We All Fall Down (9 page)

“We can now confirm that there have been dozens and dozens of deaths,” the unseen announcer said. “There have been numerous people, including members of the Fire Department
and people fleeing the buildings, who have been killed by falling debris from the towers. A hailstorm of concrete and steel continues to rain down upon the plaza and surrounding streets.”

The camera changed to a shot of the plaza. It was littered with hunks of metal and stone. There was a police car, almost unrecognizable, crushed by a gigantic hunk of concrete.

“All emergency personnel in the city have been recalled, as have doctors and nurses and all health professionals. Hospitals are preparing for the mass of casualties that is expected. Fire officials have indicated that they now have their first firefighters at the scene of the blaze in the North Tower. They are confident that they can safely evacuate all people below the level of the fire.”

But what about those
above
the fire? And what about the people in
this
building? People like us? Had anybody reached the fire in our building yet? No, of course they hadn’t, because it had just happened.

“Did you get your mother?” my father asked.

“The lines are dead. Can you call her on your cell?”

He shook his head. “I can’t get service. Everybody’s trying to call and the cell towers are overwhelmed. We’ll keep trying. What are they saying?” he asked, gesturing to the TV.

“They’re just showing the towers and the people getting out.”

“I hope my staff got out.”

I looked at my watch. It was eight minutes after nine. Twenty or twenty-five minutes had passed. “Not yet,” I said. “If they were going at the same speed as us when we came down from the Observation Deck they’d still be on the stairs.”

“You’re right, and they couldn’t possibly be moving as fast as we moved. The stairwells probably became pretty crowded—”

“And now we have, by phone,” the television announcer said, “one of the consulting engineers for the construction of the World Trade Center.”

My father reached up and increased the volume.

“Shouldn’t we be going to … wherever we’re going?” I asked.

“We need to have as much information as possible to make the right decision. Just a few seconds.”

I felt my heart pounding in my chest. I felt like I had to go somewhere, anywhere, and not just stand there doing nothing … but what choice did I have?

“Are you there, Mr. McGregor?” the announcer asked.

“Yes, I am,” a voice replied. It was obvious that it was coming over a phone line.

“Can you comment on the scene you are seeing on the screen?” the announcer said.

“It’s hard to believe. The amount of smoke is simply unbelievable.”

“I was informed that the buildings were designed in such a way as to contain and control fire on any floor,” the announcer said.

“They were, and that is a life-saving measure in this case. The smoke you see … the fuel feeding these flames is not from the building itself but from the jet fuel that was on the planes.”

“It would certainly be hard to design a building for such an occurrence—a direct hit from an airplane.”

“Actually,” the engineer said, “the buildings
were
designed to withstand an airplane crash. We did tests, simulations of a private plane crash.”

“A private plane? Like a Cessna?” the announcer asked.

“Larger. Two-engine prop plane.”

“But nothing like this. You didn’t test for the impact of a large commercial airliner?”

“No,” the engineer said. “We didn’t test for something that we couldn’t conceive happening. This is beyond anything we ever imagined.”

Once again my father reached up and clicked off the set. “He’s not saying anything that can help us make our decision. It’s time to leave. We’ll continue to try to get your mother by cellphone.”

“Did you get what you needed from your office?” I asked.

“I did.” He pulled a tie out of his pocket. I recognized it. I had given it to him for his birthday a month ago.

“You went there to get that tie?”

“It’s one of the things I got. It’s my favorite tie. And that’s going to make this hurt even more.”

He took the tie and ripped the back, opening it up.

“What … what are you doing?”

“Making a mask for you. Here, let me get it wet.” He bent over and put it under the spout of the water cooler, drenching it with water. He handed it to me. “If it gets smoky you can tie this over your mouth and nose.”

The smoke … the fire. Somehow now the fact that he’d destroyed my gift didn’t seem so bad.

He took the tie from around his neck and did the same with it.

“I also want you to take this,” he said, holding something out for me.

