Project Rebirth (8 page)

For three weeks the family prayed and gathered, and Brian worked and waited for any sign that his brother might be alive, trapped in the rubble somewhere as if living in a postapocalyptic pocket of air and safety somewhere beneath the surface of rubble. Michael was “the moon baby,” after all; maybe he'd figured out some way to survive in quiet darkness.

And then, one bright October morning—as if the people working there were waking up from a collective dream—the mood on-site dramatically shifted. “I remember it was eight o'clock and the sun was out, nice sunny day, and the whole site was at a different pace,” Brian remembers. “Everything was one notch down, much slower. Everyone just knew—there really isn't [anyone] alive now. We're still working hard, but it wasn't the same intensity of trying to save someone trapped under a piece of steel.”

For Brian, the shift meant a chance to slow down, but it also meant something much more profound. “That was the moment I knew,” he explains. “I looked at my watch and it was 8:01. Whatever date it was, I knew we weren't going to find him alive or anyone else alive.” The effort went from being a project of rescue to one of recovery. They were no longer looking for survivors; they were looking for remains. Michael was dead.

It was at the end of that day that Brian finally decided it was time to go home and kiss and hug Lori and the girls, and tell Elaine—almost nine months pregnant—that the father of her children, her husband, her childhood sweetheart, wasn't coming home.

After breaking the news to Elaine, he retreated to the warmth and comfort of his own little family. It was nice to be home, to feel the warm bodies of his little girls and the loving embrace of his wife, but by four thirty the next morning, Brian was back at the Brewster train station, waiting for the five a.m. train. It was a foggy October morning. Everything was very still and peaceful. Only one other man stood on the platform.

He looked to be in his fifties or sixties. They struck up a casual conversation. Then the man said, apropos of nothing, “Don't worry. Everything will come out all right. Things will work out for the best.” Brian was stunned. He hadn't told him anything about where he was headed or where he had been.

The man went on, “Things are screwed up, but it should work out.” Despite his confusion at how this man could possibly know anything about what he was dealing with, Brian found his words, his presence, strangely consoling.

The train appeared in the distance, moving toward them. Brian said, “Nice talking to you,” and reached out his hand. “I'm Brian.”

“Nice talking to you too,” the man responded, taking his hand and shaking it with a warm sureness. “I'm Michael Lyons.”

Brian, stunned to the core, got on one train while the man with his dead brother's name got on another.

The recovery effort was tedious, backbreaking, and traumatic, but Brian felt deeply committed to helping with any- and everything. He was especially focused on finding his brother's remains. “I felt I had a responsibility to bring his remains home,” Brian explained. “Because of my nature, and the nature of the beast that was down there—organized chaos, if you will—I really felt that they needed someone of my stature to organize some of these things. I couldn't sleep at night knowing someone down there might screw it up.” Brian had ample experience managing complex construction projects and prided himself on his capacity to keep things moving on schedule, with integrity and a sense of team unity.

He put off his sadness surrounding his loss by toiling day in and day out, eighteen-hour days, no time for tears or memories. He told himself that Michael would want him down there, helping out, making sure things were done properly. He reassured Lori that his absence was only temporary, that he would have a regular schedule again once he found whatever remains existed of Michael and his buddies from Squad 41.

What allowed Brian to sustain such long, arduous hours? Psychologists have been investigating the nature of human resilience since the late seventies. Up until that time, many researchers felt that the only respectable or serious focus of study was on pathology—essentially, what went wrong with people's psyches. Countless research dollars and ounces of typewriter ink went into investigating dysfunction. But just as a political and social change shifted the tectonic plates of American life in the tumultuous seventies, the field of psychology also changed at that time—the psychological version of “make love, not war”; study what is restorative in the human psyche, not just what is potentially destructive. Resiliency theory was born.

In 1979, psychologist S. C. Kobasa argued that resilience was related to three healing beliefs: (1) control—that one can influence circumstances (in contrast to adopting a victimized identity); (2) commitment—that one expects to find purpose and passion through one's own resourcefulness; and (3) challenge—that one pursues growth even when it's hard, knowing that this leads to greater fulfillment in the long run. Brian, it seems, is a poster child for this hardy response to trauma and loss.

He was also buoyed by fate. Eerie events, like that which transpired on the train platform in Putnam County, continued to happen, making him feel as if his work at Ground Zero was a matter of destiny. “I don't believe in ESP or UFOs or nothing,” Brian explained, “but very, very weird things happened down there.”

