German army near the town of Albert, come under heavy fire, then retreated. It was then that my grandfather realized he’d never been shown how to fire his rifle and that its barrel was still full of grease. After being told by a commander that the Germans were moving backward, the West Kents motored forward again, only to run into an ambush in Albert’s village square. The square was famous for its church, which had been flattened by the Germans during World War I, leaving only a wobbly statue of the Madonna standing. The West Kents were standing near that statue, smoking cigarettes, when a German Messerschmitt fell out of the sky and started spitting out lead. My grandfather managed to stomp on the Bedford’s accelerator pedal before being hit. He swerved down a boulevard only to meet a German blockade with a machine gun in the middle of it. He threw himself out of the truck before the gun opened fire. Then he ran, eventually meeting up with three other surviving West Kents. The shell-shocked soldiers tried to hide in a line of French refugees, but with their British army uniforms and bloody faces, the French shooed them away. Later the Luftwaffe opened fire on the unarmed civilians anyway. The West Kents had nowhere to go, and soon enough my grandfather and his friends were captured.

That evening the Germans decided to transport Driver Taylor on a horse, without a saddle, to the nearest town. Fearing he would fall off, my granddad tied a piece of string around one of the animal’s ears, hauled himself onto its bare back, and set off nervously. At that very moment, however, a German machine gun went off and the horse bolted, catapulting my granddad into a razor-wire fence. Bloody, terrified, and exhausted, he finally made it, on foot, to the camp. The next morning he was ordered on a three-week march to Germany, covering thirty kilometers a day and sleeping in cattle fields. What little food he ate was given to him by locals who pitied the starving prisoners. In the town of Trier he was shoved into a railway truck and eventually taken to Poznan, a port on the Warta River in Poland. There, as British Prisoner of War No. 4552, he joined a working party that tore down the Poznan zoo so that it could be turned into a military airfield. He also operated a crane in a quarry (at one point the POWs tried to kill a Nazi guard by dropping a boulder on him). He spent the rest of the war as a laborer near Freiwaldau—now called Jesenik—on the Czech-Polish border.

Within two weeks of returning to Newcastle, Dvr. Ross Taylor married Florence and was put on paid leave by the British army. Then he came down with tuberculosis, caused by five years of malnutrition. Doctors treated him by collapsing one of lungs and putting him in a sanatorium for nine months.

He survived all of this, needless to say, without the need for Zoloft, trauma counseling, or French existential literature. After recovering from TB, he put himself through night school and set about making himself a member of the English middle class. Sometimes, on my way to Dr. Ruth’s clinic, I would think about my grandfather, and I would feel guilt, the heavy, suffocating kind.

It wasn’t just my health that was bothering me in New York. I was also thoroughly sick of lift and view. I met up with other English foreign correspondents to see if they shared my frustration with rehashing other people’s stories. Toby Moore of the Daily Express told me despondently that foreign reporters were a dying breed: The paper’s new proprietor, onetime porn magnate Richard Desmond, had decided to get rid of all overseas bureaus apart from New York. This made Toby the last staff foreign correspondent ever employed by the newspaper founded in 1900 and bought sixteen years later by Lord Beaverbrook. Ironically, the Express had once been famous for its global reach, and in 1936 had the largest circulation of any publication on earth. In place of foreign correspondents, Desmond used young, poorly paid reporters in London to follow up stories from the online editions of overseas newspapers. Clearly it wasn’t just Joanna who knew about lift and view. Within weeks Toby was back in the UK: Desmond had shut down the New York bureau to save more money. I feared my job could also disappear. The dot-com boom, after all, had turned into a financial catastrophe and the economy was lurching into a recession. The New Economy, it seemed, wasn’t that new after all: It was just a plain old speculative financial bubble. Patience started to reject my expense claims and, in one curt phone call, warned me to cut the overhead of the New York bureau. Manhattan, however, was in denial: The hedonism of the nineties, as epitomized by Sex and the City, was still the norm.

There was also, however, a palpable sense of foreboding. Repossession trucks towed Porsches from outside fashionable loft apartments, such as the one I lived in at 666 Greenwich Street. The West Village’s trendy, candle-lit restaurants started to feel emptier on weeknights. The homeless multiplied. And the cheesy Europop of the nineties had been replaced by the depressive bleeping of Radiohead’s Kid A. Then, of course, there was George W. Bush—a president no one in New York seemed to like. The war virgins, I concluded, had been spoiled for too long.

Part of me wondered whether it would be stress or Patience’s budget cuts that ended my stint as Wall Street correspondent. I decided that a holiday in England—my first return to Britain after moving to New York—might help clear my mind. So I booked myself a ticket through News Corp’s travel department and turned up at John F. Kennedy Airport, only to discover that the company had automatically put me in first class, at a cost to Patience of $5,126.32. That was it, I thought, I was done. The travel agent had assumed I was a News Corp executive traveling with Rupert Murdoch’s entourage. I couldn’t face telling Patience about it in person, so I e-mailed her instead. “Oh dear,” was her two-word reply, followed by a week of silence. I spent the rest of my holiday convinced that she would fire me. In the end, however, she let me off, even though I had offered to pay the difference in fares, which amounted to $4,739. For the first time since Patience had arrived at The Times, I wanted to hug her. By the time I got back on my United Airlines jet at Heathrow, I was exhausted, still unwell, and not sure I was happy about going back to New York. But weren’t people supposed to love New York—the city that never sleeps? I tried hard to feel love, but none came. At least, I thought, I could savor a guilt-free, first-class flight.

I needed all the sleep I could get.

The date was September 10, 2001.

6 THE ACCIDENTAL WAR CORRESPONDENT

It’s 8.45 A.M. the next morning. I’m in my apartment at 666 Greenwich Street, wearing only a pair of white boxer shorts, debating whether or not to go into the office. I’m suffering from a mild stomach upset, probably caused by yesterday’s seven-hour flight from London. I fear, however, that it might be more serious: gallbladder disease, perhaps. I make a note to call Dr. Ruth.

