I just keep thinking, it will start with some random, unsuspecting New Yorker opening a letter, and why shouldn?t it be me??
My sister?s voice shivered nervously down the phone line. It was November of 2001, and the country was in the throes of the anthrax scare ? when 22 people got sick and five died, including that little old lady in Connecticut who had no connection to anything. To my sister, it looked like the opening salvo of a new attack, one that would sweep the nation. One that would start with her. She hunkered down in her apartment and awaited the worst, eyeing each incoming electricity bill warily as a stamped missive of doom.
I said the necessary things: calm down, be rational, think about the improbability. I said it was natural to expect the worst ? she had been in New York on September 11th, after all, while I was camped out in front of cnn in another city. So I didn?t make a fuss about her weird behavior, and that crisis passed.
As the months and years ticked by, as the terror alert level vacillated between orange and yellow, she and her husband bought a bigger apartment, and renovated it. It was a good investment. They were saving for retirement, oh yes, they would be ready for whatever life threw their way. They carefully built up their safety high around them, one share of stock at a time.
But when the lights flickered out on August 14, 2003, my sister was not ready. She was in a dressing room trying on skirts when the store went dark. Outside, no one knew what had happened ? strangers clustered around radios, trying to find out if it was another attack. My sister walked uptown quickly, through the honking chaos of the city streets, and sat in her husband?s office. He was trying to get the backup generators up and running, and she was stuck there waiting for him, a little bored. That?s when she called me.
?I want details!? I yelped into the phone. I was two thousand miles away, and jealous. ?I want descriptions, and I was hoping you could go out and take some pictures for me. It?s probably the only chance you?ll ever have to see a New York City sunset that?s not competing with the lights from the office towers.?
?Are you kidding? Do you know what happened during the last blackout?? She reminded me of the riots and looting that had taken over parts of the city in 1977. ?All the streetlights are out, you know,? she said patiently, like she was talking to one of her fourth grade students. ?I wouldn?t go out alone when it?s getting dark, I could get attacked.?
I found out later she walked home with her husband in the early evening, and didn?t stir from the apartment that night. If I?d been there, I would have stayed out till dawn, I would have walked the island from end to end. I would have left roses on the crumpled suit jackets of the stranded commuters sleeping on sidewalks and benches. And I would have sucked up every ounce of moonlight, because the poor moon is usually so lost in that landscape.
After all, no one smashed shop windows that night. The city felt scary and unknown, but so are many things in this new world of ours. People ventured out onto their stoops, and then they cautiously stepped out into the street, and then they sauntered down to their neighborhood bars to drink the rapidly warming beer. For one night, people let the unexpected sweep away their routines, and found a different way to be alive. Meanwhile, my sister was too busy holding together the bricks of her safety to notice that there was a party on the other side of the wall.
These days, New Yorkers are saying that terrorists are bound to attack the city, though no one knows when. I now live near San Francisco, where people think another big earthquake will bring buildings tumbling down sooner or later. And you, reading this: don?t forget that you will die, and you can?t say when. There?s plenty to be afraid of, should you choose to focus on it.
Eliza Strickland
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