She pushed past the policemen with a quiet smile and followed the fire hose around the building to Liberty Street. The hose was full, wet, and throbbing like a giant landed eel, turning its passage through the dust into a stew of grey mud. She followed it to West Street. To her left a maze of firetrucks, police cars, tow trucks, ambulances, and water trucks littered the eight lane street as far as she could see to the north. Hundreds of uniformed men were milling around the debris in a seemingly aimless fashion, chatting while they waited for instructions. She waded past the men and tracked the hose across the street and into the ruins of the World Trade Center.
​
It was impossible at first to get her bearings. Inside the cataclysmic wreckage of the complex, all she could see was smoke, fire, and a chaotic field of mangled steel. Then she remembered: follow the hose. A pathway had been made along it, up a small rise from the street and past the flaming wreckage of the Marriott Hotel. She scrambled to the top of a pile of rubble and looked around in awe. The broken steel was scattered in a roughly circular field that spanned four blocks, punctuated here and there by standing shards of steel.
​
She peered through the smoke to find the pile; the pancake stack of a hundred floors. Near the top of that stack she’d look for Sam. But there was no pile. There were no remains. Where there should have been a stack of floors some twenty stories high, there was nothing but space.
​
Where had the building gone? She turned round a moment in panic. She looked past the tilting shards of the tower’s curtain walls, but saw nothing behind them but fire and smoke. No stack; no floors. No walls, no ceilings, no carpets, no tables, no desks, no chairs: there was nothing but steel and dust, millions of broken, twisted shanks of steel  rising out of the smoking depression beneath her and spread hundreds of yards in every direction from the footprint of the tower. Suffused with a wrenching smell and draped in a  blanket of dust.
​
There was no place here that Sam could be.
 

She noticed other people standing by her; it was a natural place to pause before descending       into the pit. To her right she saw a handsome woman in her forties, dressed in a white lab         coat.
​
‘Did you just get here?' the woman asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I could tell by your clothes.’ Except for her feet and lower legs Diana was still clean.                 ‘How’d you get in?’
‘I took a boat from Hoboken. I just flashed my EMT badge to the guys and smiled.’
‘Amazing how that works.’
‘Yeah. I need to find a group to work with, though.’
‘You can join us if you want.’
‘Is it a triage group?' Diana asked.
‘It was supposed to be. We’ve been here since noon, though, and we’ve only found a              handful of survivors. And all of them were still on their feet.’
‘What happened to the buildings?' Diana asked urgently. ‘Why aren’t the floors stacked on top of each another? I thought you’d find survivors in the wreckage of the floors.’
‘That’s what everybody thought. We were expecting thousands of survivors.’

She paused and cast her eye around the rubble field. ‘We’re not even finding bodies.’ They stared in silence for a moment on the field of broken steel in front of them. It was quiet except for the hiss of smoke and an occasional clanging of a beam as it yielded to the efforts of the workers. There were twenty or thirty of them, searching through the mangled chaos for survivors. White hot smoke was rising up in currents from the tower basement; acrid, caustic, poisonous fumes that were subtly laced with the scent of death. ‘You’ve got to be careful when you go down there,’ she continued. ‘There’s a red-hot fire in the basement of both towers. Streams of molten steel they say. It heats the surface steel so hot it burns right through your shoes.’
‘I’m just trying to imagine where the survivors might be,’ Diana said hopelessly.
‘Good question. We’re thinking that they must be where the buildings went. You saw those clouds of dust?’ The words pierced her like a rapier, and suddenly Diana understood.
‘Of dust?' she fairly cried. ‘Dust? Oh my God... Don’t tell me...’ She burst into tears. The rescue worker moved to comfort her. She put her arms around her.
‘Do you know somebody there?' she asked.
‘My husband,’ Diana cried. Then she lost it. The woman approached and she sobbed in the arms of the stranger until she was too weak to continue.
‘I’m so sorry,’ the woman said. ‘Just forget what I said.’
‘But you said...’
‘But what do I know? What does anyone know? I just know we’re here to find them.’
Diana drew herself together and wiped her hands across her eyes to dry them. ‘Thank you,‘ she said. ‘I was on the phone with him this morning, so I know he was trapped inside...’ She began to weep again. ‘So I came up here to find him, and I had an EMT card, so...’
‘You did the right thing,’ her new companion said. ‘I would have done that too.’ Diana wiped her eyes again.