Above me, to the northwest, an American Airlines Boeing 767, piloted by Islamic terrorist Mohammed Atta, is traveling at 470 miles per hour toward Lower Manhattan at an estimated altitude of two thousand feet. In the aircraft’s coach-class cabin, Amy Sweeney, a flight attendant, is talking on a mobile phone to a colleague at Boston’s Logan Airport. “I see water and buildings,” she is saying in a low voice. “Oh my God. Oh my God.” At this point the aircraft is probably now directly over 666 Greenwich Street—a mile and a half north of the World Trade Center and one block east of the Hudson River. In Boston, 216 miles northeast, Amy Sweeney’s colleague is unaware that one of Mohammed Atta’s suitcases is currently circling, unclaimed, on a baggage carousel only a few yards away from him. He doesn’t know who Atta is, nor that the terrorist passed through Boston that morning after coming in on a connecting flight from Portland. Atta’s suitcase contains airline uniforms, flight manuals, and a four-page document, in Arabic. It instructs him to “feel complete tranquility, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.”

President George W. Bush, at this freeze-framed moment, is 1,217 miles southwest of New York, in Sarasota, Florida. He’s in a motorcade on his way to a photo opportunity with a group of local schoolchildren. He intends to read them a story entitled “My Pet Goat.” He has not yet been told by the Federal Aviation Administration, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Secret Service, or Canada’s Strategic Command that at least one commercial aircraft has been hijacked. He is, in fact, remarkably ill informed for the leader of the free world.

In my apartment, I am also ill informed. I return to bed, yawn, scratch, and then stare at the ceiling. As I lie there, another Boeing 767, this one operated by United Airlines, is diverted from Los Angeles to New York. The pilot doesn’t know about the diversion because he is currently being murdered by one of Atta’s fellow members of al-Qaeda, an Afghanistan-based terror group.

I list the arguments against going to the office. Number one: Joanna Coles no longer works for The Times —she left yesterday, after being offered a job at New York magazine. That means a solitary lunch at 1211 Avenue of the Americas. Number two: Joanna’s replacement, Nicholas Wapshott, is currently on the deck of the QE2, probably a thousand miles off the Eastern Seaboard, having decided to use a one-hundred-year-old mode of transport to get to his new posting. That means no one will know I’m working from home.

As I talk myself out of leaving the apartment, The Times’s only other correspondent in New York, James Bone, is a mile southeast, finishing a cup of coffee at an Egyptian newsstand on lower Broadway. He’s late for work, but about to get the biggest front page of his career.

The seconds and nanoseconds tick toward 8:46 A.M. Another aircraft, a Boeing 757 operated by United Airlines, idles its engines on the runway of New Jersey’s Newark Airport, 16.5 miles southeast. The pilot, who has just received clearance for takeoff, is unaware that he has only forty-one minutes left to live. He has never heard of al-Qaeda, or of Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden. A passenger on the plane, Todd Beamer, has no idea that he is about to inspire a Neil Young song entitled “Let’s Roll,” or that his family will publish a book in his honor.

I jump out of bed: I will go to the office. As I make this decision, another Boeing 757, operated by American Airlines, nears cruising altitude. It is twenty minutes into its journey from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles. The pilot of the plane has nine minutes to live. The passengers have fifty-two minutes.

The plane will not reach Los Angeles.

It is now 8:46 A.M. Outside, I hear a distant crashing noise. The world changes. In an instant my generation loses its war virginity—and I become a war correspondent. But I don’t know any of this yet. I’m still worried about my gallbladder. I assume that the noise outside is the opening of the metal shutter of the kebab shop opposite my apartment. The shop is owned by an Iranian family. I can hear sirens now; the city whines into an echo chamber. Nothing unusual in that. There’s a strange, acrid smell. I curse New York. I can see clear blue sky outside. It’s hot for September.

I put on my clothes—dark blue denim, light blue work shirt, aviator sunglasses. I open the front door to my apartment and pick up the New York Times. The lead story is this: “Arsenic Standard for Water Is Too Lax, Study Says.” I wonder if my gallbladder problem is, in fact, arsenic poisoning.

In a few minutes I won’t care.

I stepped into the elevator at precisely 8:50 A.M.

“Down?” I asked.

“Did you hear anything about the trade center?” came the unexpected reply from a middle-aged woman dressed head-to-heel in Prada. Her jaw was locked with worry as she gripped her Motorola phone.

Me: “No?”

“I heard it on the radio,” she said. “An explosion; or something. My husband’s there. He’s not… he’s not picking up.”

She stabbed at the Motorola.

At first the words “trade center” didn’t mean anything to me. It was early, after all, and I hadn’t had my morning espresso.

“Yeah, I heard that too,” said the gay investment banker next to me. By the end of the sentence his voice had risen an octave. “I think there’s been an accident with an airplane,” he speculated. “Ohmigod.”

I wondered if this was a news story. If so, I was in no position to cover it: I kept all my pens and spiral-bound notebooks at work. The “trade center” still didn’t mean anything to me, even though I had recently taken my parents to the observation deck on top of the south tower. In fact, I had been invited to a party at the Windows of the World Restaurant in the north tower, for Thursday. The invite was currently sitting on my kitchen table. “Cocktails at 1,350 feet,” it said.

I needed coffee. My stomach ached.

The elevator jerked to a halt. I strode past Walter and Carlos, the building’s doormen, and out into the sunshine. I cursed as I realized I’d forgotten my dry cleaning. Then I searched for a cab, catching a glimpse of something unusual as I turned. I looked right, toward the familiar view of downtown Manhattan, dominated by two gigantic silver towers: an inverted Bugs Bunny smile poking out of the gum of the skyline. “That’s the trade center,” I scolded myself. “The World Trade Center.” But something was wrong. There was a black gash about three-quarters of the way up the north tower and a trail of smoke coming from it. I could see an orange glow from deep within the hole. An accident, I thought: Probably an amateur pilot in a small plane. I remembered reading about the Army Air Corps B-25 bomber that had somehow managed to hit the side of the Empire State Building in 1945.

A yellow cab pulled up beside me.

“Man, that pilot must have been on fuckin’ crack to crash into somethin’ that big, on a day like this,” said the driver. “Holy crap.”

