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"Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again." - opening line of Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.

It was a week after September 11, 2001.  We were downtown for the first time, staring at the blackened skeleton of the World Trade Center.

"Move along.  You'll get the best view from Liberty Street."  A young, rather officious cop was keeping the crowd moving.

I said, "I worked there.  That was my building."

He apologized and left us there, and  I went on staring.  I kept saying to myself and to Steve, "But why is it black?'  I couldn't make the connection. I couldn't put the sight in front of my eyes together with the tall white tower, glistening in the sun, that I had seen every morning for a year.  Where was the white?

The truth is, it was all around us, in the inch-thick layer of gray ash and dust that lay on every surface that day. Every building, every window - everything - was covered with it.  And all that was left of my second home was the black skeleton.

I didn't tell the young cop that I had escaped the building on 9/11, down 60 flights of stairs and a 5-mile walk home, at one point trying to run ahead of the cloud of dust and debris.  (A week later, I was still finding it hard to walk up and down stairs - my thigh muscles called it quits after 40 flights.)

In my office of 600-odd people, only one person died.  If you believe in prayer, say one for her.  Her name was Rosemary Smith, and she was the "voice" of the firm - her sweet, musical tones answered the phone if you called us.

A beautiful September morning

I arrived early to work that day, as I always do. (Still do - though you'd think that day would have cured me of the habit.)  As everyone knows, it was a glorious September morning.  The sun was shining.  I had a new black silk jacket, and I was feeling pretty good.

At 10 minutes to 9, I had switched my sneakers for comfortable office shoes, turned on my computer, and was reaching for my pretty flowered coffee mug, to get up and get a cup of coffee.  (What happened to the mug? Who knows.)

The noise was almost too loud to hear.  The building jolted under me, then shook.  And shook. And shook.  It seemed to go on forever.  I know now that the building was slammed sideways, then rebounded, and rocked back and forth until it stabilized.  I thought "Bomb or earthquake."  I remembered being told that in an earthquake you were safer in the doorway.  (Idiot - you're 59 floors up!  What good is standing in the doorway going to do?) But I did it anyway - got up and went to my office door.  When the shaking stopped, and I was still alive, I remember looking at the walls and seeing no cracks, and thinking "Maybe I'm going to survive this."

People were in the hallway.  I knew we were going to have to get the hell out of here. When I turned to go back and get my purse, someone yelled at me, "Where are you going?  We have to get out!"  So I grabbed my purse, but made a big mistake - I did not change back into my sneakers.  (I figured I was wearing my most comfortable office shoes - so what if they had heels?)  And I headed for the fire stairs with the rest of the early birds.

Later, someone said to me, "You were so calm!"  I said, "Maybe too calm.  Maybe I should have moved faster."  "Oh, no," he said. "You were right there with us!"

The Fire Stairs

We stepped into the fire stairs, and I thought, "How can I possibly walk down 59 flights?"  The answer was, as it would be for several hours, "One foot in front of the other."  In the stairwell, we smelled what we thought was leaking gas.  We know now it was airplane fuel, but at the time we had no way of knowing the air wasn't going to explode around us.  And we didn't know what had happened, of course.  For all we knew, we were walking into the fire.  We weren't terrified, though, most of us at least - we just did what we knew we had to do.

Behind me on the stairs was my department head, from the floor above me.  He said he had seen a fireball, and for a moment started to go to the window to look, then come to his senses and headed for the stairs instead.  But we still didn't know what had happened.  It would be a few minutes, and several flights of stairs, before someone on a cell phone said.  "A plane hit the building."  We pictured an accident with a small plane.  "No, they say it was an airliner."  We passed the news back up the line of people on the stairs.  "They said it was terrorism."  Then no more information.  One foot in front of the other.

It was quiet in our stairwell.  People focused all their energy on getting down the stairs.  (I heard later that the other stairwell was a lot noisier - people panicking, complaining.)  In ours it was just one foot in front of the other. At every floor, people added to the crowd, but somehow there was no pushing, no crowding.

Some of my colleagues had been through this before, at the 1993 bombing.  One woman, just behind me, kept saying, "I can't do this again, I just can't."  (She had been with the firm through a previous evacuation in another building, as well.) But she did.  She made it out, got home safely, and called in the next day to quit her job.  She was persuaded to return a few weeks later.

About 1/3 of the way down, the air turned smoky.  (The 44th floor was the transfer point, where employees on their way to work would normally switch from the huge "cattle car" elevators to the smaller ones that went to groups of floors.)  It turned out that fireballs had gone down the elevator shafts to the 44th floor, but we didn't know that at the time.  All we knew was that the air was getting hard to breathe, and my eyes were streaming tears so I could hardly see.