‘I don’t even know your name,’ she said.
‘I’m Angela Cross,’ the woman said. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Diana Crane.’
‘I like that: Cross and Crane. Why don’t we get a cup of tea?’
‘Do they have it?’
‘Yes,’ she answered, pointing to the far side of the devastated complex, ‘there’s kind of a hot dog stand over there, at Liberty and Church.’
​
Then a huge roar stopped them in their tracks. A block away on Vesey Street another tower--Building Seven--suddenly fell in front of them. It fell freely, as if it were weightless and pulled down by a string. Their hands went to their ears reactively. It was over in seconds. The top of the building hit the top of the pile below it with a sickening crash and then it was silent again except for the whoosh of the shock wave and the clouds of dust behind it. They turned to shield their faces from it. A half dozen witnesses stood on the ridge with the women, shocked into silence. A fireman came trudging up the pile.
​
‘Now we get to eat the dust again,’ he said with disgust, passing his gaze to all of them in turn, as if to confirm that they had witnessed something they would someday feel a duty to describe. How could a fifty story tower just fall down like that? Standing on the ridge, they suddenly felt exposed. Angela pulled on Diana’s arm: they fell in line with the others, and followed the hose back down to the street.
‘Was that supposed to happen?' Diana asked incredulously.
‘I can’t see how,’ Angela replied.
‘There was rumors it was coming down,’ a nearby fireman said. ‘They evacuated it this afternoon.’
​
‘How considerate of them,’ Angela said. Diana looked to Angela to try to ferret out the meaning in her irony, but seeing her impassive face, said nothing. ‘This is nothing compared to this morning when the towers fell,’ a fireman said behind them. ‘The dust was so thick that the sky turned black; black as night. You couldn’t see three feet. On the sunniest day of the year.’
​
On West Street everyone was numb. It was like wartime: after the first few bombs you hardly notice anymore. Except that they did. Angela was still determined to visit her hot dog stand, however. She led Diana south to Liberty Street. They turned east through the fire and rubble and continued to Church Street. The hot dog stand was a plain collapsible table about six feet long that held two catering urns--one holding coffee and the other hot water--and a large steel pot of steaming water with twenty or thirty hot dogs floating on the top. Cream, sugar, mustard, catsup, napkins, cups and buns were arranged around the pots, which attracted a steady crowd of firemen and rescue workers.
​
The women made tea and stepped away from the table to view the current disaster from a different angle. The dust had settled, and with no traffic or sirens or people it was as eerily quiet as it had been before. The hot white smoke continued to rise from the base of the towers; the debris field and the fires beneath it turned Diana’s thoughts to the Inferno. The newly demolished skyscraper stood in a pile beyond it. A couple of firemen sidled up next next to them to discuss the latest catastrophe. The women listened in.
​
‘You see how that building’s all piled up there?' one of them said, pointing north to Vesey Street. ‘I must have done thirty demolitions like that. You see how high the pile is? That’s what I mean. That’s a standard demolition.’
‘You mean how tall the pile is.’
​
‘Yeah. That was a fifty story building, right? Give or take. And now the pile is what, six stories high? So it’s five hundred feet before, and after it’s like sixty: figure eight to one, ok?’ The second fireman nodded by way of understanding. ‘And the whole building is in that pile, right? I mean a little bit of dust got out, but everything is there. If you were looking for a phone or a desk or a chair or a body you could find it; you might have to dig some but what I’m saying is that everything that was in the building before is in that pile right now.’
​
‘Except the air between the floors.’
‘Exactly.’ He stopped for a moment as the point sank in. Then he swept his arm around to indicate the debris field of the twin towers in front of them.
​
‘But that’s not what happened with the towers here.' He swept his hand in a radius to mark the debris field in front of them. ‘Look at it: steel beams thrown into a field a quarter mile across. Steel beams sticking out of other buildings that they hit like spears. And that’s all you got here, is steel. There’s no walls, no windows, no floors, no chairs, no desks. No phones, no paintings, no pens. There’s no bodies. There’s no nothing. Whatever they used was so powerful, it granulated everything except the steel. It pulverized it into dust, into that black smog this morning that you couldn’t even see through. Like right there.’ He pointed to Church Street, where the dust lay up to your ankles over everything. ‘There’s no piles,’ he continued, his voice rising in intensity. The towers were 1400 feet; so eight-to-one that should have left two piles, like a hundred and eighty feet high. Like eighteen stories each, I’d say. But all you’ve got there is a couple of bumps; like twenty feet high. There’s no piles at all; there’s just this giant field of steel and dust. This was not a standard demolition charge. This was some kind of crazy shit. This was military.’
