Reluctant Hero Page 6

  The more I think back on their faces, the more I realize that they didn’t simply look tired. Their expression said more than This is unbelievably hard. Will I make it up all these stairs? It went beyond that. It was more of an expression of profound knowing. It said, I know the gravity of what’s going on around me here. They knew it was an incomprehensibly bad situation. They knew we had been attacked. They knew what airplane fuel could do. Of course, this was a physically challenging rescue that went beyond the wildest imaginable and most brutal training manual scenario. Sure they were tired. But they were more pensive than tired. These firemen understood that in this matter of life and death, they were doubtless heading toward the latter. And they walked into it with such bravery, dignity, and stoicism.

  Of the handful of instances I remember of civilians selflessly helping firemen, I’ll never forget one man, stripped down to his T-shirt and suit pants, who, seeming like he might be a volunteer fireman in his hometown, moved quickly past me carrying a heavy fire hose. He was an Asian-American man who looked to be in good shape. He appeared very much like a man on a mission who knew what he was doing. The firemen told him, “It’s OK, you can set it down.” And the man said, “No, it’s all right. I can handle it. I feel good.” The firemen kept saying “Don’t worry about it,” and the guy continued to insist he could help.

  I should do more than I’m doing now. I’m just carrying this woman down. Anyone can do this. Maybe I should trade off with somebody in the stairwell and go help the firemen. That Asian man is helping. How incredibly noble! The firemen look tired. They’ve got to carry up more stuff than I’m carrying. Why don’t I help them? I paused for just a moment. John and the woman looked at me quizzically. The firemen were still telling the Asian man to set the hose down. If I let go of the evac chair, it will just be another fireman that takes her down, and he’ll be taken away from saving another life. It’s amazing how your mind rushes to calculate risk-benefit in a situation like that. It does this in fractions of a second. I stared into the eyes of the woman in the wheelchair, and then looked straight ahead. I reminded myself of what I was doing. Keep moving. Get us out. I would learn what those firemen knew soon enough.

  Floors 33–21: Getting Lower, Moving Slower

  The farther down we went, the longer it took to get from floor to floor. Conditions worsened. The human traffic had increased twofold in number. The exodus had become increasingly diverse. Some women carried their shoes, others went shoeless. There were bandaged people, bloodied people, people wearing far less of the clothing they wore to work that morning. Everyone was sweating. And always, always firemen. Heavyset people leaned on banisters for a moment, for a few moments, breathing heavily, regrouping themselves in order to go on. Older people wheezed and sat down to rest, if only to catch their breath. For many it was just a simple matter of fatigue anyone would experience traveling the sheer number of floors. We counted floors like you count repetitions in gym workout: down the stairs, hit a level, hit floor. Repeat. When would this be over? The monotony was compounded by the steady rise in temperature. The air became thicker with more people sharing the limited oxygen in the stairwell. It was hot. It was uncomfortable. After the 33rd floor, it became a challenge to keep moving at any pace.

  I had to keep moving.

  If I was moving, I felt OK. My survival instinct was placated. Any pause, any halt in our progress alarmed me. Standing around made me very, very nervous. If we weren’t moving, my mind shifted away from hopeful thinking about the next move to fearful thinking about why we were stopped. Were the exits blocked? Did someone else need help? Any restriction of movement compromised my sense of invincibility and control, the belief that I could get out of a situation because of my speed or my strength. That was the way I’d always viewed myself. If you trap me, take away my ability to move, then who am I? I wasn’t trapped helping this woman. I was merely slowed. As long as I was moving, I was still in control of my situation. When I wasn’t moving, I was not in control; I was being controlled. That’s when I started to hear the tiny distress signal in the back of my head. And that’s precisely the signal I was trying to mute.

  Sometimes the stoppage was due to having to let firemen go up the stairs. That was better than being stopped and not knowing why. Whatever the case was, the slow pace, the slow descent heightened tension among the people on the stairs.

  As I looked around, it became clear to me that everyone on the stairwell was in a state of semi-shock. Nobody was talking to each other in a normal way. We were a zombie-like procession of tired, blank faces occasionally mustering up enough strength to show fear and to take the next physical step forward. The challenge was to do anything to keep oneself in reality, in the present, and out of shock. As we moved from floor to floor, I’d see somebody crying or bloodied. I’d ask them, “Are you OK?” They’d say, “Yes,” “No,” “I think so.” Then we’d keep moving. Offering to comfort another was one of the best ways to feel some power and control in what was a helpless situation. Little gestures like that, no matter how ineffectual, reminded you of your humanity. Those little gestures kept me grounded in reality, kept me sane, and kept me moving forward.

  For John, me, and the woman in the wheelchair, little had changed. It was me on the left and John on the right, constantly reminding each other to keep her balanced. Adrenaline overrode fatigue.

  At the 31st-floor landing, the doors to the office floor were open. As I carried the woman in the wheelchair around another corner, I glanced over my shoulder and saw a firemen on his back. His chest was heaving. He was choking. He was having a heart attack. A man tried to help him. It looked pretty bad. I looked at John, and he looked at me. I nodded to the next step in front of us. We kept moving.

