South Tower, World Trade Center
On the South Tower’s 81st floor, new blood brothers Brian Clark and Stan Praimnath returned to Stairwell A battered and covered in soot. Brian remembered the heavyset woman’s insistence that fire would block their way down, but Stan knew he needed medical help, so they decided to try. The two men pushed away the broken drywall that in places covered the stairs like playground slides and stepped through water from broken pipes that cascaded underfoot. Smoke fouled the air, but the stairwell was passable.
They passed the stairwell door to the 80th floor, unaware that some of Stan’s Fuji Bank colleagues huddled in the northwest corner of the floor. Jack Andreacchio, who urged “Stan the man” to return to work a half hour earlier, told a 9-1-1 dispatcher that he, Manny Gomez, and three others were trapped by heat and smoke, unable to reach a stairwell.
“I think we should break the window,”1 Jack Andreacchio said during a call logged at 9:23 a.m. The operator told him that would only bring fire closer.
“Fidnee,” the operator said, using dispatch jargon for FDNY, “is on the way. They have it. People are on their way to you, okay?”
“You’ve gotta help me,” Andreacchio said.
Inside the stairwell, at the 78th floor sky lobby level, Brian and Stan skirted past flames that spurted through cracks in the wall. They didn’t cross paths with the man in the red bandanna or the people he led to safety. By the 74th floor, the air in the stairwell began to clear. Lights were on and the stair treads were dry. Brian thought they’d be safe. Stan grew steadier on his feet.
The first person they encountered in the stairwell was a colleague of Brian’s from Euro Brokers: José Marrero, who’d risen from the kitchen staff to become the firm’s facilities manager. José, a married father of three who served with Brian as a fire safety warden, had led other Euro Brokers workers down partway through the building from the 84th floor. Now, breathing heavily, he climbed back up.
“José, what are you doing?” Brian asked.
José nodded to his walkie-talkie. He’d spoken with another member of their safety team, Dave Vera, who was one of the half dozen people Brian originally led down from the 84th floor. At the urging of the woman in the stairwell, Dave had reversed course and gone back upstairs with Bobby Coll, Kevin York, and the others.
“Dave’s a big boy,” Brian told José. “He can get out. We’ve just come through hell to get here. Come with us.”
“No, no, no. I’m okay,” José said as they parted. “I’ll be okay.”
Brian and Stan continued downward, trading tidbits of what they knew about what happened. Stan told Brian he’d seen the plane that hit their tower, and the enormity came into clearer focus.
At the 44th floor sky lobby, they exited Stairwell A, hoping to phone their families, unaware that the South Tower’s structure was growing weaker by the minute. They found a security guard, a man in his sixties, standing watch at his desk.
“Do you have telephones?” the guard asked.
Brian and Stan noticed a semiconscious man on the floor behind the security desk, moaning from massive head injuries. Stan had occasionally seen the injured man in the building but didn’t know his name. Stan heard him say: “Please tell my wife and our baby that I love them.”
“When you get to a phone,” the guard said, “you must get a medic and a stretcher up to the forty-fourth floor.” Stan and Brian promised and returned to the stairwell.
They exited again on the 31st floor and walked through the deserted offices. They found a working phone in a conference room of the investment firm Oppenheimer Funds, whose nearly six hundred employees on four floors had escaped unhurt. At shortly after 9:30 a.m., Brian called home. He’d last spoken to Dianne less than forty minutes earlier, after Flight 11 struck the North Tower. After they hung up, Dianne saw United Flight 175 hit the South Tower on television. Neighbors and church friends had rushed to her side, to keep her and their children from panicking.
“Hi, honey,” Brian said, breezy as ever. “I’m on the thirty-first floor. I got a good story to tell you. Got to go now, want to get out of the building. But I thought I’d check in.” He hung up, and Dianne shared the news that Brian was alive, but still inside the burning tower.
Stan tried to reach Jenny, but she’d fled from work when she heard about the South Tower, certain that Stan was dead. Stan left a message with her coworkers.
Brian then called 9-1-1 for the injured man on the 44th floor. During the next three minutes and seventeen seconds,2 the depth of chaos in the 9-1-1 system became evident. Brian was transferred twice, put on hold, and talked to three different people. His frustration rising, Brian told the last woman he spoke with, “I’m only going to say this once—don’t put me on hold.” He again relayed details about the man, then hung up.