‘Yeah, cause nobody else...’
‘Nobody else has got that kind of firepower.’
‘What about the paper?' Angela asked him, asking a question that had vexed her all day. ‘What’s that all about?’ There were millions of pieces of paper that were blown out of the collapsing towers, which now lay scattered in the dust.
‘I know, that’s weird. I think they must have rode the blast wave out. They surfed the wave and didn’t get pulverized like everything else. You want to know what else surfed out on the wave? The blinds; the Venetian blinds. See over there? And there? And there?’ He pointed to a nearby lamp post, a hanging sign, and a tree limb in the distance. All of them supported strange cocoon like hangings, a foot or two in diameter, that you could see on close inspection were the mangled remains of the towers’ Venetian blinds.
‘Yeah, and golfballs,‘ the other fireman said. ‘There’s thousands of golfballs lying under the dust. You’re walking around and you feel something funny, and you bend down and it’s a frigging golfball. Like how weird can it get?’
‘Yeah, like it’s too dense to vaporize.’
‘Unlike a telephone or something.’
‘Not to mention a body.’
​
Hearing this, Diana saw a fleeting image of the clouds of heavy dust that raced down the streets of the city, which outran the people in flight and covered them all with a flour like coating, of what? The walls, the floors, the phones, the carpets, the chairs, the windows and the pulverized bodies of the people in the World Trade Center. And the dust that funneled high into the air above the city and blended with the wind to form a stream of vaporized debris in the sea of air above them. That was Sam. His chestnut hair, his teeth, his bones, his heart, his mind. Falling on the streets in tiny bits and flakes and drifting over Brooklyn in the wind. His body blasted into dust.
​
Her mind turned black. A flood of agony rose from the bedrock of her soul, from the well of feeling that knows no words. She fell weeping to the ground on hands and knees. A strange, alien wail resounded from her throat. She pressed her forehead into the dust. Angela hastened over and knelt beside her as she keened. The firemen joined them.
​
‘Her husband was in the north tower,’ Angela whispered. Unwilling to disturb her, they could only stand by. After several minutes it was over, and they helped her to her feet. She was covered with dust now, on her face, her arms, her legs, and as she wiped her hands across her blouse, her body.
​
‘We’ve got to get you out of here,’ Angela said, embracing her, and soiling her lab coat with splotches of dust. She started to wipe them off with her hands. She glanced at Diana, who was watching her, and nervously stopped.
‘Where should I go?' Diana asked blankly, as if there were no place on earth that would have her.
‘You should go to Beth Israel; he might be there.’
‘They found a number of survivors,’ a fireman said.
‘I’m going to take you there. We’ll have to walk, but it won’t take long.’
​
Diana sat on a folding chair behind the hot dog stand while Angela went to her base to tell them she’d be gone. By the time she returned it was dark. The power was down in lower Manhattan because of the disaster. They heard generators fire up to break the silence. Harsh white lights shot down on the rubble where the firemen and rescue workers continued to peer into the fiery pit for miracles. As they walked north on Church Street, Diana gazed for the last time on the void in the sky where the towers had stood. Where the mystery of Sam’s existence was now reduced to dust. Where it seemed that life itself had been reduced to its essential element, illusion.
Diana held her hand up and they stopped. ‘I can feel them,’ she said, her head slightly raised. ‘I can feel their souls.’
​
They walked north through the abandoned, now forbidden city where the only sign of life was an occasional vortex of dust, whirling ten or twenty feet into the air and meandering half a block, drawing here and feinting there before subsiding, as if the dust remembered something of its former incarnation and was trying to reconstitute itself again.
​
There were barricades and checkpoints at Canal Street, and armed men in uniform: the introduction of martial law. People milled about the north side of the street, watching the smoke rise from the ashes several blocks below. Quiet, numb, as if the smoke were all that remained of some distant Gotterdammerung.
​
They passed a lot on Houston Street that had been turned into an impromptu stretcher factory: dozens of wooden stretchers made from 2 by 2’s and plywood, never to be used at all. On 14th Street they passed an emergency blood donation center, where hundreds of units of blood had been drawn that day to treat survivors. The blood went begging that day, and the following days as well.
