It gets on your hands, or in your lungs. It can kill you if you don’t treat it. Worst of all, you don’t know where or when or why you’ll get it.
Sort of like asbestos, anthrax seems to be stealthily infiltrating our lives. The news today is of a woman at 30 Rockefeller Center — seven blocks from my office, across the street from my girlfriend’s — who touched the wrong powdery envelope and is battling a sheep disease.
Filled with equal parts hubris and naivete, I contend that this week’s anthrax news isn’t international terrorism. It’s deranged Americans. Would the Taliban, masterminds of an attack unprecedented in contemporary culture, really send envelopes in the mail? That’s so old-world, so boring, so unheroic in the eyes of Allah.
I contend that there are copycat lunatics around America who are getting all sorts of bad ideas from the news and using it against them. Doesn’t it make more sense that some idiot in Iowa got fed up with Tom Brokaw and the newspapers in Florida? Does anyone remember “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”
The problem is, as cocksure as I am, as firmly as I implore those around me to live their lives as if nothing is wrong, I have no certainty. Things are wrong. I could be wrong. At this point, living in New York, any day could be my worst day. Sitting at home, I feel empowered to press on; sitting at work, all I want to do is go to the suburbs and stay there.
Months and years will pass before we feel normal again. I wonder how abnormal we’ll all get before it all ends. If it all ends.