None of the 9-1-1 operators Brian spoke with asked him how high he’d been inside the building, conditions on the upper floors, or details about which stairwell he’d used. As a result, they never learned potentially lifesaving information that might have helped firefighters or trapped people in the South Tower who survived the crash and then called 9-1-1 for guidance.
Amid the chaos, overwhelmed 9-1-1 operators never learned that Stairwell A remained relatively intact above the South Tower impact zone, at least to the 91st floor and possibly higher. No evidence exists that any person who called 9-1-1 from above the impact zone was urged to seek out Stairwell A3 as a potential path to survival.
One 9-1-1 operator, besieged by urgent calls for help from people trapped in the towers, vented her frustration to a colleague: “How can you have a big building4 and no way to get out of it? That’s ridiculous.”
Emergency operators also weren’t told that rooftop rescues5 wouldn’t be attempted because of smoke, or that exit doors to the roof remained locked, even as some 9-1-1 callers mentioned plans to try to reach the roof. Some of those heading upstairs might have recalled the daring rescues of twenty-eight people from the North Tower roof by a New York Police Department helicopter after the 1993 bombing.
One person who tried to reach the South Tower rooftop knew the route well. Roko Camaj was an immigrant from Montenegro, a sixty-year-old husband, the father of an adult daughter, and a man with an eagle’s comfort with heights. He’d spent twenty-eight years working as a window washer at the World Trade Center—squinting against the sun’s reflection off the towers had carved deep crows’ feet around his eyes. Roko operated a machine that automatically cleaned the lower ones, but he climbed into a harness to soap the highest windows by hand. Roko was the subject of a children’s book in which he declared: “It’s just me and the sky.6 I don’t bother anybody and nobody bothers me.”
Now, unable to reach the roof, Roko went down several floors and called his wife.7 He said he was stuck on the 105th floor with about two hundred others. He radioed a fellow Port Authority worker: “Don’t let no people up here . . . there’s big smoke!”8
Meanwhile, following traditional rules that didn’t apply to this unprecedented situation, at least some 9-1-1 operators told survivors on high floors of the South Tower to remain in place, regardless of conditions. How many people received those instructions isn’t clear.
When Brian Clark made his 9-1-1 call,9 nearly seven thousand people had already escaped the South Tower, while more than a thousand remained between the lobby and the 76th floor, heading downward if they could. More than six hundred people were on the 77th floor and above. Those numbers didn’t include the emergency responders who flooded into the South Tower after United Flight 175 struck.
Time was becoming an enemy, but not everyone understood that. A 9-1-1 caller on the 73rd floor, below the impact zone, told an operator that oxygen was running out, only to be instructed not to leave the floor.10 A police dispatcher gave a similar order to a man on the 88th floor, in the offices of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods: “You have to wait11 until somebody comes there.”
Meanwhile, the Stairwell A escape route remained nearly empty.
And at almost the same time as Brian Clark made his 9-1-1 call, the FDNY suffered its first fatality12 of the day.
Firefighter Danny Suhr, a thirty-seven-year-old captain of the FDNY football team, had just arrived on the scene. Debris littered the ground and people fell from the sky. As he neared the South Tower, Danny told his captain, “Let’s make this quick.”13
Before they reached the building, a person who fell or jumped from an upper floor clipped Danny’s head on the way down. EMTs tried to help, and two fellow firefighters from Engine 216 jumped into the ambulance with their friend, who had a two-year-old daughter and a love affair with his wife that dated from grade school.
“Danny! Danny! Danny!” they yelled.
EMT Richard Erdey knew that Danny Suhr was gone, a victim of catastrophic head injuries, but he kept trying.
“Look,” Erdey told the firefighters, “we’re doing the CPR for that small glimmer of hope,14 but I’ll tell you what they’re going to do. They’re going to call it at the hospital. Please stop staring at him. You’re going to burn this image in your head. I want you to remember a better image.”
As evacuees ran from the building, as upper-floor survivors called for help, and as firefighters rushed inside, the South Tower experienced ominous structural changes.
Shortly after 9:30 a.m., bursts of smoke15 spouted from the building’s north side, on the 79th and 80th floors, possibly from shifting floor slabs or the sudden ignition of pools of unspent jet fuel. Simultaneously, threats to the building’s integrity worsened. Intact core columns strained under the added burden previously borne by the severed columns. External columns on the tower’s east side supported added loads that had shifted from the severed columns. The remaining external columns also struggled to hold up sagging floors.