​
A little to the east of the blood center they walked by an emergency morgue, set up to receive the bodies of the victims of the crime. But the morgues were practically empty. Out of three thousand victims that day, only 300 bodies were discovered. The rest came in pieces. Nearly half of them vanished, like Sam, without a trace.
​
Beth Israel was busy nonetheless. Many victims had been treated there that morning. The hospital was waiting to receive survivors as they were found and delivered from the rubble. Family members who could get into Manhattan were directed there. There were three or four hundred such people when Diana and Angela arrived, waiting for ambulances from the site of the catastrophe. They spilled out of the emergency room, onto the 16th Street sidewalk and into Stuyvesant Square across the street.
​
‘I may know someone here,’ Angela said as they arrived at the entrance to the emergency room. They waded through the crowd to the information desk, packed five deep with questioners. Angela slipped around to the back of the desk, spoke to a woman standing in the background, consulted a list with her, and returned to Diana.
‘They haven’t seen him yet,’ she reported as she came back through the crowd. ‘She said the best thing to do was to wait here and check the ambulances as they arrive.’ Diana looked around and thought about the prospect of waiting through the night for ambulance arrivals.
​
‘I’m sorry,’ Angela said, reading her thoughts. ‘I just don’t know what else to do. I can give you the keys to my apartment if you’d rather stay there for the night.’
‘No. But thanks,’ Diana replied. ‘Thanks for everything. You’ve been a true friend.’ They embraced. As they drew apart Diana caught her eye and thought of something. ‘There’s one thing that I’d like to know. Who do you think could have planted the explosives in those buildings?' she asked.
‘I don’t have a clue,’ she replied. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all day.’ She unbuttoned her lab coat and took off the sweater she was wearing beneath. She gave it to Diana with her card.
‘Here, take this. I’ve got a jacket at the site. You can mail it back to me later on.’

She left Diana in a crowd of people on the street before the hospital, the air crisp with nightfall, still tainted with the smell of destruction and death.
As Diana watched her walk away, she took stock of her feelings for the first time that day. She had never felt so isolated. She felt like a mother in a birthing ward who had lost her baby. She understood that she’d been sorted out correctly and taken to the people she belonged to, the people who were shortly to be known as family members. And glancing around, careful not to look at anyone too long, she saw that she belonged there in a superficial way. But there was a gulf between them. Because the others, in their innocence, were full of hope. But Diana knew too much. Her faith was shattered. Reading her distress, a woman in her thirties approached her on the sidewalk.
​
‘I saw that woman drop you off. Are you waiting for someone to arrive here?’
‘From the World Trade Center?’
‘Yeah. That’s what all of us...’
‘No,’ Diana lied. Or was it a lie? Why was she here? She decided to lie. ’No, I’m an emergency worker. They just wanted someone stationed here.’
‘Have you been down there?’
‘Yeah, this afternoon.’
‘How’s it look? My brother’s...’
‘Your brother’s down there?’
‘Yeah, in Building Two. What’s it look like?’
‘It’s unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything...’
‘Are they finding anyone?' the woman demanded. How could Diana answer this?
‘Yeah, I think so’, she said. ‘They should be...’ She couldn’t continue; she was suddenly afraid that she’d be overcome with tears.
‘You think so? Wow. What does...’
‘Look,’ Diana interrupted, ‘there’s always hope. That’s all we really have to work with now.’
‘Yeah, hope,’ the woman answered with a trace of anger. ‘That’s all we’ve got.’ She said it slowly. ‘Hope.’
‘I wish I knew more,’ Diana said.

She shook the stranger’s hand. ‘God bless,’ she said. And then on impulse she embraced her.
Diana pulled away and headed somewhat blindly west on 16th Street to get away. She continued for several blocks before turning aimlessly north, then east, then finally south on First Avenue and back to the hospital again. The people of New York had poured into the streets to seek the meaning of the day’s attacks. It was a fair, almost balmy night, with temperatures in the sixties. She returned to Stuyvesant Square, where people continued to congregate and wait. American flags were everywhere: you wouldn’t have thought that the Lower East Side could possess so many flags. ‘They must have flown them up from Alabama,’ she thought to herself.
