Routine and Responsibility

There is something particularly cruel about the ordinariness of the day of the morning.

September 11, 2001, swelled quietly over Lower Manhattan like an ordinary late-summer Tuesday, which New Yorkers never paid any heed to; visibility was perfect, the harbor was flat and bright with sunlight glistening on the water, and the air was already warming up. It was the day of the local election; children were being taken to spend their first full week at school. The concourse under the World Trade Center was bustling with coffee stalls, shoe shine, and newspaper stands as on any ordinary Tuesday, and the elevators of the Twin Towers were taking up to 50,000 people to their offices in several waves. Nothing indicated the fact that this day would be anything special or different from an ordinary day. This is the first thing survivors say, and it is worth mentioning: the disaster came casually and without warning.

On that morning, two men did not know each other but were taken to the South Tower—separated by three floors. They lived their lives from completely different perspectives—one believing, the other engineering, and neither having any idea of the other person's existence. At the end of the day, both men will owe their lives to each other. Stanley Praimnath made a long journey to get to the eighty-first floor.

He was born in British Guiana, located in the north of South America, and was raised in a unique environment where people had nothing. His job was a teacher, which suited a man who believes in duty and who considers himself responsible for other people. However, the most important turning point in his life was not his profession. In 1982, he became a Christian. It happened because of a woman he loved who became his future wife—the daughter of a pastor—as well as the calling that would never leave him throughout his life. Consequently, he became an associate pastor in due course of events.

By the year 2001, Praimnath found himself in an unlikely circumstance: the offices of one of the largest Japanese banks, where he was promoted to assistant vice president. For Praimnath, faith was not something that he could leave behind in the office lobby. He had a Bible on his desk in plain sight, and he read it in the presence of his coworkers. When the casual lottery pools were held in the office, Praimnath always declined—not in reproach, but out of principle. Before long, people started respecting him for his choice instead of confronting him. Young colleagues quickly found their way to Praimnath. For instance, Matthew Wilson and John Menix named him "Uncle Stan" because they wanted his guidance, which had nothing to do with work. Praimnath would encourage his colleagues on their way to work and share some thoughts with them. He believed that his job was a work of ministry and did not see it as a contradiction. The word that guided his life is the same word that also guided him during that unpleasant time of his life: responsibility. He has always been a person who has been responsible for others and has understood this as a normal practice.

Brian Clark originated from the north and from a distinct type of assurance altogether.

He was raised in Toronto and was influenced, as he puts it, not by teachings but by one very bright episode of grace. His grandmother, at the end of her life, being in a state of dementia, suddenly gazed at him and uttered, "God bless you, Brian." Very shortly after, she died. The phrase remained with him for many years, serving as a kind of soft balance—in his opinion, a cause of his naturally optimistic mindset. It was not a creed. It was more of a personality trait.

He learned to think concretely and methodically. He was educated in engineering and obtained an MBA at the University of Toronto, thinking in terms of engineers’ thinking structures, load paths, and relationships between elements. Where do the stairs lead? What is above and below? How does the building function? He started his career in an engineering company, and soon after he was employed by a brokerage company called Euro Brokers, which later moved to New York, acquiring a high floor in the South Tower.

The job done in that place was quick, energetic in work, and community-like. Clark compared the trading platform to some kind of sports competition whereby the drug was running through the veins of people; the voices were overlapping, and trading was happening all the time. The business was easy to understand and immense in scale: Euro Brokers was making great deals in transactions between many financial centers and receiving mere pennies—in other words, fifty cents for the transaction of one million dollars in the period of one day. Unfortunately, people have no idea that the job provides great opportunities for making money. Looking at the beginning of the day, Clark was not surprised at anything. It was a normal day. Nothing was frightening; nothing indicated anything unusual in life.

It was also the case with Praimnath, residing on the 81st floor of the building. That day he had made one small, important decision that was going to change his life forever. He sent his worker Delise back home despite the fact that she was at work. He also thought about the other incident that occurred in the same building in 1993, when the bomb was placed in the parking lot. In this sense, everybody remembered that the building had survived the attack, thus being confident in its strength.

The fact that needs to be established before we go any further with this story is that two men are going through a morning that is so routine that it is hardly noticeable; in the possession of their minds are the individual constructs designed to determine the fate of the next hour. From among the two men, Praimnath brings with him his faith and a feeling of responsibility for other people, while Clark carries an architect's plan of the building and a blessing given to him by his grandmother. Neither of them knows the other, and neither of them is aware of the events that are going to take place soon.

