by Alan Gratz
And you learned how to get back up again.
Brandon pulled himself up out of the soggy Sheetrock and started the climb again, more carefully now. He made it to the 88th floor, and through one of the cracks in the wall he saw the red-and-orange glow of a fire.
Brandon felt a mix of fear and relief. Okay, he thought. If this is where the fire is, down here on the 88th floor, then my dad is all right! If I can just get past this floor, I can get to Windows on the World and we can wait for the fire department together!
With renewed energy, Brandon scrambled up the next mountain of broken and disintegrating drywall. But when he got to the landing of the 89th floor, he couldn’t go any farther.
The stairwell above the 89th floor was gone. Not just the walls—everything. The stairs themselves seemed to have collapsed in a pile of concrete and twisted metal.
There was nothing to climb, and no going past it.
The entire stairwell was gone.
Brandon’s mind reeled. How was this possible? This was the World Trade Center. The biggest building in New York. The second-biggest building in the whole United States. It couldn’t just fall apart!
Brandon tried to think. This stairwell was destroyed, but there had to be other stairwells, right? If this was Stairwell A, there had to be a Stairwell B, or why would you even label it Stairwell A to begin with? So he could just exit onto the 89th floor, find one of the other intact stairwells, and keep going up.
Brandon took a deep breath and nodded to himself. This was a good plan. This would get him back to his dad.
The door to the 89th floor was a little bent, the way a cheap plastic chair warped when somebody big sat in it, and broken Sheetrock crowded the floor in front of it. Brandon kicked at the wet drywall to clear a path, then pulled on the bent door.
It wouldn’t budge.
Brandon put his feet on the wall, going vertical like he was doing a rock to fakie, a skateboarding trick where you came all the way to the top of the half-pipe, popped half your board over the rim, and then rolled down again backward. Brandon pulled with his arms and pushed with his legs, and with a wet screech the door scraped open just far enough for him to squeeze through.
Brandon jumped down to his feet and panted. Through the narrow opening in the doorway, he could see bright light and feel a blast of fresh air. Yes. Score one for the skaters.
Brandon slipped sideways through the gap and froze.
The 89th floor was gone.
Brandon was staring straight out into open sky.
Reshmina paused at the top of a ridge to look out at the mountains that swept up through Afghanistan and into China. The enormous mountains always humbled her. It was easy to see only the village you lived in and not the wider world if you never stopped to look up.
What Reshmina didn’t see anywhere was Pasoon.
It wasn’t hard to hide out in these mountains. That was why the Taliban were so difficult to find and fight. Pasoon had to be out there, just over the next hill, just beyond the next valley.
But where exactly was Pasoon going? Reshmina started walking again as she considered the question. It wasn’t like the Taliban had a village or a camp or a base. They roamed the barren mountains and passes between here and Pakistan, slipping back and forth over the unguarded, unmarked border like they owned the place. Pasoon could be headed in that general direction, like Reshmina was, but how could he be sure he would find them?
Suddenly Reshmina remembered another time when she had followed her brother up into these mountains. What was it—a year ago? Two?
Pasoon had invited Reshmina to go exploring in the mountains, and Reshmina had been thrilled to skip out on her chores and go with him. Pasoon had picked up a stick along the way and was swinging it like a sword. Reshmina strolled beside him, naming things in English. Rock. Tree. Sun. Brother. Reshmina couldn’t remember a day so fine, a time she was so happy.
They passed a big rock with a Pakistan phone number painted on it—a recruitment sign for anyone who wanted to call and join the Taliban—and she and Pasoon followed the goat path up and around the mountain, higher and higher.
At last they came to a flat space at the top of a steep cliff, and there, leaning against a rock, was an old wooden rifle.
Reshmina gasped. The rifle was scarred and dented from years of fighting, but it still looked usable. Pasoon went right to it, like he’d always known it would be there. It was heavy for him, but Reshmina knew he had used a rifle before to hunt cranes and quail with Baba. She watched as her brother slid the bolt back to see if the rifle was loaded.
