Excerpt
Journal entry
Everyone is coughing and talking, it is more like out loud thinking, each guy trying his area of expertise. We came across a street light pole, lying on its side. A man working near me says “We have to move it.” He is wearing an American flag bandana. He digs and claws at the debris with pure desperation. He is talking out loud, “We need to find the street, we need to find the street.” I asked him why it was so important. He tells me this, “I was supposed to be working (9/11); I took it off. My partner was working instead. There was a manhole cover near here. If he saw the building coming down, he might have pulled the cover and jumped inside to take cover. It should’ve been me.” The man begins to cry, “He was my partner. It should have been me.” He goes back to digging and talking to himself.
We found an ambulance in the rubble or “bus” as the firefighters called it. The doors were open and the stretcher was sitting nearby. The plastic medical supply tackle boxes were also found nearby. The whole ambulance was only about four feet tall. It had been subjected to an incredible force from above. We found no bodies with the ambulance. I moved over into another area of the pile and began digging again.
Journal entry
It’s not daylight yet. We have dug all night. The bright lights are casting an eerie glow across the huge pit of rubble. The cranes are still dragging huge chunks of steel and concrete over our heads. The pile shakes each time they drop their load into one of the waiting dump trucks. The dust hangs like a powdery fog over the site. Dirty faced men keep walking by, some in full bunker gear and others in hardhats and jeans. They are all carrying something, some are buckets or shovels and others carry body bags. Their eyes are haunting and they stare straight ahead as they walk.
There is a cop standing nearby as I dig. He watches as I dig with my hands. The white ash keeps avalanching back down into the crevice I have formed around a newly found body. It’s not much of a body. More like a big mound of flesh with tattered clothes. “Civilian?” he asks. “Yeah” I answer him through my clinched teeth. The smell is terrible; and for some reason, keeping my teeth clinched together seems to keep me from throwing up. One torso size chunk of flesh, all red and raw, like a big piece of fish.
I flash back to my grandmother’s kitchen. When I was a child, I would sit on a stool and watch her. She prepared all the fish my grandfather and I caught. I watched as she would roll the pink and white pieces in flour, and gently place them in the pan of hot oil on the stove. When she would pick up the pieces, the blood underneath the flour would make itself known. Small pink spots appeared where her fingers had gripped the mean.
This “torso” was floured in the ash and powder of lives lost. The blood seeps through the white powder as I push my fingers into it, to get a better grip. I tug on it. It doesn’t come loose. My goal is to move a fifty feet I-beam. It stands four feet tall. An impossible task. If it was moved, it would release the last few remaining inches of flesh connected to the torso. “Just pull!” the copy growls at me. “It’s not coming.” I say half out loud, through my still clinched teeth. Then with one last pull, it gives way. Instead of pulling free from under the beam, it tears. I have just torn a chunk of human being. At that moment, when it gives under the weight of your pulling, it is as if you are inflicting a tear on your very soul, as you hope against truth that the material that is tearing as you pull is cloth and not flesh. For something has been scribed in your brain by God Himself, that it is wrong to pull one of His own apart. I looked down at my results. Someone’s father, mother, husband, or wife left for me to recover and deliver to the morgue.
I try to stand up and throw up but only a dry sob comes out. It hurts so much. It just hurts so much. I sat down on the pile of rubble and looked at my blood soaked gloves and then at the cop. He drops an empty body bag down to me and watches as I gather all of the remains into the bag and lift it up to him.
I sat back down and watch as he walked his way out of the pit and up the hill to the waiting hands of those carrying victims to the make-shift morgue. The roar of the fighter jets overhead and the clanking of the cranes drowned out my angry yell at the sky.
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