The Third Wave Read online

  On the morning of September 13, we could still hear people buried alive under the rubble making tapping noises, and this kept us going. Tragically, we had no way to get down to them. Ironworkers dug for hours but made only a small dent in the seemingly bottomless pile of steel.

  Many of the friends I had worked with during my days as an investment banker had been in the World Trade Center buildings when the planes hit. Initially, finding them had been my primary motivation for going down to Ground Zero. I quickly discovered that that was the case for many of the volunteers I met. But after only a short time, we each realized that it didn’t matter if we knew the victims or not; we wanted to help everyone. “Nobody goes home until we all go home” became our quiet motto. Even after the tapping noises stopped, we never gave up hope.

  Michael and I stuck side by side, continuing our work as first aid volunteers. The fires underneath Ground Zero were still burning out of control and black soot filled the air. It smelled ghastly, a combination of dead bodies and burning electrical wire.

  By the third day, we had collected a team of ten or so nurses and medics and volunteers who had also somehow snuck across our path. Our gang climbed onto the piles of rubble when the rescue dogs found a body and helped pass small buckets full of rubble and body parts down the long line of hands, sometimes forty workers strong. They led to a dump truck that whisked the remains away to an unknown destination. These lines became known as the “bucket brigades.”

  Along with a constant stream of firemen and policemen, people from other agencies began to pour into Ground Zero: the FBI, the U.S. Army, the Marines, ironworkers, Con Edison technicians, and medics, just to name a few. Although I was already deeply entrenched in the recovery effort, I now had to contend with the Army, the National Guard, the FBI, the NYPD, the CIA, and a line of large tanks that were locking down Ground Zero and preventing volunteers from entering the destroyed area. At every opening, guards stood with machine guns controlling the flow of people and denying most of them entry, except for certified personnel.

  I was just an everyday civilian with no formal credentials other than the will to help. When I heard about the lockdown, it occurred to me that if I left Ground Zero now, I might never make it back in. But after three full days down there, I decided to venture out anyway. I made a stop at a friend’s house, where I refueled myself with food and stocked up on supplies.

  When I returned, I marched straight past two National Guards with submachine guns, trying hard to look like I belonged there. I knew the work I was doing was probably the most important thing I would ever do in my life, and I was determined to get back to it. Luckily, they didn’t stop me.

  The miserable rains started late on the night of September 13. It was freezing. Everyone had to come off “the pile,” as it was too hazardous to work—large chunks of iron debris were still slipping off the surrounding buildings.

  I was stuck inside St. Charlie’s bar cuddling with a large older nurse under green garbage bags that we hoped would help fight the wind blasting through the broken windows. We lay across three steel chairs and held each other tightly. A few hours later, I woke up and apologized for holding on to her stomach. She replied, “Actually, those were my breasts!” We laughed, regaining our sanity. Then we looked around to find that we had been sleeping in a corner filled with human feces.

  The next day, while working on the rubble pile, I heard the voice of an angel calling out in the haze, asking if anyone wanted Kentucky Fried Chicken. I hadn’t eaten since having a snack at my friend’s house the day before, so I stood up and screamed, “OVER HERE!” I couldn’t believe my good fortune: Kentucky Fried Chicken is like crack to me. I sat in the midst of the burned plastic and ash, tearing at my precious piece of meat, its succulent juices running down my filthy face.

  Throughout my life, my true friends have always known to bring me a bucket of KFC to make me happy. Jonathon Connors, my good buddy who worked on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center, was one of those friends. As I devoured my piece of chicken, my mind floated to him, and I hoped that he had made it out alive. I picked up my phone. Miraculously, it was one of those rare occasions when I could get a cellphone signal. I made a call to a mutual friend, and learned that there had still been no word to anyone from Jonathon. I knew at that moment that I had lost him. It made me more determined than ever to keep working. I found some sunflowers in a wrecked kosher goods store and asked a Con Edison worker to tie them onto lampposts in remembrance of the dead.