There were two cartridges of bullets on the ground, and Pasoon loaded them into the top of the rifle and slid the bolt back in place.
“Pasoon, what are you doing?” Reshmina asked, suddenly alarmed. “That’s not yours.”
“No, it’s the Taliban’s!” Pasoon said. “Darwesh and Amaan said they’d give me five American dollars to shoot at the American camp!”
Reshmina felt the blood drain from her face. Now she understood. Pasoon hadn’t stumbled on this rifle by accident, and he hadn’t invited her along to “go exploring.” He’d known exactly where he was going, and what he was going to do when he got there!
Legs shaking, Reshmina inched forward to look over the side of the mountain.
Across the valley sat a ragtag collection of plywood and plastic tarps clinging to a small, flat space that had once been a logging camp. It was a small American base. Deliberately planted in the heart of Taliban territory to invite them to attack it.
Pasoon took aim with the rifle, meaning to do exactly that.
Reshmina grabbed the stock of the rifle and tried to pull it away from her brother.
“Pasoon! You can’t! They have guns there! Big guns! They’ll kill you! They’ll kill both of us!”
Pasoon frowned and yanked the rifle away from her. “They won’t even know where I am,” he told her. “Besides, I’m not going to hit anything. Darwesh and Amaan told me all I have to do is shoot at them. Then they’ll jump around like angry monkeys, shooting off their expensive bombs at nothing. They’ll be at it for hours, and by then we’ll be long gone.”
“But why?” Reshmina had said. “Why not leave them alone?”
That scowl that would eventually cloud Pasoon’s face every day when he was older set in, and his voice turned sour. “We’ll leave them alone when they leave us alone.”
Pasoon steadied the rifle against a rock and took aim, and Reshmina backed away. Why had her brother brought her along for this? To watch? To cheer him on? He had to know she wouldn’t do that. Because he was scared? Possibly. Or maybe he had brought her along just so a single boy walking alone up into the mountains wouldn’t look so suspicious.
PAKOW.
The rifle kicked when Pasoon fired it, knocking him to the ground. Reshmina covered her ears. Pasoon quickly scrambled back to the rock and hid behind it, not daring to peek out to see what his shot had done. In seconds, Reshmina heard the shouts of the Americans, and then the tok-tok-tok-tok of their guns as they fired back. She had ducked low, but Pasoon was right—their bullets didn’t come anywhere close to them. The Americans had no idea where the shooter was.
Pasoon giggled behind the rock. “I’ll just wait until they think I’ve gone, and then shoot at them again.”
“Pasoon, this isn’t a game!” Reshmina cried.
But Pasoon wasn’t listening to her anymore. He was having too much fun feeling all grown-up and important.
And that’s what he’s doing now, Reshmina realized, coming back to the present. The Taliban would tell Pasoon what he wanted to hear: that he was old enough to make his own decisions. Old enough to join them and fight the Americans. That’s where Pasoon would go—back up to that ridge with the phone number and the gun. Back to the heart of Taliban country.
Reshmina hurried down the goat path into the valley. At the bottom of the hill, young boys from her village played on an old abandoned Soviet tank. The khaki-green tan
k’s treads were broken, and it sat tilted, half-buried in the dirt. Faded black scorch marks still showed where the mujahideen—the Afghan guerrilla fighters—had hit the armored vehicle with rockets more than thirty years ago.
The boys lined up along one side of the tank’s cannon and pushed it, turning the turret uphill, against gravity. When the turret was as far as they could push it, they hopped on top of the long cannon and rode it as it swung back down. The boys whooped as the heavy turret gathered speed, and then—clang!—it hit the bottom of its arc and threw them all into the dirt.
The boys cackled with delight and got up to do it all over again.
“Do you boys know my brother Pasoon?” Reshmina called to them. “Did he come by here recently?”
“Yes!” one of the boys told her. He grunted as he and his friends leaned into the turret. “And he wouldn’t help us push the gun!”