The strain caused the exterior columns to bow inward, like straws trying to support a brick. All the while, unchecked fires undermined the strength of steel columns throughout the impact zone, contributing to a threat that almost no one imagined. The South Tower neared its breaking point.
Tiring as they continued inside Stairwell A, Brian Clark urged Stan Praimnath to slow down. Stan had begun bounding down the steps two at a time. “I’d hate to break an ankle and have to walk thirty more floors,” Brian said, “then come in on crutches tomorrow.”
As they slowed their descent, they encountered no one else, neither evacuees nor firefighters, on the final floors of Stairwell A.
Brian and Stan emerged on the north side of the South Tower, facing the sprawling Austin J. Tobin Plaza. Both men had long cherished its sparkling fountain, with a twenty-five-foot bronze sculpture called The Sphere at its center. They liked how the plaza served as an urban oasis for workers, tourists, and vendors. Now they saw it buried in ash and debris. Brian thought it looked like an abandoned archaeological site.
Stan and Brian stood shoulder to shoulder, silently absorbing the ruins for twenty or thirty seconds, then walked down a nonworking escalator to the Concourse level. A female officer at the bottom of the escalator told them it would be safer if they didn’t exit onto Liberty Street. She directed them through the Concourse mall under the plaza, past the Victoria’s Secret shop and out by the Sam Goody music store. The route snaked underneath Four World Trade Center, to an exit at the southeast corner of the complex.
Brian and Stan walked through the Concourse, feeling safe and in the clear. They passed firefighters pulling on boots and equipment, and police officers who seemed busy but under control. Although the two men were the only civilians in sight, covered in dust that should have made it apparent that they’d come from affected floors, no one asked them about conditions inside the tower or which stairwell they had used to escape.
When they reached the exit, a firefighter told them, “Whoa, whoa. If you’re going to leave through these doors, you’ve got to run for it.”
“Why?” Brian asked.
“There’s debris falling from above.”
“Should I look up?”
“No! Just go for it.”
Brian couldn’t follow that order. He slowly opened the door and poked his head out. “It looks clear,” he told Stan. “Ready?”
“Ready!”
As firefighters set up shop inside the South Tower lobby, Assistant Chief Donald Burns led relatively few troops compared to the throngs in the North Tower. But Chief Burns had at least one advantage: he’d brought along Battalion Chief Orio Palmer.
Forty-five, married with three children, Orio commanded an area that stretched across Midtown Manhattan, including the Empire State Building, Penn Station, the Garment District, and scores of high-rise office and apartment buildings. A marathon runner and three-time winner of the department’s fitness award,16 Orio had a brushy mustache, a thatch of comb-resistant brown hair, and boundless energy that hadn’t subsided since his first days on the job. Almost twenty years earlier, as a probationary firefighter, Orio had followed Jay Jonas up the stairs of the burning Bronx tenement. Later, he had interrogated Jay to learn all he could. Now, while Jay guided the men of Ladder 6 up the North Tower, Orio led FDNY’s charge up the South Tower.
An elevator mechanic before becoming a firefighter, Orio found the one functioning freight elevator17 and took it to the fortieth floor. He also discovered that, despite earlier problems, the FDNY’s radio repeater18 channel somehow worked inside the South Tower, amplifying his signal and enabling him to remain in contact with his bosses and his troops as he moved from the elevator to the South Tower’s Stairwell B.
As Orio climbed, a firefighter trailing him, Scott Larsen of Ladder 15, radioed that “the director of Morgan Stanley” had told him: “Seventy-eight seems to have taken the brunt of this stuff—there’s a lot of bodies.”19 With that information, almost certainly from Morgan Stanley security chief Rick Rescorla, Orio knew exactly where he was needed most. As he rose higher, Orio displayed no concern that the building wouldn’t stand. When another firefighter radioed that he’d stopped to catch his breath, Orio told him: “Take your time.”
At 9:32 a.m., Orio radioed down from the 55th floor to Battalion Chief Ed Geraghty that they should set up a command post on the 76th floor, just below the impact zone. Among the firefighters rushing up the stairs behind Orio were Scott Kopytko and Doug Oelschlager, who’d worked the overnight shift with Jay Jonas and his Ladder 6 crew.
By 9:45 a.m., Orio had sprinted up thirty-four flights from where he exited the freight elevator, reaching the 74th floor. He’d climbed nineteen floors in thirteen minutes despite being loaded down with gear. Breathing heavily, he cautioned the men behind him that the walls of Stairwell B on the 73rd and 74th floors were ruptured.