It is this average and boring nature of those events that makes us think that something deeper is hidden in the text. The memory fades. The ordinary and average are often ignored and cannot be remembered since it is considered not so important as far as memory is concerned. This will help us to understand the things which these people had to lose.

The usual day came to an abrupt stop at 8:46 in the morning as American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower. In the South Tower, Clark and his co-workers gathered at their windows and in front of the TV screens to witness the fire and debris spiraling into the clear sky. The question they had on their minds was whether this was just a freak accident involving an aircraft that went off course. The public address system assured them that there was no cause for concern and to continue with their work. Praimnath heard the same message from his office, which was on level eighty-one.

This steady state of mind lasted for approximately sixteen minutes, after which they found out otherwise.

The Interruption of the World

Sixteen minutes is not a short time when someone is staying by a window seeing the destruction of the wrong building.

Clark, the engineer, was doing what an engineer is supposed to do—trying to get the truth straight. The facts were tragic—the North Tower, which was barely a hundred feet across the plaza from where he stood, had a jagged hole on upper floors gushing out thick black smoke and blazing fire. Meanwhile, there was a calm announcement from an authority which stated that nothing was wrong with Clark’s own building. Some employees had already made up their minds to go towards the stairs and elevators. The expectation by the authority was that everyone else would also remain in their offices. That was the first bitter lesson the day taught.

At precisely 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 flew over the harbor at a low altitude, turning steeply into the South Tower. Praimnath observed it approach. He was speaking on the telephone from the eighty-first floor when he looked up through the window and witnessed, simultaneously and clearly, the grey underside of a plane filling a portion of the glass, making the letters on the plane visible as it flew towards him at an extremely high speed. There can be a kind of terrifying experience that surpasses time, and this is the experience. It is claimed that whenever confronted with an event that the brain cannot comprehend, it has two possibilities—either to freeze in helplessness or take an action. Praimnath simply dropped the phone, shouted “God,” and crawled beneath the desk, trying to hide his whereabouts as much as he was capable of.

The plane crashed into the tower on the floors of the stricken tower, including the section in which he was situated. Later studies estimated that the crash site was in the South Tower between floors 77 and 85; therefore, it can be considered statistically correct that both Praimnath on the 81st floor and Clark on the 84th floor were both hit by the aftermath of the attack. The plane did not simply hit the building; rather, it crashed into it, fracturing into pieces while causing an explosion that destroyed everything in its path by sending flames and debris through the floors of the building. As a wing crashed into Praimnath's office, it also stuck in debris only a few feet away from his position under the table. The ceiling collapsed, the lights went off, and the floor shook while partitions came tumbling down to form one single block of wallboards, wires, metal, and dust. Praimnath survived but got stuck under the debris, all alone for the time being. In this very moment, the two lives finally started coming together.

On the eighty-fourth floor, the impact registered as violent disorientation. While the eighty-fourth floor did not suffer direct impact as did the eighty-first, the entire structure swayed at the blow. Later, Clark calculated that the building swayed for quite some time at its peak, after which it shuddered back to its rightful position—the structure had merely performed its intended function of dissipating the lateral shock and realigning itself. The fluidity of the movement made perfect sense for an engineer who saw the action for what it was, as flexible and not incapacitated in any way.

At one point, Clark was forced to make a fatal decision.

As a designated fire warden, Clark had a whistle and a flashlight and the knowledge of what to do. The chaos around him was unique, as people scurried without knowing what to do: smoke rolled in and different hallways became impassable. Many of the people around him wanted to go up to the roof, thinking of being rescued by helicopter—this idea would never materialize. At the same time, Clark was able to understand what was wrong. He was aware of all three stairwells available to him and made the only logical decision—he opted for stairwell A, which fortunately had survived the plane strike.

This was indeed the narrowest path; at least, eighteen individuals among all the people in or above the place of collision on that day in the South Tower were the only survivors. Most of those eighteen individuals used Stairway A to escape. The fact that those eighteen people were alive while over six hundred people failed to do so depended on their choice of door they used, on the time they chose to leave, and on their decision to follow their own instincts and judgment instead of public announcements.