  After my minifeast, I found a toothbrush and water in a burned-out store and brushed my teeth while sitting cross-legged in the gutter. When I was done, I tied the toothbrush to my waist with a piece of rope, knowing I’d lose it otherwise. Then I started laughing at myself, imagining how absurd I must have looked. I thought about all the M*A*S*H episodes I had watched on TV growing up and how, ironically, they had prepared me for this very moment. I’d learned from them that humor was an important part of surviving a tragedy.

  Later that day, policemen manned the nearby Burger King and cooked free burgers for everyone. Weeks later, five-star restaurants like Daniel and the Tribeca Grill started sending down filet mignon meals to the aid workers. New York and the world were unselfishly donating their time, skills, and money to help. I remember someone spoon-feeding me crème brûlée, which sent me to nirvana. Moments like those made me proud to be a New Yorker.

  On the fourth day after we’d set up shop in St. Charlie’s bar, FEMA came by our little first aid station three times to try to shut us down. They said it was time for “the professional disaster people” to take over and asked all volunteers to leave. We prepared to protest. But then they covered their badges and told us to please stay and do what we could, saying, “We need as much help as we can get.” They realized that we were giving the firemen and ironworkers the touch of love—the key ingredient missing from the disaster response manuals.

  That afternoon, the firemen brought in an ironworker who had temporarily lost his mind. He had been digging for four days straight without sleep and was overcome with demonic emotions. A psychologist from the FBI tried to speak with him, and then many other doctors and priests tried to calm him down, but without any success.

  A nurse and I laid him down. We started smoothing his hair as we held his hands. We listened to him rant until he fell into a gentle sleep. We sat next to him for a few hours, watching over him. When he woke up, it was as if nothing had ever happened. He went quietly back to work on the pile. Like everyone else, he didn’t want to leave; the job wasn’t finished yet.

  There were bankers, waiters, lawyers, animators, actors, mums, ad execs, plumbers, singers, and students—people from all walks of life working together. No job was beneath us.

  During the first few days, a successful lawyer took charge of cleaning the only functional restroom facilities that I knew of at Ground Zero, located in the makeshift morgue at the American Express building. The bathroom consisted of just six toilets, but was visited regularly by hundreds of workers. He kept it working manually by carrying buckets of water back and forth from the Hudson River. He burned scented candles around the floor so people could see their way in to pee at night. He was there twenty-four hours a day, and he was a true hero. There were many others like him.

  One night, I found an old lady pushing a tea trolley around the broken streets. I inquired as to how she had made her way into Ground Zero. She said that as soon as she had seen the incident on television, she had packed up her car with tea and driven from Chicago. She had told the perimeter guard, “Step aside, sonny,” and he had done exactly that. She was eighty-eight years old and she knew that she was needed.

  A quiet teenager ran around with sweat dripping from his face, delivering large bottles of water to everyone. His sister had been an illegal immigrant working as a cleaning lady in the restaurant on the top floor of the World Trade Center when the planes hit. He said helping took his mind off her.

  The rescue dogs lived in the r
oom next to St. Charlie’s bar. Their owners lowered them down into the holes of “the pile” each day to sniff for survivors. They would come back with burned feet and singed tongues, but they, too, always put forth a herculean effort.

  It was moments like those, witnessing the actions of the everyday folks on the ground, that melted my soul. They showed that humanity was alive with goodness and that we weren’t going to let the terrorists win.

  By September 15, we were exhausted and had nothing left to give. But we still had one more thing left to do. All week we had heard rumors of firefighters’ body parts yet to be retrieved from the top floors of the Sheraton hotel located across the road from the World Trade Center. So Michael and I and a few other adventurers decided to climb the stairs up to the roof to take care of the issue. Fifty-five haunted floors later, we collapsed, out of breath, wondering how the firemen had done this while loaded down with hundreds of pounds of equipment and breathing smoke.

