Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  As the minutes passed, we watched, hypnotized, as again and again the plane headed straight for the tower (it didn’t hesitate, it zeroed in, as if drawn by a magnet, to be swallowed in a black-and-orange fireball by the tower), the jokes petered out, faces grew longer, people slumped into chairs, cellphones rang, the bags under our eyes deepened. The extent of the tragedy gradually began to weigh on our shoulders. We became hunchbacks. We were just beginning to shut up, in other words, when a third plane crashed into the Pentagon. Fucking hell: the sky truly was falling. You know what happened next: with the collapse first of the South Tower and then, at 4:30 PM French time, the North Tower, the atmosphere turned to global fear. I was white as a sheet, I don’t even remember whether I said goodbye to Françoise Verny as I started down the stairs. I must have walked home. Somewhere on the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts, my phone rang. It was Eric Laurrent, a fellow novelist published by Les Editions de Minuit who’d just finished a book set in the United States (Do Not Touch, it’s a title I recommend you disregard). He was looking for work and had just offered his services on my TV program. I don’t know why, but he wasn’t aware of what had happened.

  “Sorry, Eric, I’m feeling a little weird…It’s been a bizarre day…”

  “Really, what’s the matter? Are you okay?”

  “Um, the um, the World Trade Center towers collapsed, there’s airplanes crashing into everything, the Pentagon is on fire, you know…”

  “Yeah, yeah, very funny…Seriously, though, if there is a job going, I’m up for it, I’m up shit creek financially.”

  He was right not to believe me. I had a credibility problem, everything I said was unreliable, even the truth. Just because I made a fortune criticizing the rich. Even when I said “I love you,” nobody believed me. Next I phoned my daughter: I just needed to know where she was. I couldn’t get hold of Chloë, her mom had turned off her cellphone. I had to wait half an hour before the nanny called me back: she was at the puppet theatre watching The Three Little Pigs. I was lucky. No Boeing smashed into the Jardin du Luxembourg that day. On the phone, Chloë told me the story.

  “It’s about this wolf and he wants to eat the little pigs but the little pigs build this house out of bricks and the wolf can’t eat them.”

  And I thought, it’s wrong to fill young children’s heads with such lies.

  8:57

  Concerto for coughs, sneezes, throat-clearing and asphyxia.

  Strange that not a single avant-garde composer thought of the idea. Not even John Cage? Even though his name was perfect for the part. We’re performing a concerto for coughs in a crystal cage. I think back to a trip to La Reunion when Mary and I took the boys to see an active volcano. It felt like I was back there: the sulfur fumes, the suffocating heat, Jerry and David coughing and sputtering. The World Trade Center was an erupting volcano. Back in Windows on the World (107th floor), I can think of only one solution: block the ventilation shafts with our jackets, close the fire doors, seal the doorways with wet towels, upend the tables against the ventilation grilles and wait for the rescue services. In the restaurant, the Risk Water Group are huddled in the northwest corner (there’s less smoke). Some cling to the columns and stick their heads out the windows. There’s room to squeeze in three, maybe four people if we hoist ourselves up. Standing on the table, I lift Jerry and David in turn so they can get a breath of fresh air. In the vast room and in front of the bar smoke creeps across the floor like groundwater.

  Customers are beginning to realize they’re trapped. The receptionist and the head chef are barraged with questions. What’s the evacuation procedure? Haven’t you got a plan of the building? They almost have to resort to violence in order to make it clear that they’re just as much in the shit as we are. The chubby Puerto Rican waitress is called Lourdes; she helps me hoist the children toward the windows.

  “Don’t worry,” she says, “they’ll come and get us. I was here in February ‘93 when the bomb went off. Hear the police ‘copters?”

  “But how are they gonna get us out of here? It’s too dangerous, they can’t come near the building.”

  “Well, in ‘93 they airlifted a lot of people from the roof.”

  “Dammit, you’re right! Gimme a hug!”

  I put my arms round her and then collect the boys.

  “Lourdes, come with me. It was a mistake trying to go downstairs earlier, we should have gone up! Come on, kids, back to the game: everyone up on the roof.”

  And here we are again, the four of us heading for the smoke-filled stairway. Revived from the fresh air, Jerry and David play Beetlejuice with their napkins. But the black security guard stops us going back into the stairwell.