Clark was among a small team of the individuals who made their way downstairs with a whistle and a flashlight. When he got to the eighty-first floor, he came to the place where his instincts told him to leave, but he clearly heard something that was not associated with the sounds of the falling building.

It was a voice calling for help from somewhere across the wall.

Acoustic Localization and the Wrist-Lock

To comprehend what transpired next, consider it in the same manner as Brian Clark's brain operates—spatially, acoustically, and structurally—because that very process was what helped to save Stanley Praimnath's existence.

Praimnath, trapped in the wreckage of the eighty-first floor, was unable to see much at all. The office he had worked in for many years had ceased to be a known place. Instead, it had become a low, black, burning pit filled with dust, with him caught in the middle. The aircraft wing was within his reach too. There was nothing else left for him to do in his situation. He started praying and calling for help. He screamed, rattled anything that could make sounds, and sent out his voice into the depths of darkness, hoping that sound could travel somewhere where the sight is helpless.

The main character of the story is the mechanism of human auditory perception, which is called acoustic localization. Since the victim cannot be seen but can be heard, the rescuer can listen to the voice behind the separation of the ruins, thus locating the source of the sound.

The moment this statement refers to Praimnath's role in the entire affair, Clark became the listener who managed to stop in the situation when it would have been much simpler and safer to run down the stairs. Now, when he reached the impact floor, instead of hurrying downstairs, Clark stopped to find out the source of the voice calling him through the dark rubble.

The equation of Gary Praimnath's inquiry and Brian Clark's act of listening and paying attention to the voice of the stranger leads to the realization of the idea that what they didn't know was that they were beginning their so-called communication, whereby sound replaces vision and serves as a means of finding. Instead of using their eyes, both men rely on the directions given by voice, traveling in darkness illuminated by Clark's flashlight almost uselessly. In response to Clark's summons, Praimnath took upon himself the challenge of inching towards the voice in the ruins of the building.

From either end, they pulled at it. Clark was tearing up the wallboard, squeezing the pieces apart, while Praimnath was pushing and pulling from inside. And it was then, through a ragged hole in the wall, that the arm of someone appeared.

Praimnath reached through that gap and got hold of Clark’s hand.

It’s a second fact that takes place in the story and should also be mentioned with its name: the wristlock. It was neither a nice handshake nor a light pull. Clark got hold of Praimnath’s wrist and forearm, and Praimnath did the same with Clark because they knew how important the strength of their hands was for them at that moment. So, they got hold of each other, and Clark started pulling, and Praimnath followed through the ripped wall in a single move, coming out of the tomb of the eighty-first floor, into the stairway, into the air, and into the company of the other person alive.

They hugged. After all these years of being total strangers to each other, the two men had suddenly emerged onto the same spot in life, where one thought about the other and could not forget the hug.

Praimnath had talked for a lifetime about the Creator who takes people out of the mire, and here he was, taken out of the mire by the Canadian with a flashlight and a whistle, without realizing and thinking that it was an allegorical expression. For Praimnath, it was about reality rather than about metaphor. It was clear to the man of values that Brian Clark had not been an accident but a divine answer.

Brian Clark, on the other hand, thought about it in simpler terms, but he had the same understanding of the situation. He would say afterwards that it is necessary to use your skills to help other people, believing that it does not matter what gift you have; when there is a need, it will be of benefit for others.

Two individuals, one handshake, two interpretations of the same occasion. This is the core of the essay and the essential idea behind it: the spiritual and the physical, the subjective experience and the objective report, contained in the hand of one single person in darkness.

There was no time for them to relish their reunion. The building above was on fire, and the structure was weak below, which was evident to both men in different ways: Praimnath felt it in his heart, believing that it was their time to leave, while Clark realized it based on his engineering experience that the building was beginning to make a strange sound.

They found the staircases and went down the stairs, which they were able to do due to their experience, as it would play a key role in their descent of eighty-one floors in darkness amidst the wreck of an ordinary Tuesday and the sound made by the tower collapsing around them.

Though they did not realize it, they had less time than it had seemed.

The Descent

The concept of 81 flights becomes apparent only once you are inside them.