“A whistle?” I said, taking it from him.

“It’s part of my fire warden equipment. That and this flashlight.” He pulled a small yellow flashlight out of his pocket. “I want you to slip the whistle around your neck.”

“Why would I want a whistle?” I asked.

“In case we get separated you can blow the whistle and I can find you.”

“But why would we get separated?” I felt panicky.

“We won’t, but I just don’t know. It could be dark, things could happen … and if they do—and they won’t—you blow the whistle and I’ll find you
… you know I’ll do whatever I need to do to find you.”

I looked at the whistle. If I’d had this whistle years before could I have made him show up at my games? Would he have been home more often, been there to help me with my homework? Nope, it was just a little orange plastic whistle. To do that it would have had to be magical.

“Now take a big drink of water.”

“I’m not thirsty.”

“This might be your last chance to get water for hours. Just take a drink.”

He had a point. I grabbed a cup, filled it and slugged down the water.

“Okay, let’s go. We’re going to try to find a way down.”

“Should we be going that way?” I asked my father, pointing down the corridor to the door to the stairs where everybody had been going down.

“No,” he said, shaking his hand. “If we believe what they said on the TV—that the plane hit the south side of the building—then we need to try the stairwell farthest away from the point of impact.”

I trailed my father back to the stairs that we had originally come down in the morning. My father put his hands against the door to the stairwell. He just stood there. Was it locked or was he having second thoughts about doing this or—?

“The door is cool,” my father said. “That means there’s no fire directly behind it. Here we go.”

I took a deep breath and held it. I braced myself, anticipating what might be in the stairwell. He opened the door up so I could see clearly. There was nothing. No people, no fire. But there was smoke—not thick but drifting upward.

“Come on,” my father said.

I hesitated. For a split second I thought about refusing to go into the stairwell with him, but I couldn’t do that. If I had to trust somebody, it was going to be him.

The stairwell was gray, concrete and somehow darker than when we’d come down that morning. The smoke wasn’t bad, not overwhelming. What was worse was the smell. It was a bitter, acrid odor that permeated the air and filled my nostrils.

“It’s a good sign that nobody’s here,” my father said.

“It is?” I thought a good sign would be people going
down
the stairs.

“I was hoping we wouldn’t see people climbing up or stalled here in the stairwell.”

“But why is there nobody here?”

He shook his head. “Maybe people have already gone up or down through this stairwell.”

“So you think we can get down, that we can get through those floors?” I asked.

“I wish I could just say yes, but I don’t know. I’m hoping … I’m hoping. If we can get down
anywhere it’ll be through this stairwell. It would be protected by the elevator shafts and the other two stairwells. This is our best chance.”

“This is our only chance,” I blurted out, saying what I was thinking and almost hearing the words before I’d thought them.

“No, not necessarily our only chance.”

“What other chance is there?” I asked.

“There might be other options, things I haven’t thought of yet. But for now let’s just check out
this
option.”

It wasn’t just my imagination, it was darker than I remembered it on our trip down that morning. Some of the lights were off. Others were shattered by the impact, and little grains of glass littered the floor.

“Keep a hand on the railing and stay a few steps behind me. Not too many, but not too close.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Just do what I say,” he ordered.

My father turned on the flashlight. I noticed that there were glowing white strips on the handrails and the edges of the steps that brightly reflected the light. I took a few steps and then hesitated. I thought about what we were walking toward. Now, suddenly, all of this had the potential to be terribly real. This was no longer just in the other building—or really more like a
picture
of the other building on TV—this was here, and now and right under my feet. An airplane—a fully
loaded, fully fueled jet commercial plane—had crashed into this building no more than thirty or forty feet beneath my feet … so close, and it would get closer with each step that I took. We weren’t talking about injuries or fatalities like they were just a bunch of numbers. There were real people, real flesh-and-blood people who had been on that plane and in those offices just below us who were now dead … dead or horribly injured … burned … mangled.