I waved him away and called my friend Karen, who worked for Deutsche Bank somewhere within the trade center complex. Perhaps she would have the real story. No answer—she was probably late for work, as usual. It didn’t occur to me to be worried. I knew she was on a low floor: She complained about not having a view. Wearily, I called the business desk in London. “Something’s hit the World Trade Center,” I said. “There’s a bloody great hole in it.” I felt myself wanting to exaggerate—to sell the story. This could be a way of avoiding the office after all.

But as I looked at the flames, I suspected I didn’t need to embellish.

“Yeah, we’ve heard something about that,” came the distant, vague reply. Barrow was clearly knee-deep in mucky copy.

“Shall I take a look?” I asked.

Barrow: “I’ll put you over to foreign.”

I immediately tensed. The foreign news desk represented the exotic, dangerous world outside of financial journalism.

I heard eight bars of Vivaldi, then another voice. It was posh, and clipped.

“Chri-is?” My name had a dip in it, signaling the need for information.

“Hi, yes. There’s a hole in the World Trade Center.” I coughed. “Small plane probably.” I hoped this sounded informed.

“Humm. We’re watching it on Sky. Can you get down there? James Bone’s already on his way.” The voice was impatient, harried. There were probably much bigger stories to be worrying about, I thought. What with the arsenic in the water supply, this would probably make only a few hundred words: a photo story, perhaps. Maybe it would be a lead nib. I was good at those.

“Yes, I’m not far fro—”

“Good, good.” The voice was distracted.

Me: “I’ll call in later.”

I hung up, eager to cause the least possible inconvenience.

In front of me, of course, was the biggest American news story since December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I was young, ambitious, and—after months of lift and view—desperate for what Linda Christmas called real journalism. So what did I do next? Run toward the flames? Hitch a ride on a passing fire truck? Jump into a cab and order the terrified driver to step on it?

Alas, no. At 8:53 A.M., on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I strolled back inside 666 Greenwich Street and took the elevator up to my apartment, where I collected some pens and hunted for a notebook. I congratulated myself on getting out of a day’s work at the veal-fattening pen on Sixth Avenue. I was ignorant, of course, of one crucial fact: The World Trade Center had been attacked before, in 1993. The alleged bomber, Ramzi Mohammed Yousef, who had entered the U.S. with a fake Iraqi passport, was currently residing in the “supermax” correctional facility in Florence, Colorado. Yousef was a close friend of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who at this moment was watching the burning north tower from a bunker in Afghanistan. No doubt he was whooping, cheering, and doing whatever else terrorist chiefs do when they’ve successfully murdered a few thousand innocent men, women, and children.

At home, I looked in the mirror and took some multivitamin tablets. Unable to find anything to write on—not even a napkin—I snatched the red, leather-bound diary that Alana had bought for me as a gift from Italy, along with my dry cleaning, and headed for the door. As an afterthought, I also grabbed my digital camera, which I jammed into my jeans pocket. It didn’t occur to me that the fire in the World Trade Center would be the most photographed event in history. I thought The Times’s picture desk might appreciate some amateur shots. By the time I staggered back out onto Greenwich Street—coat hangers in my teeth, a bag of laundry over my shoulder, and blankets and sweaters under my arms—it was 9:02 A.M. I checked the World Trade Center again: The burning had intensified. I reassured myself that I had plenty of time to get down there before my deadline. The truth, however, was that I was deliberately stalling: I was apprehensive about the prospect of having to interview real people instead of doing the usual lift and view. Part of me was tempted to go back upstairs and cover the story from CNN. Sweating, I ducked inside the dry cleaner’s, which was next door to 666 Greenwich Street, and dropped everything on the counter. The Asian shop owner, unable to pronounce or spell my second name, was struggling to label my clothes when I heard another distant crash. By the time I made it outside, there was another gash in the World Trade Center, this time in the south tower.

I looked again.

I’m hallucinating, I told myself.

I got Alana on speed-dial. She was having breakfast with her father, who was visiting from Ohio. No, she hadn’t seen the World Trade Center. “Switch on the television,” I told her, adrenaline now starting to feed through my nervous system, dissolving the grogginess. I had already forgotten about gallbladder disease and arsenic poisoning. Alana, who had an irritating but understandable habit of never believing anything I told her until she had independently verified it, sounded uninterested. “I’m heading down there,” I said, trying to sound brave. I wanted her to tell me—or better, beg me—not to go down there. She didn’t. “Give you a call in a bit,” I said. “Enjoy breakfast.” I hung up. I tried to call the foreign news desk, but it wouldn’t connect. Karen’s office number, meanwhile, just rang off the hook.

Now I was worried.

I jogged south, passing tables set up outdoors for voting in the mayoral elections. The winner would replace Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was standing down after two controversial terms. There were people wearing sandwich boards with the names of candidates and campaign slogans daubed onto them. “He has commercials, I have credentials,” read one. Behind the campaigners, plumes of stinking black smoke were rolling out over the Hudson River. The sirens of emergency vehicles wailed hysterically. New York is deafening on a good day. Today it was unbearable. It was as though the city itself was howling.

The campaigners and voting officials didn’t seem to know what to do. They sat on their camping chairs and watched two steel volcanoes erupt less than a mile away. Later, much later, some of these same people would criticize President Bush for continuing to read “My Pet Goat” to the children in Florida, even after he had been told about the south tower. Inaction, however, was an almost animal response: like rabbits caught on a six-lane highway under a Xenon glare.

By this time I was in Tribeca, an empty warehouse district that had been gentrified with “white box” lofts, furniture shops, and Robert De Niro’s Mediterranean restaurant. There were pedestrians everywhere, all of them speed-walking north. It looked like Fifth Avenue at the weekend. Then it hit me: The pedestrians were evacuees from the World Trade Center. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of them—the men dressed in Italian pinstripes and Thomas Pink shirts, the women in smart pantsuits and low heels. They were possibly the world’s best-dressed refugees. I stopped one of them, who told me his name was John Fratton.

“What happened?” I asked. “Was there an accident… with a plane?”