Reshmina sighed. So Pasoon had come this way. And there was nothing else in this direction except the Taliban.
The boys squealed as their Soviet tank ride clanged and threw them off again, and Reshmina climbed the next hill.
Away from the river, Kunar Province was dusty and brown, the ground rocky and hard. The few plants here were scratchy and dry. Reshmina spied a boy herding his goats up a mountain in the distance and wondered if they had found anything better to eat. She doubted it.
That should be Pasoon up there, Reshmina thought. A young boy loping along, singing a song to his goats as they climbed into the mountains. Not running off to join the Taliban and fight a war that had begun a decade before he was born.
Reshmina stopped to catch her breath, stepping up onto a boulder and loosening her headscarf to let in more air.
She had begun to lose her twin brother in school. Their first textbooks, the ones they had used to learn their letters in Pashto, were old anti-Soviet primers printed by the United States and smuggled in from Pakistan. The books taught the alphabet, but they also taught the children of Afghanistan to fight back against their Soviet captors. Reshmina could still remember some of the lessons.
K is for Kabul, the capital of our dear country, the primer said. No one can invade our country. Only Muslim Afghans can rule over this country.
J is for Jihad. Jihad is the kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims and Muslim lands from the enemies of Islam. If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim.
T is for Topak. “Topak” was the Pashto word for “gun.” My uncle has a gun. He does jihad with the gun.
Another picture book followed the adventures of two boys named Maqbool and Basheer, who eventually helped the mujahideen clean and carry their weapons before an attack on the Soviet army.
Even their math textbooks encouraged them to fight. A Kalashnikov bullet travels at 800 meters per second. A mujahid has the forehead of a Russian in his sights 3,200 meters away. How many seconds will it take the bullet to hit the Russian?
Reshmina knew that the Americans had made those textbooks in order to hurt their enemy at the time, the Soviet Union. What the United States hadn’t expected was that they themselves would one day invade Afghanistan. Now the Americans were the infidels they had trained the mujahideen to fight.
Reshmina had managed to ignore the calls to war in their textbooks and used the books to learn her letters and numbers instead. But the pictures of tanks and planes and guns had been far more interesting to Pasoon. And it didn’t help when boys like Darwesh and Amaan kept coming back to tell him how great things were in the Taliban. Then Hila had been killed in that airstrike two years ago, and Reshmina had brought a wounded American soldier into their home, and now Pasoon was gone. Unless she could catch him.
Reshmina squinted into the bright sun and thought she saw movement on a ridge across the valley. She put a hand up to block the sun. Yes—it was Pasoon! She would recognize that round head and those skinny legs anywhere. Reshmina’s heart leaped. She still loved her twin brother, even if she wanted to punch him in the face.
Pasoon was waving his arms like he was trying to get her attention, and she called out to him.
The tiny figure stopped waving and turned. Reshmina saw now that her brother hadn’t been waving to her at all, but to someone up on the next ridge. She scanned the top of the hill.
There, among the rocks, she saw the shapes of four men silhouetted against the light. Four men wearing baggy pants and turbans and carrying rifles.
Reshmina was too late. Pasoon had found the Taliban.
Brandon stood on the broken edge of the World Trade Center, looking straight out into the bright blue September sky. Strong winds whipped his hair around his face, and burning papers fluttered down from somewhere above him. Exposed electric wires sparked in the sheared-off walls.
Brandon backed up against the stairwell door, his breath hitching in his throat. To his left and right, what was once an interior wall was now the outside wall of the North Tower. Below him, the Brooklyn Bridge stretched across the East River, as tiny as a model train set. He was almost a thousand feet in the air. But this time, there was no window between him and the open sky.
The wet napkin Brandon had tied around his face whipped away into the sky. One long stride and he would join it, falling forever and ever and ever.
Brandon’s brain couldn’t handle what he was seeing, and he sank, shaking, to what was left of the floor. He knew he should move. Get back inside. But he was paralyzed with fear.
