Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  Secondly, your ears burn as the fireball passes the window, then everything is swathed in thick smoke; it seeps from the floor, the walls, the elevator shafts, the air vents; tracking down an incredible number of openings designed to let in fresh air and now doing the reverse: the ventilation system becomes a fumigation system. Immediately, people start to cough and cover their mouths with napkins. This time, I remember the existence of Jerry and David: all three of us were huddled under the table. I doused napkins in the jug of orange juice before giving one to each of them.

  “Breathe through the cloth. It’s a test: they do this kind of thing in New York—they call it a fire drill. There’s nothing to worry about, darlings, actually it’s pretty fun, isn’t it?”

  “Dad, did the plane crash into the tower, Dad, WHASHAPPNINGDAAD?”

  “No, of course not,” I smile. “Don’t worry, boys, it’s all special effects, but I wanted it to be a surprise: it’s a new attraction, the plane was a hologram—George Lucas did the special effects, they do a false alert here every morning. Really scared you though, huh?”

  “But, Dad, the whole place is shaking, and the waitresses are scared and they’re screaming…”

  “Don’t worry, they use hydraulics to make the restaurant shake, like they do in theme parks. And the waitresses are actors, they’re just plants put in among the paying customers, like in Pirates of the Caribbean! Remember Pirates of the Caribbean, Dave?”

  “Sure, Dad. So what’s this ride called?”

  “‘Tower Inferno’.”

  “Right…Fuck, sure feels real…”

  “Dave, we don’t say fuck, even in a towering inferno, okay?”

  Jerry seemed less reassured than David by my Benigni-style playacting, but since it was the first thing I could think of, I decide I have to run with it, so that he wouldn’t immediately start crying. If Jerry started crying, I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t cry too and then David was likely to get in on the act. But David never cries, and he certainly wasn’t going to start now.

  “You have to admit the special effects are pretty mind-blowing: the smoke coming out of everywhere, and all the customers who’re paid to panic, it’s pretty well put together!”

  Around us, people were getting to their feet, still staring at each other, petrified. Some, who’d dived under the table like we did, look up now, a little embarrassed that they weren’t hero material. Jerry’s pancakes were lying on the floor, covered with bits of porcelain. The pot of maple syrup dripped between the overturned chairs. Outside the Windows on the World, you couldn’t see a thing: a dense black curtain blocked the view. Night had fallen, New York had disappeared and the ground rumbled. I can tell you, everyone in the place had only one idea, neatly summed up by the head chef:

  “We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

  Now I think about it, I would like to have been in one of those brainless disaster-movie blockbusters. Because pretty much all of them have a happy ending.

  8:48

  Other possible names for the World Trade Center restaurant:

  Windows on the Planes

  Windows on the Crash

  Windows on the Smoke

  Broken Windows

  Sorry for that bout of black humor: a momentary defense against the atrocity.

  The New York Times collated a number of eyewitness accounts of Windows on the World at that moment. Two amateur videos show smoke seeping into the upper floors at incredible speed. Paradoxically, the restaurant is more smoky than the floors just above the point of impact because the smoke has taken some fifty feet to thicken. We have fragments of a call made by Rajesh Mirpuri to his boss, Peter Lee at Data Synapse. He says he can’t see more than fifteen feet. The situation is rapidly deteriorating. At Cantor Fitzgerald (on the 104th floor), fire blocks the elevators. Employees take refuge in the offices on the north face, fifty of them in a single conference room.

  At that moment, the majority still believe this is an accident. There is considerable evidence to suggest that most of them were still alive until the building collapsed at 10:28 AM. They suffered for 102 minutes, the average running time of a Hollywood film.

  Extract from Against the Grain by Huysmans:

  It was the vast, foul bagnio of America transported to our Continent; it was, in a word, the limitless, unfathomable, incommensurable firmament of blackguardism of the financier and the self-made man, beaming down, like a despicable sun, on the idolatrous city that grovelled on its belly, hymning vile songs of praise before the impious tabernacle of Commerce.

