United We Stand (13 page)

“They have been surveyed, and our engineers assure us that while some of them will eventually need to be torn down, they do not present any imminent risk of collapse. Regardless, if you hear a call to evacuate you drop whatever you’re doing and leave, quickly, and go to the safety areas you’ll be directed to.”

If they wanted me to leave they wouldn’t have to say it twice. But according to James I didn’t have to worry—I was bulletproof. Even if there was a sequel to the movie, I was going to survive it to star in the next.

“At all times when you’re outside you need to keep your goggles and your mask on,” he said. “This is important, especially the mask. We don’t know exactly what’s in the air, but we do know that there will be contaminants of all kinds, including asbestos, lead, and other heavy metals, and concrete dust. We’re all here because we want to help, but you help nobody if we have to rescue you, or if your health is adversely affected. Now, before we go out I want everybody to drink a lot of water—we need to stay hydrated—and, this is important, everybody, either leave your cellphones here or turn them off.”

Problem: if I turned off my phone and my mother tried to get in touch with me she’d panic. There was only one thing I could do. I’d phone her now, and then hopefully she wouldn’t try to get in touch with me until I was back in and could turn on the phone
again. Right after that, after we’d done our shift, we’d be heading home. We
had
to head home.

“We’ll meet at the far doors in two minutes,” he yelled out, pointing. “Get lots of water now— get hydrated!”

The group scattered. Lots of people were pulling out their cellphones and either making last- minute calls or turning them off.

“We have to call home,” I said.

“I was thinking that,” James said.

“I don’t know how much longer we can keep them from knowing that we’re here.”

“I was thinking that as well,” he agreed.

“We’re good for a couple more hours. After this shift is over, though, we’ll have to think about it, about going home. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I was relieved. I’d expected a fight.

We headed for a quieter corner of the church. I just hoped I could block out the noise or it would be hard to explain. I dialed, and my mother picked up on the first ring.

“Will?”

“Yeah, it’s—”

“I was trying to call you, and I couldn’t get through!” She sounded a bit freaked out.

“I guess we were in a dead zone.” I remembered how hard it had been to get calls out of this area yesterday, and I wondered if some of the cellphone towers had been damaged or destroyed, or if there
were still too many people here trying to use them.

“Where are you?” she demanded.

“We’re walking.”

“By this time you could have walked to New York.”

I almost gasped. “Probably there and back,” I said. “But that’s what James needs, so that’s what I’m doing.”

“Can you be home by four?”

“Um … maybe … but probably not.”

“It’s just that the CNN crew is coming over and—”

“Mom, I’m not doing any interview.”

“But they really want both your father and you.”

“I already said, I’m not talking to anybody. I get why Dad wants to do it, though, to help contact people from the office. Has he made any progress?”

“He and Suzie have tracked down almost eighty people.”

“So they have to find only about twenty more.”

“I’m afraid it isn’t that simple. They’ve already been in touch with family members of most of those twenty. They … they’re … missing.”

“Like James’s father.”

“Like him and almost two thousand other people,” she said.

“Hopefully they’ll find them.”

“It’s good to be hopeful, but it’s best to be realistic,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“So far today they’ve rescued only twelve people from the rubble.”

“Yeah, but if there are two thousand people missing they have to be finding somebody … even if they’re just finding … finding the …”

“Will, we talked about this. They think that most of the bodies will never be found. The announcers are saying that the few remains they’re recovering are … The bodies they do find are broken, or burned up, consumed by the flames. The rest are nothing but dust.”

Dust, the dust I’d been breathing in, choking on.

“I don’t want to hear any of this!” I practically yelled. People turned around to look at me. I turned away and lowered my voice. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I understand.”

She could say that, but she didn’t, not really. Not just because she didn’t know where I was right now, but because she couldn’t possibly understand what I’d gone through.

“Okay, everybody, let’s go!” the crew foreman yelled out.

Had she heard? “I’ve got to go,” I said, before she could question me. “I’ll call you when I can.”

I pushed the End button and then the Power button, and the phone chimed out a message that it was closing down.

We all assembled around the crew foreman.

“I’d like you all to put your masks on now,” he said.

I took one more big breath before slipping it over my face. I adjusted it so that it fit snuggly over my mouth and my nose and took in another breath. It was harder to get the air into my lungs. I guess that
meant that it was doing its job. Coming down from the tower, my father had taken a necktie, torn it in two, and given it to me to put over my mouth and nose. This was similar, but at the same time very different.

It was so hard to believe that that was only yesterday. It was so hard to believe that it had been real to begin with. I just wished that my father were here today. No, that was wrong. I really wished that I
wasn’t
here, that I was with my father at home.

James and I settled into the middle of the pack as we headed out. I had to fight the urge to step out of the line. I didn’t want to go out there. It was strange, but today, for the first time in my life, I understood how a church could be a sanctuary, one I didn’t want to leave.

Even through the mask the foul, burning smell outside became much stronger. We circled around the side of the church, and Ground Zero stretched out before us. Any thought that this wasn’t real, any glimmer of disbelief, was finally washed away. I stopped, and James immediately bumped into me from behind.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m good. I’m good.” I started moving again.

We marched right up the center of the road. Whatever had been in the way had already been hauled off to clear a path for us.

We entered the plaza. This was familiar to me. This was almost exactly where I’d been when the tower collapsed. This was where I’d crawled away. I was shocked
by how much it was littered with chunks of concrete— some the size of small cars, and others just the size of baseballs. Any of those pieces could have crushed my skull. But none of them had. I was bulletproof.

We passed a large dump truck that had backed in as close as it could to the edge of the rubble. Stretching away from it was a long line of volunteers. Small pieces of debris and buckets were being passed hand over hand, and the two men at the end of the line joined together to throw the debris into the back of the truck. This scene was being played out in half a dozen places, lines of volunteers working doggedly to clear endless piles of small pieces.

