The Third Wave Read Online Free PDF Page B

allowed into restricted areas of Ground Zero.
    I wore my green bar badge with pride as I lined up outside the Brooklyn Red Cross building with sixty other volunteers waiting to be bused back into Ground Zero. As we were driving over the Brooklyn Bridge, a hush fell over us. There was the familiar Manhattan skyline, only the famous World Trade Center landmarks were gone.
    When the buses pulled up at the entrance to the restricted zone, we could see that another city had developed within the city of New York. It was to become my home for the next nine months. I worked down there seven days a week, sometimes eighteen hours a day. At night, a bus would drive me and the other volunteers back uptown, dropping us off near the areas where we lived. I would collapse into my bed, often still in my work clothes, for four or five hours of oblivion. Then I would mechanically get up, shower, and do it all over again the next day.
    In the mornings, I would take the long subway ride from the Upper East Side to the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Going from uptown to downtown was a complete culture shock. Uptown, people were slowly and respectfully beginning to go abouttheir business, eating in restaurants and returning to a quiet normalcy. Downtown was still a third-world disaster zone. Ground Zero had become an obsession for all of us volunteers, many of whom shared the common goal of finding loved ones we had lost in the attack. The gigantic mess seemed normal to us, while life uptown seemed bizarre.
    I found that for the first time in my eleven years of living in New York, strangers talked to one another on the subway. The events of September 11 consumed everyone’s conversations. I carried my construction hat and Red Cross vest and badge, so I was easily identifiable as a volunteer working at Ground Zero. Commuters often would approach me, telling me stories of dead relatives or friends or how they had escaped on that fatal day. One morning on the subway, I felt overwhelmed with sadness and started crying uncontrollably. Three people immediately crowded around me, offering comfort.
    On the day of my friend Jonathon Connors’s funeral, thirty-six other funerals were also held for September 11 victims in the suburb of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, alone. In those first months after the attack, thousands of funerals took place, many without caskets since there weren’t enough bodies to go around.
    When I arrived at the church for Jonathon’s memorial service, I saw him standing right there in front of me, alive and breathing. My heart swelled and tears squirted out as I raced over to hug him. I wondered how it could be true that he had survived after all! But then I quickly discovered what nobody had told me: Jonathon had a twin brother. He had never mentioned it to me before. I spent much of the devastating service sneaking suspicious looks at this living ghost through the mourning crowd.

    The American Red Cross is a traditional organization. They generally gave women the roles of caregivers, while asking male volunteers to load trucks, stock supplies, and do the more “manly” jobs.
    I was based at Respite One in the hot zone of Ground Zero, below the National Guard checkpoint at St. John’s University on Warren Street. The female Red Cross volunteers there provided comfort—our job was to smile and keep the workers’ spirits high. We looked after all the workers involved in the massive cleanup of Ground Zero. Most of them refused to take breaks even to sleep and eat. We would gently insist on feeding them, clothing them, and getting them to sleep on the stretchers we had prepared. Our station was open twenty-four hours a day. It had a television room with couches, Internet-equipped computers, and phones to call home, since many of the ironworkers had traveled here from hundreds of miles away. It also had shower rooms. We gave out all sorts of supplies, from hard hats to gloves, socks, pants, shirts, and toiletries.
    Upstairs,