Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

But little cameras like that don’t have microphones, so there’s no point screaming your head off.

  Several hundred feet below, in the deserted Command Center, on one of the hundreds of black-and-white monitors on the video wall, a forty-year-old man appears, waving, flanked by his two children and a mute woman with coffee-colored skin who sits with her back to the wall. The other security monitors show deserted offices with broken windows, blocked elevators piled with blackened corpses, smoke-filled corridors, lobbies flooded by sprinklers, stairwells filled with hundreds of people walking down single file, passing hundreds of breathless firefighters walking up. On the console in front of empty chairs, thousands of red lights blink. Sirens howl uselessly. If God exists, I wonder what the fuck He was doing that day.

  9:32

  I approached everyone I met and asked them the same question:

  “Have you been to Windows on the World?”

  And everyone looked at me, suspicious, disconcerted.

  “Why bring up that tragedy again?”

  Coming from a Frenchman, the question seemed obscene, voyeuristic. I was trying to resurrect a phantom restaurant. The Ghost Diner. So I went back to my Spanish accent.

  “Ma que está; muy intéressante and I lova youra coun-trya. Penelope Cruz, she’s hot, no? Olé olé!”

  Several New Yorkers assure me that they no longer enjoy blue skies over the city. Good weather is no longer synonymous with peace here. With a nod to Hunter S. Thompson, I could have called this book Fear and Loathing in New York. The Department of Homeland Security advises the public to buy plastic sheeting and rolls of insulating tape to block air vents in case of attacks with chemical or biological weapons.

  Today, I continue my visit, walking along the Hudson as far as the huge aircraft carrier docked at Pier 86: The Intrepid. On November 25, 1944, it was attacked by two Japanese kamikaze fighters. Now it has been transformed into the “Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum.” In fact, what we’re dealing with is the center of military-patriotic propaganda. On the entrance, I read the motto of the U.S. Air Force: “Aim High.” Films to the glory of the U.S. Army are projected in front of a sparse audience: kids sucking popsicles and a few skeptical Japanese. The reason I’ve come: a piece of the fuselage of American Airlines flight 11 is displayed in a glass case in the belly of the aircraft carrier. I approach the relic shyly. The display is very solemn. In a Plexiglas cube, a number of ruined objects have been carefully placed on a layer of gray powder collected at Ground Zero: a crushed laptop, sheets of photocopied paper stained with dry blood. And in the center of the case, a scorched steel plate measuring about three feet square: I stand before what remains of the Boeing which crashed below Windows on the World. It’s a scratched, blackened, twisted piece of metal. At the center, you can make out an oval-shaped hole in the melted aluminum: the window. The visitors gather in front of this window onto ashes. Window on the dust. I lean over, a few bare inches from flight 11; if the glass were not there, I could touch the first plane of September 11.

  I have never been closer to carnage.

  9:33

  HOW JESUS DIDN’T SAVE ME.

  The memory of Mom’s apple pie, the smell creeping up the stairs to wake me, still lying in bed. Under a sky orange as a chimney we drive along in our car, a small metal box under the stars. We used to take long trips across Texas, the largest state in the Union, Dad at the wheel, Mom sleeping and us in the back snoring, except me. I was just pretending. I was listening to those bulky eight-track cartridges—remember them?—like cassettes big as a paperback. You could skip from one song to another. Dad was listening to “Drive My Car” from the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and in my head I was humming “bee-beep, bee-beep, yeah!” Or maybe it was the Doors, L.A. Woman, that begins with the incredible blues song “The Changeling.” Eyes closed, I moved my head to the rhythm, scared that Dad would fall asleep at the wheel which is why in my head I’m shouting “Wake up, Dad!”

  “Dad, wake up! Wake up, Dad!”

  I recognize my son’s voice.

  “Huh? Was I asleep long?”

  Lourdes explains that I fainted, passed out for a minute. The kids are drowsy, flushed like me. The toxic fumes must be getting to us without our realizing. I’d like to go back to sleep, back to the dream of my childhood, my family. I’m beginning to love my family the way you love an inflatable dinghy in a storm. Lourdes starts talking; it’s her turn. She never managed to have children, she says, that’s why she wants to help with Jerry and David, she says they don’t need her down in the restaurant, she says we have to stay calm, that we’ll get through this, that we just have to wait, and I get the feeling that she’s absolutely convinced of it. She manages to get a signal on her cellphone and phones her brother who’s sick with worry. She tells him what I told Mary: tell the rescue services that we’re on the roof, that we’re fine but the smoke is getting worse, we don’t really know where to go…she doesn’t reassure him.

  The woman is a saint. Every day, we rub shoulders with saints without realizing. She goes through her pockets and takes out a pack of chewing gum which she passes round in silence. We put them in our mouths as though they were communion hosts. Then the boys start playing with her again.

