All the Names That Weren't There - September 11, 2001
Darkness and thick smoke surrounded Jacob Muller as he stood in the deep wreckage. He didn't have time to think. It didn't necessarily come down to the fact that this was his job. It surely didn't come down to the idea that he would be considered a hero after this. It most certainly didn't come down to him having a huge desire to run further into a burning skyscraper. It came down to that one faint word that he heard coming from the caved ceiling above him.
"Help."
Jacob ran up the stairs; the hollow concrete column survived the impact much more easily than the rest of the building. Even past all his fire gear, he was having trouble breathing. That made him more concerned than he probably should have allowed himself to be.
He remembered the television being on in the fire station when the North Tower was hit. He was in the break room, chatting with Nick Wells, when he heard the crash coming through the TV speakers.
People jumped up, staring. No one shouted. It seemed beside the point. By the time Jacob's unit made it to the Towers, the South one was going up in smoke as well. Even so, neither he nor his friends hesitated to run into the building.
The soft cry of "help" sounded again when Jacob reached the next floor, the forty-eighth. He could tell by the pitch of the voice that a young woman was calling.
"Ma'am," he shouted. "Ma'am. I need you to keep talking. Everything's going to be alright, just tell me where you are."
He heard the woman thanking him, her tears evident in her voice. She tried to explain her location to him, but she wasn't making much sense past all her emotions. Jacob sighed silently.
"Marco," he called, keeping his voice calm.
"Polo," came the muffled reply.
Jacob eventually found her halfway under her desk, attempting to avoid the impending doom of a nearly-fallen ceiling. It took him a moment to coax the woman out of her hiding spot. He told her that the ceiling had held up this long, and that it wasn't going to fall on her when she stepped out. She didn't trust him, Jacob knew, but she did obey him. For now, that was all he needed.
"Muller," someone was yelling when he helped the young lady out of the room and back toward the stairwell. "Jacob!" It was Nick, and a couple of other people as well, guessing from the number of footsteps echoing nearby.
"Yeah, here," Jacob called back. "Forty-eighth flor."
Nick, Wyatt Nobel, and Roy Walker pushed their way into the hall. There was a very brief moment in which the men just stared at one another, an unspoken "I don't know anymore" shared between the four of them.
"Hey, take her down, will you?" Jacob instructed Wyatt, one of the newest members of the department. He was twenty-three, only a kid, and visibly terrified. But upon being given an assignment, he squared his shoulders, set his jaw, and nodded. He took the young lady from Jacob and hurried back down the stairs. A long way down.
Jacob had a different direction in mind. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling, toward the plane and the people who were trapped closer to it. with Nick and Roy right behind him, Jacob reached the stairwell again in four long strides. They went up.
Seventeen years later, I was standing in almost the same spot, staring at the black marble wall in front of me. It was the middle of April; it would have been well into spring, had I still been in the South. But the trees were nearly bare, giving the square the look of late autumn. A stiff breeze tugged at my hair, and the grey sky seemed to watch humbly over that place where so many had lost their lives. The wall that I faced was not really a wall; it was one of the sides of a massive fountain that extended deep into the ground. It was lined with black marble, and the water spilled down the sides into the pool at the pit's lowest point. The fountain was quite literally the size of a building. More specifically, it was the size of the South Tower of the former World Trade Center.
The 9/11 Memorial Square was quiet; it was filled with people, as would be expected, but they all spoke in reverently hushed voices, as if they felt some natural inclination to leave the deathplace of so many in as much peace as possible.
As for me, I hardly spoke. The square seemed to demand my silence, as did the thousands of names carved into the marble that I faced.
It wasn't until much later that I thought of that scene in a different light. With those marble walls carved with a seemingly unending list of names, it was hard to think of anything other than all the people who died on that tragic day in our nation's history. But now, as I think back on the sight that I beheld in April, and all the names that I traced with my finger, I'm more inclined to think of the people who lived. The people who left that tower seventeen years ago, alive and whole, and the people who ran into the flames rather than away from them to defend all the men and women who still breathed. Now, I think of all the names that weren't there, thanks to the bravery and the unconditional love of those who made it their top priority to keep our country on its feet.
I think of the firefighters there on that day, and how they didn't hesitate to get others out of danger even if it meant putting themselves into it. They kept names off that wall. I think of the people on the fourth plane, the one headed to our nation's Capitol building, who put it down in a field instead. They kept names off that wall. I think of the rest of the country and the rest of the world, and of all the people who rallied together to strengthen what had become weak and rebuild what had been broken. Literally or not, they kept names off that wall.
I remember now turning around and seeing the One World Trade Center gleaming in the pale morning light.
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