Fall and Rise

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  When the dust cleared, Stan and Brian left via a back entrance, behind the New York Stock Exchange, and made their way onto Broad Street. Winter seemed to have arrived three months early. Gray-white ash coated buildings, cars, mailboxes, parking meters, and anyone caught outside in the unnatural blizzard.

  Somehow Brian and Stan became separated32 as Stan rushed toward the Brooklyn Bridge, to reach Jenny and their daughters. In the crush of people trying to leave Lower Manhattan, Stan caught a ride from a stranger in a pickup truck who was driving on sidewalks to avoid pedestrians in the streets. When the driver saw Stan’s battered and bloody condition, he offered a cigarette. Stan’s wry humor returned: “No, man, I had enough smoke for one day.”

  When Brian realized that he’d lost Stan, he scrambled through the crowd, yelling, trying to find him, just as he’d done on the 81st floor. But Stan was gone.

  Brian walked on alone, in disbelief of all that had happened. The building where he’d worked for twenty-seven years was gone, and with it who knew how many friends and colleagues, other workers and visitors, emergency responders and plane passengers and crew. Half in shock, Brian wondered: Had Stan been a figment of his imagination? A guardian angel who prevented him from climbing higher in a building doomed to fall?

  Brian paused. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the business card. It read frocks & tops inc., stanley praimnath, president & ceo. Brian relaxed. He tucked away the card, comforted by the certainty that amid all the loss and madness, his new blood brother was real.

  Chapter 18

  “To Run, Where the Brave Dare Not Go”

  Ground Level and North Tower, World Trade Center

  Around 9:30 a.m., inside Stairwell B of the North Tower, Elaine Duch, her colleagues-turned-caretakers Gerry Gaeta and Dorene Smith, and their fellow evacuees couldn’t tell how badly the building had been damaged. Most still didn’t know the cause.

  When they emerged in the main lobby, they saw blown-out windows, broken walls, and water from severed pipes streaming down from the mezzanine level. Gerry thought it resembled Niagara Falls. As they sloshed through six inches of water, Gerry still gripped the knot in Elaine’s sweater while Dorene held the empty sleeve.

  “Burn victim!”1 Gerry yelled. “Where do we take her?”

  Someone pointed to the entrance to the Concourse-level shopping mall, toward the building known as Five World Trade Center. The subterranean route would take them under the outdoor plaza, where bodies and burning debris continued to fall, and where high above, the South Tower had begun its death spiral. Soon, two medics spotted Elaine. Each took an arm and sped her through the Concourse. Gerry’s legs ached from the seventeen-hundred-stair descent, and he knew he couldn’t keep up. He told the others to run ahead. Dorene jogged alongside, staying as close as she could to Elaine as they reached an exit onto Church Street, where ambulances awaited them.

  “I’m hurt,” Elaine announced to anyone in earshot. “Help me.”

  Dorene helped her hobble toward the street. Elaine turned to her and asked: “How’s my hair?”

  “It’s fine, Elaine,” Dorene lied. “It’s fine.”

  As they moved toward the fleeing masses, EMT Moose Diaz turned to his partner Paul Adams: “This is the big kahuna, man.”

  They headed past St. Paul’s Chapel toward the Millennium Hotel, where scores of men and women from the towers gathered outside. The moment anyone left the North or South Tower, their status changed from evacuees to terrorism survivors.

  The injured streamed toward Moose and Paul, bleeding, badly burned, some hyperventilating, some with chest pain, some with broken bones. Protocol called for the EMTs to triage the wounded, to prioritize treatment by issuing green tags to those with relatively minor injuries, yellow for more serious needs, and red to those who needed immediate care to survive. Black was for hopeless cases.

  Paul told Moose they had no time for triage tags, blowing past a lieutenant who insisted otherwise. Convinced that the implausible might happen and the burning towers might fall, Paul yelled to Moose: “These people should be getting the fuck out of here!”

  Two women approached them, one whose terrible burns served as their own triage tag. Her blouse was melted to her peeling skin. A sweater partly covered her ruined flesh. For the moment, she’d been spared from pain by the fireball’s destruction of her nerve endings. The woman had a single polite request for Moose and Paul, issued in a hoarse, smoke-strained voice.