  Stepping to the edge of the roof, we leaned over the railing and found ourselves gazing down into the under-gloom of the gates of hell. I saw a great black pit, as though Satan had risen up out of the earth and scorched everything in his path. Fire and steam came spewing forth from the nostrils of crushed steel, which had the greenish color of bile. Everything was imprisoned in a metal dungeon. I closed my eyes and listened to the cries of a thousand innocent voices. I thought of a quote from Dante’s Inferno: Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch’intrate: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

  The gates of hell at Ground Zero

  The final shutdown of our first aid station came on the afternoon of September 15, when FEMA declared the area unsafe and we were too exhausted to put up a fight. It was time to head home. I walked in a daze from the south facade of the World Trade Center past Century 21, a store about one hundred feet to the east of Ground Zero that had also been badly damaged during the attacks.

  As we trudged along, Michael told me that he would catch up with me in a minute; he wanted to go back and get his oxygen tank, which he’d forgotten at St. Charlie’s. It never occurred to me that this was good-bye, but once he’d disappeared into the crowds and rubble, we lost track of each other. We didn’t see each other again until one year later, at the Ground Zero memorial ceremony.

  I was still inside the Ground Zero perimeter when a random stranger offered me a piece of chicken. I thought that was a really nice thing for someone in the street to do. As I sat on the curb eating my chicken, the world fell silent. I was absolutely brain-dead and felt no emotions at all. It was as if I had been in a long dream, and while I’d been trying to wake up, something kept dragging me back in. All around me, fresh workers with shocked faces and clean uniforms were streaming into the Ground Zero area. They stared at my sooty clothes and hair and the toothbrush, scissors, and selection of first aid tools tied to my waist, and the oxygen tank slung over my back, and they tilted their heads in respect for what I must have been through.

  I found my Rollerblades against the Stuyvesant School wall where I had left them five days earlier and started to Rollerblade up the West Side Highway toward my apartment on the Upper East Side. The streets were filled with thousands of New Yorkers who had lined up to show their appreciation for the workers as they left Ground Zero. They held up THANK YOU signs and red, white, and blue streamers and cheered. For the first time since I had entered Ground Zero, I burst out crying in uncontrollable tears. Embarrassed at myself, I skated home as quickly as possible, tears flooding my face, taking darker streets to hide from the light.

  CHAPTER 2

  I grew up in Australia. My father was an Anglican preacher and a businessman, and my mother was a nurse. They were always flying off to developing countries across the Asia-Pacific region, from the Philippines to Indonesia to Fiji, teaching about God and helping the poor. I was the youngest child of four, so my parents often took me with them on their trips to the jungle while my two brothers, Geoffrey and Stephen, who were only a few years older than me, and my elder sister, Lyndall, stayed behind in school or at work or with relatives.

  On those overseas adventures, I shared my showers with frogs and great big water bugs that had eyes the size of quarters and looked like they were going to eat me alive. I ate strange foods, played with kids who didn’t speak English, and suffered through many 103-degree fevers.

  When I wasn’t traveling, I still had an adventuresome childhood. My family lived in a big white house at the edge of the Australian bush. Our extensive gardens led down to a deep river, and across its banks lay one of the largest national parks in the country. My parents had bought the land for next to nothing back when nobody wanted to live out in the middle of nowhere, but soon it flourished into a beautiful estate.

  There in the hot, dry Australian bush, our home was threatened by bushfires annually. When the fires started, kangaroos would swim over and come bouncing up into our backyard. My siblings, the neighborhood kids, and I would jump in our tin boats and try to put out the smaller fires on the other side of the river with wet sacks before the flames flew across to our houses.

  Throughout my childhood, my strict, religious parents monitored the minds of us four kids but let our bodies run free. On the weekends, Geoffrey, Stephen, and I would canoe across the river into the bush that was our backyard. There, we would camp, climb trees, and swim in secret underground freshwater pools full of turtles and eels. My brothers would jump into the river and chase small sharks with large knives. They played with poisonous snakes and crushed hard-shelled eggs in their mouths. The rest of the time, we played soccer and cricket and every other sport imaginable. We never wore shoes.