John, a grandfatherly figure with thick gray hair, was agitated. “This wasn’t some two-bit propeller job from Teterboro airport,” he said, waving his arms at the burning towers. “There were two jetliners! Jetliners!” John wasn’t looking at me as he spoke. It was as though he was trying to explain to himself what had just happened. “The cops said the second one came in over the East River—and then, slam!” He shook his head, as if something was trapped inside.

His pupils were pinpricks.

For some reason the word “jetliner” clicked. I thought of the silver tube of a Boeing 767 and the damage it would do to a skyscraper. It didn’t occur to me that a Boeing 767 would also have nearly twenty-four thousand gallons of jet fuel in its wings. I was, however, a little skeptical: Did John really know what he was talking about? There were plenty of amateur pilots, after all, who flew small private planes from Teterboro airport in New Jersey. Surely it was possible that they could get their navigation so muddled that one could hit a 110-story building. But two planes, into two buildings, within minutes of each other? On a clear and sunny September morning?

“Thank you, sir,” I said, giving him a quizzical stare.

John Fratton didn’t look like an exaggerator.

At this point, of course, I hadn’t seen what the rest of the world had already watched live on CNN: United Airlines Flight 175, from Boston to Los Angeles, making an unscheduled stop between the seventy-eighth and eighty-fourth floors of the south tower. The aircraft had seemed to twist as it cut into the building.

As I continued jogging south, the refugees began to look more ragged. Some of them had specks of white dust on their business suits. The election officials, meanwhile, were starting to hurriedly pack up their tables. The was an overwhelming stench of what I assumed to be jet fuel… and something else. I stopped one of the evacuees. She seemed calm and together. She said her name was Diane Rieck and that she worked for American Express in the World Financial Center, one block north of the twin towers. “I heard a big bang and then saw a… a huge red fireball,” she told me, her hand over her face to shield it from the sun. Diane continued: “But the worst was seeing the people jump: three or four from this side, two or three from the other.” She pointed matter-of-factly to the inferno of the north tower. I finished my jerky writing—in longhand—then began to process what Diane had just told me.

“What? There are people jumping?”

Diane didn’t answer; her face was suddenly awash with tears and mascara. A colleague held tightly on to her arm.

“Interview over,” he said.

It’s now 9:45 A.M. This is what I don’t know: The fire caused by the twenty-four thousand gallons of jet fuel in the plane that hit the south tower is weakening the steel core of the building. It will collapse in twenty minutes, nearly killing me. A total of 642 others will not survive: 18 of them on the ground, 618 above the impact zone between the seventy-eighth and eighty-fourth floors, and six on the floors below. The north tower, even though it was hit earlier than the south tower, will take another forty-three minutes to fall. A total of 1,466 will be killed: 1,356 of them at or above the impact zone between the ninety-fourth and ninety-eighth floors, and 100 below. This is what else I don’t know: at 9:30 A.M., President Bush described the events in New York as “an apparent terrorist attack”; at 9:40 A.M., the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights in the U.S.; and at 9:43 A.M., 213 miles southwest of Manhattan, in Washington, D.C., an American Airlines Boeing 757 nose-dived into the west side of the Pentagon. I also don’t know, of course, that at this very moment, 2.6 miles northeast of the burning Pentagon, the White House is being evacuated.

I have jogged from Tribeca to Murray Street, three blocks north of the World Trade Center. I’m facing sideways with the sun searing into my forehead. Beside me there’s a man sitting on the curb, his back to the inferno and his son on his lap. The boy, barely more than a toddler, is being shielded by his father’s body from the unbearable horror behind him. The man is holding a book of nursery rhymes and reading into his son’s ear, not once giving in to the temptation to glance over his shoulder. I wonder where the mother is. Then I look up at the flames.

There’s a police blockade in front of me. NYPD officers and FBI agents have gathered around their cars, watching helplessly. Four burly and uniformed men are around one vehicle, thumping their fists on its roof and stifling sobs. They’re listening to something on the police radio. “People don’t see shit like this in wars,” says one. A yellow school bus grunts eastward. Some of the cars on Murray Street have shunted into each other, a disaster movie visual cliché, as their drivers stare at the spectacle above. Already the crowd on Murray Street has witnessed scores of people suffer one of the most wretched deaths imaginable. Here they come: black shapes, writhing, turning, and grasping as they make the quarter-of-a-mile journey from the top floors of the World Trade Center to the concrete plaza below. They fall silently: The sirens scream for them. I tell myself they have passed out with shock; but why are they moving? Why do they seem to be clawing at the acres of glass?

I remind myself that I have been to the observation deck of the south tower three times. Each time I felt a chill of fear as the elevator doors revealed Manhattan and New York Harbor as if viewed from space. I remember the sickly sensation of the building swaying in the wind; I also remember reading that the 1,350-foot towers swing a few feet every ten seconds, their giddy movements counterbalanced by gigantic steel pendulums in the center of each structure. The last time I was up there I wanted to be back on the ground immediately. The elevator operator cracked stupid jokes all the way down. I wonder if he is one of the terrible black shapes.

Now they’re falling in clusters; two of them appear to be holding hands before gravity takes over. I glimpse a flapping necktie. The cloudless blue sky makes for perfect viewing conditions. Someone in the crowd says he has just escaped from the building. He says he saw bodies in the treetops.

The clutter of the skyline makes it impossible to see where, or how, the black shapes land. Then a terrible thought strikes me: The human shrapnel must be deadly for those trying to evacuate the building. Again I think of Karen. The plaza itself must be a vision of hell—God, I hope she was late for work. The crowd gasps, weeps, and whoops as the human confetti continues. Every so often a bystander falls to the ground, shaking and praying, unable to watch anymore. This happens to me after perhaps the sixth faller. I’m a godless soul, but praying seems appropriate. I’m willing to try anything to help the poor bastards falling from the building.

