Chicken Soup for the Soul of America (5 page)

But one of them had had a chance to save himself and had not taken it. Migdalia Ramos spoke about her anger—not at Rebecca or Victor Wald but at her own husband. She just couldn't understand then why he had gone back in. I understood how she felt. How could he leave her and his children with all the responsibilities that they had to face? Couples should be there for each other, should cleave to one another. And if everyone else at his firm had gotten out, why hadn't Harry? He made a choice and the consequences of it didn't just affect him. It affected his whole family.

Then Migdalia Ramos told about another incident in her life. Her mother had died on September 1. The management of her mother's apartment building had told Mrs. Ramos that she would have to clear out the apartment by September 30. So, on September 30, Mrs. Ramos together with other family members went to her mother's apartment. While they were hauling out boxes and furniture, the fire alarm sounded. The hallway quickly filled with smoke. Mrs. Ramos did what every mother would do, what every right-thinking responsible person would do—she got her child and her relatives to safety.

But then, without thinking, she did something else: Migdalia Ramos ran right back into a burning building, up seven flights of stairs, to get her mother's blind neighbor out.

She did what Harry did. And, probably like Harry, she did it without thinking, reflexively, because whatever was in Harry that made him act that way was in her, too. That “something” made her forget every other aspect of her life and focus on someone else, someone who needed help.

Migdalia didn't use the word “hero” once in her interview. I don't think she thinks of herself that way. She just did what needed to be done. A lot of people called her husband a hero. He was, but not just because he went back into the World Trade Center. To Migdalia and her family, Harry Ramos was probably a hero just because he got out of bed every morning.

Migdalia Ramos lost a lot—her husband, her lover, her best friend. But maybe Migdalia Ramos found something, too. Maybe she found that the best qualities in her husband had rubbed off on her.

Personally, I think they were there all along.

Migdalia Ramos said that what happened at her mother's apartment building made her understand her husband's motives. She thought he was sending her a message.

I heard a message from this woman on my TV screen. There's something inside some of us—inside, I think, most of us. It's something good and decent and brave and unselfish. It's that best part of ourselves, that part that rises to the surface unquestioning, without thought, the simple act of caring for and about another human being. In a world where there are those who only exist to cause pain and terror, Mrs. Ramos' message is timely. It is a message for all of us, of hope.

Marsha Arons

FYI

New York City Transit puts a lot of faith in paperwork. At times, it seems to have missed the whole computer revolution, or at least mistrusted it. In fact, in a dusty file room in downtown Brooklyn, there are boxes containing minute-by-minute records of the daily movements of your subway line, going back several years—all handwritten on paper.

But in the weeks since September 11, 2001, weeks that have generated enough paperwork to wrap every subway car like a Christmas gift, there are three pieces of paper that have survived consignment to the oblivion of a cardboard file box.

Instead, they have been copied and copied again and passed around like Soviet
samizdat
[a means of expressing oneself and communicating with one another in a sphere outside the censor's supervision.] They were written by a fifty-five-year-old man named John B. McMahon, who works as a superintendent over several stations in Manhattan. The pages are dated and stamped, and start like any transit memo, heavy on military accuracy and acronyms, like “F.O.” for field office.

“While at my office at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue at approximately 0900 hours,” it begins, “the F.O. notified me . . .”

But as the memo continues, recounting Mr. McMahon's journey on September 11 from his office to the area around the World Trade Center, it quickly becomes apparent that it is something other than official correspondence.

It is the soliloquy of a man trying to figure out what happened to him that day. In essence, it is a letter from Mr. McMahon to himself.

That morning, he rushed downtown to get into the Cortlandt Street Station on the N and R line to make sure that no passengers or transit employees remained inside the station. When he found none, he went back up onto the street and, as debris began to rain down from the fires in the towers above him, he took refuge under a glass awning in front of the Millennium Hilton Hotel.

At 9:58
A.M.
, he looked up.

He saw what appeared to be a ring of smoke form around the south tower. “Except,” he wrote, “that this ring was coming downward . . .”

There was a truck parked next to him in front of a loading bay at Cortlandt and Church Streets, and he dove between the truck and a roll-down door, grabbing onto the bottom of a wall.

He wrote: “There was an upward, vacuum-type of air movement, followed by a ‘swoosh' of air and then . . . NOTHING. Not a sound, but pitch darkness with a powder-like substance covering every inch of the area. It also filled my eyes, ears, face and mouth.”

He struggled to breathe. He scooped ash and dust from his mouth. But as soon as he did, his mouth would fill up again. He felt other people around him, and he remembers hearing himself and the others count off, signifying that they were still alive.

“Then,” he wrote, “the strangest thing happened.” ”While I was facing this wall, I turned my head slightly to the left because I saw two lights that were too big to be flashlights and there were no automobiles around. Although I thought I was losing my battle to breathe, I was comforted by the lights, which gave me a sense of peace. We yelled, ‘help,' and joined hands, walking toward the lights. The more we walked, the lighter it became, until finally I saw images of cars and people.”

But as he emerged from the cloud of ash, he wrote, he looked around him and realized that he was not holding anyone's hand. He was alone. He has no idea what happened to the other people. He still has no idea what the lights were, and no idea how he found his way out of the debris.

“I'm a Catholic,” Mr. McMahon said. “But I only go to church about once every five years. I don't know what that was that day. I don't know how to explain it. Somebody got me out,” he said.