  I deliberately chose to desert my own flesh and blood. These two brats were holding me back. I couldn’t help thinking any man who stays with a woman for more than three years is a coward and a liar. I wanted to say “fuck you” to middle-class ideas of the perfect family: that a man shouldn’t leave the mother of his children even if he’s in love with another woman, that if he does, he’s a bastard, an asshole with no sense of responsibilities. A “sense of responsibilities” clearly meaning cheating on your wife without her finding out. I didn’t agree. Real responsibility is telling your children the truth, not some phony, hypocritical bullshit. These days, so-called laid-back, liberal society imposes a cardboard cutout of love as a model of stability. The sixties were a “magical detour.” What I wanted to tell my sons was that you should never stay with someone you don’t love; that you should be faithful to love and love alone; that you should tell society to piss off as often as possible. I wanted to tell them that a father’s love for his children is indestructible and has nothing to do with whether their dad loves their mom. I wanted to tell them what my father never told me, because his father never told him: I love you. I love you, but I’m free. I love you, but Christianity can go fuck itself. You are the only people I will love for more than three years.

  Now, here I was all choked up like some schmuck, marveling at them, wrapping myself up in the most reactionary archetype in the world, sitting on a furnace, all warm and snug, and soon we were going to die together, and I realized I’d been wrong about everything.

  9:34

  At 9:34 AM in the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald the employees scuttled under their steel desks, each to their own little corner, to burn to a cinder. We don’t know whether the fifty people in the conference room prayed, but they used the word “God” a lot on the cellphones. On the ninety-second floor at Carr Futures, they were up to their knees in water. Two dozen brokers were asphyxiated in a meeting room, piled up near the door like a gas chamber. On the ninety-fifth floor, the left wing of the plane had ripped out the ceiling, the walls, the windows, the information desk, even the marble in the reception area. It was pitch dark, blood flowed, there was a smell of singed hair, it was the silence of lifeless bodies. In the South Tower, at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, the Investment Banking division took the stairs and survived; not the traders. They didn’t want to miss the opening bell.

  It’s snowing over the city. On the sidewalks, a layer of white powder falls from the heavens as it did on the eleventh—though natural this time—and settles on the asphalt. From the observation deck of the Empire State Building, the city looks as though it’s covered with a white sheet, like sofas in a sleeping country house. But here, there are police sirens and the murmur, the pulse of urban life. Few tourists have come here this morning; the icy wind
whips the snowflakes, stinging the eyes. A loudspeaker broadcasts an Ella Fitzgerald song: “In my solituuuude, you hauuuunt me.” The view is obscured but if I try hard I can make out the rocks and the water, even the waves on the East River, circular ripples on the expanse of black. Above my head, the needle on the Empire State Building—intended as a place where airships could moor—looks like the mast on top of the Eiffel Tower which Americans had wanted to outdo since 1899; which they finally succeeded in outdoing in 1931. I walk around the terrace: behind the curtain of snow, I can see chimneys smoking, as if New York were a rumbling forge, a factory with 10 million workers. Over the mantle of white, several strata of gray are overlaid, like confectioner’s sugar, then a sudden flash of orange—canvas sheeting around a building site; or gold—the dome of a building; or silver—the Chrysler Building in the distance, pearlescent in the cotton clouds. A pair of lovers ask me to take their photo. I despise them. Their lightheartedness hits me as hard as the cold air. I feel like grabbing the girl by her fur collar and screaming: “Enjoy it while it lasts. One day he’ll go to a brothel with his buddies and you’ll cheat on him in a hotel room with someone from the office. You’ll wind up leaving him, and who’ll hold onto the photo I’m taking? Nobody. It’s a waste of film, it’ll end up in a shoebox at the back of a wardrobe.”

  In the world bitterness championships, I’m aiming to make the finalists. But I don’t say anything, of course, and I immortalize them, a kiss in the ice. Turning toward the south I verify that the two towers are missing. The Empire State Building should be happy: it is once again the pinnacle of the city. For thirty years, two buildings attempted to contest its supremacy, but that’s all over now: the seventies are dead. The Empire State, at 1,250 feet, is kingpin again. At every moment, the shifting light transforms the landscape. To the north, the Pan-Am building has changed its name: MetLife, I write your name. Similarly, the RCA building is now the GE Building. The three things which change a skyline are: clouds, terrorist attacks, and branding.

  9:35

  The battle for the air: struggling to get even your torso out the window, to escape the furnace, the lungs are insistent. Down in Windows on the World, Jeffrey helps his coworkers from the Risk Water Group to find pockets of air. Standing on the bar. In the kitchens, the freezer. Through the windows on the north face. The fire rages. A number of other executives have managed to get through to the Fire Department who give them the same instructions: “Don’t move, we’re on our way.” As if we could move. Jeffrey is looking for water, but nothing comes out of the faucets anymore, so he tips water out of a vase hanging from the ceiling to moisten his group’s napkins. He tears down the red drapes to staunch, or at least to filter, the smoke. He waves tablecloths out the window where huddles of people are screaming for help. Jeffrey isn’t scared anymore. He’s become a hero. He upends tables over puddles of water so his friends can cross the corridor without being electrocuted by bare wires dangling in the water.