At first it seems inexplicable why they would choose to jump. Then comes the slow realization—the furnace of burning jet fuel, the charred skin, the toxic fumes. And then the conclusion that there is no choice at all. There’s a helicopter hovering close to the mast on the south tower. I wait for it to land on the roof, but it backs away and circles. Some trapped office workers are waving brightly colored rags out of the shattered windows. “What the fuck are they doin’, man?” someone next to me shouts at the retreating helicopter. “Why don’t they land on the roof and save them?” No one is able to supply an answer. And then it starts to happen.

There’s a crunch, a boom, and the sound of several thousand windows exploding. A section of the north tower comes loose, like a melted ice shelf falling into the ocean. The impact creates a wave of debris that crashes through the streets, channeling itself between buildings and sweeping pedestrians off their feet. Then comes a terrible realization: It’s heading for Murray Street. For the first time in my life I experience mass hysteria: Everyone starts to run. Head down, my notebook in one hand, camera in the other, I sprint northwest, toward an apartment complex near Chambers Street. I stop noticing other people. I find an enclosed square and a doorway facing north, away from the collapsing building. There are perhaps ten of us in the doorway—we look at each other but say nothing. The smoke clears; we’re okay. I jog east to where Chambers Street meets the West Side Highway. I walk slowly backward up the highway, staring at the disintegrating skyscraper ahead of me. Then a police officer shouts something. There’s a loud pop: Did someone fire a gun?

Then another crunch, another boom. This time much, much louder.

I think of the man sitting on the curb with his son.

I’m running again.

I didn’t stop running until I was about halfway up the West Side Highway: Only then did I dare turn around to confirm what had caused the seismic boom behind me.

The south tower of the World Trade Center had disappeared. In its place was an acrid mushroom cloud, slowly billowing northward and upward: black ink spilled on a blue canvas. I wondered what had happened to the police officer who screamed at the crowd to move. I could have sworn I heard him fire his pistol into the air. I concluded that the people only a few yards behind me as I ran north must have been killed: At one point when I looked over my shoulder, I saw them being sucked into the wall of smoke. There were, however, some survivors, their suits ripped and matted with dust. They ran, walked, and stumbled north, occasionally pausing to throw up in the gutter or spit out gobs of filth. None of us had even thought about what would happen if one of those 110-story towers collapsed. After all, the Empire State Building hadn’t keeled over after the B-25 hit it back in 1945. “You bloody idiot,” I thought to myself. “What were you thinking?” But I wasn’t thinking. I was watching.

I turned east onto the cobbled part of Greenwich Street and then north again, back up toward my apartment building. By the time I got to the massive UPS warehouse on the border of Tribeca and the West Village, the throng had stopped and turned to look at the burning north tower. A brown UPS truck, its doors and windows wide open, had parked in the middle of the street and cranked up the radio in its cab to full volume. A hot dog seller, who had presumably wheeled his rusty cart all the way up from the financial district, was offering snacks. There were curses of disbelief as the K-Rock DJ, who had stopped playing back-to-back Led Zeppelin for probably the first time in his career, declared that the Pentagon had also been hit by an airliner, and that another aircraft had come down in Pennsylvania. “This is fuckin’ World War III,” shouted a teenager on a skateboard. At that moment the north tower fell—all 1,350 feet of it sucked into the bedrock of southern Manhattan.

Each tower, I later learned, created 900,000 tons of rubble when it fell. And each Boeing 767 released one kiloton of raw energy—the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT, or a twentieth of the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima—when it hit the World Trade Center. The scale of the destruction, it seemed, could be described using only the metrics of nuclear Armageddon.

So there I stood on Greenwich Street—watching a 110-story skyscraper being razed for the second time in one morning. It was then I realized that this was a deliberate act of cruelty, not a freak double accident. Perhaps, I thought, this is the beginning of the end for the war virgins. Perhaps our adrenal glands weren’t malfunctioning: They were trying to tell us something all along. But who would want to vandalize the world’s most famous skyline? What could they hope to achieve? I felt my first flash of anger. Only one name seemed obvious: Saddam Hussein. I thought of President George W. Bush, and I thought of his father, President George H. W. Bush. And I thought of the inevitable revenge ahead. There is a war coming, I told myself—and this time, it won’t be over in five days. My only comfort, out there in the ash and the smoke, was that wherever the war was declared, I wouldn’t be there to cover it.

Little, of course, did I know.

I got back to 666 Greenwich Street sometime before noon: Deadlines seemed like an abstract concept after what had just happened. Even now, I can’t remember the final steps into my apartment. Did I say anything to Walter and Carlos at the door? Was there anyone in the elevator with me? My memory resumes its narrative with me trying to call the foreign desk, then Alana, with no success. The mobile phone masts had jammed with 21 million New Yorkers calling their mothers. Instead, I e-mailed. Luckily, my Internet service was still working; it was hooked up via cable, not through the dead phone line.

This is what I sent to Barrow:

Subject: Hell

Must say the whole thing has been traumatic. Not only do I have a friend who works there (can’t contact her), but I also sat and watched at least 20 people jump out of the W.T.C. from the top floors because they were being burned alive. I stayed as long as I dared, but when the first tower collapsed and a huge mushroom cloud engulfed the financial center, I’m afraid to say that I legged it as fast as I could. I’m not going anywhere near the financial district again, too dangerous.

In hindsight, those final two sentences were probably not the best way to begin a career as a war correspondent. Legging it, after all, is not what war correspondents do: They hold fast; stand firm; head back into the action. The e-mail did, however, establish a theme for my later work. I also e-mailed Alana and Glen. I told Glen to call my mother. She would have assumed the worst.

Finally, I e-mailed Karen:

Subject: OK

Are you okay?

I imagined the message pinging into the inbox of her computer, buried beneath 1,800,000 tons of melted steel and plastic. Perhaps she would be able to access her work e-mail account remotely, I thought. I remembered that she used to carry a Palm Pilot around with her. After clicking on “send,” I noticed I had a new message. It was highlighted with a cheerful yellow envelope icon.

