ERICKA'S LONELY HUNT FOR PAUL
By ANDREA PEYSER
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September 14, 2001 -- I AM staring into the mouth of the devil, searching for one small, little man.
His name is Paul Ortiz, and he is 21 years old. I try not to think of him in the past tense.
Paul is a computer technician by trade. But at heart, he is a father, a son and a husband.
This man is loved. And needed. We must do everything humanly possible to bring him home.
I am standing just feet from the World Trade Center, what's left of it, with Paul's sister-in-law, Ericka Sanchez. We are cloaked in masks and surgical scrubs, which do nothing to shield us from the horrible, choking, burning odor. No clothing can cushion the sight before us: two skyscrapers, felled like tissue paper. Twisted and pancaked and brought to their knees, smoking. Men stand atop the wreckage, passing down buckets full of rubble, one by one, in a process that is numbingly slow.
It is beyond me how this beautiful, young man could still be alive.
Yet we must not give up. For when hope is extinguished, Paul will be dead for sure.
"If you don't want to see this, I'll understand," Ericka tells me kindly, as she hunts for a makeshift morgue where his body may be.
Ericka has faced the devil head-on since this evil was unleashed Tuesday morning. The morning of the attacks, she was supposed to be inside the Trade Center at a meeting. Instead, she switched her schedule at the last minute to attend a meeting at a building next-door.
Since Tuesday, she has worked around the clock. A trained rescue worker, she pitched in to help survivors. She also has searched hospitals, triage centers, the wreckage itself, for any sign of Paul. At night, she goes home to comfort Paul's wife, her sister.
If she can take it, then I must, too.
Ericka's sister, Estradita - everyone calls her Star - was too distraught to come with us, to see what those bastards have done to her love. Star, a delicate beauty of 21, stayed at home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, looking after their 9-month-old daughter, Rebecca.
Rebecca. When I visited her in the morning, Star told me she's certain the child knows what's going on. Last week, the baby said "Mama" and "Dada."
But now, all she says is "Dada." Over and over and over until Star's heart feels like it will break in two. The baby looks exactly like her dada. Except now, her smile has gone.
*
I traveled with Ericka from Bushwick to Manhattan. Our first stop was NYU Downtown Hospital. It was strangely empty.
"Yesterday, you couldn't even get in," Ericka says.
A young man scans a list of patients.
"I'm sorry," he says.
The staff looks at us sympathetically, and hands us gowns and masks. We are going to the morgue.
"You have to be prepared for what you will see," Ericka says.
We walk down streets deserted but for men in military garb, to face the awfulness. At once, Ericka grows mute.
"I can just see how they died," she whispers. "How can anyone live through this?"
Star and Paul met two years ago when they were students at Katherine Gibbs business school. Their love came immediately, and fiercely.
But there was a bump in the road. Paul is a Jehovah's Witness and Star attends an evangelical church. When they were engaged, and Star became pregnant, Paul's church friends shunned him.
"It was hard," she said. "They wouldn't talk to him."
In November 2000, Paul and Star married at City Hall. Afterward, Paul's parents and brother, and Star's parents and her brother and sister, joined the couple in a dinner at Windows on the World.
A week later, Rebecca was born. A few months later, Paul's church welcomed him back.
*
Tuesday morning, Paul kissed Star gently at 7 a.m. She was still asleep as he set out for work at Windows on the World, the place where they celebrated their marriage.
Employed by Bloomberg, he was setting up computers for a conference in the restaurant on the 106th floor when the first plane hit the building.
He immediately phoned his dad by cell phone to say he was OK. "It's nothing big. I'm going to continue working," he reassured him. He did not call Star, so as not to worry her, his wife believes.
The night before, they'd had a rare disagreement. Paul told Star his company wanted to send him to Arizona for a week. She disapproved, and that memory haunts her.
"I want to tell him I'm sorry I was so upset. It's just that I didn't want him leaving me alone for a whole week," Star says.
"I love him so much," she says. "I need him."
*
Ericka and I enter Brooks Brothers. But all we see in the shattered store are socks and pants, price tags still attached, strewn on the floor. They've moved the morgue. And no one knows where.
Traveling uptown, we hear on the radio that men have been pulled from the wreckage alive.
"I just hope he has the strength to wait until rescuers come," says Ericka.
Star is trying to cling to hope.
"I thought this was forever," she says.
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