We shuffled along beside the line. I decided it was best not to look up or around. I needed to watch where I was walking. I kept my eyes on my feet, moving carefully over the uneven, shifting ground. As we continued to move forward the foreman started to remove people from the line and replace them with us, the fresh hands. He’d skip over a dozen people before deciding who to remove. This wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d thought James and I would at least be working side by side.

Finally I was next.

“You take a break,” he said to a man in the line. Wordlessly he stepped out.

I didn’t need to be told what to do. I just took his place. James tapped me on the shoulder as he passed by, following the foreman. Before I could even say goodbye to James the man in front of me turned
around—he was holding a piece of concrete. For a split second I just looked at him, wondering what I was supposed to do. Then I nodded a greeting, took the concrete, and turned to pass it to the man behind me. He gave me a nod. I was part of what needed to be done.

It didn’t take long to settle into the rhythm of the job. Piece after piece—concrete; drywall; wood; small pieces of metal; some melted, molded, nearly un recognizable bits of plastic—came through my hands and was passed toward the truck. If the pieces were small enough they came in buckets … Full buckets were dumped and the empty ones were passed back up to be refilled. There wasn’t much conversation except for an occasional warning: “It’s hot,” or “Heavy,” or “Sharp edges.” I focused on the work, thinking about not thinking, but it was impossible to ignore what was going on around us.

While we were moving the smaller pieces there was bigger work going on. Girders were being cut up. The flare of the blowtorches sparkled blue and orange in my eyes, and then the giant pieces were lifted out by cranes and loaded onto flatbed trucks to be hauled away. Sometimes the girders would swing almost overtop of us, and I’d feel myself involuntarily leaning away.

Sometimes my mind would start to think about what
might
have been. A few seconds later, a longer stop on a floor, a slightly slower pace and we wouldn’t have made it out in time. Or maybe I would have made it out and my father would have died. Or we both would
have died. Or I would have been trapped underneath the wreckage. It might have been me they were digging for right now …

I felt those anxious feelings start to creep in, and my chest became tighter, my breath came harder and faster. I couldn’t let that happen. I forced myself to think about the task instead. I tried to forget about what was all around me and what might have been, and instead thought only about the single piece of steel I was passing, or the concrete, or the bucket. The next piece was handed to me—a sharp hunk of metal. I took it from the man in front of me. That was the only part of this that had to concern me, the only part I needed to worry about. I turned around and handed it to the man behind me. Maybe I couldn’t handle the whole thing, but I could handle this one little piece … and then the next … and then the next … and then the next. I felt myself start to relax.

Moving throughout the site were the rescue workers. These included soldiers—I was told they were rescue specialists. Some of them wore headphones and were holding listening devices, trying to pick up faint sounds from underneath the wreckage. I didn’t know how they could hear anything faint with so much commotion around them.

Strangest, though, were the dogs, like the ones I’d seen on TV, the avalanche dogs that had been trained to pick up the smell of humans buried under snow.

Here they were trying to pick up the presence of people trapped beneath concrete and steel. The dogs
wore little white boots on their feet to protect them from the sharp edges and the heat. The ground where I stood was cool, but two men had come down the line having to replace their boots, the soles re-formed into a bizarre waffle of melted rubber.

There were also firefighters all over the site, working with large poles, probing the wreckage. Others had hoses and were watering down the spots that were still alive with smoke from flames beneath the debris. The smell was tremendous, and depending on the way the wind was swirling we would, from time to time, become engulfed in smoke. The mask helped, and it seemed to stop me from breaking into another coughing fit. The goggles protected my eyes from the wind that whipped up ash and dust against exposed skin. It felt like hail pelting against my face.

I watched those firefighters working. So many of them looked like James’s dad. They were about the same height, same mustache, same build—I kept thinking that I was seeing him. Was James thinking the same thing?

He was five places ahead of me in the line. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of his face or the back of his head. Even though our eyes didn’t meet and we didn’t exchange a glance or a word, it was reassuring to have him close by. I wondered what U thoughts were going through his mind. It was probably better I didn’t know.

A signal went out for silence. This meant that the searchers thought they might have found somebody—something.
Slowly, a ripple of silence spread out until the entire site was hushed. People stood perfectly still. Trucks were turned off, cranes stopped, torches extinguished, and no one spoke. We all collectively held our breath.

The first time that happened I’d waited expectantly for what was going to come next, figuring that it surely meant somebody was about to be pulled from the wreckage—either dead or alive. But nothing happened that time, and we were given the signal to start working again. All over the site silence slowly gave way once more to the banging and crashing of work. It happened again, another four or five times, and eventually it started to seem more like an excuse to stop working and rest. I really needed to rest.

My arms were sore and I was dying for something to drink. I felt exhausted, physically and emotionally. I just wanted to sit down, or lie down, maybe close my eyes for a few minutes, go to sleep. Sleep would be nice … but not here, at home. Soon we could go home, and I could go to sleep. I looked down at my watch. It was only five in the afternoon and I really wanted to go to sleep.

This time at least I could see where they were digging. The ironworkers and the rescue workers were side by side, carefully removing chunks of metal, shifting the debris, trying to dig down. A call came down the line. They wanted a stretcher to be brought up! That could mean only one thing—they’d found somebody! A ripple of excitement radiated throughout
the site. This was why we were here—this was why we were all here. I tried to think, Could it be Mr. Bennett? Were we on a part of the site where the South Tower had collapsed? There was no way for me to know that.

Two paramedics brought a stretcher up and set it down beside the rescuers. I was there, watching, hardly breathing, waiting, hoping, and praying. Was it possible that I’d been a little part of moving some of the pieces that had allowed somebody to be saved?