  On the 28th floor, I reported to the next firemen I saw. “Listen,” I said. “There’s a firemen a few floors up who looks like he’s having a heart attack.”

  “I know,” the firemen said. Pensive resignation was written all over his face, indicating that he’d just gotten a call on his radio. He stared down at John and me carrying the woman and spoke to me at close range. “You could set her down on the 21st floor. There’s a medic station set up there, and they can take care of her.”

  I looked back at the woman. “Do you want us to set you down on the 21st floor?” She looked back, didn’t speak, but communicated instead with a slight shrug, which I took to mean Whatever you think is best.

  I needed her to tell me what she really wanted. But before I could open my mouth to ask her, the human log jam suddenly cleared. As if on reflex, the three of us moved as quickly as possible, moving toward the 21st floor as fast as we had done with the previous floors. I turned to the woman again. “Listen, would you like us to set you down here?” She equivocated. Did she think that I wanted to set her down? I didn’t want to do it. I only said it because the firemen said it. Here we were on the 21st floor, and I wanted her to know that if she wanted to stay there for medical attention, it was entirely her call.

  I thought back to when I first found her on the 68th floor. Those women were standing around her, and I’d asked, “Does she need help?” Her friends didn’t answer. When I looked at the woman straight in the face and asked her “Do you need help?” she said “Yes,” and I could tell she meant it.

  I looked at her like I did that first time.

  “Look, I’ll take you all the way out of here if you want me to. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Don’t let go,” she said. “I want to stay with you.”

  I have since learned that the woman I was carrying was someone who worked very hard for her independence. I doubt she felt comfortable asking anyone straight up for help, and a complete stranger, no less. I’m sure in any other circumstance she would have said to me, “If you want to set me down here, then yes, set me down.” But this was a situation where she needed my help, and there was no way, from the moment I saw her, that I was not going to help. She would not let go. I would not set her down. We had c
ome too far. Little did we know that the longest part of our journey together was ahead of us.

  Floors 21–5: Time Is Running Out

  On the 21st floor, movement in the stairwell slowed down to the point where we no longer measured progress by floors. We measured it by whether we advanced a step. The atmosphere changed dramatically. People were on edge. Everybody was operating on their own theory of what was really happening. Uncertainty led to more fear, and the fear fueled greater uncertainty. The physical and emotional strain was starting to show. Desperation germinated all around us. We felt it. The scenery changed as well. On these lower floors we saw more and more injured people. They were everywhere. Whoever had gotten this far had paid a visible price. Cuts and torn clothing. Heads wrapped in bandages. All around darkened hallways. Cracks in walls, water seeping through. It truly looked like a horror movie. But this was real.

  On the 10th floor, we were greeted by a tremendous rumbling sound. Powerful vibrations shook the floors under our feet and the railings under our hands, yet we could see nothing. John and I looked at each other wide-eyed, sharing the same thought without speaking it: What in God’s name was that? We both looked down at the woman. She stared straight ahead. We looked back at each other and shook our heads as if to say, What next? I nodded to John, indicating, Let’s keep going. We knew something significant was happening because the entrance doors at the 10th-floor landing were different than the entrance doors at every previous landing. At every other floor, if you wanted to leave the stairwell and enter a floor, you had to pull the heavy entrance doors open toward you. But at the 10th-floor landing, a breeze came through with such force that the office doors blew open. The open doors blocked our three-person chain from getting through the landing to the next set of stairs. I had to hold the wheelchair in one hand and, with all my might, push the door closed with my other arm and hold it closed until we got completely clear of the landing. Once I let go, the door violently swung open again. Even without carrying a woman in a wheelchair, many people couldn’t handle the doors on the 10th floor.

  We didn’t know it, and we couldn’t see it, but that massive rumbling was the South Tower falling. All reports have this occurring at 9:59 a.m. John, the woman, and I had been inseparable for almost an hour.

  And then, on the 7th floor, things stopped. I gripped my side of the wheelchair tightly, perhaps for the first time feeling the burden of its weight. We stood there, anxious and still, at the top of the stairwell that connected the 7th floor to the 6th. I could see all the way to the bottom of the stairwell. No one was moving. Should we get off the stairs and find another way? I could no longer waste any time trying to figure out what the exact nature of the danger was. All my figuring had to be about getting us out of there. That was it. And the closer we got to getting out—the 7th floor was pretty close—the more I desperately wanted out. I knew at that moment that things were taking too long. We had to find a way out, fast. I knew whatever it was that was causing the holdup had to be bad, and that time was running out.

  I was not alone in feeling intense pressure to get out. The feeling among the halted train of people became less of common community and more like that of a caravan of disparate, disgruntled refugees. Faces darkened. Hopes dimmed. Kindness dissipated. A heavyset man moved slowly through the 6th-floor doorway, and some in the crowd let slip moans of impatience. Tension in the stairwell reached its breaking point. Fear began to manifest itself in different ways. Mine was a quiet fear. Others vocalized their desperation. The louder people got, the quieter I became. The more they panicked, the more I focused. Finally, the bubble burst. I stood there dead quiet in that dark stairwell, while everyone around me was yelling, “We’ve got to move! What’s holding it up! My god, we have to get out of here!”

