“I Now Know What It’s Like to Have A 110-Story Building Come Down on My Head.”
An unforgettable story of survival and rebirth on the anniversary of 9/11
A few days after 9/11, journalist Cal Fussman met in a bar with a 30-year-old man named Michael Wright who’d miraculously survived after 1 World Trade Center collapsed on top of him.
Wright had been left trapped in the darkness with his mouth, nose, and ears packed with debris—thinking he’d die a slow, painful death. Thoughts of his wife and infant son lifted him up. It took several pints of beer, but Cal, then a writer-at-large for Esquire, got the full story.
“I can remember many feelings shifting through me as he recounted what happened,” Fussman says today. “I can remember recoiling in horror as he honed in on details. I can remember welling up with tears at certain mentions of his family. But, most of all, I remember walking away feeling uplifted. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten every time I’ve spoken to Michael ever since.”
The resulting piece, which ran in the January, 2002 issue of Esquire, is extraordinary. For this, the 17th anniversary of 9/11, Medium is proud to run it again, with an afterword from the author, in tandem with a new interview Fussman has done with Wright on his podcast, Big Questions, available…
