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The Nanobots Are For Your Own Good

I managed to make an appointment to give blood today. Actually, all the blood banks seem to be full-ish, so I made an appointment to give platelets. Platelets are used in the treatment of burn victims and leukemia patients: apparently, it takes six donations’ worth of whole blood to make up one transfusion, but only one platelet donation. So I went into the blood center on 67th and 2nd with my co-worker Steve Farrell and spent two hours with tubes in both arms, hooked up to an apharesis machine.

The apharesis machine takes your blood out of one arm, strips out about 10% of your platelets, then puts it back in the other arm! EEEwwwww! It looks kind of like an elementary-school projector, except instead of film, the machine is threaded with dozens of tubes carrying your personal blood around a maze of spinning knobs. During the course of a donation, it processes about four liters of blood (according to Yahoo, about 70% of my total supply: cool!) Frankly, I couldn’t wait to go through the procedure so that I could write about it here — the whole thing has this kind of B-movie science fiction panache. Maybe they’ll introduce nanobots into the tubing, giving me super powers! Maybe I’ll come out with laser-beam eyeballs, or X-ray vision!

Well, I didn’t gain any freaky cyborg abilities, but I did get to pretend, sort of. I spent the whole time talking on my wireless Bluetooth headset, because both my arms were tied down and festooned with tubes. I even got to be on TV doing it; Reuters came in to shoot some footage on disaster volunteers, and filmed me talking away, green light on my microphone boom flashing, knobs on the steel-and-enamel machine spinning in opposite directions, tubes jerking as the flow reversed periodically. Right on!

After this horrifying week in the city, I needed to get away and get some perspective. So this morning I bought a roast beef sandwich, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain (and a P.G. Wodehouse book, in case I needed to cut the Merton), and took the Metro-North up the Hudson line to do a day hike on the Appalachian Trail.

I did this same hike in June, when the weather was hot, buggy, and sticky. Today was glorious early-fall weather; cool and dry, and the trees are just barely starting to turn. One of the things I like about hiking is that, unlike many workday pursuits, there’s no illusion of control. The hill is just there, and it doesn’t care if you climb it in ten manly minutes or fifty wimpy ones. It doesn’t care if you climb it at all, in fact, and there’s not even the presence of not caring; the hill just is. Usually, I like that because it’s a good antidote to a “type A” New York lifestyle. Today, it was a good antidote to the horrible human calamity that’s been the first thing on everyone’s mind since 9AM on Tuesday morning.

Every time I do this hike there`s something to make my jaw drop. Last time, it was a green bottle fly sitting on a rock at the top of Anthony’s Nose, above the Bear Mountain bridge. The sun caught it in a way that made it brilliantly, vibrantly green, as if this fly was a chunk of pure additive color.

Anyhow, this time it was a rushing sound like surf that I noticed in a field of cattails on the way to Manitou train station. The rushing sound got louder; I looked over and realized that it was a flight of thousands of tiny birds (sparrows?) wheeling and diving for insects. It sounded like a big nylon kite does on a windy day at the beach, except smoother.

I started to try to work on my freelance job last night, checking in on the websites’ server status. One of the boxes was running hot, trying desperately to pump out a huge backlog of mass e-mail. I tried to connect to the box, but there was a minor glitch in the terminal software. Which is when I realized that the server is located in the Puck building on Houston street, and I found out that the server farm had been evacuated.

So, wanting something to do, I talked my way through the police line around the Family Counseling Center in the Lexington Avenue Armory. The armory is on the same block as my office, sharing a wall with the building [My employer] is in. I had learned some buzzwords in my Red Cross training on Tuesday, and by repeatedly stating that I was a “Red Cross LDV”, “trained in Mass Care” and “ready to work the second shift”, I made my way into the cavernous space.

The Lexington Avenue Armory is the site where European art was first introduced to America in 1913. The room has a colossal arched ceiling and a wooden floor; in fact, my grandfather once played polo on the dress floor. Last night, however, it had been set up with dozens of folding trestle tables, each table with a landline phone and several police officers. A group of five hundred people sat in rows of folding chairs, waiting to describe their loved ones to the officers. The officers listened, wrote the descriptions down on paper forms. So far, out of 4,700 missing people, I don’t know of a single one that has been located this way.