​
She found a seat on a park bench facing the hospital, from which she could monitor ambulance arrivals. She looked around. The mix of people in the park--a combination of family members and neighborhood residents--gave her a comforting sense of anonymity. And however pointless the purpose of her vigil, she refused to think it completely useless, for if nothing else it gave her something to do that night. And there was always hope. Yeah, hope.
​
A man placed a television set on a bench in front of her, plugging it into a long extension cord that he ran across the street. A small crowd gathered to watch. He surfed slowly through the channels. They all showed the three falling skyscrapers, accompanied with narration by the network commentators.
​
‘Anybody who’s ever watched a building being demolished on purpose knows that if you’re going to do this you have to get at the under infrastructure of a building and bring it down,’ Peter Jennings said, as the tapes of the exploding buildings played over and over on the set. The man turned the channel to CBS, where Dan Rather said, ‘It’s reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen too much on television, where a building was deliberately destroyed by well placed dynamite to knock it down.’
​
He flipped the channel again. President Bush walked stiffly to a podium set up in the Oval Office, a look of grim determination on his face. ‘Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices. Secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers. Moms and dads. Friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror,’ the President told the nation. ‘The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. Today our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature… The search is underway for those who were behind these evil acts. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts, and those who harbored them…’
​
She walked to a quieter side of the park, and sat down again on a bench. Like most of the people on the vigil, she dozed off at times throughout the night. Was it safe for a woman to sleep on a park bench in New York? When she woke she had her answer: for this night only, yes. It was an intermittent outdoor slumber party, with hundreds of proctors and participants. No one would dare to breach the sanctity of that gathering: the criminals in attendance joined the vigil just like everybody else. The secret sinews of humanity had found a common purpose for the city.
​
In the cool light of dawn they woke to find that not a single living person had been brought up from the wreckage. Knowing why this was the case, she still felt powerless to speak. She had no right to talk about it--no right to destroy another person’s hope. Which made her feel she had to leave. Nothing was going to regenerate her husband from the dust, and nothing would avail her to pretend that was the case. She sat on the bench in the morning light, running her finger over the dew on the planks. She could go back to the site, but for what? To see it all again? For what? She wasn’t sure they’d let her back in anyway. The word had spread that volunteers were being weeded out as federal troops arrived. Martial law was now the word in New York City.
​
She chatted briefly with her neighbors on the bench, a couple of kids in their twenties who were waiting for news of their father. Now that it was light they hoped the ambulances would begin to come. It looked to be another gorgeous, sunny day. Nature was mocking their tragedy. Diana stood and said goodbye. She didn’t know where to go: apart from leaving the hospital, she didn’t know what to do. After a moment’s hesitation she turned west again for no better reason than to see the river.
​
Everywhere she looked that morning, New Yorkers were waving the flag. They pasted them in windows, hung them over doors, carried them around on poles and paraded them down the streets. It was understandable, but nauseating. As she approached the river, she realized that she would wind up in the crowds around Ground Zero, a prospect that she couldn’t face. She stood in a crowd on the corner of 14th and 8th Avenue and blankly pondered the reality, standing mutely as the throng moved west to cross the avenue, then south to cross the street. Then she made a snap decision to go home. She walked north to 39th Street, and turned west to reach the ferry landing.
​
Once aboard the ferry she leaned on the port rail and stared at the site the entire way across the water. A thin trail of white smoke rose from the molten fires that raged in the basements below the towers. Her mind was numb: under-rested, overtaxed, it seemed incapable of generating thought; it could hardly produce emotion. She watched the smoking columns rise until they hit the lower tendrils of the westerlies, where they turned and join the prevailing wind in its long march through New England to the sea. How long will that infernal cauldron burn, she wondered.
​
Sam was in that wasteland; that was all she knew. However hard she tried, she couldn’t quite grasp the reality. He was in it, but not of it. He was gone.
​
She had to make some calls: Sam’s brother--his parents were deceased--and her parents. Melanie and Charlie. She didn’t have a cell phone; it could wait. But it gave her a genuine reason to go home. Who else called yesterday? Was it only yesterday? It seemed an age ago. It was this time yesterday she talked to Sam. She was so certain that he’d make it. The boat sounded its horn as it approached the dock. It landed at Jersey City; she had to hail a taxi to Hoboken to retrieve her car. The radio was playing in the taxi. The driver was out for blood.