  “Well, crumble then, society! perish, old world!” cried Des Esseintes, indignant at the ignominy of the spectacle he had conjured up…

  I knew it. The person really responsible for this attack wasn’t Osama bin Laden, but the incorrigible Des Esseintes. I thought that decadent dandy was behaving a little oddly. Having for so long found nihilism cool, spoiled children now root for serial killers. All those weird little boys who sniggeringly advocate hatred now have blood on their shirt fronts. No dry cleaner will ever get the blood spatters out of their designer vests. Dandyism is inhuman; the eccentrics, too cowardly to act, prefer to suicide others rather than themselves. They murder the ill-dressed. Des Esseintes, with his pale hands, murders children whose only crime is to be ordinary. His snobbish contempt is a flamethrower. How can anyone forgive the murder of the old woman in Florida on page 201 of my previous novel? We point the finger at those who are indirectly guilty, anonymous, impersonal pension funds, dummy organizations. But at the end of the day, those who scream, who plead, who bleed, are real. At the end of the world, satire becomes reality, metaphor becomes truth, even political cartoonists feel embarrassed…

  8:49

  Your first instinct is to grab your cellphone. But since it’s a first instinct, everyone else has had the same idea and the networks are jammed. As I anxiously press the green “redial” button, I try to convince the boys that this suffocating darkness is just a funfair ride.

  “You’ll see: any minute now they’ll send in a fake rescue team, it’s gonna be wicked! That black cloud’s really well done, isn’t it?”

  The stockbroker couple look at me pityingly.

  “Jesus!” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “Let’s get the hell out of this sauna.”

  The dark-haired guy gets up and runs for the elevators, dragging his lover by the hand. I fall in behind, a child on each arm. But the elevators are out of order. Behind her desk, the receptionist is sobbing.

  “I’m not trained for this kind of thing…We’re supposed to evacuate via the stairs. Follow me…”

  The majority of Windows on the World customers haven’t waited for her. They’re already crammed into the smoke-filled stairwell. They cough in single file. A black security guard throws up in a trash can. He’s already been down four floors.

  “I’ve just been down there, it’s hell, don’t go, the whole place is blazing!”

  We go anyway. It’s utter chaos: the crash has knocked out all means of communication with the outside world. I turn to Jerry and David who have started whimpering.

  “C’mon, kids, if we’re gonna win the game, we can’t let them think they’ve fooled us. So, no panicking, please, otherwise we’ll be eliminated. Just follow your dad and we’ll try and get downstairs. You both played Dungeons and Dragons, right? The winners are always the ones who are best at bluffing the enemy. If we show any signs of weakness, we’ll lose the game, got it?”

  The two brothers nod politely.

  I realize I’ve forgotten to describe myself. I used to be striking, later I was handsome, later still, not so bad, now I’m all right. I read a lot of books, and underline the sentences I like (like all autodidacts) (that’s why autodidacts are often the most cultivated people: they spend their whole life preparing for an exam they never took). On a good day I look like Bill Pullman, the actor (he was the President in Independence Day). On a bad day I look more like Robin Williams if he was prepared to play a Texan real
tor with a funny walk, a receding hairline, and crow’s feet around the eyes (too much sun, yeah!). In a couple of years’ time, I’ll be a perfectly good candidate for the “George W. Bush lookalike contest”; if I survive, that is.

  Jerry’s my oldest son, that’s why he’s so serious. The first-born have to put up with the teething problems. He reminds me of my mother. I like the way he takes everything so seriously. I can get him to believe anything, he’ll swallow anything, but afterwards, he hates me for lying to him. Honest, sincere, brave: Jerry is the man I should have been. Sometimes I think he despises me. I think I disappoint him. Oh well: it’s a father’s destiny to disappoint his son. Look at Luke Skywalker, his father is Darth Vader! Jerry is exactly like I was at his age: he believes in the order of things, he’s impatient for everything to come good. Later, he’ll lose his illusions. I hope he doesn’t. I hope his eyes will always be so honest, so blue. I need you, Jerry. In the old days, kids depended on their parents to guide them. Now it’s the opposite.