The site was extraordinarily busy; I talked to the head Red Cross staffer, and looked around for stuff to do. My theory is that all the untrained volunteers (like me, frankly), tend to consume more resources than they contribute by needing constant managament. Ever worked with a new intern? Yeah, it’s like that. So I saw a colossal pile of garbage next to the food table and started to haul it, bag by bag, to the dumpster around the corner. Fighting the glow of conscious virtue that comes from doing the “dirty” job, I walked the bags back and forth through the police cordon. I couldn’t help it; I felt smug. The door was assaulted by waves of New Yorkers coming to volunteer; staffers thanked them politely and turned them away. Yet I moved trash, one of the chosen, without so much as a nifty Red Cross windbreaker or a name tag for thanks!

It was the sight of the single people on the folding chairs that really brought me down from my volunteerism high. There weren’t any hysterics; just people sitting by themselves with red-rimmed eyes; people that looked dazed and desparately unhappy. It hit me how uncertain their situation was. You’re a single, successful, young New Yorker living with your husband, your girlfriend, or your fiancee, the disaster happens, and…


…nothing. No uniformed officer comes to the door and takes off their hat, like in the movies; you just don’t hear anything at all. So you go to a big, hot, smelly government building and fill out forms. It was utterly, utterly horrifying.

One one of my trips, one of the bags I was carrying burst, spreading dozens of half-empty Poland Spring water bottles and banana peels across the sidewalk. The mess wasn’t actually all that nasty; the trash was so fresh that the water in the bottles was still cool. I was collecting the mess when I looked up and saw Governor Pataki walking into the building, surrounded by a cordon of plainclothes police. He looked like hell; like he hadn’t slept in seventy-two hours, probably because he hadn’t. He was tottering along in a navy-blue suit, being led by the hand by a young woman almost as tall as he was, maybe his daughter. People applauded, I think at least in part because he looked so exhausted. We want our civil leaders to look exhausted; we want to think that they’re working harder than is humanly possible, doing whatever it is that they’re doing to make things better.

Walking home from the Lexington Avenue armory, having spent the evening moving garbage at the Red Cross and Salvation Army mass care table. The scene was gut-wrenching – the armory has been set up as the city center for families to inquire about their loved ones. The people there by themselves were the ones that got to me the most.

The city is a bizarre mix of normal and catastrophic; everyone sees the pictures of the work going on in lower Manhattan, where the foot-deep drifts of concrete dust make the area look like a moonscape. From my desk at [My employer], I can clearly see the hazy plume to the south and smell the acrid, plastic-y smoke. Telephone kiosks are covered with missing person flyers. [My employer]’ building abuts the National Guard armory where families are trying to locate their loved ones; the streets are blocked off by troops, and Bill Clinton made an appearance outside the Staples next door, shaking hands while being trailed by television crews. At the same time, though, everything is open, subways are running, phones are working, and business is moving again. It’s like the disaster hasn’t stopped normal life in New York, but it’s superimposed itself onto it.

Telephone kiosks in the city are becoming covered with color flyers, each one carrying a color photo and asking if anyone has seen the pictured person. The people are uniformly good-looking, athletic, and in their twenties, thirties, and forties. The flyers are well-put-together, the work of educated people who have access to scanners and inkjet printers, people who have money to spend on hundreds of color copies. It’s horrifying. One of the worst things about it is that it makes you realize that the tragedy is just unfolding now; that the incident wasn’t over when the buildings collapsed. I have a friend who staffed the phone banks for the Red Cross last night; she said that she spent the entire day fielding questions about missing people without a single identified match. Everyone who’s missing, it seems, is gone.

I’m walking home from the Red Cross building, where I spent the day out front answering questions about blood donations, volunteer opportunities, etc. It was tiring but enjoyable. It’s really nice to have had something to do besides watch the news all day.

