QUARANTINE

by Norman Spinrad

If it wasn’t the best of times, at least it wasn’t the worst of times, or something like that, which is the opening line of a novel called A TALE OF TWO CITIES, and it seemed like this would be only a tale of one.



Back in the day before the Quarantine, Manhattan island was the heart and soul and pocketbook of New York City, to the extent that New York could have been said to have all three, Wall Street, Greenwich Village, Broadway and 42nd Street, and all that jazz. When you saw a movie or a TV show or an ad featuring New York, the Big Apple was Manhattan, not anything in what some visiting Californian must have dubbed the “Outer Boroughs,” the moral equivalent of Anaheim or Eagle Rock as far as a Hollywood wise guy was concerned.



Not that I was a Hollywood wise guy just because my sales office happened to be located on the seventh floor of one of those unglamorous glass towers at the busin…