On the 75th floor, at around 9:49 a.m., Orio met Fire Marshall Ronald Bucca, a twenty-three-year FDNY veteran who also was a registered nurse and a reservist in the U.S. Army Special Forces. Fifteen years earlier, Ron earned the nickname the Flying Fireman20 when he fell five stories from a fire escape, surviving thanks to telephone and cable wires he struck on the way down. After Flight 175 hit, Ron had walked up from the lobby with Fire Marshal Jim Devery. On the 51st floor, Jim Devery came across a burned woman who needed help: Ling Young, who’d first been rescued from the 78th floor sky lobby by the man in the red bandanna. Jim Devery helped Ling down to the lobby, while Ron Bucca kept going up.
Blocked from climbing higher inside Stairwell B, Orio found a new path: Stairwell A. He and Ron Bucca switched to the intact stairwell only minutes after Stan Praimnath and Brian Clark had used the same route on their way down.
At 9:52 a.m., gasping for breath, sounding stressed but in control, Orio reached for his radio. Roughly forty-five minutes had passed since he rushed into the burning South Tower, rode an elevator up forty floors, then scaled more than seven hundred steps. Now, he faced the twin forces driving his professional life: a fire to fight, and people to help.
“We’ve got two isolated pockets of fire!” Orio radioed Lieutenant Joe Leavey of Ladder 15, who’d reached the 70th floor. “We should be able to knock it down with two lines.” Encountering the bloodbath in the sky lobby, Orio described what the man in the red bandanna, Ling Young, and others experienced more than a half hour earlier: “Seventy-eighth floor, numerous ten-forty-five, Code Ones.” In FDNY terms, Orio was describing a floor filled with fatalities. But others, still alive, needed rescue.
“Numerous civilians,” Orio told Joe Leavey. “We’re gonna need two engines up here.”
Orio offered guidance to the men coming up behind him, who were busy fighting a fire in Stairwell B: “I’m gonna need two of your firefighters, Adam [A] Stairway, to knock down two fires. We have a house line stretched, we could use some water on it. Knock it down, ’kay?”
Meanwhile, another problem emerged, as the freight elevator Orio found earlier had stalled, trapping ten injured people sent down by members of Ladder 15. “We’re chopping through the wall to get out,” a firefighter radioed. He advised his commanders that they’d have to find another way up and down.
As Orio surveyed the 78th floor, he eyed an escalator in the sky lobby: “We have access stairs going up to the 79th floor.” He announced that he wanted firefighters up there and higher. Some six hundred people remained on the upper floors, some calling 9-1-1 and their loved ones, some jumping or falling to their deaths. Orio intended to help as many as possible.
As they awaited more firefighters, Orio and Ron Bucca apparently tried to free a group of people in an elevator who’d tried to evacuate after the North Tower crash, only to become imprisoned for nearly an hour when Flight 175 hit the South Tower. At 9:57 a.m., a Port Authority security guard named Robert Gabriel Martinez radioed a call for help: “We need EMS21 over here! On the double! Two World Trade Center!” He told the dispatcher that he was in the 78th floor sky lobby, then said, “The firefighters have eighteen passengers stuck, and they’re going to try to get them out! They’re trying!”
One minute later, Orio made a final radio transmission, an unfinished, unanswered call from a commander to his troops. It cut out after the first words: “Battalion Seven to Ladder 15.”
Brian and Stan ran across Liberty Street, avoiding or hurdling debris, and jogged a block and a half south down Greenwich Street. Shopkeepers in doorways cheered as the two men passed. Brian stopped outside a deli to catch his breath. The deli owner gave them each a bottle of water, then rushed back inside and reemerged with an unclaimed breakfast platter of sliced fruit and pastries. “Nobody’s coming for this today,” he said.
Brian carried the platter as they continued south. They turned east and bumped into two priests. Stan felt an outpouring of built-up emotion. He wobbled and broke down.
“This man saved my life!” Stan wept to the priests. “He called to me in the darkness!”
Brian welled up. “I think you saved my life, too,” he told Stan. “You got me out of that argument about whether I should go up or go down.”
In the middle of the street, one priest placed his hands upon them and led a prayer. Brian and Stan embraced. The priest mentioned that Trinity Church remained open, a block away. Brian and Stan headed for the sanctuary, walking along the upward-sloping street on the church’s south side, stopping beside a wrought-iron fence a few feet from the grave of Alexander Hamilton. They looked up at the burning South Tower, roughly a thousand feet away. At that angle, they couldn’t see its twin. In two minutes, it would be ten o’clock.