The e-mail was from the foreign desk:

Subject: [Blank]

Thousand wds please on “I saw people fall to death,”

etc…

I felt a twist of anger at the almost comic insensitivity of the e-mail. “Fuck you,” I mouthed at the screen of my laptop. Part of me, however, felt pleased with the request. To the foreign desk, I was a dull, egghead business reporter—and a young and inexperienced one at that—not a trusted “color” writer. The rest of me, however, felt disgusted at the thought of using the trade center’s destruction as a career opportunity. Nevertheless, I could only imagine the agony of Wapshott, having to watch or listen to reports of the destruction in New York and elsewhere from the QE2. I wondered if the cruise liner was even within range of satellite television.

My most pressing concern, however, was that I was in shock and unable to summon a single emotion, never mind a pleasing turn of phrase. The final deadline for the first edition was in about two hours, meaning I would have to file my thousand-word piece within an hour to guarantee it a place in the newspaper. I got up, washed my face, and spat dust and phlegm into the kitchen sink.

Then, somewhat belatedly, I threw up.

Next to my laptop was the red, leather-bound diary I had grabbed before running toward the World Trade Center. I opened it up. On the first page I had unimaginatively scrawled “Independence Day!”—a reference to the Hollywood film. I felt a shudder of incompetence, not the first of the day. My notes ended with a quote from a random bystander: “Dude, there’s no way that tower will collapse.” I sat on my cheap, pretend-leather chair and stared at my laptop’s postage stamp screen. Behind me was the only window in my apartment. I stared harder at the LCD and felt lightheaded with anxiety, as though the morning’s terror had dissolved the sugar in my blood. I jiggled my feet in an effort to revive myself.

Then I typed:

At first, we thought it was burning debris falling from the upper floors of the World Trade Center. Then we noticed the debris had arms and legs.

By 1:00 P.M., it was done. Twenty years ago the deadline would have come and gone; I would probably have been frantically jogging uptown in search of a working telephone, into which I could cough a few lines from my notebook. Perhaps my story would have made it into the following week’s newspaper.

I tried to watch television but kept being distracted by an unusual noise. It sounded like distant cheering—not constant, but in irregular bursts. I heard air horns and applause, like in a ticker-tape parade. For the second time in a few hours, I thought I was hallucinating. There it was again. I stood on my windowsill, cupped my hands against the filthy glass, and tried to see what was going on. Nothing: just an empty street, trees, and that awful smoke. I grabbed my keys and headed for the elevator. Outside, as I reached the corner of Christopher and Greenwich Streets, the noise came again, louder. Then I saw where it was coming from: On either bank of the West Side Highway was a crowd of perhaps two hundred people, waving American flags and holding placards with OUR HEROES and GOD BLESS AMERICA painted on them. As the ambulances and fire engines hurtled south down the highway, toward the mouth of hell, the crowd cheered, hooted, and wiggled the signs. I felt a sudden and unexpected swell of patriotism for a foreign country. There was no traffic going in the opposite direction. The vehicles blasted their horns. Their occupants, I noticed, looked more like soldiers than emergency workers. Some of them raised their fists and shook them in defiance. Others just waved. The rest, sootfaced and sipping sticky energy drinks, stared blankly at the missing Manhattan skyline. Perhaps, like me, they felt angry.

Later, my mobile phone managed to connect for the first time since 9:00 A.M. I talked to my dad, who told me I was lucky to have witnessed such a historic event: I could tell, however, that he was just trying to find something positive to say. He was also trying to hide the fact that he was hugely relieved. My mother said that she and my sister had cried all day. I spoke briefly to Alana, who was still with her own dad. She said she would come over to the apartment later. Then I got through to James Bone, who had written the day’s lead story. I found his cheery tone both hugely reassuring and unbearably irritating. “This reminds me of Afghanistan,” he said casually. Bone, of course, was a real war correspondent. He hadn’t legged it.

After another few restless hours in the apartment, I decided to take a walk, but there was a police blockade at Fourteenth Street. No one without ID was being allowed in or out. On my way home I saw a Vietnam veteran draped in an Old Glory flag standing on the corner of Seventh and West Thirteenth. He was shouting; crying; pleading—I made out something about God and the “fucking Arabs,” but his words didn’t form coherent sentences. It didn’t matter: Words had been put out of business on this particular day. I headed south and the terrible fog thickened; my walk broke into a run. A light rain of ash made my contact lenses sting. American flags were draped over the brownstone buildings on Charles Street: Christ, I thought, I’m in a foreign country in a time of war. The U.S. had never really felt foreign to me: It did now.

The same thought had clearly struck others: a Muslim cabdriver, who had probably escaped his own war-torn country to come to New York, was buying an I LOVE THE USA bumper sticker from the Asian-owned newsstand on Hudson Street and West Tenth. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

The Italian restaurant on Christopher and Washington Streets had wrapped its outdoor tables in plastic and put its winter snow canopy over the front door—but there were still people inside, eating and drinking, as ash rained against the windows. It seemed odd to order pasta and swig Chianti with a blazing mass grave only a dozen or so blocks away. But then, what else were we supposed to do? Sit at home, sober and hungry, waiting for the next jetliner to hit? I ducked into my monolithic redbrick apartment building and felt relieved to be inside.

Back in the apartment, I logged on to The Times’s website—I couldn’t stand another second of television. It was about 3:00 A.M. in London, and the first of tomorrow’s articles were going online. The September 12 edition was turning out to be an almost unbearable mix of the world as it was, and the world as it had become: “Clingfilm Attack Lover Jailed for Five Years” was next to “She Sat at Her Desk and Watched an Airliner Flying Straight at Her.” I skimmed through several other articles—all probably written before lunchtime on Tuesday in London—but developed a fixation with a single item, halfway down the nib column. It read:

Some like it hot: Thousands of volunteers from the Women’s Institute and Women’s Royal Voluntary Service have knitted the world’s longest scarf—22 miles. The scarf, which would cover two football pitches if laid out, took five years to make and involved 500 million stitches.

How long would it be, I asked myself, before another story like this makes it into The Times? Weeks, months… years?