I spent the morning in a Disaster Relief Training session, where a Red Cross Air Incident Response team member spent four hours putting four hundred people through three courses that usually take eighteen hours: Introduction to Disaster Assistance, Shelter Operations, and Mass Care. I was surprised to learn that the Red cross normally responds to eight to fifteen incidents per day in the New York City area, all with a small staff and just six hundred volunteers. I also got the feeling that the Red Cross is grateful to the thousands of people filling out Spontaneous Volunteer applications, but that we weren’t really that useful — we’ll help the most by coming back several weeks or several months from now and doing unglamorous work after the rubble has been cleared. The Red Cross is being remarkably non-passive-aggressive about it, but I get the feeling that they don’t want to waste too much time training hundreds of people that will only be available to help for a few days. Even though I’ve volunteered for them for two days, I still kind of feel that they’ve invested more in me than I’ve given back, and I plan on sticking around and helping out later on until the balance is at least equal.

Today, the competition for jobs was intense. Out of an auditorium holding four hundred volunteers, there were requests for 24 standby workers for shelter shifts. John McGee, the volunteer coordinator, started to cut down on the number of hands for spots by calling for volunteers only born in randomly chosen months. That worked for about ten seconds, until all the type “A” advertising executives and marketers in the room started looking around shiftily and getting to their feet. “Sure, I was born in October! Sign me up!” On the way out, I spotted a woman with a clipboard looking for people to answer questions, and insinuated myself into the line.

The cops on Broadway and Houston weren’t gonna let me home last night. There are cordons across 14th street, and another more aggressive one across Houston. The cops are only supposed to let through area residents; you have to show your drivers’ license to get past them. New Yorkers never, ever, get their drivers’ licenses updated, though, when they move from wherever it was they lived last, so most people still have their California or Montana licences from fifteen years ago. Lots of folks are showing utility bills or paystubs instead.

When I got to Broadway and Houston on Tuesday night, the cops were agitated, swapping hostile-civilian stories.

“So this one lady holds up her cell phone and says to me, ‘…Tell Channel Two News that you won’t let me home!’”

“…So what did you tell her?”

“I took the phone and I said, ‘She can’t go home!”

“Unbelievable.”

I walked up to them and I asked if I could cross. They told me I couldn’t, that the city below Houston was under martial law, that the concrete dust would damage my cornea. So I walked to Mulberry street and the cops there checked my license and let me through. My apartment was just fine, though there’s an acrid, plasticy smell in the air from the huge fires.

Funnily enough, the roadblocks have created a macabre downtown velvet-rope party. The few people on the streets are looking at each other, thinking “okay, so you actually live here, and you live here…” Funnily enough, the people still around aren’t the beutiful ones. All the lean, seven-foot-tall fashion mutants that you see all the time on Spring street are not in evidence. They must have come from Jersey.

Mulberry street was supposed to host the Feast of San Genarro this week. There are decorations stretched across the street, and carnival trucks parked in ranks from Canal street to Houston, but every one of them is shuttered, and the street is empty.

Oh, by the way, please give blood, especially if you don’t live in New York City. The blood centers here are swamped, and other cities are flying in blood as fast as they can.

I just walked back to my desk from the Red Cross in Lincoln Center. The streets have very few cars in them. In Times Square, vendors are selling paper easels holding two pictures of the Twin Towers — first the towers on fire, then the smoke plume left after they collapsed. Other vendors are selling out of oil paintings of the (now old) New York City skyline. In a bizarre touch, there’s confetting raining down on the Square from some deposit left over on top of some building, caught in the breeze.

I interviewed about fifty people today, helping them fill out their applications to volunteer for the Red Cross. They ranged from the helpful and non-freaky to the, well, freaky. And, it’s true, the Red Cross is inundated with bags of useless clothes after every disaster. An important part of the job, it seems, was thanking everyone nicely so that they’d still be interested in volunteering tomorrow, or next week.

The Red Cross is an incredibly well-run organization, and it was a real privilege to feel like I had something useful to do all day. Tomorrow, I’m gonna go back for a four-hour training in something called Shelter Operations and Mass Care, then I’ll probably work in one of the shelters around the city. I figure that [My employer] won’t be back on track for a couple of days.

I’m volunteering at the Red Cross headquarters on 66th and Amsterdam, helping other volunteers fill out their paperwork. I don’t have any cell service right now, as all the circuits are swamped. I’m checking e-mail on my iPaq periodically, though. There are National Guardsmen with rifles in the streets. Everything is pretty calm right now, though.