Mr. McMahon wrote the memo to his boss on a yellow legal pad at the end of that week, sitting in his backyard in Westbury on Long Island. When his fiancée read it, she cried.

“I wrote it,” he said, “because I had to get it off my chest.”

The day it happened, as Mr. McMahon recounted in the memo, he wandered until he came upon New York University Downtown Hospital where nurses pulled him inside and checked his vital signs. He rinsed out his mouth and took a shower. Then he had his fiancée buy him some new clothes at Macy's so he could, as he wrote, “finish out my day performing my duties.”

He is taking some time off now, struggling with hearing loss and problems with his right eye, which was injured by the dust. More than those ailments, he said, he is struggling with his own mind.

“When I tell my psychiatrist, I know it all sounds crazy to him, but that's the way it happened,” he says.

Mr. McMahon's memo ends like thousands of others. On a line by itself are the words:

“For your information.”

Randy Kennedy

What Can Be Said?

10:32
A.M.

I am writing this from downtown New York. In a perverse reversal, I have no way to contact anyone except through my high-speed wireless Internet connection—phones are out, and electricity in the area is intermittent.

The media will ultimately tell the story better than I, but I can tell you that there is massive loss of life. The sky is black with ash, and the people have been panicking and fleeing in unadulterated terror. I have never seen anything like it. It is very difficult to breathe, even with your mouth covered—the ash blows down the streets and burns your eyes. It feels like the world has ended. When the screaming started and the crowds began to run after the second plane struck, it was a horror film running in overdrive, jumping frames and cutting in and out. Time got lost—I don't know how long this went on. I have a cut on my leg. I ended up in a Wendy's where a huge number of us took refuge. I don't know where the workers were—I helped get water for people.

I am starting to see emergency workers, and the streets are clearing somewhat—at least the first waves of panic are passing. I've seen bodies draped in white sheets—it took me time to realize those were bodies, not injured people; they must be out of room or not be able to get them to the morgues or the hospitals.

I'm headed for the Brooklyn Bridge to walk out of the city. I'm going to stop at any hospital I find to give blood before leaving. If anyone reading this can, please donate blood—I heard from a medic that the hospitals are already running out.

3:50
P.M.

I am writing this from my home in Brooklyn after leaving Manhattan. I have signed up for a time slot to give blood later this evening and have a few hours available before then.

After my last posting I made my way east through an urban moonscape—everywhere there is ash, abandoned bags in the street, people looking lost. I managed to get a cell line out to Jean-Michele, who is still in Seattle, and she helped me navigate with online maps as I plotted my exit strategy.

Bizarrely, I caught a taxi cross town. I was standing at a corner, I'm not even certain where, and a taxi was sitting there. A very pushy woman, whom I will always be thankful for, barged her way into the cab.

In a moment, without thinking, I climbed in, too. The driver, a Pakistani guy who had an improbable smile, immediately took off.

The ash blocks out the sun downtown—it is like driving in an impossible midnight, made even more impossible because I'm in a cab with this woman who won't stop trying her cell phone and another man, my age, who looks like he's been crying. Maybe he just has ash in his eyes, I know I do—I feel like I will never see properly again, though that's probably just trauma. I don't even know where the driver is going. The crying man got someone on
his
cell phone and started explaining what he's seeing out the window. It's like having a narrator traveling with us. I only notice the things that he is describing as he describes them.

God bless that taxi driver—we never paid him. He let us all off, and I think he got out as well, near the Brooklyn Bridge. There are cops everywhere, people are herding themselves quite calmly, mutely, onto the bridge. We all walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, which is unbelievably beautiful, the wires and stone of the bridge surrounding us and the bright sun ahead, passing out of darkness.

No one is talking to each other, but there is a sense of warmth. Everyone has their cell phones out, fishing for a clear signal. Those who catch them talk hurriedly to families, friends, people in other cities, children in their homes. It is comforting to hear their voices, telling how they are, “Okay, shhh, it's okay, I'm okay.” As we walk out into the sunlight, I am so happy to be in this company, the company of people who are alright, those who walked out.

I was in the city today to turn in some of my book. I had stayed up all night writing and I was so worried—is it ready, have I done my work? Those questions seem small today—not unimportant, but smaller, in a new proportion. I kept thinking of how much I have left to do in my life, so many things that are undone, people I haven't spoken to in years. It's overwhelming to feel everyone around me thinking the same thing, the restless thoughts trickling over this bridge as we come back to Brooklyn.

From the Promenade, I stand with hundreds of others, listening to radios, watching the plumes of smoke and the empty holes in the skyline. People stand there for a long time, talking to one another in hushed tones. Someone hands out a flyer for a vigil this evening, which I will go to after I give blood.

What can be said? Just this: we will emphasize the horror and the evil, and that is all true. It is not the entire story. I saw an old man with breathing problems and two black kids in baggy pants and ghetto gear rubbing his back, talking to him. No one was rioting or looting. People helped each other in small and tremendous ways all day long . . . a family was giving away sandwiches at the Promenade. Everyone I talked to agreed to go give blood. If a draft had been held to train people to be firefighters, there would have been fights to see who got to volunteer.

No matter how wide and intricate this act of evil may be, it pales in comparison to the quiet dignity and strength of regular people. I have never been more proud of my country.

Mike Daisey