Stairway A flowed downward through the heart of the South Tower in a constant, relentless sequence—half a flight, a landing, a turn, half a flight, a landing, a turn—and Praimnath and Clark settled into this rhythm together, in complete synchronization as they traveled through the dark vertical tunnel. The stairwell was nothing like the clean and empty slide of a fire drill. In certain spots it was intact and orderly; in other places it was filled with smoke, covered with water from burst pipes and sprinkler systems, and littered with junk and garbage from an office building wrecked beyond recognition. The lights in the stairwell were sporadic. Most of the way was navigated by Clark, thanks to his flashlight, as well as his memory of the floor plan, and thanks to Praimnath, who had just escaped from the wreckage and was full of adrenaline and prayers.

They were not alone in their descent, as they met several other people—survivors, colleagues, strangers, and other people, some going up and some going down—as their crisis psychology played havoc with them. As they reached one of the landings, they met a big woman coming up, who told them earnestly that they should not go down since the way below was blocked and they must go back up instead. Once more, the day tested the difference between confident statements and correct information. Clark, balancing her conviction with his spatial knowledge about the building and simple logic that going up would only lead him to fire on the roof, decided to continue his descent. It was the same intuition that had led him to select Stairs A in the very beginning.

In the journey down, there was a moment of quietness, which, later on, turned out to be crucial to the plotline of the tale. Somewhere in the middle floors, far away from the floor where the collision was, they stopped. Praimnath was exhausted; he needed to reach out to a colleague of Clark; he felt

the necessity of contacting someone outside even during the disaster. They located the phone and made a call, which was a regular achievement of a human being, as he was informing someone about his survival and the start of the descent. It is the scene on a small scale, against the background of the events of the day, two men being at rest in one of the landings of the staircases while the buildings are still standing, but still, it is the scene that might disappear from history without any deliberate effort to preserve it: the minute before the final breakdown, the phone call that proved to exist outside the terror of the tower.

Following this, they proceeded down, counting down from 50, 40, 30… Closing on the possibility of giving ground. Once they had dropped below the zone of impact, the mood in the stairway shifted. Firefighters were now climbing, passing them on their way into the building the two men were running from. This is something Praimnath emphasizes in quite a moving way and needs to be stated in such a way: as the people were escaping towards safety, the first responders were getting closer to danger with packs weighing 60, 70, or 80 pounds, getting up to where men carrying nothing could only collapse. Firemen. Policemen. Emergency workers. They were going past the ones escaping and climbing higher, into the building that more and more of them must have been guessing would not survive. Many of those passing Praimnath and Clark on those stairs were people who would not come back down. The credit survivors owe to these people is not something sentimental. It is a question of simple mathematics. Some chose to ascend to let others escape and paid dearly for that decision.

When they reached the bottom, the stairs led them into the disorder of the concourse and plaza areas, an area that looked nothing like the shiny lobbies of the start of the day. They were met with water, debris, and unsettling light signals of the space, which had changed a lot in less than sixty minutes. Emergency teams were helping the survivors to escape, taking them away from the place where they had just survived and pushing them towards the streets. Clark and Praimnath were led out and into the openness of New York City.

It was done. Two total strangers, just one and a half hours ago, located three stories higher than them before, had exited the building together, reaching the streets covered with dust and noise. They had conquered over eighty stories in fire. They were classified with the group of eighteen people who had survived.

Subsequently, at the time of 9:59 a.m.—less than sixty minutes after Flight 175 hit the building and right after the two of them passed through the exit—the South Tower collapsed.

Collapse, Aftermath, and the Argument for Memory

The disaster is the point where the two sets of words come across a minor hitch, because there is no correct linguistic, logical, or spiritual structure for describing one’s experience of seeing a 110-story construction hit the ground from his/her distance.

Neither Praimnath nor Clark was completely safe when it happened to them. They were clinging to the fence close to the base of the towers when the terrible thing started happening. The entire structure seemed to move in a manner that no building should move: swaying and then collapsing down. The loud noise eclipsed any other sound and became part of the terrible phenomenon described by all witnesses of that day, which cannot be expressed in words. Praimnath calls it a smoke tsunami, which is a very appropriate term for the phenomenon, with its vigorous and engulfing grey wave engulfing everything in its way, i.e., streets, cars, and even people.

