We All Fall Down: The True Story of the 9/11 Surfer (7 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Everything Was Changed

“I see movement, and again I’m just screaming, ‘No! No! No! No! Why, God? Oh Jesus, please don’t let him suffer. Please tell me what’s going on in this world. Tell me!’…I just lost it at that point.”

~ Louise Buzzelli

The phone rang again. Joanne ran to answer and came back with the phone in her hands, holding it out to Louise. “It’s Aunt Mima,” she whispered. “Can you…uh, can you talk to her? She wants to—”

Of course. Aunt Mima, Pasquale’s aunt, wife of his oldest uncle, a woman who commands respect.
Louise took the phone.

On the other end, the woman who was usually so in control of herself said in her broken Italian, “Oh, Louisa! It’s Zia Mima. You okay? You speak to Pasquale? No worry, Louisa. It gonna be okay. Your cousin is there? Good. Now…”

Louise listened, but her eyes were fixed on the TV. There, right in front of her, more huge clouds of smoke began to billow out. The same nightmarish fireworks filled the screen, and streamers of smoke and ash came raining down. Horrified voices screamed, “NO! NO! NO!” as the top of a building burgeoned over, ready to collapse—a building with an antenna at the top.
             

“Louisa! Louisa?” Zia Mima’s voice was in her ear, but she could barely hear. “Louisa! Turn off the TV. Stop looking. No matter. Pasquale’s gonna be…”

She dropped the phone, and the voice of their distraught aunt faded.

It had only been minutes since he’d called.
Twenty minutes? He wouldn’t…he couldn’t have had time to leave the building. Oh God! He’s still inside!
She screamed, then screamed again, then folded in on herself.

Joanne reached out and held her.

The two watched in horror from their safe and helpless place across a river from a city under attack, as the second building, Pasquale’s building, began to fall.

Louise watched, with her hands at her mouth, as her husband died. She stood in her New Jersey home, sun and blue sky beyond their safe windows, peace and quiet all around her, watching as Pasquale crumbled with the North Tower. Dark, rolling clouds chased running people through Manhattan streets. Clouds of stone and mortar rained over rooftops. Shreds of paper—terrible ticker-tape—and something beyond the imaginable, all of it eating up the sky and overpowering the city.

Yet she could do nothing…but watch.

At her center, something formed. It was beyond pain—more a nothingness, as if her very heart was being torn away. For a moment, she felt hollow, like a building after a fire—only the outer walls, the façade of something that had once been whole and solid. She stood, aware of her arms and skin, but only as if they belonged to another woman. That woman could smile and talk and live a life not touched so many times by tragedy. That woman would go on living; Louise, on the other hand, doubted at that moment that there was anything left to live for.

The next pain doubled her over.

All I can do is watch. Maybe it’s only a television program…nothing real…

She wrapped her arms around her body, holding herself together. She turned from the TV screen and ran blindly past her cousin. There had to be a place where she didn’t have to watch Pasquale die again and again. There had to be somewhere she could go to rid herself of pain. But all she had was her home. There was no real world left out beyond the walls of that place. Everything was changed—everything. She needed to take her home, her life back into her hands and hold on until whatever horror had overtaken the world had passed, and Pasquale could come home. She ran through the back door and out into their back yard.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Waking Up to Blue Skies

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”

~ Lao Tzu

He opened his eyes. He saw an unbelievably peaceful, unbelievably blue sky above him. He lay still. He closed his eyes again and let his mind pull inward.
So this is what death is like? This peace? This blue Heaven overhead. Or maybe,
he thought, since he began hearing sounds,
I’m someplace between Heaven and Earth, still connected to my past while I wait for the mystery to unfold. Maybe, an angel will come for me and tell me it’s time to go.

A shock of pain ran up Pasquale’s right leg. He winced and tried to grab at it, but as he shifted his body, debris from beneath him moved away, plunging over a terrible edge, skittering and bouncing down into nothingness. He lifted his head enough to see. A pit surrounded him—a very deep pit. Everything was covered by a scrim of smoke and dust. Miraculously, a few walls were still standing not far off. There were tall pikes of twisted metal, and there was fire.

He lay, it seemed, atop a mammoth pile of debris. Everywhere he dared to look, he saw nothing but cement, broken pieces of metal, paper—all around him and under him, as if he’d been the last thing to fall. And from his place atop the pile, he saw that improbable blue sky. It was as if the regal North Tower had been peeled away—floor after floor of offices, elevators, stairs, people, desks, files, phones, machines—all of it. All that was left now were the sky that had always been there, the debris, and Pasquale Buzzelli—for all he knew, the last man alive. If the entire city were like what he could see from his vantage point, there was nothing left of New York—or of the world, for all he knew. His mind couldn’t possibly grasp such an idea, such a…nothingness.

He took a deep breath and coughed hard. The taste in his mouth was metallic, thick, and brutal, like used-up air with no life left in it. Wisps of black smoke moved across his vision, drawing dark streaks across the blue.

It was beyond a nightmare.
The mighty Twin Towers couldn’t have fallen down like something built of children’s blocks. With all of that technology, everything the building was and all it contained, it simply couldn’t have toppled. No,
he thought.
This has to be something else—an alternate reality. There has to be a reason. It’s a nightmare…only I’m awake.

His right ankle throbbed, and smoke filled his lungs.

I’ve got to tell Louise. She was watching TV. If she saw the building fall…

He strained to wiggle up a bit, not daring to move too much. “Pat!” he called as loudly as he could, desperately wanting to locate his co-workers, to know that someone else was still alive. He hoped maybe they could help him down from the place where he’d landed. “Steve?”