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung explains such happenings through his concept of “synchronicity.” Jung explains: “Meaningful coincidences are unthinkable as pure chance—the more they multiply and the greater and more exact the correspondence is, the more they can no longer be regarded as pure chance, but, for the lack of causal explanation, have to be thought of as meaningful arrangements.”

These inexplicable moments are experienced not only by those in mourning, of course—just ask a starry-eyed couple how they met and you'll likely hear a tale of synchronicity. But for someone trying to process a recent loss, someone aching for a sense of connection to a loved one who has been torn from their daily lives in one brutal swoop, synchronicity ensures a continuation of the relationship. Whether real or imagined—who can possibly know?—these defining moments are opportunities for comfort and wonder.

On Thanksgiving morning, Brian had yet another ineffable experience. He watched as a machine dug up a huge batch of identification cards and sent them flying through the air. On a whim, he grabbed one, and then a strong thought flashed through his head: “I know I'm going to read this thing, and it's going to say Michael Lyons.” Indeed, it was his brother's ID card.

On St. Patrick's Day, at around five p.m., Brian and a couple of guys from Squad 41 who hadn't been on duty that fateful day, two of Michael's dearest friends, were digging in the same general area as where the ID card had shown up months earlier. All of a sudden, a piece of hard metal hit Brian in the foot. He looked down to see a Halligan bar—a tool commonly used by firefighters and law enforcement to pry, twist, or force entry—with Squad 41 etched onto it. “I just knew my brother had been carrying that Halligan that day,” Brian said. Michael was often the one to grab the Halligan for his team.

As he held it in his hand, feeling the weight of the cold metal and experiencing a wave of relief, a light snow began to fall. “I realized that there was a force that kept me going from 9/11 until St. Patrick's Day,” Brian explains. “The instant it started snowing, it was like a switch went off inside, as if everything was drained from me.”

But Brian and Michael's friends didn't give up just yet. They kept digging in that exact spot. Just before midnight, they found a very hot area filled with ashes and bones. Later on the next day, they found a Squad 41 helmet. Within three days, they had recovered every tool, bone fragment, and all the remains they could find in the area. The remains went to the medical examiner's office to be identified. Brian brought the tools back to the firehouse, where the surviving squad members laid everything out. Just about every tool was there, except for the head of a solitary ax. To his great relief and honor, the squad gave Brian the Halligan, saying it was his right to keep it in honor and memory of his brother.

“That was huge closure,” Brian explained. He had fulfilled his responsibility of finding what was left of his baby brother, a sacred promise he'd made to himself. (None of Michael's physical remains were ever found.)

At Michael's memorial service, Brian recounted that his brother had always regretted having missed “the action” with the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center. “Everyone wants to get the big fire,” Brian explained. “So when the towers were on fire, I knew Michael was so excited to get there. I could picture him, getting out of the fire engine, grabbing his Halligan, and running into that building. I know he was full steam ahead, trying to get in there and accomplish something he had in his heart.”

Roman lyric poet Horace wrote, “Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.” He could have been speaking of Brian, who in the process of pitching in at Ground Zero found both a mission and a new identity. He had always worked in construction, of course, but the leadership that emerged from within during his time on the recovery effort brought his professional life to a new level. He was asked to stay on as one of the key managers overseeing the PATH Restoration Project from August of 2002 to November of 2003.

Every morning, he would facilitate a coordination meeting at nine a.m. between the fifteen subcontractors and the PATH and MTA teams. They would go over the agenda, talk about various safety issues, cover any labor questions (e.g., Who is working today? How long are they working?), go over all the systems (fire alarms, elevators, plumbing, heating, sewer, drainage, etc.), and discuss how the track work and other reconstruction efforts were coming along. Brian would write down any outstanding issues on the board and assign people to follow up. It was like he was the choreographer of an incredibly intricate dance involving hundreds of laborers, thousands of tons of steel, and the dream of a restored transportation hub downtown.

Brian believed that his brother would have been proud of him, that he would have seen the new job as a great accomplishment. “It's something Michael and I would have talked about,” he said. “It's like he guided me right here—the whole way through, the whole process.” When they placed the first beam in the temporary PATH train of the “bathtub”—what the workers called the pit of Ground Zero—in August of 2002, Brian wrote, MICHAEL LYONS, SQUAD 41, on it.

The project wasn't easy, as it was on an accelerated schedule. Brian had to face down some stress, deal with lots of conflicts along the way, work long, hard hours. On tough days on the site, he would give Michael a hard time in his head:
I'm walking through the mud and the freezing cold. Jesus Christ, Lyons, look what you got me into. I'm down here because of you, you dope.