Units Are On Their Way

I was living in DC on 9/11. DC reacted very differently than New York did to 9/11, in part because DC is kind of always prepared to become an armed fortress. Overnight, concrete barriers had suddenly been erected around every Government office, Metro station, Starbucks. The streets were filled with every conceivable brand of law enforcement and intelligence service. The roads were just black SUVs for as far as the eye could see. And, you, the average citizen, were constantly being told that everything around you was a high value target for any terrorist out there who might be filled with post 9/11 FOMO. It was a very paranoid time, not unfounded considering it was the seat of the American government, and that paranoia crept its way into everything, including the bookstore I managed.

This came to a personal head one Friday night as I was at work at the bookstore. As I said in the last post, this bookstore was a hotspot of DC social life, and Friday nights were when the staffer meat market reached its highest pitch. The store was packed full of people in congressional badges trying to determine if the person browsing next to them was hot enough to cross party lines for. It was a less partisan era.

I was standing at the info desk, watching the crowd, when I heard someone say, “Um, excuse me.” I looked down and there was a guy in his late 20s, in a middle price range suit, holding a copy of The Taliban by Ahmed Rashid. I said, “Yeah?”

Sheepishly he said, “Well, I was looking at this book on The Taliban and when I opened it up, well, there was all this white powder inside.” At this point, he holds the book out to me, splayed open, so I can see that there is, indeed, white powder down the center of the book.

This was the era when envelopes full of anthrax were being sent to Senators and Congressional offices as well as TV News Stations and everyone was on edge. You were constantly being told to look out for white powder secreted in envelopes or deposited in the Metro or sprinkled on your latte. And here was this guy, with a book on the people we had just declared war on, with white powder down the spine. And he had just thrust it into my hands so I could give him my expert opinion as a bookstore manager/bioweapons expert.

I was skeptical.

I said, “Well, this book has been selling by the hundreds lately and honestly, they’re trying to pump the thing out so fast that my guess is this is just book pulp. It’s the kind of thing they normally would have cleaned up before shipping it out, but demand is so high that they aren’t taking the time.”

It was true that demand for The Taliban had shot through the roof. It had actually come out before the attacks. But pre-9/11 it had been a fair to middling mover at best. Not because it wasn’t good. I had read it when it came out and it was very good, a very thorough deep dive into a bizarre and terrifying political movement. But it was also an obscure political movement before September of 2001. Even in a town as heavily invested in world events in DC, most people couldn’t have told you much about the group, before the attacks. They were an extremist group in one of the countries that ends in “stan.” Don’t they blow up statues and execute people in soccer stadiums? But the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks changed all of that and now, we couldn’t keep the thing in stock. We were ordering them by the carton load, and we were just one tiny, independent bookstore. Who knew how many Barnes and Noble and Borders were blasting through on a daily basis?

But now it was time for the customer to look skeptical. We were supposed to be taking any potential attack seriously. I looked to the other manager on duty, Chris, for back-up. Chris said, “I think you gotta call.”

I said, “Really?”

Chris nodded while backing away from me and the book in my hands.

I called 911. The operator said, “Is the person who handed you the book still there?”

He was staring at me wide eyed and sweating.

I said he was.

“Ok, don’t let him leave, units are on their way.

The units arrived.

I didn’t know what to expect. I had half expected paratroopers, or men in black with curly wired earpieces, or the white coats from the end of ET. What we got were uniformed cops. Four cars worth, plus some kind of mobile lab in a van. The customer and I were taken out onto the wide sidewalk in front of the shop. He and I were placed in the center of the sidewalk and the cops encircled us at a distance of six feet, waving passersby to move around the perimeter they’d established. A very serious looking policewoman came from around the corner where they had parked the van. She was wearing rubber gloves, a yellow nylon smock over her uniform, and a pair of clear goggles. She walked through the line of cops and pointed to the book I was still holding and said, “That the book?”

I said it was and without another word, she took it from me and went back to where she’d come from.

It actually didn’t take that long for her to come back, but it took long enough to observe how weird DC is. We were hardly more than a month beyond the largest terrorist attack on US soil, parts of the city were still locked down, we had just declared war on a foreign country, and still, people defaulted to being too cool to look at the people quarantined on the sidewalk. Like any place with a heavy tourist economy, people who live in DC hate to be mistaken for yokels on vacation. So, they studiously do not do anything a tourist might do. What do tourists do? They stare at things. So, the locals make it a point of not staring, no matter how out of the ordinary things get. People would split around our little cordon without breaking stride or interrupting their conversation. Through the window of the store, I could see Hill staffers continuing to flirt. If they looked at us at all, it was a mildly surprised glance as if to say “Oh, is that potential terrorist bio attack still going on?” You got the feeling that if the woman from the van came back with a shotgun and announced that there was nothing to do but put us down, people would have rolled their eyes at the inconvenience to their evening.

The customer and I said nothing. Not to each other, not to the cops.

When the woman finally did come back, she had the book in her hands. The nylon smock was gone and so were the goggles, she was still wearing the gloves. Nevertheless, she handed me back the book and said, “It’s book pulp. Anthrax is more beige.”

Then, all the cops were just gone. It was just me and the guy, still on the sidewalk. The customer gave me a small, chagrined little smile. I nodded. We both went back into the store without another word.