  “Could you help me?”

  It was Elaine Duch, with Dorene Smith still at her side.

  Moose and Paul dropped everything and eased Elaine onto their stretcher, with Moose talking softly to her all the while. “What happened?” Moose asked.

  “I felt a hot flash,” Elaine answered. She asked him about her burned and matted hair. Moose told her not to worry.

  Elaine looked for Dorene. “Please don’t leave me,” Elaine begged. “Come with me to the hospital.” Dorene promised she would.

  A priest from St. Paul’s Chapel seemed to appear from nowhere. He asked Elaine, “Are you Catholic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mind if I give you your last rites?”

  “Please do,” Elaine said.

  The priest knelt next to the stretcher and delivered the sacrament as quickly as he could, so Elaine would be properly reconciled with God. At the prayer’s end, Moose and Paul lifted Elaine into the back of 45 Adam, as Dorene scampered aboard. Elaine made Dorene promise that she would call her twin sister, Janet. Elaine repeated Janet’s phone number multiple times, like a mantra, to be sure.

  Paul jumped behind the wheel and drove two miles uptown to St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center on Twelfth Street. In the back, Moose cut away whatever he could of Elaine’s clothing and gently bandaged her wounds.

  “Am I going to die?” Elaine asked. A hush fell over the ambulance. No one answered.

  Ron Clifford and his newfound helpers, the hotel nurse and the man from Long Island, led burn victim Jennieann Maffeo from the Marriott lobby. As they reached the street, a photographer spotted their little group. The resulting image captured Jennieann swaddled in the white tablecloth and Ron holding her up. His yellow tie remained bright. He stood out from the crowd, just as his sister, Ruth, had advised.

  They emerged to find a burning Federal Express truck, broken glass, scattered debris, ash-covered people and vehicles, with a hellish soundtrack of sirens and screams. Ron glanced up and thought the towers looked as if they were melting. He heard loud thumping noises, not like gunshots but strange, awful thuds. Another glance revealed the source: the impact of bodies falling or jumping from great heights.

  A firefighter with the white helmet of an officer stepped toward them out of the smoke and ash. The towers groaned as fires warped their insides. “Run!” the firefighter told them. “Run, run, run!” Yet he ignored his own advice; instead of leaving, the chief or captain led a group of fellow firefighters toward the dying buildings. Ron marveled at their bravery.

  “Can you run?” Ron asked Jennieann.

  “I’ll try.”

  The group tottered in unison across West Street to a line of waiting ambulances. Medics rushed to help Jennieann, as Ron passed along information she gave him about her latex allergy, her asthma, and her boss’s telephone number. As they loaded her aboard, Ron told Jennieann: “You have to make it now, after all we’ve been through.”

  Then Ron Clifford stood at the curb, watching the ambulance pull away.

  Still climbing higher inside Stairwell B of the North Tower, Captain Jay Jonas remained focused on the steps ahead and his men around him. Determined to keep Ladder 6 together, Jay took regular head counts. “This is the mother of all high-rise buildings,” he told his crew. “I can’t afford to be looking for you guys.”

  During their third ten-floor march, Jay realized that two of his men had fallen behind. They’d been delayed when they stepped aside to let evacuees helping one another pass two abreast on the
stairs. “Wait here,” Jay told the men still with him. He found the missing men and reassembled his team on the 27th floor.

  By then, the number of descending civilians in Stairwell B had slowed to a trickle. Roughly an hour had passed since Flight 11 hit the North Tower, and nearly all the able-bodied men and women below the impact zone had fled.

  By one estimate,2 1,250 people evacuated the North Tower in the first few minutes, even before United Flight 175 hit next door. Another 6,700 men and women left before ten o’clock. Yet along with more than nine hundred civilians still heading for the exits, more than two hundred firefighters remained inside the North Tower, either climbing or resting for the next upward push.

  “All right, everybody take a knee, get some water,” Jay said. They’d try to make up for lost time and shoot for the fortieth floor on their next effort. They exited Stairwell B through a door that led into a hallway on the 27th floor.

