DAY FIFTY ONE:Oct. 31:
Elvis was walking down Broadway today, Cat Woman at his side. A few blocks further uptown I spotted a six-foot yellow chicken chatting in front of a tapas bar to a matador and an angel whose wings were lavender feathers.It's Halloween, New York's favorite party day. Terrorists or no terrorists, the Greenwich Village cross-dressers wouldn't miss a chance to strut their stuff. My building was a cacophony of trick-or-treaters, though the streets were bereft of youngsters. The police estimate 1 million people braved the night chill and terrorism fears to gawk at 30,000 costumed crazies in the Village tonight -- that's about 25% below the usual crowds. A man dressed as Bat Man declared, ''You can't be scared. You got to live and be free. Bat Man ain't afraid.'
One float in the parade had a man dressed as Osama bin Laden, seated inside a jail cell. But most of the costumes and floats seemed deliberately nonpolitical. As usual in the Village, silliness dominated.
Though the revelers had their fun, it's doubtful few could completely forget that today Kathy Nguyen, a 61-year-old Vietnamese immigrant who worked in a clerical department at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital, died of inhalational anthrax. Nobody knows how she was infected. Even the best options to explain her case are pretty grim. Perhaps the New York City mail is contaminated: a man in Queens did, Mayor Giuliani said, receive a soiled telephone bill that tested positive in one lab for anthrax, negative in another, is being re-tested as I write these words. So, concluded the Mayor, 'We're hopeful that it will turn out negative but we don't know for sure.'
Today government investigators conceded that the investigation is wide open: almost anything is possible. The strongest probable explanations for Nguyen's case include:
1.) There has been an environmental deliberate release of anthrax in NYC and she happens to be one of first cases.
2.) She handled a piece of mail at the hospital that came from Washington DC and was in the Brentwood Road facility at the same moment as Daschle's letter. This is the Brentwood cross Contamination theory.
3.) She handled mail that was cross-contaminated in a NYC postal office, at the time the NBC, CBS or NY Post letters went through
4.) There are other, as yet unidentified, letters going through the US postal system at this moment that may have contaminated postal facilities. If so, this may represent a broader threat to the general public.
That leaves New Yorkers with some pretty sorry options. Maybe all of our mail is potentially contaminated. Maybe there is anthrax somewhere entirely independent of the postal method of delivery. Maybe we will never know.
It's hard to know what advice people out to receive at this point. Who should take prophylactic antibiotics? What mail should be read? Discarded? Should we be wearing masks in the subways?
My literary agent sent me this note today:
You know what! I've instructed my assistant to buy rubber gloves and a mask and to throw away all mail that is not from a client or a publishing house and to ask clients to email us from now on.
Furthermore, HarperCollins is also doing the same thing. Of course that
Doesn't control for mail that happened to be contaminated but it makes me
feel better about our work environment. Charlotte
Newsday's book review editor tells me many publishers and agents are following suit, which prompted me to ask, 'But what if one of those odd, poorly addressed bundles is the unsolicited manuscript that would have been the Next Great American Novel?'
I'm off to Washington D.C. tomorrow morning, where I will be speaking on Capitol Hill about public health capacity to respond to bioterrorism. It will be interesting to see how the tensions and fears felt by New Yorkers compare to those anxieties expressed in the nation's capitol.
As midnight approaches the Yankees are, very sadly, trailing in the fourth game of the World Series. It's the bottom of the ninth and Arizona leads 3 to 1. Sigh.
Be well. Stay safe. Stand defiant.
Laurie Garrett
