Rescue
workers on their way to the World Trade Center, where
digging goes on and hope is tested. "The smell of the
rotting flesh is beginning to take over," says one.
Steve Lockwood, a paramedic, wakes up in the morning and, for
a few blessed seconds, thinks that his life is as it was before,
a routine of stabbings, shootings, heart attacks and bloody car
accidents.
"I think it has to be a dream," he said, but reality
jerks him awake. "Nothing's normal anymore."
John Casanovas, a New York firefighter who has
worked through the wreckage of the World Trade Center, still
hears sirens and radio calls even when he turns out the light
and goes to bed. The sounds are not real, just ghosts that have
followed him home through the smoke and debris. "It's in
my head," he said.
Kirk Pritchard, another firefighter and Mr. Casanovas's
friend for 13 years, has slept long and hard, medicated by doctors
after falling debris from one crumbling tower hammered him to
the sidewalk and caused a small fracture in his spine. But even
as he drifted off in a narcotic haze, he imagined he was falling,
imagined that things were falling around him. "I felt like
something was going to hit me," he said.
"I can't stand now," he said, because
of the pain in his legs, but doctors have told him his long-
term prognosis is good and he expects to recover, with treatment
and therapy. In fact, he walked for two hours after the falling
debris pummeled him, searching for and calling the names of other
firefighters at the scene of the disaster — men he had feared
were buried but, like him, made it out alive.
Like everyone else, it seems, who responded to
the call for help after the series of disasters began on Tuesday
morning, he has been marked, perhaps forever, in his mind and
memory. A big, muscular man with a shaved head, a dark mustache
and a don't-mess-with- me face, he sat in a wheelchair on a sidewalk
outside St. Vincent's
Manhattan Hospital yesterday and waited for an ambulance to take
him home, as police officers and firefighters came by and shook
his hand, saying kind things. Stoic, he told them he would be
fine. Then, when it was just him and Mr. Casanovas, he looked
up at his friend and said, quietly, "John, I need to go
to the bathroom." His friend pushed him inside.
When they are busy, when they are pawing and scratching
at the rubble, they do not think about anything except the work,
the frantic, frustrating work. And when they are together, they
have each other to talk with and lean on.
It is when they are alone that they begin to think,
and dream.
Mr. Lockwood, 28, a paramedic working from St. Vincent's, responded
to the scene Tuesday morning. Like most others who did, he has
training at tragedy. He makes his living from it.
In his first year as a paramedic in New York — he believes
it was 1996 or 1997 — he answered a call to a drive-by shooting
in Park Hill in Staten Island. Three teenagers, one shot in the
face, one in the stomach, one in the chest.
"Three months on the job," he said. "I
didn't know who to go to first."
He thought it was the worst thing he had ever seen.
But just as in the movies, the emergency medical personnel worked
frantically to save the three. "They all lived," he
said.
Then came a drumbeat of bloody accidents and stab
wounds and worse. Buildings collapsed and buildings burned. "Amputations,
shootings," he said. "The city used to be a lot worse
than it is now." He did his job and slept and woke up to
the realities of life in a big city. Then, on Tuesday, an unreality.
Now he wakes up to a few seconds of hope that "this
was just a 
nightmare."
He watched smoke, a kind different from any he had ever seen,
boil over people who were choking on ash. The first person he
helped was a woman crawling on all fours, coughing.
Later, he searched for someone to help, but there seemed to be
more body parts than bodies.
He knows it has changed him, deep inside. He hopes
it has not made his heart harder, but he has less patience now,
with pretenders, with whiners. After working a shift as a rescue
worker on Tuesday, he was called out on a possible heart attack
downtown. He found, instead, a drunk. "A guy too drunk to
stand," he said. He yelled at the man: "Get up, get
up. Do you know how many people died today?"
Mr. Casanovas, who works on Engine 7, has toiled
without thinking of anything beyond, "We have to get these
people out, we have to get our brothers out. Trying like hell."
Then, "yesterday, I broke down in church."
Every day is worse, not better. "The smell
of the rotting flesh is beginning to take over," he said.
"We know there are people alive. We just can't get to them."
At night, as he tries to sleep, the sirens and
radio calls still swirl in 
his
head, reminding him of the people under the dust and rock and
iron. "There's got to be people," he said.
Kirk Pritchard, the wounded rescue worker, will
work on standing, then walking, watching it all from a hateful
distance. And wondering how he was so lucky.
"I wasn't buried," he said. "I thought
I would be." But as the falling tower rained down, it piled
up around him, not on him.
He walked around, yelling the name of a firefighter he believed
was buried. But all the firefighters in his station made it out
alive. He knew he was hurt. Many firefighters still digging,
he said, are hurt. They just keep digging.
*Rick Bragg, author of the critically acclaimed
and best-selling All Over but 
the
Shoutin' and a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent
for the New York Times, says he learned to tell stories by listening
to the masters, the people of the foothills of the Appalachians.
They talked, of the sadness, poverty, cruelty, kindness, hope,
hopelessness, faith, anger and joy of their everyday lives, and
painted pictures on the very haze of the early evening, when
work faded into story-telling.
