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Alissa Quart: In New York, the exception has become the rule

Tuesday 16 October 2001 00:00 BST
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Today, the Bush administration is buying antibiotics to treat up to 12 million people in the wake of anthrax contamination in Florida, Nebraska and of course, New York. Indeed, in New York, anthrax has already taken hold of the collective imagination.

Two married friends discuss leaving Manhattan, so as to avoid chemical attack: spearing their breakfast omelettes, they ruminate on lead-ceilinged bunkers and how far one need be outside the city to avoid nuclear fall-out. "100 miles?" the husband asks his wife.

A doctor tells me that every patient mentions anthrax at least once during their appointment. The old saw is that, as a doctor, when you hear hoof beats, look for horses not zebras, or look for the commonest cause not the exceptional cause, he says. This has been turned on its head, now, where patterns of upper respiratory infection must now be considered as possible signs of germ warfare. And lifestyle journalists have taken to proving their perverse bonhomie by joking that the worst threat of all to media folks would be anthrax in the cocaine supply.

This is part of our new climate in New York, that of constant unknowability. Now, the exception is the rule and paranoiacs are the sages. Somehow, I am not afraid physically but fear locates itself differently in different people. Some no longer take subways. Others look askance at deli salad bars, once the staple of single women in New York: who knows what a transcendentally-inclined miscreant could sprinkle in the dressing? One friend dreams that she is forced to be a suicide bomber, another that she is trapped in a burning building.

My personal fear is that, in New York's descent to drear and despair, that I have lost my faith in my own structures of meaning and feeling permanently. I can't seem to concentrate on anything but the news. This makes sense as everything I report on has been marked by the goings-on.

On Friday, after the NBC employee was reported to have been struck ill, guards attempt to clear youth peace protesters who had gathered in front of MTV, trying to bring attention to their cause. I try to interview these kids, who tell me they don't "want to live in a world like this" but guards keep shuffling me away.

And the place is simply teeming with cops rather than the usual tourists and media workers: Condé Nast has just been said to have been evacuated (one imagines the Vogue girls clattering down the street in their antediluvian high heels) and the New York Times, fearing one of its reporters was infected with anthrax, is in a similar state of alert. Friends from other magazines now have their mail screened as a matter of course.

On Saturday, my friends and I decide we are still not okay and that we should just hole up. We watch three full hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and there was such a sense of relief in viewing ritual phantasmogoric slaughter, its vampires simply creatures of pure evil, not terrorists who are complicated victims of years of colonialism, post-colonialism and regional economic interests, revenge being a matter of stakes through hearts and not confusing airstrikes and curbed freedom of expression.

Leaving the world of entertainment is hard, now. As if chiming into a chorus of paranoids-turned-seers, my mother calls to tell me that I was one of the last infants to be inoculated for smallpox and I decide that one might as well embrace the uncanny and I start to plan my Halloween costume. Others are thinking along the same lines. I have heard of the inevitable World Trade Centre building costume, the Anthrax the metal band costume, the human Cipro pill costume. I am going with a indirectly related but nonetheless depressing costume, that of the bubble economy.

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