Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  Walking up the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, I pass a hostess bar (Le Monocle Elle et Lui: strange name), a famous swingers club (the 2+2) and several funeral parlors. After that, I follow the walls of Montparnasse cemetery where Sartre, de Beauvoir, Duras, Cioran, Beckett I leave the cemetery, walk back up the boulevard to the Cartier Foundation, where there is a huge exhibition of accidents staged by Paul Virilio. I walk down the concrete steps (more steps!) and arrive in a basement filled with dull mechanical rumblings.

  9:05

  In the roof space on the 109th floor, the Attic of the World, through the wall of smoke, I watch the crowd streaming away from us. I give the kids a leg up to get to the meager fresh air. It’s a desperate flight for the air. If I’d known, I would have brought oxygen tanks, or gas masks. In any case, soon everyone in the West will walk round with gas masks slung over their shoulders.

  Anthony is back with a bleary Jeffrey. He got him to take a couple of Xanax. He looks strange, like a deflated punch bag. Anthony looks even more miserable than Jeffrey. Lourdes quietly breaks down and cries. I take her hand, stroking it like a kitten I once had. Little by little, the masks, and the people, fall away. The heat is getting closer. Fear like a viral infection inhabits us. I have only to see the despair in Jeffrey’s eyes to be infected. I hold back, determined not to look at my sons so that they don’t see the resignation in my eyes. Nobody must suspect that I’m giving up hope. We’re sitting on the floor in front of the only exit: a thick, red, steel-plated fire door on which is written the words EMERGENCY EXIT. Around us, the moaning is unrelenting. Groups of haggard people arrive, reeling like incredulous zombies. Hope is the most painful thing in the world. I couldn’t bear another disappointment.

  Fucking hell, what would Bruce Willis do in my shoes? Jeffrey’s phone manages to get a signal: he calls his boyfriend. I hear his partner sobbing from here. Jeffrey’s gay, but he wears a wedding ring. Marriage is such bullshit. Oh God, I can’t let emotion get the better of me. I’ve got to be brave in front of the kids. Jerry’s nosebleed has stopped, so that’s something at least. I’m losing it, this kind of barbarism has me eaten up with hate. How could they do this to us? I grew up during the Cold War, it was all so simple back then…America only had one enemy: Russia. It was useful, having one fuck-off, clear-cut enemy, it gave everyone else a choice. Do you want your supermarkets full or empty? Do you want the right to criticize or the duty to shut the fuck up? Nowadays, with nothing to counterbalance it, America has become the Goliath to be slain. America has become its own worst enemy.

  I don’t know what makes me think of Genesis, maybe I’m remembering something from Sunday school: Methodists consult the First Book of the Bible a lot, some creationist lunatics still reject Darwinism. My parents’ puritanical Calvinism was based almost entirely on the Old Testament. According to them, Adam and Eve really existed…Not to mention the apple, the serpent, Cain and Abel, the Flood, Noah’s ark, etc.…And the Tower of Babel? I wonder if that’s where I am now. You know the story: it appears in a number of Mesopotamian writings: man learns to make tools and decides to build a tower to reach the heavens. They want to “make a name for themselves lest they be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” God does not approve of their decision: man must not be prideful, man must not take himself for God. You might have thought that, to punish them, God would destroy the tower in a furious rage, but not at all. The word Babel represents Babylon, but brings language to mind (hence the verb “to babble”). God avenges Himself in a much more cruel and twisted fashion by preventing men from using the same words to denote objects. God decides to create chaos in language on earth. God chooses to dissolve language: hereafter, things will be known by many different names, the link between word and object will be lost; for presuming to build this tower, men will cease to understand one another. Divine punishment takes the form of preventing men from communicating with one another. The Tower of Babel was the first attempt at globalization. If, as millions of Americans do, we take Genesis absolutely literally, then God is opposed to globalization. The Judeo-Christian faith is founded on the idea that there must be simultaneous interpreters, languages which are foreign to each other, that there must be bread on the table before one can pass on the Scriptures, that the human race is divided into exotic idioms and uncertain babble. God has set His face against New York.