  “It’s impossible, the whole place is on fire.”

  “Is there some other way up to the roof?”

  “Anthony,” says Lourdes, “remember ‘93? We’ve got to get to the roof. They’re gonna come and airlift us off the roof, they might be waiting for us already.”

  Anthony thinks. His arm has second-degree burns, but he thinks. His shirt is in tatters, but he thinks. And I now know what he’s thinking: it’s fucked, but I can’t let them down.

  “Okay, follow me.”

  We fall in behind him, weaving through the maze of kitchens and offices in the highest restaurant in the world. He avoids the blocked stairwells, squeezes through corridors crammed with cases of French wine and gets us to climb up a steel ladder. Jerry and David are having a ball. With white napkins over their faces they look like highwaymen, or like a couple of Ukrainian peasant women. We arrive on the 108th floor. We’re not the only ones with the idea. Soon there are about twenty of us trying to get to the roof. Frantically, I dial 911 to alert the rescue services. Jerry asks why I keep punching today’s date into my cellphone: 911, 911, 911. Nine Eleven.

  “It’s a coincidence, honey. Just a coincidence.”

  “What’s a coindesense?” asks David.

  “It’s when things happen all at the same time that seem like they’re connected and you think it’s on purpose but it’s not on purpose, that’s what coincidence means, huh, Dad?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. It’s just chance, but gullible people think it’s an omen. Like, for instance, some people might think that the fact that today’s date is the same as the emergency services number is like a secret message. That someone’s trying to tell us something. But that’s just bullshit, it’s obviously a coincidence.”

  “Is bullshit a bad word?” asks David.

  “Yeah,” says Jerry.

  “You shouldn’t say bullshit, Dad, it’s not nice.”

  8:58

  The fire regulations at Le Ciel de Paris are exactly as they were before September 11: exit in a calm and orderly fashion via the stairs. And if the stairs are damaged, full of smoke, white hot, like an oven? Well, um, wait calmly to be burned, asphyxiated, or crushed to death. Okay, fine, thanks. The way up to the roof is still sealed off to stop smart kids coming and partying at night. It happened: a couple of years back, a gang of squatters organized a picnic on the roof of the tower. Since then, the movements of every young alcoholic are carefully monitored.

  “In any case,” said a member of the security staff, “if a 747 flew into the Tour Montparnasse, it would be sliced in two straightaway so the question of evacuation wouldn’t arise.”

  Well, that’s reassuring. To get my mind off the subject I think about a serious semantic problem which has occured to me: what verb should one use for parking a plane in a building? Not “to land,” since there is no longer any question of reaching land (the same problem arises with the French atterrir, which presupposes the presence of terre beneath the wheels). I propose “to skyscrape.” Example: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We are now approaching our destination and will soon be skyscraping in Paris. Please stow your tray tables, return your seats to the upright position and fasten your seat belts. We hope you’ve enjoyed your flight with Air France and regret that we will not have the pleasure of s
eeing you on our airlines, or indeed anywhere else, again.”