I just stood there, one foot on the first step, one foot on the landing, holding on to the railing, frozen in place.

“Okay, that’s far enough behind,” my father said, “you can come now.”

A shiver went through my entire body, unlocking my legs, and I started down the steps after him. He was five or six steps ahead of me and had just reached the first landing. He looked back at me as he made the turn and went around the corner. I felt a rush of panic that he was leaving me behind and I jumped down two steps and then a second pair and a third, hitting the landing with a solid thud, spinning around the corner to continue down.

I reached up to my forehead. I’d wrapped the tie around my forehead like a bandana. It was wet and cold. It was also my mask if I needed it. I could slip it over my nose and mouth and breathe through the material, and it would filter out
smoke and fumes. I felt a little reassured, and then even more unsettled when I realized that I was relying on a ripped, wet, not even very expensive tie to protect me from a raging fire caused by the crash of an airplane carrying tons of burning jet fuel. This was ridiculous. We should have just headed back up and waited for the firemen to put out the blaze.

“Let’s have a peek,” my father said as he went to pull open the door on the floor below us, checking first to make sure it wasn’t hot. There was a big “84” on the back.

He pulled it open. “Hello!” he yelled, and I practically jumped backwards up the steps.

Instead I bounded down until I was standing beside him, peering through the door. I felt like a peeping tom, looking into a place where I didn’t belong. The office was not much different from the one we’d left a flight above. There were overturned desks and chairs, shattered glass and paper everywhere, some ceiling tiles on the floor and others hanging from the ceiling, cabinets knocked over and, strangest of all, a cup of coffee, still steaming, sitting on the closest desk. Imagine that, just a few minutes ago somebody was sitting at that desk, maybe worried about what was happening in the next building but still enjoying their morning coffee, and then …

“Hello!” my father called out again. “Is anybody here?”

Complete silence. Not even ringing phones. The phones on that floor must have been out of order too. Probably all the phones above the fire were gone.

“Hopefully they evacuated before the crash,” my father said.

“I hope.”

“Let’s get going.” He let the door swing closed and he started down to the next level. I looked at my watch. It was 9:17. My father got partway down the flight and I started after him. Hitting the landing I made the turn and realized it was now much darker. The lights on the landing and on the next level down were mainly broken, and the one remaining fluorescent tube was flickering and hardly throwing out any light at all. In the top corner of the walls there were small lamps—battery-operated emergency lights—trying to light the way. They were much dimmer than the regular lights.

My father aimed his flashlight down the stairs. The bulb that had seemed so weak in the office now projected a strong, powerful shaft of light.

“Watch out for the glass from the smashed lights,” my father said.

Reaching the landing I heard—and felt—the broken glass crunching under my shoes.

“Eighty-three,” my father said. “We’re getting closer.”

“Do you think the smoke is getting thicker?” I asked anxiously.

“Maybe a little, but not that much,” he said.

“But look at the light.”

The flashlight was pointed down the stairs. Drifting through the beam was a thick layer of smoke. It slowly danced, climbing through the shaft of light and then vanishing into the darkness. I reached up and touched the tie around my forehead. It was my security blanket.

It was even darker below where we stood. Not even the emergency lights were working.

“Stay closer to me,” my father said.

We started down to the next level. I stayed right on his heels, only one step back, looking around him, following the beam of light as much as I was following him. It felt better anyway to be close to him. I held on to the railing, although I would have liked to hold my father’s hand instead. I started to count the stairs. Nine steps, then a landing, a turn and down nine more stairs.

We made the next landing—“82” was marked on the back of the door. I wondered if my father was going to open the door and poke his head in. We really didn’t have time to stop at every floor. I was glad when he just made the turn and started down to the next level. It was just as dark down there. What would we have done if my father hadn’t had that flashlight, and what would we do if something happened to it? I didn’t need to think of that. There was enough right in front of me to worry about without making up anything new.