  “And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.”*

  9:06

  At 9.06 AM, Glen Vogt, general manager of Windows on the World, was (fortunately for him) not at his place of work. Twenty minutes after the plane entered the building, his assistant, Christine Olender, called him at home. She got his wife instead, because he was on the street at the foot of the World Trade Center getting a crick in his neck, shocked by the disaster. Ms Olender told Mrs Vogt that they had heard nothing on how to leave. “The ceilings are falling,” she says. “The floors are buckling,” she adds. At least forty-one people in the restaurant succeeded in getting a call through to someone outside the building.

  That morning, three torches burned in New Amsterdam: the torch atop the Statue of Liberty, that of the North Tower, that of the South Tower.

  There is another eyewitness account from Windows on the World: that of Ivhan Luyis Carpio, in a call to his cousin. “I can’t go anywhere because they told us not to move, I have to wait for the firefighters.” It is plausible that a high percentage of the restaurant’s customers meekly obeyed the order to stay put, while struggling to get air, smashing the windows, climbing on tables to avoid being burned. But we also have evidence of numerous calls to 911 from the roof, which seems to indicate that some of the customers disobeyed to escape to the fresh air.

  Can a human being melt?

  Someone else summed up the situation very clearly: “We’re trapped,” Howard Kane said to his wife Laurie.

  What no one said: everyone was vomiting.

  Even if I go deep, deep into the horror, my book will always remain 1,350 feet below the truth.

  9:07

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  Anthony keeps trying his cellphone. Anthony’s got a problem. Something that’s been bothering him for a while that he hasn’t dared tell us. Something which leaves a fathomless sadness deep in his eyes.

  “What? What’s the problem?”

  “My key won’t open the door on its own. Someone downstairs at the security desk has to push a button. And I can’t get through to them. I can’t get a signal on the cellphone and the internal phones are cut off…”

  “Spare me the bullshit!” (I could also have said “Cut the crap” but that would be less refined.) “Where are they, these security guards?”

  “The control center is on the twenty-second floor, but they’re not answering. Jesus, if the control center has been evacuated, there’s nothing I can do. They have to release the lock with the buzzer, if they don’t we’re stuck. And that doesn’t make me any happier than it does you guys.”

  Jeffrey emerges from his stupor.

  “Never mind the fucking buzzer! We’ll break the fucking door down!”

  Anthony would like to share his optimism.

  “The door’s secured, we couldn’t open it even with a power drill. And we haven’t got a power drill.”

  “FUCKING SHIT! HOW THE FUCK ARE WE GONNA GET OUT OF HERE?”

  Jeffrey has picked up a machine, a huge, heavy, cast-iron thing, and is using it to pound the lock. He works furiously, hammering at it with all his strength. Anthony and I step back so we don’t get our heads caved in by this thing he’s swinging with t
hose muscular arms he’s got from working out regularly in some gym in the East Village.

  Anthony shakes his head. I realize that I hate this man, that I admire Jeffrey all the more. His coworkers are counting on him and he’s determined not to let them down. Fatalism sickens me, I much prefer the energy of despair, the ferocity of nature, the instinct to survive. I’m not prepared to admit defeat until I’ve dislocated both my shoulders on this door. I want to sweat, to try anything, to go on believing. Under Jeffrey’s bludgeoning, the door handle gives way, but the door remains tightly sealed. He turns to us, looking helpless, but his despair inspires only respect. I hope that Jerry and David haven’t heard any of this. They’re standing on the ledge of a fanlight with Lourdes. They’re not scared of heights anymore now they’re suffocating. Jerry’s napkin is stained with blood, like his T-shirt. “It looks bad, but it’s not serious, he gets nosebleeds all the time.” I say it over and over, trying to convince myself.

  Anthony huddles over his cellphone, obstinately pressing the green redial button. He has to get through to the security staff, or, failing that, the cops. I can hear police helicopters on the other side of the door. I refuse to burn to death just because some emergency exit is stopping them from rescuing us. Nine-one-one. Nine-one-one. SOS. SOS. Just like the end of Johnny Got His Gun. Save Our Souls.

