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tanks and sprayed over the floors below, a film of fuel covering stairwells, offices, and elevator shafts “at a rate of more than a hundred miles an hour. Curtains, upholstery, and carpets soaked up the fuel like wicks.” 2
    Fumes are floating along the air currents inside the building and infiltrating the ventilation system, so everyone in the stairwell can smell it now. I am the first to say it out loud. “I think the smell is jet fuel. Maybe an airplane hit our building?”
    The people around us talk it over, trying to figure out what happened. We speculate that maybe there was some sort of midair collision, causing the plane to plow into our building. But we are not sure.

    Actually, this isn’t the first time a plane hit a skyscraper in New York. In 1945, a B-25 bomber rammed into the Empire State Building, back then the world’s tallest building. The pilot, a decorated veteran of more than one hundred combat missions, got lost in thick fog and slammed into the 79th floor at two hundred miles per hour. In a stroke of luck, the accident occurred on a Saturday morning without too many people in the building. Still, fourteen people died, along with the pilot and two passengers. The damage was extensive, with the bomber blasting an eighteen-by-twenty-foot hole in the building, spewing plane parts, and shattering windows. In addition, when the bomber hit, its fuel tanks exploded and started a fire on the 79th floor.
    Just like us in the World Trade Center, those Empire State Building survivors took to the stairs, and some of them descended seventy flights to get out. But rescuers also used the still-working elevators for evacuation. One miraculous survivor story emerged after an Empire State Building elevator operator named Betty Lou Oliver was thrown out of her post by the impact of the plane crash and badly burned. Betty was given first aid then was put into a different elevator and sent down to meet a waiting ambulance. Disaster struck when the elevator cables, weakened by the crash, snapped, and the car plummeted a thousand feet to the basement. Strangely enough, Betty survived and was recovered when rescuers cut a hole in the car to get her out. 3

    The Empire State Building survived the crash and the fire, and the beautiful old skyscraper still stands. But I am certain the hole in our building must be much larger than just eighteen by twenty feet.
    An airplane crashed into the building. Why? How could this happen? The thunderstorm is long past, and September 11 is a clear autumn day, no fog. With instrumentation and air-traffic control, no airplane should have come anywhere near the World Trade Center. What is going on?
    As we walk down the stairs, the sound of the initial explosion reverberates in my head. The crowd on the stairs is large enough that many of the usual echoes I would hear while going between floors are muffled or gone altogether. The walls of the stairwell are the boundaries of our little world. Although our senses are on high alert, inside our cocoon it feels natural, almost hypnotic, just to continue to walk down ten stairs, turn, and then walk down the next set.

    While this situation was unfamiliar, navigating down the stairwell wasn’t too much of a challenge. But learning how to ride a bicycle blind was. When I was about six years old, a girl named Cindy Loveck moved into the neighborhood during the summer. The Lovecks lived across the street, a few doors down, and Cindy and I became friends. Cindy had a full-sized bike and rode it up and down the streets of our high desert town of Palmdale.
    One day she offered to let me try out her bike. I didn’t hesitate. After several attempts that included a number of falls and scrapes, I learned how to balance the bike on two wheels.
    But once I learned to ride the bike, I had to figure out how to avoid obstacles, so I set out to use the tricks I’d learned while driving my little pedal car. Just as I learned how to hear the coffee table, I learned