To Reach the Clouds Read Online Free PDF Page A

that has been resisting me for days: today, several employees punch in 7-7-4-3-5 three feet from me, without so much as a suspicious glance. Whenever a guard surprises me, my infirmity transforms him into a Samaritan who escorts the lost soul all the way to the exit.
    The crutches—a trick to remember.
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    Two days later, when I am able to limp around freely, again I grab the sticks for an improvised premiere: a middle-of the-night sneak scouting.
    It’s not easy to get a cab to WTC on 96th Street at 3 a.m. on a rainy Saturday. Two drivers refuse to take me when they learn where I am going—“No one lives down there”—but a third driver does not ask questions, does not say anything, although he stares at me in his rearview mirror at each red light.

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    The door slams; the taxi speeds away.
    I am facing the unfinished commuter tunnel that drills beneath the construction site to reach the underground entrance to both towers. In the rain and dimness it looks like a gigantic black mouth. At my back, a freezing draft whirls across the deserted avenue. Above me, the March wind howls. The towers, mostly dark—how rare—loom before me like a vampire’s castle. My trembling silhouette proceeds through the tunnel.
    Through the glass panels of the north tower’s lobby, I can see the guard at his desk, leaning half asleep on the logbook I know well.
    I pace back and forth in the shadows for an hour, drenched and frozen, before I decide to risk the wolf’s den.
    I hobble through the revolving glass door, reach the desk, lean my crutches against it, nonchalantly pick up the ballpoint pen, and copy the last entry. I give the guard a little wave and direct myself, light-footed, toward the nearest elevator.
    Shit! My crutches!
    I turn about with a smile, hop back to the desk, pick up the crutches, and disappear like a true handicapped man.
    The guard does not react.
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    Several times during the night, I have to run back downstairs to retrieve the crutches forgotten on the floor where I was—oh so successfully—scribbling my spy plans.

AN ARGUMENT, A FRESCO, A FRIEND
    The day before my departure, Jim comes up into the south tower with me. We climb the stairs silently, so as not to attract the attention of the sentinels stationed on the 44th and 78th skylobby landings. At some point we hear a guard descending quickly toward us, walkie-talkie blasting. We have no time to retreat, no place to hide. My reflex is to test my two-people-passing-in-front-of-someone-whose-job-it-is-to-arrest-them hypothesis, which states: Do not slow down. Disregard the hostile presence to the point of
not acknowledging it—bumping is allowed. Draw your accomplice into a mammoth festival of laughter—tears in your eyes, as out of control and loud as possible: if you’re good, the enemy may join in. Conversely, engage your co-conspirator in a verbal battle in apparent full swing, each of you roaring your differences on the subject at hand, spit flying, gesticulating angrily; if you act your parts well, your true antagonist may step aside to let you pass.

    With no time to warn Jim, I go for the loud argument:
    â€œWhat the hell do you mean, Tuesday? You told Gerard Tuesday? Are you crazy? Everything is arranged for Wednesday! You’re such an idiot! You really said Tuesday? Answer me!”
    â€œTu-tuesday?” stutters Jim. But immediately he gets it and jumps into the improvisation.
    Screaming at each other, we pass.
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    Closer to the roof, before we reach the floors still under construction, we give ourselves a well-deserved break to celebrate our victory, dry the sweat from our foreheads, and gather our
thoughts. I pull out a black permanent marker and draw the facade of a gothic cathedral on the plaster wall of the stairwell, at eye level. Between the two towers, I add a line with a wirewalker on it and, underneath, an inscription: NOTRE DAME, 26 JUIN 1971. Under that, and at the