“I think those buildings are going down,” Stan said.
An engineering student in college, Brian dismissed him: “No way. Those are steel structures.” He described the great strength of steel and assured Stan that the fires were from furniture, paper, carpeting, and other combustibles. Not knowing the true extent of damage in the South Tower, Brian felt certain that the fires would burn out and the buildings would remain standing.
As Brian and Stan debated, and as Orio Palmer, Ron Bucca, and other firefighters went above and beyond, inside the South Tower an insurance company vice president named Kevin Cosgrove22 dialed 9-1-1. He was forty-six years old, a caring husband, and the kind of father who indulged his three children with dessert before dinner.
Kevin worked for Aon Corporation, a giant insurance brokerage, on the 99th floor, far above the impact zone. After the plane hit, he walked down to the 79th floor,23 but he couldn’t get down through the stairwell he’d chosen. He climbed back up, beyond his office floor, apparently headed toward the roof. His 9-1-1 call connected from the 105th floor, where window washer Roko Camaj also took refuge.
Kevin coughed on smoke as he sought help and reassurance from a male firefighter and a female police operator on the call.
Kevin: “What floor are you guys up to?”
FDNY: “We’re getting there. We’re getting there.”
Kevin: “Doesn’t feel like it, man. I got young kids.”
FDNY: “I understand that, sir. We’re on the way . . .”
Kevin: “Come on, man.”
The female operator came on the line: “We have everything, sir.”
Kevin: “I know you do, but it doesn’t seem like it. You got lots of people up here.”
Operator: “I understand.”
Kevin: “I know you got a lot in the building, but we are on the top. Smoke rises, too. We’re on the floor. We’re in the window. I can barely breathe now. I can’t see!”
Operator: “Okay, just try to hang in there. I’m going to stay with you.”
Kevin: “You can say that. You’re in an air-conditioned building. . . . What the hell happened?”
Operator: “Sir, I’m still here . . . still trying. . . . The Fire Department is trying to get to you.”
Kevin: “Doesn’t feel like it.”
Operator: “Okay, try to calm down, so you can conserve your oxygen, okay? Try to . . .”
Kevin: “Tell God to blow the wind from the west! It’s really bad. It’s black. It’s arid [sic]. . . . We’re young men! We’re not ready to die!”
The operator’s voice dropped to a whisper. She seemed on the verge of tears. “I understand,” she said.
Kevin: “How the hell are you going to get my ass down? I need oxygen.”
Operator: “They’re coming. . . . They have a lot of apparatuses on the scene.”
Kevin’s voice grew raspy, his breaths shallow. His words became at once labored and frantic: “It doesn’t feel like it, lady. You get them in from all over. You get ’em in from Jersey. I don’t give a shit. Ohio.”
Seeming unsure what else to say, the operator asked his name again.
“Name’s Cosgrove. I must have told you about a dozen times already. C-o-s-g-r-o-v-e. My wife thinks I’m all right. I called and said I was leaving the building, and then—bang!”
Kevin said he was with Doug Cherry, a colleague at Aon and a married father of three, and another person he didn’t name.24 He described his location again: “We’re overlooking the Financial Center. Three of us. Two broken windows!”
Suddenly the building shifted. Before the call disconnected, Kevin screamed: “Oh, God! . . . Oh!”
The forces of catastrophe25 and heat had gnawed at the South Tower impact zone for fifty-six minutes. The fires weakened and added stress to its remaining core columns, its exposed steel floor supports, and its load-bearing exterior walls.
The clock read 9:59 a.m. Passengers and crew members of United Flight 93 over Pennsylvania fought to prevent a fourth building strike. The Pentagon and the North Tower burned. Countless millions watched on live television.
Thick gray smoke gushed with greater intensity from the South Tower. The weakened east wall, where fires had been the most intense, lost the strength to withstand the inexorable pull of gravity. As the east wall failed, its multi-million-pound burden shifted through the building’s core to the adjacent north and south walls. But those walls were compromised, too. The damage from Flight 175 and the resulting fires made the load too much to bear. Sapped of their fortitude, the steel wall columns bowed farther and farther inward. Floors sagged deeper and deeper.
The end began.
Above the impact zone, twenty-five stories tilted as one, to the east and south, then went into free fall. The plunging upper floors overwhelmed the undamaged lower floors with a mass impossible to resist. Down it all went, almost straight down. The roar of steel, concrete, furnishings, and so many lives crumbling to the ground was a seismic event. It registered as a minor earthquake26 on sensors throughout the Northeast. It lasted about ten seconds.