  That said, you can visit the roof during the day. Unlike the roof of the North Tower of the World Trade Center (inaccessible), the roof of the Tour Montparnasse is open to the public for a fee of €8. You can take the elevator to the fifty-sixth floor with a handful of Japanese tourists dressed in black and a mustachioed security guard wearing a navy blue blazer with gold buttons. (When I was a kid, I was dressed like that: itchy flannel trousers and a sailor’s blazer, and I probably looked just as furious.) On the fifty-sixth floor, you visit a little exhibition about Paris, and already you can enjoy the panoramic views. My gaze plummets through the picture windows to Montparnasse cemetery looking for Baudelaire’s grave, a white pebble in a garden of stone. On the left, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the distant childhood I try to prolong by remaining stock-still, as if staying in the same place geographically might somehow stop time. I’m not young anymore, simply geostationary. A dismal cafeteria (the Café Belvédère) serves goblets of hot liquid to tired provincials. To get to the roof, you have to brave a stairway that smells of bleach (memories of swimming pools, rowdy lessons, toweling swimming trunks, and smelly feet). Out of breath, I climb the last steps, my efforts rewarded by stenciled numbers on the wall indicating the altitude (“201 meters, 204 meters, 207 meters”). A metal gate opens onto the sky. Wind whistles through the bars. From here, you can see planes take off from Orly. In the middle of the concrete roof, a white circle has been painted for helicopters to skyscrape. If I wanted to, I could throw things into the void onto passersby. I might be arrested for vandalism or attempted murder or malicious wounding occasioning involuntary manslaughter, or dangerous schizophrenia or inexplicable hysteria or frenzied panic. Pink mist, far off, over the Sacré-Coeur. A billboard attempts a pun: LA VUE PARISIENNE. This is mine: my name is Frédéric Belvédère. I go downstairs to Le Ciel de Paris. A similar restaurant exists in Berlin at the summit of the Fernschturm on Alexanderplatz, and that one spins round like a record. In the seventies, the modern world desperately wanted to dine in a skyscraper, lunch in the stratosphere, eating at altitude was chic—I don’t know why. On the floor with the “panoramic exhibition,” a screening room shows old aerial pictures of Paris to a depressing flute soundtrack. The tape wows and flutters. People in anoraks walk around looking bored. Lovers force themselves to kiss full on the mouth despite their breath. A child yawns; I imitate him; perhaps he is me.

  And then, instinctively, for no particular reason I turn to look at Denfert-Rochereau and that’s when I see a human ribbon made up of thousands of individuals, a river of hair piled up round the square. The largest antiwar demonstration for fifty years; it is February 15, 2003. Yesterday, the U.S. took on France in the U.N. Security Council. The President of the United States, like his father, wants to go to war on Iraq; the President of France does not agree. Anti-Americans slug it out with Francophobes. Televised insults are hurled liberally on both sides of the Atlantic. At the foot of my tower, the mammoth protest march stretches from the Place Denfert to the Bastille—200,000 people marching in the cold along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, beneath the freezing sky of the Boulevard Saint-Germain…On the same day, the same number of marchers are saying the same thing on the streets of New York. I take the elevator down to join them. Am I a coward, an appeaser, an anti-Semite, a cheese-eating surrender monkey, as the American newspapers say? Turning back toward the smoked-glass monolith from which rays of sunlight ricochet, I decide to rename the Tour Montparnasse. In contrast to the Twin Towers, I shall name it the Lonely Tower. This curved rectangle, the shape of a cracked almond at each end, that ridiculous, forlorn beacon surges from between the couscous restaurants and the merguez vendors. Along the Rue du Départ, I meet lots of North Africans in front of a wall which has been painted by Walt Disney Pictures acclaiming The Jungle Book 2. Baloo the bear is dancing with Mowgli across ten meters of façade among the stale fat of shish kebabs. The protesters brandish STOP THE WAR banners. The Disney movie takes place in the Indian jungle colonized by the British. But there is a moral to the book that is absent from the cartoon: “Now in the jungle there’s something more than the law of the jungle.” Come back, Kipling, they’ve all gone mad!

  8:59

  Oh shit, the tall red-haired guy has flipped. He’s screaming at the top of his lungs but you can’t make out a word. He’s sweating like a pig. To stop the kids freaking out, I decide to try the theme-park story again. I ask Lourdes to look after them, giving her a wink so she’ll play along.

  “Sorry, Lourdes, could I ask you a favor? The thing is, my kids refuse to believe this is a theme-park ride—they’ve never head of ‘Towering Inferno—anyway, could you look after them for a couple of minutes while I go and check out the way to the roof with Anthony, okay? Boys, you behave yourselves, promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “And don’t pay any attention to that guy shouting, he’s just an actor, and not a very good one.”

  “Why is you name Lourdes?”

  “Shut up, Dave!” says Jerry.

  “Boys, boys,” says Lourdes, “you’ll have to cool it a bit, because I work here and I can tell you usually they don’t let kids your age on this ride because you’re not regulation height, so if I were you I wouldn’t kick up a fuss. Do I make myself clear?”

  Anthony takes the red-haired guy by the shoulders and talks to him very calmly. They’re crouched in the mirrored hallway. Columns of foul smoke snake round the elevator shafts like black ivy.

  “It’s okay, it’ll be okay. Don’t worry, it’s gonna be okay.”