  In his play No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre famously penned the line “Hell is other people.” Where the hell was our exit?

  The 5th Floor

  On the 5th floor we came to a dead stop. There was no movement at all. We had come to a crossroads. John, the woman, and I left the stairwell and went out onto the floor. We had to. It was a good decision if for no other reason than the fact that we were moving again. Some people chose to stay in the stairwell. Before we got to this point, all common sense said to stay with the crowd, which was moving, even if slowly at times, toward the bottom. That was no longer the case. It was no longer clear that it was safer to stay on the stairs. Nothing was obvious now. At this point, no one felt that one direction would definitely get you out. It wasn’t quite every man for himself, but you felt free to find your own way out.

  On the 5th floor we saw firemen everywhere. The 5th floor was a custodial area. It was dark and smoky. It reminded me of the original Poseidon Adventure, where the small group of survivors are trying to make their way to the hull of a ship that’s been overturned. That’s exactly what it was like. Broken pipes, hissing smoke. Water on the ground up to our ankles. The hallways were very narrow, lined with equipment lockers. It was so dark that we had to follow the lights affixed to the firemen’s helmets or their flashlights for our next steps, or we would run into things. This was not the predictable terrain of the stairwells, with steps and stairwell platforms. Here John and I had to watch our every step to avoid sharp metal, wires, and exposed pipes. At each obstacle, we had to set the woman down, reposition ourselves, pick her up, and then carry her over debris. It was hard work, but what made it harder was the creeping suspicion that there was no discernible way out of the 5th floor.

  The panic ratcheted up even higher. The yelling started again. “Why can’t we get out!” people demanded. “C’mon, let’s go! What’s the problem? Tell us the problem!”

  Some broke away from the firemen. I didn’t think that that was a good idea. Keep following the firemen. We set out in another direction with one firemen and the small group of people still following him. We found a doorway off the custodial area where another firemen stood as if he was keeping watch. “Can we get out this way?” the firemen leading the way asked. The one in the doorway said, “No.” John and I held the woman, and I watched these two firemen closely. “Why not?” said our firemen. The other firemen just shook his head and waved his hand as if to say, “Don’t ask.” There was no doubt in my mind now: Something had gone terribly wrong.

  Looking back, I can only guess the fallout from the South Tower must have made it very dangerous to exit that doorway. Maybe there were bodies there. Who knows?

  Now the little voice in my head was screaming: We’ve got to get out of here now. We’re stuck. I am definitely not in control of any of it anymore. We’re not moving. We’re on this dark floor. I have no idea where to turn for a way out. How the hell will the three of us get out of here? I thought, if it came to it, I’d throw her over my shoulder and find some other way out of there.

  We reversed course and followed the firemen back toward the very first exit we checked. People shouted their disapproval. “No, no—we already tried that way!” The firemen halted in his tracks. He turned and looked at all of us. We had arrived at that Poseidon Adventure moment where some people left the Reverend and some followed him. We followed. We chose well. We got to the doorway, and he said to us, “It’s OK now. We can get out this way.”

  This stairwell was not like the one we had been using. The first thing we noticed was the almost-complete lack of other people. Earlier that could’ve been cause for alarm, but at this point, we saw it as a path with fewer obstacles. What made it different, but worse, was the lack of visibility, which made it almost impossible for us to keep a steady footing.

  It was dark, smoky, and very slippery, with water everywhere. The only thing we could see and follow were the fluorescent glow strips on the stairs. That was enough. We flew down the last four flights of stairs to the lobby.

  Through the Lobby, Out of the Building,

  and Into the Ambulance

  Like cave dwellers stepping cautiously into first light, we limped out from the dark stairwell and into the west s
ide of the North Tower’s lobby. We could see outside the building and out all the way to the West Side Highway. We made it. We were finally free from those damn stairs, from the confinement, from the lack of control. But our immediate sense of relief was quickly overcome by confusion resulting from a flood of new information as we surveyed the scene. To our right, toward the north end of the building, we saw devastation. It was a war zone. What happened here? This is more than a transformer fire or a gas explosion. Shattered glass littered the inside of the lobby and the outside of the building. Twisted metal poked out from all sides of the lobby walls, with chunks of broken cement and loose paper all over the ground. The bright sun now had a dusty film over it—like snow, but dirty, with a grayish white hue. People moved around aimlessly, bandaged and bloodied—seemingly looking for help, for a friend, for something they lost, for I don’t know what.

  Three of us held the woman—the firemen on the back, me on one side, and John on the other. For John and me, fatigue was no longer a factor. Whatever strain we felt gave way to the new world of sights and sounds we had now entered. In fact, after sixty-eight floors, we no longer thought of ourselves as two men carrying a woman in a wheelchair. The chair had become an unconscious extension of our own bodies—the three of us moving as one body. When we turned, she turned. If we bent low, she went low. When we froze—startled or shocked—she froze with us. The three of us—me, John, and the woman—had become incapable of moving anywhere except together.