A cloud of grayish smoke and dust rose like the ghost of a vanished civilization. The collapse took the lives of everyone still inside. It left behind a hole in the skyline, a mound of rubble, and a question: Would its twin follow suit?
Roughly eight thousand people27 escaped the South Tower. But 619 people remained on the 77th floor and higher, and eleven stood in the lobby, when it fell. That didn’t include emergency responders and others whose exact final locations were unknown. Among the dead were men and women who almost certainly would have lived if they’d evacuated immediately or soon after but who remained inside because they were told not to leave or because they stayed to help others.
One was Rick Rescorla of Morgan Stanley. Of the firm’s twenty-seven hundred employees in the South Tower, all escaped safely except the former Vietnam platoon leader and five others, several of whom were members of Rescorla’s security team.
Another fatality was the civilian rescuer who appeared in the 78th floor sky lobby, his features masked by a red bandanna. He’d later be identified by several people whose lives he saved as Welles Crowther,28 a driven, charismatic twenty-four-year-old equities trader with Sandler, O’Neill & Partners. A volunteer firefighter and college athlete whose bandanna was his trademark accessory, Welles had recently told his father and friends that he wanted to give up Wall Street to become a New York City firefighter. His actions spoke even louder than his words. Welles Crowther died in the South Tower lobby, surrounded by members of the FDNY, among them Assistant Chief Donald Burns.
The South Tower collapse claimed the lives of the responders who reached higher in the building than anyone else: Battalion Chief Orio Palmer and Fire Marshal Ron Bucca. Others who sacrificed themselves included Battalion Chief Ed Geraghty; Lieutenant Joe Leavey; firefighters Doug Kopytko, Scott Larsen, and Doug Oelschlager; and sky lobby security guard Robert Gabriel Martinez. Outside the tower, among those killed was Police Officer Moira Smith,29 who made the first NYPD report of the Flight 11 crash. She guided dozens of evacuees, many of them hurt and bloody, away from the South Tower, each time returning for more. Victims trapped on upper floors included 9-1-1 callers Melissa Doi and Kevin Cosgrove, and window washer Roko Camaj.
The World Trade Center’s security chief, John O’Neill,30 was last seen ten minutes before the collapse, walking from the North Tower command post toward the South Tower. O’Neill had begun the job only weeks earlier, after retiring from a storied career as the FBI’s foremost authority on Osama bin Laden. He’d publicly warned of the hidden dangers of militant terrorist groups four years earlier. At the time, he said: “A lot of these groups31 now have the capability and the support infrastructure in the United States to attack us here if they choose to.” O’Neill had been proven right.
If Alayne Gentul had evacuated instead of going higher in the building to tell others to leave, she wouldn’t have found herself trapped on the 97th floor. When the building collapsed, as Jack Gentul prayed in his New Jersey office, he felt as though his wife’s spirit passed through him. On his knees, Jack suddenly smelled Alayne’s perfume.
For several seconds as the South Tower fell, Brian Clark and Stan Praimnath stood side by side on the sidewalk outside Trinity Church, mouths agape. When each floor pancaked downward, window glass burst into the bright blue sky. The shards looked to Brian like sparkly confetti in the morning sunlight. In their shock and disbelief, neither Brian nor Stan yet registered the human toll. Seconds later, the surreal beauty yielded to horror when dust as thick as malted milk stormed toward them.
Brian and Stan sprinted down Broadway. Trinity Church’s brownstone walls shielded them, absorbing the blow. They glanced back to see swirling dust rise over the church, obscuring the steeple that once marked the highest point in New York City. The ash-filled cloud threatened to crash down onto them.
Before the dust could overtake them, Brian and Stan ducked into a century-old stone building at 42 Broadway. As Brian pushed through the doors, he realized that he’d run the entire way carrying the breakfast platter. He stripped off the cellophane and invited several dozen strangers in the lobby to share the fruit and sweet rolls.
Brian and Stan remained there for forty-five minutes, filthy and disheveled, resting and talking, unaware of the full extent of what had befallen the South Tower. They didn’t know it had collapsed entirely. In their partial awareness, they knew about the hijacked planes, but not that there were four. As they waited for sunlight to return, Stan handed Brian a business card, with his home address and a phone number for a clothing company that Stan and his wife, Jenny, ran on the side.
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.