James GLANZ,
Last words: "It doesn't look good, Babe".

Perhaps only mythology can convey the strangeness of this story: that people 
trapped high in the World Trade Center spoke to their loved ones even 
as the flames rose and the towers fell. 

The channels of communication - cell phones and BlackBerry communicators
and a few surviving land lines - were the by-now familiar miracles of
modern technology.

But the experience of those outside the buildings who received the final 
messages was as timeless and uncanny as the story of Halcyon and Ceyx in 
Ovid's "Metamorphoses." 

Ceyx died in a tempest at sea, but was allowed by the gods to return to his lover, 
Halcyon, in a dream and reveal his death.

At least 353 people trapped inside the towers on Sept. 11 communicated 
with the outside world before they died. In a way, all of us reporting 
about their fates, and those who read about it, became the dreaming Halcyon. 

We learned intimately, what it was like up there as death neared, and 
are now left to make sense of it on our own.

The final transmissions reveal as nothing else the full scale of the events
of Sept. 11 - something that carries beyond the panoramic camera shots
of the burning towers and delves at least some distance into the measure-
less depths of the heart. The power of those calls emerges in part from the 
way in which instant communication almost seemed to slow down the 
tragedy so that it could be explained, as it happened, to people who meant 
the world to the doomed.

"They died alone," said Sophie Pelletier, whose husband, Mike, a commodities 
broker, phoned her from the 105th floor of the north tower. "No one 
was there to help them. They did everything they could to get out, and 
they fought with their heart and soul and there was just no way out, and 
that was torture."

The colloquial directness and easy intimacy of those communications from 
the sky, juxtaposed against the sheer scale of the disaster they describe, 
made them all the more haunting.

"It doesn't look good, babe," said Jeff Shaw, an electrician who was on 
the 105th floor of the north tower when it was hit by a plane 10 floors below, in
a cell phone conversation with his wife, Debra.

Some of those conversations have been burned into the minds of those
who survived in ways that are as indelible as they are painful. Patricia 
and Louis Massari had just learned that morning that she was pregnant 
with their first child. They were talking on the phone when the first plane 
hit, very near her office. Mrs. Massari said, "Oh my God," and the connection
was cut forever.

"She had seen something, she felt something," Mrr Massari said." I kept
saying, "Not now, not my wife, not just when we heard this news about the
baby."

Of Mrs. Massari's last communication with the outside world, Mr. Massari
said, "I hear it every day in my mind."

Technology, in the end, is not godlike; it cannot bequeath to men and 
women the solace the gods sometimes give in myth.

Zeus turned Ceyx and Halcyon into graceful birds after her dream, while 
ordinary life goes on for the bereaved families. But the stories of their loved 
ones have been written into history.