Bill (Part 2)

I worked for a tiny design studio in Breckenridge, whose offices were in an old wooden house just off Main Street. The graphic designers were on the first floor, and the rest of us were upstairs. My desk was next to the front windows and looked out onto the Ten Mile Range and Peak Nine.

About a week after the attacks, the office intercom blooped at me.

"Aileen? I have a Bill Hannigan* on the phone for you?"

I snatched the phone to my ear.

"Bill? Oh, Bill, you're alive." I put my head down on my desk and started to cry.

"Hey, I'm sorry I didn't call you back sooner, it's been a little crazy here." Understatement of the decade, and so typical of Bill that he would apologize for not returning a phone call in the middle of the biggest disaster any of us had ever seen.

He told me he couldn't stay on the phone too long, that he had gone to his home on Long Island to check on his house and his tenants after spending days and nights at the site, digging, and that he was going back to keep digging.

He had been off-duty that day -- and as the Department issued its recall order (calling all members into active duty who were off-duty that day), he had rushed to the firehouse, grabbed his bunker gear, and they had commandeered an M104 bus on 8th Avenue.

"Everybody off. This bus is now going to the World Trade Center."

He had pretty much been down there ever since.

Who? I asked, and started naming names.

Gone.
Gone.
Gone.

The list was a grim yearbook of my first years in New York City. Strangely, many of the more senior members with whom I had drank coffee in the firehouse kitchen, or who had bought me beers across the street at Michael's, somehow spared.

His best friend Carlo?

Gone.

The whole first day and night, he kept thinking he would see Carlo. Carlo was driving the Chief that day. When you see those red and white Battalion SUV's racing through the streets in front of the firetrucks, those are the Battalion Chiefs, and they are driven by an on-duty firefighter. That first day, as everyone was frantically digging through the rubble, Bill kept seeing the Chief, and assuming that Carlo was somewhere nearby. Sometime close to midnight, they mustered for a roll call at the pit to see who was there, and Bill told me he looked around for Carlo, and that's when he realized he was gone.

All those people you saw on the news with their sad "Missing" posters? They were engaged in magical thinking. They looked at the rubble of these two 102-story buildings that had collapsed in on themselves and concocted fairy tales in which their loved ones were the ones who miraculously survived. They heard the random tale or two of the handful who were found alive at the fringes of the site, or huddled in a stairwell that remained intact in the collapse, the already-burgeoning urban legend of the guy who surfed his way to the bottom, and tried to tell themselves that their loved one would be one of the lucky ones. It became a national delusion as days and weeks went on, that this was a *rescue* operation. I think the ones who were there from the start, they knew there was no one to rescue, only remains and body parts to be put into buckets and body bags and carried off to the ME's makeshift tent.

Remains still turn up around the site or are finally identified by the ME's office. They no longer get headlines, just a paragraph in the gutter of the Daily News on page 8. "More WTC Remains Identified."

Bill had to get off the phone and get back to the city, so he could continue to look for the bodies of his friends.

"Is it okay if I call you again?" He asked, with that endearing diffidence of his.

Of course. Of course.

*Not his real name, but Irish enough and close enough.