Carmen: We both worked at the towers as elevator operators for about 25 years, and we fell in love shortly after the 1993 bombing. Arthur, who is from Panama, was always joking to me that he’s never kissed a Puerto Rican. So one day I said, “Well, why don’t you?”
Arthur: She’d had her eye on me for a long time!
Carmen: We’ve been together ever since.
TEN YEARS LATER: THE POST REMEMBERS 9/11
COMPLETE 9/11 ANNIVERSARY COVERAGE
On 9/11, we woke up at 4 a.m. and got to work about an hour later. We kissed each other goodbye, and I went to the 78th floor of the North Tower, where I was running elevators up. I loaded up the elevator and I had just hit the “close” button when there was a huge crash. There was screaming, and debris came smashing down, and then a panel popped open and the fire just flew into the elevator, searing everyone — then it went back in the shaft.
“Someone help me!” I yelled, and we pried open the doors, and I held them open and told the people to get out. I took one look back to make sure everyone was gone and then suddenly the fire was there again, right in my face. It swept over me, my face, my hair, my hands. I screamed, and fell to the floor.
My co-workers got me down the stairs and in an ambulance to Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn. I was there when the South Tower collapsed. My eyes were so swollen I couldn’t see anything, but I heard the nurses screaming. When I realized that the North Tower was going too, where Arthur was, I went out of my mind. They had to sedate me.
Arthur: I was in the freight elevator around the 20th floor of the North Tower, when suddenly the elevator went into a free fall, all the way to the basement. It jerked to a stop, and the door blew off. I felt it crush into my knee. The elevator immediately filled up with dust and smoke, and it was pitch black inside. There was some sort of second explosion, and I got knocked out. When I came to I was gagging and choking. I saw a flashlight and hollered. When I tried to stand I kept falling down, and I didn’t understand why until I touched my leg and felt the bone sticking out. It was broken.
I crawled out, and a guy yelled at me to follow his voice. It was so dark I kept hitting walls. Finally he found me, and some carpenters there fixed a splint for my leg, threw me on plywood and ran me out.
When I saw the gash in the building I said, “Oh my God, my wife is dead. She’s dead.”
I was in St. Vincent’s when the two towers came down. I thought I had definitely lost her.
Her mother’s phone number suddenly popped into my head — I didn’t know it by heart because Carmen usually called her, but there it was.
I called and said, “I’m alive, where is Carmen?”
She didn’t know. Nobody could find my wife. The next night I had surgery on my leg. I came out around 10 p.m. and called my mother-in-law again, and when she told me Carmen was in Brooklyn, I cried so hard that the doctors had to sedate me.
The third day I got to speak to her, but her ears were burned so bad they couldn’t put the phone there — I had to talk through the nurse.
Carmen: I told him I was a little burnt. That he might not recognize me, but that I’m still me.
Arthur: I told that nurse, “Listen, you tell my wife I don’t care how badly burned she is, I love her. I only care that she is alive.”