Twenty five years ago today, a man on the 81st floor of the South Tower looked out his window and watched the second plane come straight at him at eye level. Stanley Praimnath worked for Fuji Bank. Born in Trinidad, immigrant, family man, a loan officer with an office on 81. When the North Tower was hit at 8:46, he and about twenty coworkers got out and went down to the lobby. There they were told the South Tower was fine, that it was the other building, and that they should go back to work. So Stanley got in an express elevator and rode all the way back up to the 81st floor. At 9:03 he was at his desk on the phone with a colleague in Chicago who was telling him to get out of the building. He looked up toward the harbor and saw an airliner coming at him. Not above him. At him, level with his window, big enough that he could see the markings. He got under his desk and prayed. Flight 175 hit the South Tower between the 77th and 85th floors. The wing came through his office and the tip of it stopped in his doorway, about twenty feet from where he was crouched. The floor above collapsed down onto his desk. He was buried, deafened, and pinned in the dark with fire around him. He got himself out from under the desk and started yelling. Brian Clark worked for Euro Brokers three floors up on 84. He was one of the company's fire wardens, which meant he had a flashlight and a whistle and the job of getting people to the stairs. He had a group with him in Stairway A heading down. Around the 81st floor they ran into people coming up who told them the stairs below were impassable, full of smoke and flame, and that the only way out was the roof. Most of Clark's group turned around and climbed. They died. There was no roof rescue. The roof doors were locked and no helicopter could have landed in that smoke. Clark did not go up, because while everyone was arguing he heard a voice through the wall yelling for help. He left the group and went toward the sound with his flashlight. He found a gap in the shattered drywall and a man on the other side of it. Praimnath asked him whether he was a Christian and asked him to pray. Then Stanley punched and clawed at the broken wall from his side while Brian tore at it from the other, and Clark reached through and got hold of him and hauled him over the debris. Praimnath came through and grabbed him and would not let go, and called him brother. Then the two of them went down Stairway A together, past fire, past water pouring down the steps, through 81 floors, stopping to check on people along the way. They got out of the South Tower and kept moving and were near Trinity Church when the building came down behind them at 9:59. Almost everyone at or above the impact zone in that tower died. A very small number got out, and they got out through that one stairway, and Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath were two of them. If Clark had gone up with his group, he dies. If he ignores the shouting, he probably still lives, and Stanley Praimnath does not. They are still friends twenty five years later. Praimnath became a pastor. Clark retired to New Jersey and has grandchildren. They still talk about it, and they still call each other brother, because a man who owed nothing to a stranger stopped in a collapsing building to find out who was yelling.