  I go back to join the boys to get a breath of air from outside. Perched on Lourdes’ shoulders, they repeat the prayers she’s saying aloud. In the past, they used to put gargoyles at the top of buildings to protect them, like on the Chrysler Building. Sculptures made to look like dragons, monsters, demons like the ones at the top of the towers of Notre-Dame de Paris, intended to drive away devils and ward off invaders. Will my children, these little blond gargoyles, leaning into the void, be enough to ward off evil spirits? Why did architects stop treating skyscrapers as cathedrals? If they put gargoyles at the top of towers there must have been a reason. Why would they do so, if not…in anticipation of what has just happened to us? They knew that one day danger would come from the air. In those moments of terror, prayer comes to us unbidden. Religion is reborn in us. In the minutes ahead, the World Trade Center, a temple to atheism and to international lucre, will gradually become a makeshift church.

  9:08

  In The Joke by Milan Kundera, one of the characters asks the question: “Do you think destruction can be beautiful?” I move about like a sleepwalker, stunned by the exhibition “Ce qui arrive” mounted by philosopher and urban planner Virilio in collaboration with Agence France Presse and the Institut National de I’audiovisuel from November 29, 2002, to March 30, 2003. On the walls of the Cartier Foundation hang sepia photographs of a train wreck which took place at the Gare Montparnasse on October 22, 1895: a steam locomotive piled straight through the second-floor façade before falling onto the cobbles of the square outside. A crowd of men in derbies surrounds the mangled wreck. The exhibition consists of a succession of dark, noisy rooms in which videos of disasters are being projected. Everywhere there is smoke and security guards communicating on walkie-talkies. Images of the diggers at Ground Zero appear on a giant screen (a looped ten-minute digital video by Tony Oursler): an immense column of white smoke overshadows a colossal heap of scrap iron; a few minuscule human beings wander round the cranes which resemble helpless grasshoppers. In the background, a number of prefabricated concrete sections of the World Trade Center still stand, forming a pitiful rampart. What is most striking is the mud. This edifice of concrete and steel has been transformed into a muddy heap. Man-made purity has given way to natural filth. The smooth, glittering towers have been reduced to a hideous, chaotic mess. Now I understand what the sculptor César intended by crushing cars. The bulldozers would try to tidy up this mess, to rediscover the purity of glass, the perfection of the past. It’s impossible not to feel a lump in your throat when contemplating such carnage. Nonetheless, I can’t shake a feeling of disquiet, the very feeling I have writing this book: does one have the right? Is it normal to be quite so fascinated by destruction? Kundera’s question resonates oddly among these disasters. The New York streets are white with paper and dust as if it had been snowing; in the middle of the image, a black baby sleeps in a stroller. Virilio’s exhibition caused a scandal when it opened. Isn’t it too early to make art out of such misery? Of course, art is not obligatory and no one is obliged to visit an exhibition or read a book. All the same, “Ce qui arrive” collects disasters as one might collect trophies: images of mercury pollution in Minamata, Japan, 1973; a dioxin leak at the Icmesa factory, Seveso, Italy, 1976; a plane crash in Tenerife, Spain, 1977; the wreck of the oil tanker Amoco-Cadiz, Finistére, 1978. Some of the spectators wipe their eyes, blow their noses, turn away, refuse to confront the images. I know how they feel. And yet this is our world and for the moment we cannot live anywhere else. Radioactive gas leak, Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, 1979. Toxic gas leak, Union Carbide plant, Bhopal, India, 1979. Explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, Cape Canaveral, Florida, 1986. Virilio’s perspective can be seen as shocking: merging industrial accidents with terrorist attacks. Reactor meltdown at Chernobyl nuclear facility, Ukraine, 1986. Wreck of the Exxon Valdez, 1989. Sarin gas attack, Tokyo subway, Japan, 1995. To these he adds natural disasters like the hurricane in France in 1999, the bushfires in Australia in 1997, the earthquake in Kobe, Japan, 1995. All underscored by a soundtrack of dramatic film music. I stroll among these monstrosities. I would gladly wash my hands of them, I’d like to think that I am not complicit in such horrors. And yet, like every human being, at a microscopic level, I am complicit. Freud’s quotation is emblazoned above the entrance: “Accumulation puts an end to the impression of chance.” This enigmatic sentence, which dates from 1914-15, seems to answer David’s earlier question: “What’s a coindesense?”

