Melissa Doi

Thousands of New Yorkers yesterday retreated to the privacy of their offices, studies, or bedrooms to click onto the Internet and listen to the last words of a woman they never met. They were the words of Melissa Doi, who was trapped on the 83rd floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center when, at 9:17 a.m. on September 11, 2001, she reached a 911 emergency operator. Doi's was the only civilian voice heard in the batch of 911 tapes released yesterday. Her pleas were made public because her voice had already been introduced as evidence in the trial earlier this year of Zacarias Moussaoui. Yesterday, her voice testified to something else — to the way in which the unique spirit of New Yorkers allowed glimmers of light to shine through even on that darkest of sunny summer days.

The written transcript is wrenching, the tape difficult to listen to more than once. "Are they going to be able to get somebody up here?" Doi asks. "Of course, ma'am. We're coming up for you," the female operator replies. Later on, as smoke thickens at Doi's location, her desperation rises. "I'm going to die, aren't I?" she says. "No, no, no, no, no," the operator says. "Ma'am, say your prayers. You've got to think positive because you've got to help people get off the floor." Melissa Doi's words are heard only for about four minutes of the 24-minute tape."Ma'am, stay calm," the operator gently repeats again and again as she tries to comfort Doi, even as her words are met only with a chilling silence on the other end of the line.

Doi had marked her 32nd birthday less than two weeks before that morning. She was a manager at IQ Financial Systems. Friends writing on September 11 memorial Web sites paint a picture of a woman of spirit and kind heart. One former co-worker described her as "the type of person you never forget," with an infectious smile and never in a bad mood. A friend from grade school wrote that Doi was "always so sweet and beautiful."

The operator, meantime, has not been identified. Thus, New Yorkers know her, for now at least, only for her consoling voice even amidst her professionalism — as she's heard comforting Doi, she's coolly collecting information that might have helped rescuers had the damage not been so great as to preclude any rescue. We may never know whether these two women encountered each other before that single phone call; in a city this size, the odds are against it. But the operator was New York at its best, both compassionate and pragmatic, and unwilling to give up so long as there was any hope onto which to hold.

Five years on, New Yorkers still catch themselves longing for the firefighters to arrive on the 83rd floor, hardly willing to accept that what help might have arrived ultimately was in vain. Doi's voice tolls out as a reminder of the human tragedy of that day. Yet the tape is more than that. It is also a reminder that even on September 11, the city's darkest day, as airplanes flew into buildings and fields and as Lower Manhattan was blanketed with the clouds of a new war, one New Yorker was there to reach out to another. The tape is a reminder that the terrorists succeeded in breaking the city's buildings and taking lives, but not in robbing New York of its humanity.