Together, Ramos and Hong helped the man down one more flight to an elevator. “Don’t take it,” a Port Authority official screamed.

Hong and Ramos tried to send a magazine down in the elevator to test its safety. But when they pressed the “down” button, the doors wouldn’t close. So Hong decided that he would be the guinea pig instead.5

He stepped inside, and the doors shut behind him.

Hong took the elevator down to the 44th floor, the next transfer lobby. So far, so good. He pressed “52,” went back up and collected Ramos and the heavyset man.

On 44 Hong and Ramos helped the man toward the last bank of elevators that would take them all the way down.

Hong pressed the “down” button again. Nothing. They would have to take the stairs. Ramos and Hong tried to support the man. “One step at a time,” Hong said.

They had been trying to get out for an hour and five minutes. They were on 36 when they felt the South Tower collapse.

“We really have to move,” Hong said.

The rumbles of the collapsing tower next door seemed to sap the heavyset man of his last gasps of energy. “I can’t do it anymore,” he said, sitting down.

Hong and Ramos tried to persuade him to continue. “You don’t have to move your legs!” Hong shouted. “Just move your butt. Let’s go!” But the man couldn’t go on.

A fireman ran up to them. Hong expected that he would join in to get the heavy man to move. Instead, the fireman turned to Hong.

“Who are you, screaming at him to get out?” the fireman shouted. “You get out!” Hong looked at Ramos, who was still standing with the heavyset man.

“I’m coming down with you,” Ramos told the man. “I’m not going to leave.” “I left,” Hong says sorrowfully. “Alone.”

The next day, Adam Mayblum sent an e-mail describing his experience to friends and relatives, who sent it to still others. The e-mail was read by someone in San Francisco who knew a woman in New York named Rebecca. Her husband, Victor, a heavyset man, was missing.

On Saturday, September 15, May Davis’s chairman had a gathering at his New Jersey home. Adam Mayblum was there. So was Hong Zhu. Rebecca was also there, learning how her husband, Victor, had been comforted in his last moments, how Harry Ramos had refused to leave him behind.

Ramos’s wife, Micky, was there too. She kept asking Mayblum and Hong where her husband was, convinced that somehow, Harry — the only May Davis employee still