  David, well, of course, being two years younger, David constantly doubts everything: his blond bangs, the point of going to school, the existence of Santa Claus or the Hanson Brothers. He hardly ever talks, except to yank his brother’s chain. In the beginning, Mary and I thought there might be something wrong with him: he’s never cried in his life, even when he was born. He doesn’t ask for anything, doesn’t say anything, remains eloquently silent; but I know that doesn’t mean he agrees. He spends his life in front of a video game and sometimes manages to cream the machine. His favorite hobby is winding up Jerry, but I know that he would die for him. What would he be without his big bro? Anything he wanted probably, just as I am now I’ve moved away from my sister. David bites his nails, and when his fingernails are down to the quick, he starts in on his toenails. If he had nails anywhere else—his nose, his elbows, his knees—he’d bite those too, you can count on it. He does it in silence. It’s great having a kid who never cries, I’m not complaining, but it’s a bit scary sometimes. I like it when he scratches his head, pretending to think. I’m forty-three and recently I’ve started to imitate him. As I said before: these days, parents imitate their kids. Do you know a better way of staying young? David is a little monkey: grouchy, scrawny, pale, irritable, and misanthropic. He reminds me of my father. Maybe he is my father! Jerry’s my mother and David’s my father. “MOM, DAD, COME AND GIMME A BIG HUG!” “Oh God, David—” Jerry sounds alarmed—”the old man’s lost it.”

  David looks at me and frowns but says nothing, as usual. We’ve just reached the 105th floor.

  8:50

  What they don’t know but I now know (which doesn’t make me any superior, it’s simply hindsight) is that the Boeing has destroyed all the exits: the stairwells are blocked, the elevators melted; Carthew and his two sons are utterly trapped in a furnace.

  Signed: Mr Know-it-all (in French, Monsieur Je-sais-tout).

  The Tour Montparnasse was inaugurated in 1974, at about the same time as the World Trade Center. Twenty-six acres; each floor 21,500 square feet; 1.1 million square feet of office space; 320,000 square feet of shopping; 170,000 square feet of storage space; 1,000,000 square feet of communal areas; 220,000 square feet of specialized offices; 1,850 parking spaces. Width: 104 feet. Twenty-five elevators and 7,200 windows. Weight: 130,000 tons. Foundations: fifty-six piles running to 230 feet below the forecourt, straddling four Metro lines. This is why, at 8:50 AM, the building scares me stiff. Since September 11 I see the Tour Montparnasse very differently, I can tell you: as a spaceship, a rocket about to take off, as the last pin standing in a bowling lane. Did you know that when the Maine-Montparnasse project was first announced, Pompidou wanted to build two identical towers? For a long time it was on the cards, then he gave up on the idea.

  At the Lycée Montaigne, discipline was the enemy; we thought education was like military indoctrination: the endless, droning classes, the murky depths of capitalist democracy. Insubordination was more romantic. I admired the exploits of Action Directe on TV. They were free, they blew up things, kidnapped pot-bellied exploitationists. Nathalie Ménigon was sexier than Alice Saunier-Seïté. At school, the coolest thing you could wear was a PLO scarf, but I was dressed in Burberry—talk about a rebel. Terrorism was a lot more glamorous than next Friday’s history quiz. I should have run away, joined the underground movement, but the heating in squats wasn’t up to the standards of my mother’s apartment. At the lycée, I began poring over revolutionary manifestos while still keeping my grades up. That way, I could win on all fronts: I wouldn’t get beaten up by the police, I wouldn’t wind up in a maximum-security prison, but I could quote Raoul Vaneigem and seem cool. It was a Canada Dry revolution: it looked like the hard stuff, I looked like a rebel, but I wasn’t a rebel. One day, an American journalist would come up with an acronym for the Bourgeois Bohemians: he called them “BoBos.” I was getting ready to be a RiRe: a “Rich Rebel.”

  8:51

  A stroke of luck (if you can call it that): on the 105th floor, I get a signal on the cellphone. I call Mary at home.