  As they rested, they were joined by a friend of Jay’s, firefighter Andrew Fredericks, a nationally known fire service instructor from Squad 18 whose obsession with hose techniques earned him the nickname Andy Nozzles. Andy was still mourning three fellow firefighters who died three months earlier in a Father’s Day fire he’d helped to fight in a Queens hardware store. He’d written a tribute to the men that laid bare his emotions that night. “Emptiness is the only way3 to describe the way I felt,” Andy wrote. “I kissed my kids and hugged them and watched the news and cried.”

  While they caught their breath, Jay, Andy, and Ladder 6 also encountered the leader of Engine 21, Captain William “Billy” Burke Jr., tall and lean, the son of a retired deputy chief. In his free time, Billy Burke was a photographer, a Civil War aficionado, and a summertime lifeguard on Long Island. Jay and Billy went back years, to when Jay was a lieutenant and Billy served under him.

  At 9:59 a.m., as Jay greeted his old friend, an earthquake seemed to rock Lower Manhattan. The floor heaved, and the North Tower swayed. A whoosh of air crested into a roar, then subsided. The lights switched off. The North Tower righted itself and the men and women inside regained their balance, if not their equilibrium.

  Alone on the floor of his elevator car, oblivious to everything beyond the walls of his box, Chris Young occasionally heard loud cries amid sirens and fire alarms. Nothing sounded like human agony, only some kind of vague emergency unfolding nearby. He knew nothing of planes or fires or people falling and jumping to their deaths. Several times he tried calling out to the people in the other elevator but got no response. As his anxiety rose, Chris tried to pry open the doors, but they wouldn’t give. To pass the time and calm his nerves, he alternated between sitting and pacing.

  More than an hour had passed. At 9:59 a.m., Chris’s enclosed world shook. The rumbling intensified, accompanied by a roar. The lights flickered and went out, then a few seconds later came back on. Gusts of smoke and dust blew into his elevator car. Still suspecting that the crisis had been caused by a bomb under the trade center, now Chris thought a second bomb had detonated. Terrified that he would soon die, he again rolled into a ball. Seconds felt like minutes.

  The rumbling stopped. Struggling to breathe, Chris took off his blue dress shirt and wrapped it around his head as a filter against the smoke and dust. He rose and pressed the fire hat button, but this time the electronic voice didn’t answer. He toggled the alarm button on and off in three short spurts, three long spurts, then three short ones again: the S-O-S distress signal in Morse code. No answer. He shouted: “Is anybody there?”

  No one was. Emergency workers had evacuated the North Tower lobby. The seven people who’d been trapped in the nearby elevator had freed themselves. Not knowing any of this, Chris grew afraid. He thought about his mother. He comforted himself again with monologues, but they weren’t enough. He thought again about the moment when he’d felt most self-assured: on a college stage, performing Man of La Mancha.

  Chris’s voice bounced off the elevator walls as he sang its most famous lyrics, about an ordinary man who faces overwhelming odds yet wills himself to be a hero:

  To dream the impossible dream,4

  To fight the unbeatable foe,

  To bear with unbearable sorrow,

  To run where the brave dare not go.

  To right the unrightable wrong,

  To love pure and chaste from afar,

  To try when your arms are too weary,

  To reach the unreachable star.

  Around 9:30 a.m., after guiding Jennieann Maffeo into the ambulance, Ron Clifford went looking for refuge and a safe place to phone home. Ron ran across West Street, about a hundred yards to Three World Financial Center, the American Express Tower. He curled up on the lobby floor, reeking of fuel and smoke. Ron looked down and saw charred pieces of Jennieann’s skin clinging to the elegant clothes that his sister, Ruth, had helped pick out for his meeting.

  Ron shifted his view to the horrors outside. He watched a couple jump together from the North Tower, holding hands. In the woman’s other hand, she gripped her purse, for comfort or eventual identification, or by habit, perhaps. It confused Ron. “That’s weird,” he thought. “Why is she carrying her purse if she knows she’s going to die?” The image replayed itself on a loop in his mind.

  Ron reached Brigid, who was racked by worry as she watched CNN. “It’s pretty bad here,” he told her, his voice on the verge of cracking. “I’m on my way.”