It’s 11 P.M. I’m lying on my mattress, sweating and tangled in the blue cotton sheets, waiting for Alana to arrive. I would phone, but the phones don’t work. Nothing bloody works, apart from cable television. All 897 channels have become one: the terror channel. I don’t want to watch it. Not again—not ever. My apartment looks much the same as it did yesterday; nothing else does. Outside, there are pedestrians wearing gas masks. The amber fuzz of the streetlamps through the terrible, stinking fog makes Manhattan look like Victorian London. The fog, with all the microscopic particles of horror within it, is being carried up the wind tunnel of Greenwich Street from downtown, which has today been renamed “ground zero” by the news networks. That, apparently, is what scientists used to call the impact zone of a thermonuclear bomb. Perhaps, as the skateboarder said, this is World War III.

Today Manhattan became a target in a war no one knew had been declared. And today I became an accidental war correspondent. I can’t get the smell out of my clothes. And the NYPD officer’s words are still trapped in my head: “Get the fuck out of here!” His handgun was raised and his face was stretched and twisted into a drenched mask of panic. But his scream was silenced by the tsunami of smoke and debris crashing toward Chambers Street. “How do you know it’s over?” he mouthed. “Go home! Go home!” There was a gunshot, or perhaps the sound of steel and glass hitting concrete, and then the simultaneous realization of several hundred people that they were about to die. That was when the running started.

I keep having to wash my face and spit gobs of grit and dust and God-knows-what-else into the sink. I snapped and bought a carton of cigarettes an hour or so ago; cancer can try as hard as it wants, but it’s not going to scare any New Yorkers today. Let’s see if civilization survives tomorrow first—then the cigarette smokers can start worrying about their ruined lungs.

Still no word from Karen. I reflexively dial her home and mobile numbers, but it can’t or won’t connect. I call her office again and listen to a cheerful recorded voice telling me the number’s temporarily unavailable. How about permanently unavailable, I think, along with an entire zip code of southern Manhattan? I imagine Karen’s melted desk in the inferno still blazing less than a mile and a half from my bed. From Greenwich Street, the floodlights erected by the rescue workers look like a distant rip in the space-time continuum, a blinding white doorway to another dimension. Even from this distance I can hear the groans of the machinery. Karen would probably have been late for work, I reassure myself. She always was—is.

Alana is on her way from Midtown: Fortieth and Lexington. It’s close to Grand Central; I hope she’s okay. Maybe that’ll be next? It’s hard not to speculate. I haven’t seen her since I left for England two weeks ago. I can barely believe I landed at John F. Kennedy Airport last night. Alana must be walking or taking the subway: The cabdrivers have all gone home, and who can blame them? Who’d want to be an Iranian or Afghan—prayer beads hanging from the rearview mirror; the Holy Qur’an on the passenger seat—picking up angry Americans on the streets of Manhattan tonight? There’s a gospel song playing on the clock radio next to my bed: “I keep on falling,” goes the lyric. The bass notes make the radio’s casing rattle. I close my eyes and think of black shadows against blue sky and reflective glass.

7 BACILLUS ANTHRACIS

“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.”

Soon enough, Stevens’s astonished doctors began to understand why: Anthrax was charging through his body, whistling as it worked, shutting down every vital organ, one by one. Anthrax, it is said, does to its victims from the inside what South American flesh-eating ants do from the outside.

But I didn’t want to believe that Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden, or any other celebrity killer on the international terror circuit had used a biological weapon to murder Stevens. The very idea of someone launching an anthrax attack on a Florida supermarket tabloid seemed comic, worthy of one of The Sun’s own wacky news items. For the first time in journalistic history, however, the facts were on The Sun’s side: It was virtually impossible to catch the inhalation form of anthrax by accident. Cutaneous anthrax, the more common version of the disease, was usually passed on by cattle in Third World countries. Stevens, whose most adventurous activity before his death was a five-day fishing trip to North Carolina, could have spent a decade herding goats in Africa, and he would still have been unlikely to catch skin anthrax—never mind the inhalation version. But even before the statistical improbability of Stevens’s death had time to sink in, another employee of The Sun, a seventy-four-year-old grandfather, Ernesto Blanco, came down with the disease. Blanco, born in Cuba, was initially diagnosed with pneumonia before doctors at Miami’s Cedars Medical Center decided that the fluid in his lungs was caused by inhaled anthrax spores. To me, the only positive aspect of the whole affair was that it was happening more than a thousand miles south of Manhattan. Then anthrax arrived, refreshed from the Florida sunshine, in the Rockefeller Center, yards from my veal-fattening cubicle. It was ready for work.

New York had already faced spectacular, televised violence; now, it seemed, it was going to face invisible, biological violence. Living in Manhattan felt like living in some distant, war-weary outpost: how I imagined Casablanca might have felt during World War II. The White Horse Tavern, an Irish pub on Hudson Street, became my Rick’s Bar. Only a few blocks south, debris from a two-kiloton blast still smoldered; every day brought color-coded alerts and closed bridges; and every conversation seemed to end with a suicide attack scenario. “What if they, like, just walked into Grand Central Station with an AK-47 and opened fire?” I heard one woman ask at the checkout of D’Agostino, a West Village supermarket.

The Times’s bureau on Sixth Avenue, meanwhile, became a fortress. Before entering 1211, I had to show my British passport and put my Starbucks chocolate croissant through an X-ray machine. It was, I suppose, a new kind of normality, but it didn’t feel very normal—especially not with the posters for missing World Trade Center workers still gummed to every surface imaginable, including the entrance to 666 Greenwich Street; or, of course, the firehouses in the West Village, their bloodred doorways strewn with wreaths, candles, and makeshift shrines to dead emergency workers. Then there were the news reports of President Bush ordering the bombing of Taliban forces in Afghanistan, and the hit song “I Wanna Bomb Osama” (to the tune of “La Bamba”) that was all over morning radio and the Internet. In Times Square it was possible to buy a “Wanted: Dead or Alive” T-shirt with Osama bin Laden’s face on it for twenty dollars. The War on Terror had even affected the gay boutiques on Christopher Street. One of them had put a pink sign in its window saying, “We Love Everything the Taliban Hates.” I had a serious conversation with James Bone about buying a kayak to escape Manhattan, in case of another attack. But I knew a kayak wouldn’t stop me from getting the plague. “Ring around the rosy,” I heard a pack of boisterous ten-year-olds chant outside the school yard on West Eleventh Street. “Pocket full of posies. Anthrax! Anthrax! And we all fall down…” They thought it was hilarious.

