NEW YORK — A nightmare descends on the city that never sleeps.

        People are tossed from their regular lives onto Manhattan streets. Many are dazed, others cry. Some run with no real direction.

        It is Tuesday morning. Overhead, one of the flaming World Trade Center towers appears to lurch, then a billow of smoke obscures it momentarily. With the next gust of wind, it's apparent the building exists no more.

        “Jesus Christ, it's gone,” someone screams.

        Someone's grabbing my arm.

        Frantic, a guy is asking me for help. He sees my press credential and thinks it's a badge. He's a Federal Express worker.

        “I'm trying to find my wife,” he says breathlessly. “She works in the World Trade Center. She hasn't called home.”

        We're about five blocks from what remains of the center, where thousands of workers are trapped or presumed dead.

        “What building does she work in?” I ask. “What floor?”

        “The 100th floor, Building One,” he replies.

        We both look up. There is no 100th floor where the 110-story towers used to be.

        We locate a police officer. The cop just looks at us crazily.

        “We don't know anything; we can't even communicate,” he tells us.

        I turn to the FedEx worker and say, “She probably got out.”

        But we both know I'm lying.

        Minutes later, the second tower collapses. Nearby streets become corridors of debris as a horizontal mushroom cloud rolls along, tearing up everything in its path.

        People duck in buildings as the cloud chews its way past storefronts and offices with teeth of glass and brick.
       

First NYC vacation

        Thirty minutes before all of this, I'm in bed with my wife. We are in a Times Square hotel, on the second day of our vacation. We've never been to New York City. The World Trade Center was on our list today.

        Now, I'm standing in the blast zone of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. Streets are littered with rubble. It seems like all of lower Manhattan is on fire.

        Ash chokes the air. White dust coats everything. It cakes in hair, films over eyeglasses, leaves footprints on city streets. The air smells charred and noxious..

        Police and firefighters emerge from the haze wearing masks and goggles, swearing and sometimes yelling at things I can't see.

        Lower Manhattan, south of Greenwich Village, looks the way I always envisioned a mine collapse might look, with victims coated in dust, retreating north.

        A group of police officers from the 50th Precinct is huddled in the hallway of a courthouse. They say they can't find their lieutenant. They can't seem to look at one another. But they all want to talk.

        They were standing outside the World Trade Center after the first plane hit. Then the second plane crashed into Tower Two.

        They ran as debris rained down on them. Some made it. Others almost surely were crushed. Pieces of the plane fell down on them.

        “I've never run so fast in my life,” one female officer says.

        Two janitors working in the basement of the trade center's Tower One describe elevators dropping like bombs, blowing up as they crashed.

        “The elevator fell down burning,” says Kenny Johannemann, a janitor at ABM Janitorial. “The doors blew open, it was on fire, there was a guy in there. We dragged him out. His skin fell off in our hands.

        “We dragged him and rolled him over and over. We're not sure if he's dead or not.”

        Secondary explosions echo through the city's concrete canyons. Gas mains break and blow up. More of the towers fall down.

        From a side street, I catch my first glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge, shrouded in smoke, looking wounded.

        This isn't the way I'm supposed to see it.

        But I also see things the way they are supposed to be.

        People carry water bottles out onto the streets. Store owners open their locked doors to strangers.

        At St. Vincent's Hospital on Seventh Avenue, a triage unit is set up on the sidewalk. On Fifth Avenue, cars offer rides uptown to pedestrians. In Greenwich Village, a store owner offers me a free drink.

        During my walk back uptown, I don't turn around to look at the wreckage. Not once.

        The expressions on the faces of people I pass tell me all I need to know about the carnage behind me.

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