At one landing, someone was handing out wet paper towels - heaven.  We held them over our noses and mouths, and breathing was easier.  A few more floors and the air cleared again.

On another landing there was a woman in a wheelchair.  A couple of people were with her, radioing for help for her, so there wasn't much to do except keep going.  Later, I heard that people carried her down in shifts. They'd go a few floors, then new people would take over.

The second plane hits

Then something happened. The building shook again.  Not like the first one, but frightening.  This time there was no information - cell phones were no longer working.  Of course, we realized later - much later - that it was the second plane hitting the other building.  But at the time, we knew nothing. This time there was the sound of panic in some people's voices - "Faster.  Go faster!"  One foot in front of the other.

A little more than halfway down, we began to meet firefighters coming up.  As long as I live I will never forget their faces.  I recognized some of them in the posters outside fire stations later - pictures of those lost.  And forget the news reports of them "charging" into the building, and "racing" up the stairs - nobody races up 90 flights of stairs.  They trudged.  People offered to take their equipment and pass it up the line of people coming down so they didn't have to carry it, and one or two took them up on it, though I suspect they weren't supposed to.

Since then I've been in fire drills where they explain that you should keep to the right, because the firefighters will always come up on the right. Bullshit!  Those firefighters came up on the left, because it was the inside of the spiral, and anything that saved them a few steps was OK with us.

By 2/3 of the way down, my feet were hurting from the pressure of wearing heels, and I was beginning to realize that leaving the sneakers behind was a big mistake.  I took them off and tried going barefoot, but I'd waited too long, and stockinged feet on concrete was even worse.  Then the people coming up started instructing us to leave our shoes on because there was debris on the floor anyway.

Then we were down.  My thigh muscles had turned to mush, my back was hurting, but we were down.

Ground level

We were directed out of the fire stairs - but we didn't really know where we were.  We were in an open space; ahead stretched a long hallway with doors at the end.  It turned out we were on the street level, and the doors at the end were the main doors out onto the plaza, but for a while we were disoriented. We just followed the people ahead of us, towards the doors, then turning right.

Ahead of me, I saw someone go out through the doors.  He stepped outside, and BAM!  What I thought was a large chunk of concrete slammed into the ground a few feet from him, narrowly missing him.  He stood frozen for a moment, then the police called him back in and directed him to the right.  As we caught up, they told us, "This way, this way, don't look out there." 

For a month, I thought about the "chunk of concrete," wondering over and over why it was red.  Why would concrete be red?  My mind didn't accept the obvious even when I heard the story about someone I knew having been nearly hit by a falling body, so close blood sprayed up in his face.  It wasn't until I wrote this up the first time (this is the second writing) that I made the connection and realized this is what I had seen.  My friends had other similar stories; one told me about coming out of the subway and seeing stick figures falling from the sky.  She went home, and for several days her mind said she had seen stick figures, even while she watched the news reports.  Sometimes the mind doesn't accept the unacceptable.

We were still in the building - it wasn't safe to go out through the plaza doors.  The police (there were police and firemen everywhere) directed us to the escalators down to the concourse, and we had to go down yet more stairs.  Needless to say, the escalators weren't working!  I stepped onto the escalators, then realized why everyone was using the other one - the bottom of the escalator was inches deep in water.  A police officer at the bottom said, "Keep going.  Jump over the water - I'll catch you."  And he did.

The sprinklers were on in the concourse, and the floor was under an inch or so of dirty water.  The police said, "Walk! Don't run!"  And I resisted the temptation to run through the sprinklers, and instead ducked and picked my way through the water and debris, one foot in front of the other.  (My beautiful silk jacket was a goner, anyway.)  Behind me, someone instinctively tried to run and went sprawling, cutting his hand on something under the water.

An image that stays in my mind is the deserted concourse.  Usually it was jammed with people, rivers of people flowing up the escalators from the PATH train from New Jersey, lines of people at the wagon that sold coffee and bagels in the morning and salads at lunch, people zigzagging in and out of crowds of other people.

It was empty.  So empty.  The coffee wagon was there, abandoned and forlorn.  And a trickle of people ahead of me were following the urgent directions of police to the other escalators to return us to ground level.  We splashed through the water, climbed the stilled escalator (by then, I was hauling myself up by my arms), and emerged next to the Borders bookstore - one of my favorite places.

Another young policeman said, "Cross the street, go on to Broadway, don't look back."

And of course, I turned and looked.

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