  My brothers teased me daily. They would pin me down and dribble saliva from their mouths, then suck it back in at the very last second, just before it was about to drop onto my face. Geoffrey and Stephen solved all their problems through humor, and I adored them for it.

  When I was ten years old, my brother Stephen talked me into doubling up with him on his bike. We came to a humongous, steep hill and he raced down it at full speed, with me screaming behind him on the seat. I was yelling my head off for him to stop so that I could get off. He just laughed and went faster, which infuriated me. I told him that if he didn’t stop, I would jump off the bike. He thought I wouldn’t do it, and continued to charge downhill at full throttle. So I jumped off the bike and rolled down the tar road, scraping off layers of my skin along the way. There was a lot of blood, but I had showed him how serious (and stupid!) I really was.

  Once, my brothers formed a Raiders of the Lost Ark Adventure Club. To become a member, you had to watch the movie twenty-three times, swallow spiders, and jump off forty-foot waterfalls, just like Indiana Jones. I tried several times to join the club, but whenever I met the requirements, they added new ones.

  I was an athletic kid, but when it came to adventure, I never could bring myself to take quite the outrageous chances that my brothers took. I had silly fears that always got in the way. I’d jump into bed at night as quickly as possible before the boogie monster living under it could grab me. I’d tuck my hair into my pajamas so that a pair of invisible hands with scissors couldn’t reach up to snip off my ponytails.

  Geoffrey and Stephen were good-looking guys, and as we grew older, the girls went crazy for them. They had that sort of James Bond confidence that could conquer the world. As teenagers, they went on camping and hitchhiking adventures all over Australia. I admired everything about them.

  My brothers also were highly competitive and intelligent, and enjoyed using polysyllabic words to outsmart each other. When they couldn’t think of any more impressive words, they would make them up. This kept us all in hysterics at dinnertime, the laughter accompanied by kicks under the dining room table.

  My sister, Lyndall, had a very different approach to life from the rest of us kids. She was ten years older than me and loved Alice Cooper and had boyfriends with Harley-Davidsons. She was a naughty preacher’s daughter and had a wild, passionate excitement for lif
e. In her younger years, she rejected my parents’ doctrine. Even though I didn’t always agree with her views, I admired her for her bravery and independence. My parents were irate when she got into trouble with the law for growing large amounts of marijuana.

  My father was an immensely talented preacher who would cast quiet spells on his congregation. He would preach in a simple, childlike way, telling exciting stories of the great battles of David and Goliath and of Daniel in the lion’s den. He raised his voice during the scary parts and spoke so gently during the suspenseful moments that everyone would have to lean forward in their chairs, eager to hear what was coming next. He would then shout out loud again, and people would almost fall out of their seats. I think he would have made a great actor. In some ways, he already was one.

  My father was an honest man who never drank or gambled. He didn’t allow us to buy raffle tickets or play soccer on Sundays, but he had the greatest sense of humor and was a terrific athlete. We always won the three-legged race at church picnics.

  Yet while everyone adored him and crowded around him after church, I was always a little scared of him. He was a strict, God-fearing man with high blood pressure and a quick temper. His ancestors were sailors and clergymen from Ireland who had been among the first white men to set foot on Australian soil with Governor Phillip, on a ship called The Sirius.

  My mother was a kind, compassionate woman. She embodied unconditional love and cared more for others than for herself. She never pampered herself, preferring to spend her money and time helping people. She ran a busy geriatric hospital, but despite her packed schedule, she always managed to be there for us. She would cook and clean for all four kids, shuttling us to every sporting event and activity, and also find time to toil in our huge garden creating the most beautiful flower beds. My father was always traveling or working, but despite his frequent absences—or perhaps thanks to them—my parents remained totally in love.