We All Fall Down (16 page)

That thought made me smile. The officer started back to the building and I pulled the cellphone out of my pocket. I’d just go over and stand by the ambulances and wait for my father.

I dialed the first three numbers, hoping I’d be able to get through this time. I stopped dialing and walking … there was a sound … like thunder … but there wasn’t a cloud … As I craned my neck to see the top of the building it sagged and it started to collapse!

I turned and started to run when all at once I was picked up and thrown, sailing, through the air. I skidded into the pavement, my face crashing into the concrete! My head and my back and legs were stung by the bite of something smashing into them. I tried to pull my arms over my head and I was engulfed in a thick, white cloud of dust, stinging my eyes, choking my lungs as my ears were flooded with sounds so intense it felt as if my eardrums might burst. The sounds went on and on and on, and then, it all just stopped.

I struggled to get to my feet but couldn’t and fell back down to my knees. I tried to draw in a
breath but it was as if I were lying face first in sand—the harder I tried, the more the dust was drawn into my lungs. I felt as if I were drowning in the air. I pushed off with my hands and staggered to my feet. I tried to see through the cloud … tried to understand what had happened … what was happening. I coughed violently, trying desperately to expel dust and gather air into my lungs. I looked back and peered through the cloud … it was so thick I couldn’t even see the building … I tripped over something and smashed back down to the ground.

My ears became filled with the sound of sirens, as thick in my ears as the dust was in my throat. I knew something had fallen—maybe the entire top of the building—sending up the cloud of swirling, choking, blinding dust so thick that it blocked everything from my view. I couldn’t even see the tower. Maybe I wasn’t even looking in the right direction any more. I hardly knew which way was down. I tried to look up, to see the sky, but all I could make out was a sort of brightness in the white cloud where the sun was trying to force its way through. I staggered a few feet in one direction and then the other, going nowhere. Where was there to go? Which direction should I head? I tripped and fell down again. What had I tripped over? It was a gigantic piece of concrete. If that had hit me I would have been crushed, my head broken into little pieces, killed.

I scrambled forward on all fours. Through the haze I could see that the ground was littered with pieces of concrete, hunks of metal, broken and shattered shards of glass. I looked down at my hands. They were white and red! The palms of both hands were cut and bleeding, the left hand worse than the right. It was bleeding badly, blood flowing out of a large, ugly gash that extended up from my hand to my elbow. My shirt was shredded and torn. I held my arm up and slowly turned it around, looking at the cut, watching the blood dripping out of it. It didn’t hurt. There was no feeling … it was just numb … like I felt. This was unreal, like a dream … a nightmare.

The white cloud was streaked with bursts of red and yellow pulsating, flashing lights, from the roofs of the emergency vehicles. The lights met and passed and parted and joined. They were coming from all over, creating a strange, bizarre light show.

I became aware of people all around me, running, screaming. They looked more like ghosts, faces and clothes covered with the thick white powder. I struggled to my feet again, my knees shaking, not sure if I could walk even if I did know which way to go.

Suddenly I was hit from behind and knocked off my feet.

“I’m so sorry!” a man yelled. He grabbed my arm and helped me up. It was a police officer. He
was covered from head to toe in dust, his hat missing, his eyes wide open, dark holes staring out at me from a blanket of white. He looked terrified.

“You gotta move away!” he screamed. “Get away!”

“I have to wait here for my father!”

“Your father … where’s your father?”

“He’s in the lobby.”

“The lobby … the lobby of what?” “The South Tower.”

He seemed to recoil in shock. “Oh, son … I’m so sorry … so sorry.”

“So sorry about what?” I demanded.

“It’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean gone?”

“The building, the whole building, the South Tower, it’s gone, it collapsed.”

“It can’t be gone! It can’t! You’re wrong!”

“We have to move away. Come on, let me get you to an ambulance. You have to be treated.”

“I have to find my father!” I screamed.

“There’s nothing that we can do son, we just have to—”

“Leave me alone!” I yelled, and I tried to break away from his grip on my arm. “I’ve got to find my father!”

He held me tight and I thrashed around, breaking his hold. He tried to grab me again and I stumbled away, forward, in the direction I thought was toward the building. I got no more
than a half dozen steps when I crashed over top of something and flew forward, landing painfully on my hands and knees.

A firm hand grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me to my feet. It was the officer again.

“You have to come with me, there’s no choice.”

“But I can see it! I can see the building!” I said, pointing through the cloud.

A dark shadow could be seen through the cloud. It was the tower … but it looked different … the shape was all wrong. I strained my eyes, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It had a jagged outline … oh my God … it wasn’t the tower … it was the
remains
of the tower … a twisted tangle of metal and concrete that had collapsed, throwing rubble across the plaza. The building was gone. My father was gone.

My knees felt like rubber, and if it hadn’t been for the officer’s hand holding me up I might have fallen again. Then I had the strangest thought … that nursery rhyme from history class …
we all fall down
…
we all fall down
. The words echoed in my head.

“Come on, son, we have to move farther away. It’s not safe here.”

He started to lead me away. I was powerless to stop him … but why would I even try? I looked back over my shoulder. I could make out the images of people, stumbling around in the thick white cloud. They were lost, confused, unsure where to
go, possibly—probably—hurt or injured, definitely stunned, unable to comprehend what they had just witnessed, what they’d just been a part of.

