(7 of 10)
No! It doesn't matter. It's soft. She just wants to move the rubble and lie on the...
the corpse
...the softness, just to get some relief, just to get close to something that gives a little. A crack in the concrete above her is stingy with the light, allowing just a glare. Slowly the hours pass, and she sleeps on and off. Now the glare dims. Nightfall.
In her dreams, God is a white man. He is holding his hands out. Not to her, but to his angels. But maybe she's not dreaming; maybe she's just remembering a picture she has seen. She can't tell the difference now. She is so hungry. She fancies macaroni pie from Bake & Things, a Trinidadian restaurant in Brooklyn. Now she dreams of her mother. Her mom is talking to one of Genelle's sisters, but Genelle can't hear them. She sleeps.
When she wakes, she prays again. She feels a bit better. She will probably be found, she thinks. She prays more, and then she opens her eyes and hears voices. "I'm here!" she screams as loud as she can. "Hey! I'm right here!" A rescue worker responds, "Do you see the light?" She doesn't, so she bangs a chunk of stone against the concrete over her. The rescuers find the noise. When she reaches her left hand out through an opening, one of the workers can grab it. OH GOD, THANK YOU.
The workers have been drawn to her spot in the vast acres of destruction by a fire fighter's uniform. Civilian clothes blend with the rubble, but reflective bands in the uniforms stand out. There is a uniform just below Genelle: the soft man. It takes 20 long minutes, and then she is saved.
Saved, but not restored. Genelle's life hasn't returned to anything approaching normality. She hasn't resumed her duties at the Port Authority--and she won't, she says. She wants to become a social worker or pursue some other helping vocation. Returning to the Port Authority would remind her too much of everything that happened, everyone who was lost. Rosa Gonzalez and Susan Miszkowicz are dead. So are all the others in the group who took the stairs with her--except Pasquale Buzzelli. He was knocked unconscious in the collapse and awoke hours later stranded atop a 15-ft.-high mass of twisted metal and concrete. He was rescued around 3 p.m.; he had suffered a fractured bone in his foot and other injuries. As for Genelle, she has two foot-long scars, one on each side of her right calf, which doctors virtually rebuilt in four surgeries.
Though she has recovered from her leg and other injuries, Genelle spends most of her days at the Cypress Hills apartment, where she reads the Bible and watches the big-screen TV. She, Roger and Roger's son Kadeem live mostly on the salary Roger makes as a pressman for a direct-mail firm. Genelle has received some financial aid--rent from the Red Cross, lost wages from Safe Horizon, the victim-assistance group--but she doesn't plan to go for big bucks with a lawsuit. She met with a lawyer, but in the end she decided to apply for the victims' compensation fund. "I'm a Christian now," she explains. "I don't think it's really anybody's fault."