The ledge he sat on followed the wall in both directions, but it was only three feet deep. He stared, horrified, at the emptiness around him. There should have been walls here. Cubicles. Desks. Copiers. Fax machines. Water fountains.
People.
But there was no one. Nothing.
In his mind, Brandon kept seeing himself sliding off the edge and falling eighty-nine stories to the ground. He tried not to think about it, but it was all he could think about. First his feet would go over, then his legs. He imagined himself clawing and grabbing at the carpet, sobbing, desperate not to go over the side. He couldn’t fall. But the pull of gravity was too much. He was too high up to resist. Over the ledge he would go, and then that terrible, awful sinking feeling as he fell backward, arms flailing, legs churning. There was nothing to grab onto, nowhere left to stand. He was disconnected from the earth. From everything he’d ever known. And then the ground would come rushing up toward him, closer, closer, closer until—
Brandon’s eyes jerked open. His heart thundered in his chest and every inch of him quivered, like when he woke with a start from a nightmare. He was still sitting on the floor. He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t fallen.
But he was going to, if he stayed out here much longer. The wind was a living thing up here, pushing and pulling at him like a cat playing with a toy. Brandon had to get up, get out. The whole 89th floor wasn’t gone. He could see that now as his senses returned to him. There was still part of it, off to the sides and behind him. If he crawled along the broken hallway, he could make it around the corner, try to find the other stairwell. But his arms and legs were lead. He couldn’t make them move.
Whoomp-whoomp-whoomp-whoomp. Air pounded against Brandon and the floor juddered underneath him. Suddenly a blue-and-white helicopter rose up right in front of where he sat. The helicopter hovered, rotating back and forth to hold its position, and Brandon saw the letters NYPD written in white on its side. How often had he seen a New York Police Department helicopter flying by overhead and wondered what trouble they were headed for?
Now he was the trouble.
Brandon put a hand up to keep the wind from his eyes, and as the helicopter blocked the sun, he saw two people inside it, a man and a woman in dark blue uniforms wearing helmets and sunglasses. Brandon’s arms came to life, and he waved them over his head like someone stranded on a desert island trying to catch the attention of a passing ship. The helicopter pilot put a hand to the microphone that bent around from the side of his helmet, like he was talking to someone, telling someo
ne about Brandon. They had definitely seen him! They were going to help! Brandon almost laughed for joy.
But the longer the helicopter hung there, the longer Brandon smiled and waved his hands, the more he realized that there was nothing the police helicopter could do. It wasn’t like they could land anywhere here on the 89th floor, or even get close enough to lower him a rope or a ladder. There they were, safe in their helicopter, and here he was, on the edge of a broken, burning building, with a thousand-foot-deep gulf between them.
Brandon lowered his hands and slumped against the door. He might as well have been on the moon for all they could do to help him.
The people in the helicopter must have been thinking the same thing. The woman pulled off her sunglasses, and Brandon could see the anguish in her eyes. She knew Brandon couldn’t hear her, not through the window of the helicopter, not over the thundering blades and the roar of the wind, but she said something anyway.
It might have been “I’m sorry.”
The helicopter turned and flew away, and Brandon lifted a hand goodbye. Maybe they could help someone else. Maybe they could help his father get off the roof—and Brandon too, if he could get up there.
Brandon’s arms and legs obeyed him once again, and he knew he had a decision to make. He had to move from this spot, get off this ledge. But which direction should he go? The easiest thing to do, the sanest thing, was slip back through the door behind him into the safety of the stairwell. But the only way that stairwell went anymore was down, and his father was up. There were two other stairwells though, and if one of them went up from this floor, Brandon might still be able to get to Windows on the World.
He had to try.
Brandon wiped tears from his eyes. The ledge he was on extended all the way along the interior wall to the south side of the building, which was still intact. Black smoke poured from the open hallway, but all Brandon had to do was crawl ten or fifteen feet along the ledge and he would be on solid ground again.