Only echoes returned his call.

“Lisa? Genelle?”

But there was nothing but silence—not another human voice. Even the horrid groaning had stopped, all the death rattles of the building. Dust filtered down softly like a gray snow flurry, covering him.

“Help!” he screamed. “Help?”

But nothing answered. There was not one single word spoken in that place that had always teemed with human voices.

He held his breath to listen, then called for help again. It was as if a huge breath were being held as he lay still, concentrating on clearing his lungs. “Help! Help…”

Occasionally there came a muffled
bang
. Once in a while, things around him creaked. He lay back in the kind of stillness that comes after a heavy snowfall, when the Earth just…stops. But there was nothing beautiful about this stillness. It was more like the melancholy quiet at the eye of a tornado—an evil, sinister, ominous silence. He lay stunned, dazed, and in shock, amazed at his survival and awaiting whatever would come next.

After lying still a while, he assessed how badly he was hurt. There was still pain in his right leg, but nowhere else. Twisted metal and pulverized concrete surrounded him, but no metal pipe or piece of steel had impaled him.

He’d come down the stairs with his cell phone, and that thought gave him hope. He wriggled around until he could reach the phone clip, but he found it empty; the phone was gone. No one would ever know he lay atop that mound of debris with his feet dangling off into space, high above what looked like the bottom.

He coughed harder, then pulled his shirt up over his face in order to breathe through the sweat-dampened cloth as explosions went off around him.

We’re at war,
he told himself.
We’ve been bombed. New York, a prime target.

He called for help every five minutes, knowing there had to be someone left.
Surely I’m not the last man alive.

Finally, he heard it: “Richie!” A voice from way down below him echoed upward. A man was calling for someone.

Pasquale leaned up as far as he could without falling. There, in an opening in the rubble far to the left of him, he saw a man—a man with a megaphone. “OVER HERE!” Pasquale yelled as loudly as he could.

The man didn’t seem to hear.

He yelled again, this time desperately screaming for help.

At last, the man looked up, shaded his eyes with one hand, and shouted, “You okay?”

“My ankle!” Pasquale yelled back. “I think it’s sprained—maybe broken.”

“Hold on,” the man said. “We’ll get you some help.”

Pasquale lay back, relieved to know he wasn’t alone, to know he’d soon be out of there. He could call Louise. He could go home. It would all be over.
Soon…

Probably another survivor,
he thought of the man who was going for help.
Maybe he’s been wandering around in all the chaos, hunting for anyone he could find.

Ten minutes passed, like a decade of hours, before another fireman was back.

He called up to Pasquale, “You okay, buddy?”

“I’m…stuck!” he called back, his throat raspy from the smoke.

“I’ll throw you a rope so you can shimmy down!” the man hollered.

Pasquale thought for a second, worried about trying to “shimmy” down a rope, but he answered, “Okay. Whatever you want me to do. I’ll even jump if you need me to, but I’ve never done that before.”

The man below was quiet. After a minute, he looked back up. “Who are you with?”

“No one. I was in the building, and…it just fell!” Pasquale shouted.

The rescue worker said nothing for a minute, then called back to others on the radio, back to his friends, “Holy shit, guys! We’ve got a civilian up there!”

There came a murmur of voices from below.

Finally, the same man called to Pasquale, “Hang on! We’ll get you down.”

Pasquale lay back, relieved. He was in pain, but at least he wasn’t alone anymore. At least he knew there were others out there. As soon as he could, he needed to ask what had happened to the city. He needed to know that the rest of the country was okay. Most of all, he needed to call home.

Across from where he lay was a standing wall, a precarious leaning structure of steel beams, one listing toward the other. A slight movement in that remnant of wall made him nervous, a reminder that it could all come tumbling down at any minute. Nothing around him was substantial. He hoped the men below, his saviors, would hurry. There was so much there that could still kill him.

From behind the broken wall, cracking noises coming from fires grew louder and louder.
Steel heating
, Pasquale told himself. But it cracked again and again, almost as if rounds of ammunition were going off. The noise intensified as the feel of heat grew around him. The fires circled him, getting closer. He looked over to where the rescue workers had been, and he saw them running—small, urgent figures so far below, back around the pile, away from the fire.

Pasquale lay still, alone again. The fires moved toward him; he had survived only to burn. As if a cruel joke were being played, he could only wait. It would not be the quick death he’d prayed for, but rather a slow onslaught of heat and flames.

There were pieces of steel and broken glass shards all around him. He snaked his right hand out, feeling over the shattered bits and pieces until his fingers closed around a sharp metal fragment with serrated edges. He brought it to him, holding on, letting his hand curl around it, testing the lethal sides.
No. I will not wait for my flesh to burn. I will not die that way
. He was ready, armed for death.

The fire crackled, and the single standing wall groaned.

Pasquale lay still, armed and ready to die.

CHAPTER NINE

How Could This Happen?

“It was the weirdest thing. It was so peaceful there. It was a beautiful day, and there I was in New Jersey…

but I’d just watched Pasquale die right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do.

I felt like I wanted to die myself at that point. I wanted to grieve. I wanted to rip everything apart.”

~ Louise Buzzelli

There
, she thought, standing in the middle of the mowed green lawn, with late summer flowers around her.
There.
She looked over at the pool, the stone paths Pasquale had laid himself.
Nothing’s changed.
She looked up.
The sky is perfect—not a single cloud. It’s all just as he left it this morning. Nothing bad could possibly have…