  The greater the scientific progress, the more violent the accidents, the more beautiful the destruction. At the conclusion of the exhibition, Virilio unquestionably takes provocation too far, screening a TV broadcast of an astonishing fireworks display over Shanghai: he dares to establish a link between unadulterated horror and esthetic beauty. The exhibition left a nasty taste in my mouth. I left feeling even more guilty than before. Can the destruction of the Twin Towers really be presented side by side with a fireworks display, be it the most grandiose in the world? Oh, the beautiful flames, oh, the beautiful blue, oh, the beautiful burning bodies? Will I be able to look myself in the eye after publishing this book? It makes me feel like throwing up my Ciel de Paris breakfast, but I’m forced to admit that my eye develops a taste for the horrific. I love the vast column of smoke pouring from the towers on the giant screen, projected in real time, the white plume against the blue of the sky, like a silk scarf hanging suspended between land and sea. I love it, not only because of its ethereal splendor, but because I know the apocalypse it portends, the violence and the horror it contains. Virilio forces me to face that part of my humanity which is not humanist.

  9:09

  Dad’s cure for when he’s scared is to just keep talking.

  “Soon as they airlift us out of here, I’m taking you guys to FAO Schwarz and you can have anything you want. A big splurge.”

  “Can I get a Dr Pepper?”

  “Sure. You know your great-great-grandfather nearly put money in the Coca-Cola Company? Did I ever tell you this story? Back then, the family lived in Atlanta. One day, this little druggist who lived in town came by: he was looking for money to launch a new tonic that he’d just perfected. Since we were one of the wealthy patrician families in town, he naturally asked your great-great-grandfather if he wanted a share in the profits. The story become a standing joke in the Yorston family: the little druggist was invited to dinner at the mansion. He gave the whole family this weird concoction made of coca leaves to taste. Everyone thought it was disgusting, undrinkable. ‘Besides, the color is repulsive!’ ‘Ugh! It’ll never sell!’ The druggist defended his potion, explaining that it contained vitamins and aided digestion. Your
ancestor burst out laughing and hollered, ‘This sure is the first time I’ve been asked to invest in a laxative.’ And the inventor of Coca-Cola left without a cent. For years the family laughed about it, then one day they stopped laughing: if we’d helped out that little druggist, we’d be in the Forbes Top 100 today.”

  Dad’s told this story, like, thirty times, but I never get tired of it. He looks so happy when Jerry and me listen to his stories. I like the idea we were almost rich. Every time I drink a can of Coke I think how I could have been CEO. No point getting pissed at the ancestors. I read about this stuff in class. They were too busy with, like, plantations full of slaves that picked the cotton. How were they supposed to know they’d be ruined by the war with the Yankees? Anyway, later on, they struck oil. Mostly, they were a bunch of dumb rednecks, sometimes they just got lucky, sometimes not. It’s like today. First, everything’s cool, we’re cutting class, we get to go to New York, the pancakes are wicked, Dad lets us mess around in the elevator, pressing the buttons, making them light up and go “ding,” it was dope. But now, with the fire and all, everything stinks, Jerry’s got a nosebleed and I’m coughing all the time, it’s heavy. Lourdes is really nice with us but she cries nonstop, it’s a real bummer. Anthony’s cool, Jeffrey’s, like, completely out of it, forever going off to check on his group and coming back to see if he can get a signal on the cellphone. They’re good people, but everything is skank. Dad has to use his secret superpowers, the ones that only kick in when there’s megadanger. He’ll probably mutate in a couple of nanoseconds: it’s like Clark Kent, you have to give him time. Like, right now, all he wants to do is talk about his grandparents passing up the deal of the century and stuff, but nobody cares. Jeez, I hate it when this happens in comics—you have to wait, like, forever before the hero gets round to saving the people trapped in the burning building. It’s boring, but that’s always how it happens. If the hero showed up right at the start, there wouldn’t be any suspense. Same thing with Dragonball on TV. The guys who make cartoons are smart: they know you have to make the kids hang around. So we wait. That’s all kids ever get to do anyway. Wait till we grow up before we can pig out on M&Ms and go to Universal Studios all the time without having to beg the ‘rents. To kill time, I make out like I’m really interested in Dad’s story.