Feature

The Fear This Time

"Are you sorry you’re away?” one of my colleagues at work asks me during our daily conference call. “It’s like 9/11, when people who weren’t here wanted to come home and felt they’d missed out on the biggest event in our lives.” No, really: I don’t mind at all. The sun is shining, the finches are out in full force. I’m not ready to come home. But I have to admit, I feel defensive. What am I doing up here, on my knees in the garden plucking crabgrass, while everyone else is on the front lines? I’m like a deserter—like Bush evading service in the National Guard, only with shame.

But come Labor Day, I’ll be back at my post, shutting out the din of sirens, disciplining myself not to hyperventilate when the elevator is slow. I could never seriously entertain the notion of fleeing for good—of selling our classic six, giving up my job, enrolling our 16-year-old son in the local high school. It would be cowardly, ignominious. A few weeks ago, before the Big Announcement, I was having lunch with a friend when the subject came up. We were talking about a successful advertising salesman we knew who had pulled up stakes after 9/11 and moved his family to Vermont. “He should be in New York selling ads,” said my friend. “That’s what he does! That’s who he is! That’s the essence of his identity!”

I nodded in affirmation. The essence of my identity is to sit with my feet up on a desk in a midtown high-rise, a phone clapped to my ear, making deals. “It’s not as if I’m going to move up to my farmhouse and tend my sheep,” I said defensively.

He looked down at his sushi. “Actually, I have sheep.” (Just for the record, I don’t.)

“You have sheep?” I was stunned. “Sheep,” he repeated. Robert—I’ve changed his name to protect his privacy—is one of the most urbane and sophisticated people I know. Yet he began to discourse with great authority about sheep pens, informing me that you don’t need to heat them in winter. “Sheep don’t mind the cold.”

Robert would never voluntarily leave the city either—he’s the quintessence of what I love about it: the large population of people with lively minds. His sheep are a weekend thing. But what if we have no choice but to go? My family’s escape backpack has been in the closet for almost three years now—since the day after 9/11. In it is a wallet containing $500 in twenties, two miniature flashlights, batteries, a portable radio, and a canteen—we haven’t worked up the nerve to buy gas masks yet. In the kitchen cabinet below the sink are additional supplies: twenty bottles of Poland Spring, a Frost King Outdoor Window Insulation Kit, cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew. In the basement of our building, locked to the communal bike rack, are four bicycles with pumps—one for Will, one for Molly (off at college now, but what if she’s home on vacation when the bomb goes off?), one for my wife, Annie, and one for me. I check the tires every month. “I need a pair of sneakers at work,” Annie says. “All I’ve got are high heels.” This summer, we brought up to Vermont three of our six family albums. If all else perishes, the photographs will be there to remind us of the lives we led.

If—when—It happens, the consequences won’t be temporary, or localized. I’m haunted by an article I came across by Victor Davis Hanson in The National Review last month: “Another 9/11: The Awful Response That We Dare Not Speak About.” Hanson isn’t just some pundit; a farmer-classicist and the author of several erudite books on ancient Greece, he takes the long view. Another 9/11, he writes, will be “the sure end of civilization as we know it.” I used to gaze up at the monoliths of downtown Manhattan, sky-high versions of the Pueblo caves I once saw in Santa Fe, and think, How is all this going to come down? Global warming, like in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, where a tidal wave of melting icecaps inundates the city? Nowadays I think it will be a “dirty” bomb that spews radiation over the island, rendering it uninhabitable for decades. With the Republican convention less than a month away and the prospect of another stolen election looming, a new scenario occurs to me: civilians fighting the National Guard, barricades in the meatpacking district, the old paving stones pried up and hurled at the police. New York as Paris in 1848.

A few weeks ago, I was strolling the streets on a warm summer afternoon. At dusk, the vista up Fifth Avenue, the sky over Central Park as brilliant as a Turner, the canyon of buildings glinting in the sunset, was stunning in its majesty. I stared up at the monumental Columbus Circle towers in astonishment: You’ve gotta be kidding. Who would live up there? Let me amend Marx’s famous declaration that history occurs the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. No: History occurs the first time as tragedy and the second time as tragedy and also the third time and the fourth. One of humanity’s most pronounced and dangerous traits is that we never learn.

On tuesday, i grab the front page first, before obits and sports. Wait a minute: The information about an imminent attack has been declared obsolete. Reports that led to the terror alert were years old, officials say. You may resume the rhythm of your lives. A day later, It’s back. new qaeda activity is said to be major factor in alert. Day Four: qaeda strategy is called cause for new alarm. Yeah, yeah.

Here are the alternative scripts I play out in my head: It happens, and people stream out of the city, crowding over the bridges like the Cambodians when the Khmer Rouge took over, hospital patients being wheeled out of Phnom Penh in their beds; or Sudanese heading for the borders to escape marauding bands unleashed by the government. We’re spoiled, softened by half a century of peace. History—a chronicle of warfare and pillage—has passed us over. But our good fortune can’t last forever. It never does.

The other possibility is this: It won’t happen, the threat will recede, the focus will shift to Afghanistan instead of Iraq, Al Qaeda will be rooted out. “Page Six” will return its attention to Paris Hilton. I’ll grow old and die in my bed: Is survived by his wife, two children, and four grandchildren. Had homes in Manhattan and Vermont. Was 82 years old.