In that dark place, Praimnath was again assisted by an unknown person. A certain Albert de Leon found him—a person who introduced himself as the senior lawyer of a French bank, who seemed to know where to go when nobody could see anything, who took him by the hand and led him through the haze towards Brooklyn Bridge, away from the place of disaster. It was evident to Praimnath that at every crossroad where he could have died, a stranger appeared who had exactly the ability he was missing. Brian Clark provided him with a map, and Albert de Leon helped him to find a way in the complete darkness. Later, a nurse took care of him, and later somebody gave him food and water. Pranthanath considered the events above as a sequence of extraordinary coincidences, which were not accidental but deliberate. Even if a reader does not share the author's point of view, the fact remains the same—Prajmanth survived due to the fact of the assistance of another person at each separate stage of his failure.

Clark’s travels took him away from the water through the ad hoc evacuation process of lower Manhattan to Jersey City and finally home. Nevertheless, for Clark, the reckoning was coming on the other side of merely surviving. Euro Brokers, the brokerage firm that had its trading floor that morning running like an Olympic event, lost sixty-one employees. Sixty-one. It was the people coming down from the hundredth floor who gave the same honor to those emerging from the tower, but Clark, having come down by the now-familiar A stairway, would carry that figure for the rest of his life. Ron was a colleague who survived but was badly burned, after whom there was a lapse in news, and Jose Marrero was a coworker who died in the towers but kept coming back to Clark afterward. He had such vivid dreams about Jose that he concluded the mind had dealt with grief and farewells and said goodbye to the deceased after all.

And even here we see that the story is bent toward a continuation. Within days of the event, the survivors from Euro Brokers gathered again at the W Hotel, and within hours, they resumed the trading business with the help of equipment and lines rushed to them by companies like Dell and New York Telephone. By Wednesday, the day after the towers went down, the company had started generating profits again. The fact that one of the companies that lost sixty-one of its people continued with its normal life within twenty-four hours resists all kinds of easy sentimentalizations.

In Praimnath's case, the consequences lasted a long time and affected him physically as well. After moving away from the crash zone, he had to fight leukemia and then have a quadruple bypass. He accepted these two challenges in life just like he accepted the eighty-first floor, with faith that they were more pieces of evidence proving that he was saved for some specific purpose. He found out that his purpose was to tell.

In fact, he considered himself to be just one among eighteen survivors. According to him, he could not pay the debt in silence. That is why he started telling the whole story about the airplane in the window, the voice in the dark, the hand coming through the wall, the unknown people in the smoke, and so on, to tell people how strong the grace of God is and make sure the tragedy is not forgotten.

That is to say that it is their insistence, having gone on completely separate paths in their lives, that brings them back together again—because, in the end, it’s basically the same dialogue in two different languages. Praimnath maintained that September 11 is to be understood as a matter of faith and gratitude and should therefore be officially established as a Day of National Remembrance, with its stories brought to the next generations who were not yet born when the towers fell and have to remember the present reality. Clark, the engineer, proposed certain lessons on how things should be perceived by a man whose thinking is based on structures and probabilities: that the future cannot be predicted with certainty; that the only wise way in answering this uncertainty is behaving appropriately in the current situation; and that the abilities of a person—spatial, intellectual, and spiritual ones, for instance—should be used for helping other people.

These are not contradictory ideas. Instead, they are essentially the same notion viewed from two very unconventional perspectives in life. They derive from the altar above and below the table of drafts but share the same purpose that this essay is aimed at attaining: it must be established once and for all that everything that happened on those floors is immune to the passing of time.

This is the principal justification for the significance of digital delineation and for the melancholy, because it is impossible to fully convey the meaning of that incredible morning with words. Although it is rather easy to formulate the story, it is impossible to spell out the geometric parameters to bring it to life—for instance, the distance from Praimnath's place to the wall where he put his hand; the distance of the staircase to which 18 people managed to walk while hundreds of others could not; and the relationship between the voice that is being heard today on the 81st floor and the action of the engineer that has stopped on that very floor during his escape and started listening. The more people hear the testimony about the 81st floor, the less they remember about it. However, when it comes to creating the memory physically, when one can reestablish a building that the eighteen people managed to leave, the memory starts living forever. The descendants in the future will not be able to hear the voices belonging to Praimnath or his colleague Clark. But they would be able to see the place where those events took place, the chance to walk the ground where they stood and feel how narrow the gap was.

Eighteen lucky souls who managed to leave the territory of the South Tower. Only two of them managed to find each other amidst all the chaos, and they stepped out together into the world that has changed forever.