  “Hello?”

  “Mary? It’s Carthew. Sorry about all the coughing, but the boys are fine, we’re going to do our best to get out of here.”

  “Carthew? Why are you whispering? What are you talking about?”

  “There’s been an accident, but I’ve told the boys that it’s a theme-park ride. Turn on the TV, you’ll see what I mean.”

  Silence, not a sound, I hear a television being turned on, then a piercing scream. “Oh Lord, tell me this isn’t happening. Carthew, don’t tell me you’re up there!”

  “Shit, you’re the one who told me to get the kids up early so they didn’t get out of their school routine! I’d rather be somewhere else, I swear. I saw it, Mary, I SAW that fucking airplane crash right under us! It’s starting to get hot and there’s smoke everywhere, but the kids are okay. Hang on, Jerry wants a word.”

  “Mom?”

  “Oh, honey, are you all right? You’re not hurt? Look after your little brother for me, okay?”

  “Mom, this ride is awesome, the place really stinks. Here’s Dave.”

  “…”

  “David?”

  “Kof, kof,” (he coughs), “Mom, Jerry won’t lend me his camera!”

  “Hi, Mary, it’s Carthew. Try and find out if they’re sending in a rescue team. We can’t get through to the lobby from here. We’ve had no fucking instructions on how to evacuate! Call me back. Later!”

  We’re still in the neon-lit stairwell following the herd down the stairs like lambs being led to the slaughter. Solzhenitsyn compared those exiled to the gulags to lambs. Baaa. What a stupid bloody idea, bringing the kids here, they were bored shitless, they were as bored as I was. All these things we put ourselves through thinking it’s for the best…Now we’re being punished for not sleeping in. Look at them, all these early risers in their shirts and ties, freshly shaven, the overperfumed working girls, the disciples of the Wall Street Journal…They’d all have been better off staying in bed.

  “You okay, kids? Keep your napkins over your nose and mouth, and don’t touch the rails, they’re really hot.”

  In the silence, the herd swells; at each floor we’re joined by a traumatized legion in gray suits and pink pantsuits. We step over the tiles from the false ceilings obstructing the passage. The heat is suffocating. Sometimes someone gives his neighbor a hand, or cries, but most say nothing, they cough, they hope.

  8:52

  My parents met each other in the Basque country, but quickly left to study in America. Nowadays, we’ve forgotten how many French graduates were drawn to American universities, especially the business schools. So my father headed off to Harvard to do his MBA (as George W. Bush would later), my mother went with him and used her time to get a master’s in history at Mount Holyoke. Nineteen fifties America: like a black-and-white documentary. The dream reached out to the rest of the Western world. Long Cadillacs with fins, extra-large ice creams, buttered pop
corn at the movies, Eisenhower reelected: magical symbols of perfect happiness. This was the America that kept its promises, the country of Cockaigne described by the handsome, tanned Philippe Labro. At the time, dissent was insignificant. Nobody said McDonald’s was fascist. Dad laughed at Bob Hope’s jokes on TV. People went bowling. Middle-class kids were inventing globalization. They believed in America, to them it personified modernity, efficiency, freedom. Ten years later, this same generation voted for Giscard because he was young like JFK. Brilliant, energetic, no-bullshit guys. At last we’d be rid of the burden of our European education. Go for it. Be direct. Go straight to the point. In the United States, the first question you’re asked is: “Where are you from?” because everyone is from somewhere else. Then they say: “Nice to meet you.” Because it’s nice to meet new people. In America, when someone invites you over, you can help yourself from the fridge without asking your hostess’s permission. I remember phrases from that period I often heard at home: “put your money where your mouth is,” “big is beautiful,” “back-seat driver” (my favorite, Mom used it when we were getting on her nerves from the back of the car), “take it easy,” “relax,” “gimme a break,” “you’re overreacting,” “for God’s sake.” The capitalist Utopia was just as crazy as communist utopia, but its violence was covert. It won the Cold War because of its image: of course people were dying of starvation in America as they were in Russia, but those who were dying of starvation in America were free to do so.