Mike Rambousek sits in front of his Hewlett-Packard computer, pulling up a chair so I can join him. He fiddles with a file on the desktop, and says he wants to show me the photograph, the one that is “not a bit pleasant”. It shows people standing in the windows of the World Trade Center’s north tower a few minutes before their building caves in. One of them, he believes, is his 27-year-old son Luke, a computer maintenance engineer who was working on the 103rd floor.

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, he says, “I saw the picture (on the TV) at nine o’clock. People thought, Cessna. I called Luke’s office and the phones were ringing. And I thought, he’s okay. I’ll go pick him up and bring him lunch.”

Mike packed the usual — pepper steak and diced watermelon — and planned on sharing a meal near the towers, to be followed by a “walkabout”, as Mike called it, a ritual stroll around the nearby streets that father and son had enjoyed for years.

Mike and Luke were especially close. Both loved electronics; Mike, now 58 and retired, had been a computer system engineer. He and his son both worked in the World Trade Center — Mike during the 1990s, Luke starting in early 2001. Both revered Mike’s father Ota, now in his eighties and living in Prague. Ota had taken part in the Prague uprising against the Nazis in 1945, Mike in the reform movement during the Prague Spring of 1968. After the Soviet crackdown that year, he escaped to Italy, then, with his wife Jindra, to the United States.

On his way into downtown Manhattan, Rambousek became trapped on the subway. He was disoriented when he looked out the windows to see a station platform (Fulton Street, it turned out) “completely empty”, he says. “It was suddenly pitch black. People tried to stay cool, but it was getting hot in the train, smoke was getting in too. People began banging on the driver’s door.”

The darkness, he later calculated, coincided with the collapse of the south tower. Over the next half hour, the passengers in his car managed to exit and make their way towards a turnstile. As they reached the stairway, Rambousek heard a woman yell, “Oh, my God, we’re going to die here.” The north tower, it turned out, had just collapsed.

“It was like somebody (took) a bucket of ashes and just poured it on me,” he says. “If you remember those figures from Pompeii — I thought, that’s how we’re going to end up.” In the black squall of ash, an overwhelming sensation overtook him, he says, his eyes welling up at the memory of it. While crawling up the stairs on his hands and knees, he recalls, “I suddenly got a feeling that Luke’s gone. I suddenly knew. There must be particles of him in that stuff we were breathing there.”

Rambousek reached into his lunch sack and squeezed the watermelon into his shirt in order to breathe through the wet cloth. He struggled up the stairs, then emerged near a church, hoping to set out again to find Luke, though sensing the search would be futile.

He did not find Luke. Nor did he find out what really happened to Luke until several months later, when he came across an image on the internet. In silence, he clicks his mouse and calls up the picture on his computer. It shows some three dozen World Trade Center occupants, having smashed through the glass, standing clustered on windowsills at the highest levels of the north side of the north tower. Most are standing and seem to be straining for air. Some have collapsed, possibly dragged to the windows. Others appear to be propped up by their colleagues.

A thin ribbon of smoke, blown sideways by the wind, rings the building like a lasso. The long, vertical wall panels that separate the dark window banks give the impression that these hazy figures are clamouring at the bars of a prison. The vague shapes, and the obvious exhaustion and desperation in the faces, suggest a scene out of Dante.

Though Rambousek has no idea how his son met his end that day, he has this remnant of this moment. He holds up a digital print and points to a blur in one of the precarious, top-floor perches. It shows a man with Luke’s dark brown hair, his stocky frame, his bare upper torso. His son, he posits, might have removed his shirt in the extreme heat, or used it to help a colleague handle the smoke. He believes the photo reveals Luke, his arms cradling a woman who is passed out or near death.

Luke, his father says, would not have been the type to jump. Luke was too altruistic a spirit; he had a job to do. “He was holding somebody, so he wouldn’t (have) quit,” says Mike. Jindra agrees. “He had a gold heart,” she says. “He was always like that. He was helping everybody; giving $20 when he got paid to (an old woman) down the street.”

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