Seeing the Faces by Cheryl DePaolo
	We stood by the drink coolers, handing out cold drinks at Ground Zero. He was from Trinidad, with a slight accent and dreadlocks. He complained about the cold and joked about returning to the islands before winter set in for good here in New York. He said that he had been at Ground Zero from the beginning, and he told stories of people rescued in the early hours. A cop trapped under rubble, who fired off three clips between his feet, through the floor of his squad car, until someone heard the shots.  It took six hours to get the officer out, and he was hospitalized with internal injuries. A pregnant woman, not yet due, who started having contractions while fleeing the debris. Two firefighters trapped in their fire truck who were brought out unharmed. Then his stories became more disturbing. Body parts in the rubble.  His mental determination that he would not look at the faces of the victims, for fear that they would haunt him. His anger at a mental health worker who, upon arriving at Ground Zero, looked around and declared that it was not as bad as she had thought it would be.  He claimed that she fled the scene when he led her a bit into the rubble and showed her a woman's body, disemboweled. He asserted that there had been children lost in the towers. We had not heard that before.  He stated that there had been a school group on a tour.  All of them had gotten out of the building safely. Then he looked down at his feet, and his voice lowered a bit. "I found two kids", he said. "Maybe six years old, maybe seven. They were huddled together, arms wrapped around each other".  I thought he would tell of leading them out of the building. "They were charred beyond recognition," he said. "We had to put them in a body bag together, there was no way to get them apart". "I shouldn't have done it. I saw their faces.  I didn't mean to, but I looked at them". He stated that he drank an entire bottle of Scotch that night, but did not feel any effect, couldn't forget the faces. He was seeing their faces all the time now.  He couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. He was drinking more and more each night, still to no effect. Later my friend and I expressed our doubts to each other as to whether or not all of his stories had been true. Maybe that didn't really happen, we hoped. I was glad we didn't have faces to go along with the story.