I suddenly dug in my heels and stopped.

“We have to keep moving,” the officer said. “It isn’t safe here.”

“No.” I reached down. Still around my neck was the string holding the whistle. I put it to my lips and began blowing. It made a shrill call that sounded so loud in my ears but was absorbed and silenced by the dust and the sounds all around me. I kept on blowing anyway, expelling every last bit of air I had in my lungs into that whistle. He’d told me he’d come if I blew the whistle … he promised … he promised …

I began coughing. The dust replaced the air.

“He said he’d come if I whistled,” I cried, desperately trying to explain it to the officer. “He said he’d come.”

The policeman placed an arm around my shoulders. “He can’t hear you, son. We have to go … we have to … your father would have wanted you to be safe.”

I felt my whole body get weak. My father would have wanted me to …

I saw a figure, slowly moving forward, too tall to be real … no, not one figure,
two
… one person carrying another!

I broke away from the officer, my movement so sudden and unexpected that he couldn’t stop me.
I ran, closing the gap, hoping, praying, hearing the officer screaming for me to come back, but I kept on running and then skidded to a stop. It was my father, although I almost didn’t recognize him. He was covered with a thick layer of white dust and his clothes were practically shredded and hanging from his body. There was blood streaming down from his forehead. Ting still clung tightly to his back, her black eyes staring out in shock and surprise.

“Will!”

I threw my arms around him. “You’re okay … you’re …”

“I’m okay.”

“I thought you were dead.” I burst into tears.

“It’s all right. I’m alive. We’re
all
alive. I heard the whistle.”

I hugged him with all my might. Then an arm wrapped around me. I looked up and realized it was Ting’s arm around my shoulders.

“We had just left the building and we were picked up and thrown, like rag dolls, by this rush of air … the building just collapsed and shot us out of the way. I was slammed into the ground, and when I was able to get air back into my lungs I realized that Ting was still on my back. I crawled, scrambled away, with her still there.”

“Come on, all of you, we have to leave, we can’t stay here!” It was the police officer.

“This is my
father,”
I said. “And
now
we can go.”

I was sitting in my little office in the basement of my house, working away on a novel, when my wife called me on the phone. She said I had to turn on the TV. Something had happened—something terrible—in New York City. I flipped on the set and was greeted by an image that was incredibly disturbing and completely unbelievable. The screen showed one of the towers of the World Trade Center, ablaze, smoke pouring out of a gigantic gash in its side.

The announcer said that they were still gathering information, but from what they knew, a plane—a large commercial jet—had crashed into the building. They were still trying to piece together what had happened and what was going to happen next.

As I sat there, eyes glued to the screen, not able to fully understand the scale of the tragedy, a dark shade, a second plane, streaked across the sky and sliced into the other tower, disappearing, transformed into a gigantic orange ball of flames and fire. I felt as if my heart had stopped beating. I blinked. I rubbed my eyes. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be real. This was too awful to even imagine, and now it was playing out before my eyes—before the eyes of the world—on CNN.

I sat there for the rest of the day, watching first one tower and then the second tumble down. I watched as the scene shifted to the Pentagon. I heard reports about the plane being downed in Pennsylvania, and how all flights in the United States were being suspended, while midair flights were being diverted to Canada.

It was at that time that I heard the sound of an airplane right over top of my house. It got louder and louder—disturbingly loud. What was a plane doing flying so low? The worst possible thoughts flooded my mind. I rushed outside as the craft flew over my house. It was an air-ambulance helicopter setting down at the local hospital. For a few seconds I had thought the worst instead of the usual.

I didn’t write any more that day. Ironically, the story I was writing involved a group of terrorists trying to kidnap two young members of Britain’s royal family. I didn’t write again for weeks. My soul and my psyche were both too distracted, too troubled, too disturbed. The terrible enormity of what had happened was all just too much. I’d be walking the dog, eating a meal, or waking up and I’d just feel … off. I didn’t know what, but something just wasn’t
right
.
Then I’d remember, and I’d know what was wrong. For a while I wondered if those feelings would ever go away. Slowly, ever so slowly, they faded.

I lived my life, the way all people had to go on with their lives. I began to write again, first working on the novel I was creating at the time, and then another one, and another and another. Sometimes, during school visits, I would be asked if I thought I would ever write a story about 9/11. I always answered that I thought maybe, at some point, perhaps … but I really didn’t think I would. I wasn’t sure if I could ever put into words what I’d witnessed, what I’d been a part of from six hundred miles away. Two years after 9/11 I was still being asked that same question. Something about what had happened was very much alive in the minds of the students. They needed to know more. And maybe I needed to write the story, my way, in my words.

What happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were attacks against the United States of America. But they were more than that. They were atrocities against all good-thinking people, of all countries, of all faiths. This book is my way, my small way, of helping me, and others, to come to grips with this evil and to emphasize that, as Gandhi said, in the end, good always triumphs.

Eric Walters, a former elementary-school teacher, began writing as a way to encourage his students to become more enthusiastic about literature. His many works include
Camp X, Royal Ransom
, and
Run
. His novels have won numerous awards including the Silver Birch, Blue Heron, Red Maple, Snow Willow, and Ruth Schwartz, and have received honours from the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year, and UNESCO’s international award for Literature in Service of Tolerance. He lives in Mississauga, Ontario.