NOW, THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE. UH, NEVER MIND

WHEN it first became clear that bioterrorism would change the world
forever, it probably didn't occur to many people that this meant
models would have to stop snorting cocaine.

"People are just too scared now," a young woman with a kind of
truckstop Lolita beauty who has appeared on many international runways
said the other day.

"I mean," she continued, after insisting, understandably, that her
name not appear in print, "it's a white powder, made by who, and cut
with who knows what? Who is going to put that up their nose now?"

It was not just a rhetorical question -- particularly when expanded
beyond the confines of the nasal passages of the beau monde.

By now most of us are well informed about the proper precautions to
take if a letter turns up in the mailbox with "4th Grade Greendale
School Franklin Park New Jersey" as the return address. So the
cultural anxieties about anthrax, if not entirely diminished, have
generally morphed into something more manageable.

No, the real fallout from bioterrorism lies elsewhere -- in a realm
where the mass effect has been truly awful, generating new fears and
myths and some minor but not inconsiderable alterations in daily
routine. Even the terrorists, that is, could not have anticipated the
current look of one's mail.

For many people, print correspondence can seem like the town drunk,
something you gripe about and find yourself missing the moment it's
gone. Throughout the early weeks, when offices everywhere were without
mail, many journalists could be seen wandering past their boxes with
the look of hollow-eyed longing that one associates with Charles
Addams cartoons.

True, there was the consolation of e-mail, and the demented doorbell
sound the computer produces when something new arrives. But trashing
e-mails is a sad-sack ritual, with none of the drama that comes from
theatrically dumping press releases unread. It is safe, however, and
so, it appears, is land mail now, after exposure to various
anticontamination procedures that leave letters, postcards and
catalogs looking as though they've been thoroughly poached.

This is not altogether a bad thing. Or, at any rate, it has generated
some fascinating results. By the time they have been through the
bacteria-killing process, for instance, photographic slides tend to
have melted into amoebic blobs; glossy magazine pages have stiffened
and bonded; press releases are welded illegibly to accompanying
photographs; and anything plastic wrapped can be considered
hermetically sealed.

Letterhead ages so convincingly when sanitized that it occurs to one
that this process might be something autograph forgers should look
into. Whether because of the steam or the high temperatures or the
bleach used to kill microbes, the overall effect on catalog images has
been to transfer them ghostlike onto nearby blank pages. Much of the
mail now has the blurred look of a miniature surrealist masterpiece.
The only drawback is that most of it cannot be read.

But so much of the quotidian has taken on a surreal aspect that it
seems perfectly normal now when the dentist suddenly starts
fulminating about the menace of latex gloves.

"This is the deal," Richard Kirsch, a Manhattan prosthododist, said
last week, as he bore down on a reporter's molar with that goofy Jerry
Lewis look dentists get when they wear their special magnifying goggles.

As the anesthetic took effect, and the suction hose started making its
gargling noise, Dr. Kirsch began explaining that nearly all of the
latex gloves worn by doctors, dentists, surgeons, nurses and postal
workers -- not to mention the people supersizing your meal at
McDonald's -- are made in Malaysia.

Although Dr. Kirsch did not have statistics at hand, a little
post-novocaine research yielded numbers compiled by the Division of
Small Manufacturers, International and Consumers Assistance. According
to this division of the Food and Drug Administration, the quantity of
latex gloves imported into the United States has increased by 247
percent over the last decade; in 1996, the last year for which figures
are available, 62 percent of those gloves came from Malaysia.

"And Malaysia," the dentist went on, "is the single largest Muslim
nation in the world."

It is true that nothing in particular is signified by this fact. All
the same, there was some unmistakable symmetry in the emergence of new
phobias about powders of mysterious source. "The last step in
manufacturing the gloves is filling them with this white . . . stuff,"
Dr. Kirsch said. "And that," he added, hitting the pedal on his speed
drill, "would be about the easiest pathway in the world to spread . .
. well, do I have to spell it out?"

As it happens, he did not.