Half an hour passed and nothing happened. Barrow, who had asked me to “hold tight,” hadn’t called back. I stared at the television, wondering whether to take the next subway back to the West Village. I started monitoring myself for flulike symptoms. I wished I had bought some Cipro over the Internet. I had been put off, however, by the price: $399 for sixty pills. It also occurred to me that I was at the scene of the first ever bioterror attack on America, and should be writing about it. But how do you write about airborne germs? The drama of invisible violence is psychological, not physical: Bioterrorism could end up putting war correspondents out of business.

Not, of course, that I wanted to write anything: I wanted to run. On the television, a brave or foolish reporter was standing outside the headquarters of NBC, opposite the news ticker at 1211 Avenue of the Americas. “After everything New York’s been through over the past month,” he was saying, “it’s hard to believe the city is now having to cope with a biological terror attack.”

The NBC building, like 1211, is part of Rockefeller Center, an eleven–acre village of concrete, glass, and nasty Trump-style gold fixtures, connected by windy underground tunnels, one of which leads to the Forty-ninth Street subway station. The centerpiece is Rockefeller Plaza, which features a food court and, during winter, an ice rink and Christmas tree. If one part of the complex became contaminated with Bacillus anthracis, I calculated, it would spread to the others, affecting tens of thousands of workers. One of those poor bastards would be me.

“Business new-ews?”

This was Martin again; I couldn’t wait any longer.

“Martin? It’s me.”

“Chris. You okay?”

“No.”

“Oh dear. What’s up?”

“You told me to ‘hold tight.’”

“Bit snowed under, sorry. James Bone’s covering the anthrax.”

“Oh, righ—”

“I’ll put you over to foreign.”

I heard Chopin, then a familiar posh voice.

“Chr-is?” Again, the info-seeking dip.

Me: “Hi. I’m in the Rockefeller Center: where they’ve found the anthrax. Should I go over to the NBC building?”

I was hoping for a brisk “no.” Let Bone get infected.

“Good idea,” the voice said. “Go.”

Shit.

Outside, as I leaped between the yellow cabs heading upstream on Sixth Avenue, I thought about a film I had once watched called The Andromeda Strain. It was about a U.S. Army satellite, named Scoop VII, that had fallen to earth in the New Mexico desert. The satellite, army scientists discovered, had become contaminated with a deadly extraterrestrial virus. The plot revolved around the race to find a cure for the virus before it wiped out humankind. The cast of The Andromeda Strain, I recalled, wore white chemical suits throughout the entire film.

I, on the other hand, was wearing blue jeans and a YSL shirt. I wondered how effective they would be at protecting me from killer bacteria. I wished I had a gas mask, or some bloody Cipro tablets. Should I even be going anywhere near NBC? Would I end up being wheeled into St. Vincent’s Hospital at 2:00 A.M., a chart above my head reading “not oriented to person, place, or time”? Would the wind carry the anthrax spores deep into my lungs? I imagined the anthrax bacteria multiplying inside my body. I had read that a thousand anthrax bacilli can grow into trillions within three days. By the time they kill you, 30 percent of your blood weight is live bacilli. Through a microscope they look like teeming worms. Your bodily fluids, meanwhile, ooze into the gap between your brain and skull, making your face swell into an unrecognizable balloon of putrid, yellowing flesh. That was why anthrax was described as “repugnant to the conscience of mankind” by the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which banned its use on the battlefield. I pictured my face as an anthrax-inflated balloon. But it was too late: I was under orders from the foreign desk. And that, in my warped mind, was more terrifying than any biological weapon.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

The cause of the air crash, however, was not terrorism: Investigators suspected that the tail fin and rudder of the Airbus A300 had been sheared off when the plane hit turbulence caused by a 747 in front of it. It was a reminder that life could still be taken by fate, as well as by Osama bin Laden. Two of the victims, Kathleen Lawler, forty-eight, and her twenty-four-year-old son Christopher, were simply sitting at home in Belle Harbor when a fireball came out of the sky and devoured them.

I desperately wanted to leave New York. I knew I was supposed to love the Big Apple, but I couldn’t pretend anymore. I hated it. It was nothing like the relaxing, sunny business trips to Silicon Valley I had taken while covering the dot-com industry in the late nineties. By spring I saw a chance to move when Peter Stothard, The Times’s editor for a decade, announced his retirement. He was replaced by Robert Thomson, managing editor of the American edition of the Financial Times. I asked Patience if there was a chance Thomson would reopen The Times’s Los Angeles bureau. Patience said yes, but that I was unlikely to get the job. “Chris, you’ve got to remember: You’re still very young,” she said. “And besides, you’re a serious financial journalist. Los Angeles is all about celebrity fluff.” A week later she called back: I was the new Los Angeles correspondent. Thomson had also decided to reopen the New York bureau, this time in Battery Park, and hire two people to cover Wall Street—essentially ending the culture of lift and view. I wasn’t quite sure how it had all happened, but I was delighted. Thomson, apparently, had wanted someone on the West Coast who could write about the economics of celebrity fluff as well as the celebrity fluff itself.

Alana, on the other hand, was distraught: She hated the idea of giving up the West Village for La-La-Land. I suggested going alone and trying a long-distance relationship. After several furious arguments and a brief separation, Alana decided to come with me. In the end we drove there, picking up my company jeep in Long Island and pointing it west. California, I imagined, would mark the end of my career as an accidental war correspondent. My two years in New York would be a violent blip on an otherwise peaceful life. I would spend my days lounging by the Beverly Hilton swimming pool and my evenings at celebrity parties in the Hollywood hills. I would drink cappuccinos in Shutters of Santa Monica, sink vodka martinis in the Sky Bar, and cruise up and down Sunset Strip with Led Zeppelin crunching out of the jeep’s stereo system. There would be no anthrax, and no falling skyscrapers.

Oh yes: In California, I would be a new man.