25 years ago, two strangers met in the twin towers and escaped on 9/11. What happened next?

He has told the story hundreds of times, but it never seems to fade. If anything, it only becomes more vivid. “Oh, gosh,” exclaims Stanley Praimnath, his voice cracking with an “ooooooh!” as if bearing a weight. “It’s like reliving that day.”Nearly 3,000 people died in the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC on September 11 2001. But Praimnath and another office worker, Brian Clark, were two of only four individuals known to have survived from above the impact zone in either tower of the World Trade Center. The two strangers met in the smoke and fire of the 81st floor of the south tower, and walked down 1,620 steps into the rest of their lives.Their split-second decisions that day made all the difference. Over the next 25 years, both men moved from middle age into old age and retirement. Both enjoyed family weddings and watched children and grandchildren grow. Both saw US presidents come and go as old wars ended and new wars began. They remained friends through it all.They also told their story – countless times – in churches, schools, TV studios and elsewhere. “It could be 800, 1,200, a number like that,” Clark estimates.Praimnath, in a separate interview, muses: “People refer to me as ‘the 9/11 guy’. It doesn’t feel repetitive. It is like unloading baggage from my shoulder, like washing my soul with tears. It is comforting to know that people out there still want to hear.”A cry for helpClark is now 79, living in retirement in northern New Jersey with his wife; he has 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Praimnath, a decade younger, lives in Valley Stream, Long Island; he is a pastor, grandfather and empty-nester who speaks of his survival not as luck, but as an act of God’s grace.Their recollections of 9/11 are still as clear as the cloudless sky over Manhattan on that September morning. Clark, a Canadian who was executive vice-president at the financial brokerage firm Euro Brokers, arrived at his office on the 84th floor around 7.15am. Down on the 81st floor, the Guyanese-born Praimnath had settled into his desk at Fuji Bank, where he worked as a loan officer.At 8.46am, the peace was shattered by a deafening double boom as the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower. Clark recalls: “The lights above me flickered and I spun around in my chair and my peripheral vision caught flames against the window. It was surreal. Two or three seconds later, the flames dissipated and the airspace was filled with singed paper.”Having volunteered as a floor fire warden after the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing, Clark sprang into action. He retrieved an official torch marked “WTC fire safety team” from an overhead cabinet and began shepherding staff toward the building’s central corridor.A man stands in the rubble, calling out asking if anyone needs help, after the collapse of the first World Trade Center Tower on 9/11. Photograph: Doug Kanter/AFP/Getty ImagesCo-workers crowded against the north-facing windows, gazing up nine stories at the raging “ring of fire” consuming their twin building. Thinking the emergency was confined next door, Clark phoned his wife at home and his father in Toronto, reassuring them that he was safe.Three floors below, Praimnath was on the telephone with a colleague in Chicago who had witnessed the north tower explosion on television and begged him to evacuate. He was looking towards the Statue of Liberty when he spotted another plane – so close that he could make out the “U” on the tail of United Airlines Flight 175.“On a given day, it was normal for a plane to zoom by a half a mile to a mile away,” he recalls. “But this plane is coming towards me. I made eye contact. I dropped the phone and screamed and said, ‘Lord, I can’t do this. You take over’. I don’t know why I said that – but thank God I said that.”Praimnath dived under his desk in the foetal position, weeping and praying as the Boeing 767 bore down on his window. “With the most thunderous sound, the plane came and crashed into the building,” he says.The aircraft struck diagonally at 9.03am, cutting through the 77th to 85th floors. The impact flattened entire walls, severed electrical wiring and sent a shock wave of jet fuel and debris through Fuji Bank’s offices.Praimnath says: “That big orange glow that you see there – I’m stuck in the middle of it. Upon impact, it looks like a demolition crew came with a big giant wrecking ball and ripped the entire office. Every wall is flattened. I remember a large chunk of the plane was broken off and stuck in the office doorway.“I remember flames all around me, as if somebody took a giant bag of cement, threw it in the air and I can’t breathe. The floor above me collapsed and it’s hovering over the desk and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to die. It’s gonna totally collapse, crush me to death, or I’m gonna get sucked out by the air pressure.’ You can hear the sound.”At the memory, he sets his teeth and blows down the phone to recreate the terrifying whoosh.The point of impact where a plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11. Photograph: Jeff Christensen/ReutersThree floors higher, Clark was standing on the west side of the 84th floor when the aircraft sliced into the building’s eastern trading floor. “Our room exploded,” he says. “Everything came out of the ceiling – air conditioning ducts, lighting, the whole works. For five seconds the building swayed to the west and then it swayed back to vertical. For those 10 seconds I was quite terrified, thinking the building was going to roll over. But it didn’t.”When the tower steadied, Clark gathered a group of six or seven colleagues and led them toward the central core. The impact had demolished stairwells B and C, but stairwell A, tucked furthest away on the north-west side, somehow remained open.The group began descending stairwell A. On the 81st floor landing, they were halted by a man and woman coming up the stairs. “She was insistent we not go down,” Clark says. “‘No, no, no. You can’t go down,’ she said and, because she stopped us, it allowed me to hear a call for help from within the 81st floor, a muffled cry: ‘Help, I’m buried. I can’t breathe.’”Brothers for lifeClark squeezed through an opening where the door frame had been ripped from the drywall and stepped into the dark 81st floor, guided by Praimnath’s desperate shouts.Inside the office, Praimnath prayed for rescue. “I can still remember the flames encroaching and I’m screaming, ‘Lord, send somebody, I don’t want to die.’ I’m crawling away from the flames, dodging all the cables that were hanging in the ceiling, short-circuiting because the sprinkler system came on,” he recalls.“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m gonna die.’ Somebody had a flashlight on the other end of the floor. The person’s saying, ‘I’ll wait for you’, but I couldn’t hear because I got temporarily deaf when the plane hit the building. As I’m crawling away, the flames are coming closer, licking up the office space.“I got to the wall. The person’s saying, ‘Bang on the wall, I know where you are’. I hit the wall and the person says, ‘Climb over there.’ It had a hollow ceiling, a 10-foot sheetrock wall, a drywall. I remember that so vividly.”Clark’s torchlight had picked out a hand protruding from a hole in the 10-foot sheetrock wall. He grasped Praimnath’s hands and hauled him over the partition. The desk beneath Clark gave way, and both men crashed to the floor in a heap.New York City firefighters wear face masks as they prepare to join other firefighters in battling blazes and helping injured people after the World Trade Center buildings collapse on 9/11. Photograph: Anthony Correia/ReutersClark recalls: “We fell and he gave me a big kiss. I said, ‘What’s going on, what are you doing?’ I stuck out my hand and said, ‘I’m Brian Clark.’ He says, ‘I’m Stanley Praimnath; we’ll be brothers for life.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have any siblings.’”Clark noticed that Praimnath had a puncture wound on his palm, while his own hand was cut and bleeding from moving debris. Clark recalls his instinctive gesture of solidarity: “I smooshed our hands together and said, ‘In fact, we’ll be blood brothers for life. Come on, buddy. Let’s go home.’”When they returned to the stairwell, Clark made the critical decision to ignore the warning of the woman on the landing. Pointing his torch down the staircase, he saw no flames. Clark and Praimnath turned downward. Most of the colleagues who had been with Clark, however, chose to head upward, believing safety lay on the roof. They died in the collapse. At Euro Brokers, 61 of Clark’s colleagues perished.Lives intertwinedWhen Clark and Praimnath finally emerged on to the street, police and emergency workers yelled at them to run. Minutes later, the south tower collapsed in a cascade of steel and concrete, sending a rolling cloud of debris surging through lower Manhattan. The two men dived inside 42 Broadway to escape the choking dust.In the chaos, Praimnath reached into his pocket and handed Clark a business card from a small home business he and his wife operated. Separated in the confusion, Clark used the number on that card to reach Praimnath late that evening, confirming that both had made it home.While Clark suffered remarkably little long-term psychological distress – describing his lack of post-traumatic stress as an unearned “gift” – Praimnath’s return to the living was fraught.Arriving home on Long Island on the evening of 9/11, Praimnath says he suffered profound memory loss. “I wanted to know what this strange woman was doing in our house with two children, not going home. I refused to go to bed because this strange woman was in that room.”An American flag flies near the base of the destroyed World Trade Center in New York on 9/11. Photograph: Peter Morgan/REUTERSHis wife, Jennifer, quietly cared for him without judgment. “She would hobble me into the bathroom, fill the tub with warm water and