AUDASE

Boston in Lockdown

Posted by Ian Crouch THE NEW YORKER

 

 

Since Monday, most of the talk about the Boston Marathon bombing has centered on the city itself—narrowing in on the spot on Boylston Street, where a finish line was turned, as one runner said, into “a war zone.” But anyone who knows Boston knows that the city is much bigger than its official dimensions. It is the capital of New England, and its reach includes the places that surround it: Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Chelsea, Revere. And, as much of the world now knows, Watertown, which is just a few miles west on the Charles River. In the frantic late hours of Thursday and early ones of Friday, Watertown became the site of a car chase, shootout, and manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a nineteen-year-old former student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, who was born in Kyrgyzstan to a Chechen family and came to the United States nine or ten years ago. His brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was twenty-six, was killed in the night; according to reports, he was run over by his brother during an attempt to escape. News broke that Tamerlan had explosives on his body, which turned the search for his brother into an even more urgent and precarious effort. By late morning, the world was watching Watertown, where soldiers, police SWAT teams, bomb-sniffing dogs, explosives experts, and a barely corralled gaggle of press were all tracking someone assumed to be Dzhokhar. Residents were ordered to stay in their homes, and some tweeted photos of law-enforcement officers lying flat on neighboring houses, with machine guns drawn.

It was another in a series of blue-sky spring days. And for the fifth straight morning, much of the greater city was shut down. It started on Monday, when, in a festive mood, the streets of Boston were cordoned off for the marathon. It is an annual inconvenience, a joyous one that many people in Boston gripe about and love. On Tuesday, new barriers went up, blocking off a crime scene in the middle of the city. Those have stayed in place, and on Thursday, a new part of the city was closed down when President Obama travelled to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, in the South End, to lead a rousing interfaith service that was an emotional high point in a week of low ones. The trash got picked up this morning outside my apartment, in the South End, but that was before Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick gave a brief press conference in which he called for a citywide lockdown. The Boston and Cambridge police departments were tweeting out the locations of suspicious packages, which were being called in from all over the metro Boston area. Public transportation had been shut down, trains were stopped coming in and out of Boston, planes were being rerouted away from the city’s airspace, taxi service was suspended, schools were closed, and the city was told, in the words of Patrick, to “shelter in place.” Kenmore Square, one of the city’s beating hearts, was bare this morning. The blue-sky days have kept coming, but the weather has come to seem a kind of ill omen. Maybe we are all waiting for rain.

Robocalls went out across the city, reminding people to stay inside. Locked down, we turned to the television. As the hosts on CNN were reporting that Dzhokhar was considered “armed and extremely dangerous,” and warned that he might be contemplating “going out in a blaze of glory,” they were also pulling together interviews with people who had known him, and were learning incongruous things about him. He was, apparently, a thoroughly “Americanized” young man. He went to parties, was said to smoke marijuana from time to time. His father referred to him as a “true angel,” and an acquaintance suggested that he may have been roped into a bombing scheme by his older brother. On Thursday, at a memorial service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, President Obama had talked about a city that opens its arms to young people from around the world: “Every fall, you welcome students from all across America and all across the globe, and every spring you graduate them back into the world—a Boston diaspora that excels in every field of human endeavor.” Dzhokhar might have been one of those people welcomed to the city, but he was a suspect in the murder of three young people and the maiming of dozens of others-the most serious terror attack in America since September 11th. How had Dzhokhar become radicalized so seriously and so fast? There were references to videos on what looked like might be one brother or the other’s social-media page, but nothing confirmed. Tamerlan had also been featured in the Boston University student magazine as an aspiring boxer. There he was quoted as saying, “I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them.” The Tsarnaevs’ uncle held a press conference. He called them losers.

Greater Boston had been clamoring for information about the bombers for days, and was growing impatient. Scheduled F.B.I. press conferences on Wednesday had been postponed and then cancelled. Some in the press grew impatient, too, and began to report false information to fill the void. These rushes to judgment left everyone in a kind of uncomfortable limbo. That changed on Thursday evening, when two easels, covered in black, were brought into an F.B.I. press conference. Suddenly, the city had two faces to put to the bombing, which was reassuring but also brought a new, deeply uncomfortable element of humanity to the whole thing—it was easy to picture relatives or friends or even the pictured suspects themselves seeing these images and suddenly experiencing any range of emotion.

On Twitter, Jess Bidgood, of the Times, noted that everyone who had died so far in connected to the marathon attack was less than thirty years old. Boston is a place full of young people; it drains in the spring and fills in the fall. The loss of the young, and the idea that young people could have done this, may be the great madness of this all.

Krystle Campbell, from Medford, was twenty-nine. Lu Lingzu, a graduate student at Boston University, who had come to Boston from China, was twenty-three. Martin Richard, with a smile that no one in Boston will soon forget, was just an eight-year-old kid from Dorchester. Sean Collier, the M.I.T. police officer who was shot on Thursday night, was twenty-six. The first suspect in the shooting and the bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was twenty-six. Meanwhile, the city is looking for Dzhokhar, who is nineteen.

Each day has brought news in a trickle. We’ve learned the names of victims and of the wounded, and have heard stories of the volunteers and bystanders who rushed to the aid of strangers. We’ve come to understand how a city’s hospitals were primed to respond to disaster so well. We’ve pored over bomb-making techniques, studied video, and zoomed in on photographs. Yesterday, we saw faces. And today we have names, and are casting our glances toward recent world history and to places far away from Boston, to Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan. Yet there remains a gaping hole in our understanding. It’s not about missing facts but, rather, a larger question, one that won’t be answered anytime soon. On Tuesday, after we had learned the name of the second victim of the attack, Krystle Campbell, her mother, Patty, spoke briefly to reporters. She was distraught, but her words came through: “This doesn’t make any sense.”