  “As long as you’re okay,” she said.

  “I’m alive. I’m okay. I love you.”

  Ron thought about returning to the towers to see if he could help anyone else. Then he thought of his family, and a mantra took shape in his mind, one he repeated multiple times: “Monica’s birthday. Got to get home to Monica’s birthday.”

  Looking out at the Twin Towers, even with their damage Ron couldn’t imagine that the giants might fall. But he worried about the North Tower’s teetering communications antenna, a 362-foot mast that was the most prominent feature that distinguished the twins from each other. “That big antenna is going to tip over,” Ron thought, “and it’s going to take out a couple of streets.”

  Ron rushed to the ferry terminal, jumped over the gate, and climbed aboard just as the boat left the pier, overloaded with passengers desperate to get home or simply away. A young man showed off a piece of one of the planes, a grisly souvenir that he’d grabbed as he ran away. Other passengers shamed him for it, and he slunk away.

  As the ferry reached Hoboken at 9:59 a.m., passengers burst into screams and cries as they watched the South Tower tilt.

  “Holy shit!” Ron said aloud.

  After delays and detours, as 10 a.m. neared, Cecilia Lillo and her friends Nancy Perez and Arlene Babakitis exited Stairwell C at the mezzanine level, one floor above the lobby. They gasped in horror as they looked out the windows onto the debris-strewn trade center plaza. Cecilia desperately wanted to exit there immediately, to find her husband, Carlos, or, as they’d planned, to locate an FDNY ambulance and ask another paramedic to radio him.

  But emergency workers wouldn’t let them out onto the plaza, for their own safety. Cecilia looked longingly out the tall windows and saw an airplane part painted the patriotic colors of American Airlines. She stopped and shuddered as she began to grasp what had happened.

  “It wasn’t a small plane,” Cecilia thought. “That’s why the building shook the way it did.”

  “Keep moving!” someone yelled.

  Emergency responders and Port Authority officials ushered everyone single file toward motionless escalators, to walk down to the lobby level. Like schoolgirls on a fire drill, Cecilia held Nancy’s hand and Nancy reached back to hold Arlene’s. At the bottom of the escalator, Cecilia let go of Nancy’s hand and prepared to sprint outside, toward West Street, as she’d done after the 1993 bombing. But a man in a white shirt blocked her way and told her to turn left, toward the blown-open revolving doors to the Concourse mall.

  “Walk fast, don’t run,” the man said, pointing her toward the e
xit at Five World Trade Center that led onto Church Street.

  With Nancy trailing several yards behind, and Arlene farther back, Cecilia quick-stepped down an east-west mall corridor, to a spot near a Banana Republic store. Had she turned right, another corridor would have taken her directly to the South Tower. Instead, she veered to the center of the polished stone floor, toward a security guard she recognized who on normal days checked IDs at the elevator turnstiles. He faced the oncoming pedestrian evacuees and waved them onward, toward the exits. As she passed, Cecilia overheard him say “Five minutes.”

  Cecilia didn’t know what he meant, but the guard’s comment disturbed her. She turned around, back toward where she expected to see Nancy and Arlene, to scream that they should run. As Cecilia turned, the clock struck 9:59 a.m. The ground shook. A rumble became a whump, then crescendoed into a roar, bass notes of destruction pierced by the treble of human shrieks.

  In the distance, Cecilia saw the escalator inside the North Tower lobby disappear in a cloud of smoke and dust. She couldn’t see Arlene, but she locked eyes with Nancy, perhaps ten yards away, her arms outstretched, her face contorted in fear. Amid the cacophony, Cecilia didn’t hear Nancy scream, but she read her unmistakable body language: “Help me!”

  Before Cecilia could respond, a gust of smoke enveloped Nancy, the security guard, and everyone and everything else between Cecilia and the entrance to the North Tower lobby. Cecilia spun around, away from the danger, to run east toward the exit onto Church Street. Before she could take a step, the world went black. Cecilia went down. The force of the collapsing South Tower funneled through the North Tower lobby and channeled underground through the Concourse mall corridors, throwing her to her knees.