  He keeps saying this until he calms down. The red-haired guy is bawling, he’s so scared; he’s lost his nerve. I try to join in.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jeffrey.”

  “Look, Jeffrey, we’ve all gotta stick together, okay? Don’t worry, everything’ll be fine. Just keep cool.”

  “OH GOD, OH GOD IT’S ALL MY FAULT I WAS THE ONE WHO ARRANGED THE WORKING BREAKFAST I DON’T WANNA DIE I’M SORRY I’M SORRY OH GOD I’M A JERK I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I’M SO SCARED OH GOD HAVE MERCY!”

  I look round to see if the kids are freaking out too: but no, they’re holding up. They’ve got their hands over their ears so they can’t hear Jeffrey screaming: I’VE GOTTA GET OUT! It’s something Lourdes showed them. By a stairway blocked with pipes Anthony takes me to the 109th floor. We walk through rooms full of huge multicolored machines, between cooling turbines, boilers, and the elevator machinery. Clearly, everyone else has had the same idea. After all, what choice do we have? Downstairs is a furnace, death is inevitable from burns or asphyxiation. Our only hope is to get out via the roof. Little by little we’re joined by a hundred people; they spread out, looking for pockets of fresh air. Groups of people take their heads in their hands; sit or stand; climb on tables in an effort to breathe; throw metal lockers through the window to let oxygen in (yeah, it works with a metal locker too). Bunches of people welded together, propping each other up, holding hands, consoling each other, coughing.

  “There’s only one set of stairs to the roof,” says Anthony, “I’ve got a key—all the security guards have one.”

  We’re standing in front of a red door marked EMERGENCY EXIT. I don’t yet know how much I will come to despise that door.

  On the floor below, Lourdes is keeping up a running banter with my two sons, turning her head this way and that like she’s watching the Williams sisters play tennis.

  “I’d rather be in school,” says David.

  “No way, this is just too cool,” says Jerry.

  “Cooler than junior high?” says David.

  “Yeah, sure,” says Jerry.

  “Yeah, but it’s really hot,” says David.

  “You said it,” says Jerry. “Feels like being in a sauna.”

  “What’s a sauna?” says David.

  “A sauna is like a bathroom that’s really hot to make you sweat,” says Lourdes.

  “But what’s it
for?” says David.

  “It’s supposed to make you thin,” says Lourdes.

  “You should go to one sometime,” says David.

  “Shut up, Dave,” says Jerry. “You’re not funny.”

  “Shut up yourself! I am too funny, even Lourdes is laughing…” says David.

  Lourdes is doubled up, she’s laughing so hard she’s crying. She takes out a packet of Kleenex to wipe away the tears.

  “You think we’ll be on TV?”

  “‘Course, dumbass,” says Jerry. “We’re probably live on like a dozen channels right now.”

  “Wow, cool!” says David.

  “Da bomb,” says Jerry.

  “Pity you used up all the film in your camera,” says David.

  “Tell me about it, I’m well pissed,” says Jerry.

  “Hey, your nose is bleeding,” says David.

  “Ah, shit, not again,” says Jerry.

  And he puts his head back, stuffing his napkin against his nose. Lourdes gives him a tissue,

  “Don’t worry about him, Lourdes,” says David. “He gets these all the time.”

  “Only when I’m angry,” says Jerry.

  “Like I said, all the time,” says David.

  9:00

  Other eyewitness accounts? It’s like being in an apocalyptic J. G. Ballard novel, except this is reality. Edmund McNally, CTO at Fiduciary, calls his wife Liz as the earth rumbles. He’s coughing hard. Quickly, he reels off his life insurance policies and employee bonus programs. He just has time to tell her that she was the whole world to him. He calls her right back to advise her to cancel a trip to Rome he had booked. On the ninety-second floor, Damian Meehan telephones his brother Eugene, a firefighter in the Bronx. “It’s pretty bad here,” he shouts. “The elevators are gone.” Peter Alderman, a broker at Bloomberg LP, sends an email to his sister from his PDA; he mentions the smoke, then adds: “I’m scared.” I think that, by 9:00 AM, that phrase sums up the general atmosphere. Following the surprise, the shock, the hope, after fifteen minutes all that remains is terror, a brute fear that clouds all judgment and turns legs to jelly.