  He really did everything he could for the others before taking his chance. He wanted to put his idea to the test; maybe he was just tired of watching the people he loved die and being unable to save them. He grabs the four corners of the curtain (two corners in each hand) and jumps. At first, the fabric billows like a parachute. His buddies cheer him on. He can see their petrified faces. He picks up speed. His arms have too much weight to carry, the curtain tangles. He’d been paragliding in Aspen, so he knows how to use updrafts. Even so, he falls like a stone. I would have liked to be able to say that he made it, but people would simply criticize me for the same reason they criticized Spielberg when he had water gush through the nozzles in the gas chambers. Jeffrey didn’t land gracefully on his toes. Within seconds his derisory piece of fabric became a torch. Jeffrey literally exploded on the plaza, killing a firefighter and the woman he was rescuing. Jeffrey’s wife got the news of his death from his boyfriend. She found out he was bisexual and that he was dead in the same instant. If I’d hoped to tell charming stories, I picked the wrong subject.

  9:36

  In a book published in August 2000, I spun a metaphor to describe the entryist revolution: “You can’t hijack a plane unless you get on board.” Octave Parango was convinced that he could change things from the inside. Then, at the end of the novel, he realized that there was no one to fly the plane. Appointed head of his agency, he discovered it was impossible to revolutionize a system that was autonomous, an organization that had neither manager, nor management, nor purpose. Advertising’s capitalist society triumphant and globalized? A rapacious machine running in a vacuum. (The metaphor of a plane without a pilot was borrowed from an American comedy: Airplane!) On September 11, 2001, that image appeared to me in all its horrific significance. You have to board a plane in order to hijack it. But what if the plane commits suicide? We become a ball of fire and we’re no further on. If we get on board, it is because we want it to change direction, but if it’s only to plow it into a building? The only revolution is one external to this self-destructive system. Never board a plane. Accept the world, participate in advertising or the media and you’re certain to die in a colossal explosion live on CNN. Nowadays, entryism has become self-mutilation. The true revolution is effacement. What is important is not to play a part. It’s time to favor active desertion over passive resistance.

  The boycott rather than the sit-in.

  Stop blaming others, blaming the world. As the rich man’s Zola, it’s time for me to write: “Je m’accuse.”

  I accuse myself of complacency and narcissism.

  I accuse myself of pathological seduction.

  I accuse myself of Park Avenue socialism.

  I accuse myself of social climbing and venality.

  I accuse myself of jealousy and of frustration.

  I accuse myself of affected sincerity.

  I accuse myself of trying to please even in this self-accusation intended to parry the blows to come.

  I accuse myself of two-speed consciousness.

  I accuse myself of appearing on Canal+ to avenge myself for not being a star.

  I accuse myself of arrogant indolence.

  I accuse myself of writing veiled autobiographies.

  I accuse myself of not being the hetero Bruce Benderson.

  I accuse myself of being facile at 9:36.

  I accuse myself of not being capable of anything much other than the facile.

  I accuse myself of being entirely responsible for my own depression.

  I accuse myself of a complete lack of courage.

  I accuse myself of abandoning my child.

  I accuse myself of doing nothing to change what is wrong with my life.

  I accuse myself of loving all that I disparage, especially money and fame.

  I accuse myself of not being able to see farther than the end of my twin noses.

  I accuse myself of self-satisfaction disguised as self-denigration.

  I accuse myself of being incapable of love.

  I accuse myself of only seeking the approval of women without ever interesting myself in their problems.

  I accuse myself of esthetics without ethics.

  I accuse myself of mental (and physical) masturbation.

  I accuse myself of mental (and physical) onanism.

  I accuse myself of imputing to my generation failings which are mine.

  I accuse myself of confusing falling out of love with superficiality (there can be no falling out of love if one is incapable of love).

  I accuse myself of looking for the perfect woman knowing that perfection does not exist, doing it so that I will never be happy and can therefore wallow in comfortable whining complaint.

  I accuse myself of being uglyist.

  I accuse myself of not giving a fuck about anything except myself.

  I accuse myself of blaming others because I am jealous of them.

  I accuse myself of wanting the best but settling for very little.

  I accuse myself of having nothing in common with
New York City except perhaps individualism and megalomania.

  I accuse myself of burning all my bridges, running from my past, i.e. from myself, and of having no friends.

  I accuse myself of vociferous stagnation and clumsy parenting.

  I accuse myself of chronic irresponsibility, that is to say ontological cowardice.

  I accuse myself of washing my dirty linen in public since 1990.

  I accuse myself of leaving nothing in my wake but ruins.

  I accuse myself of being infatuated with ruins because “Birds of a feather flock together.”

  And now, the verdict:

  I sentence myself to solitary for life.

  9:37

  The tricky thing is there’s no phone booth round here. Clark Kent can’t turn into Superman with no phone booth to change into his costume. Dad’s hardly gonna get his kit off in front of Lourdes! Obviously Jerry and me don’t care if we see his peter, we’ve seen it before. But how can he change into a superhero if he can’t get dressed? It’s silly but I should have thought about it. And Jerry’s peed his underroos, dork! Thinks I didn’t notice! Is he blind or what? I didn’t say anything so as not to distract Dad from his proton metaglucidation. A while back when he went to the bathroom, I thought he was going to transform but he didn’t; I think it’s ‘cause he doesn’t want people to know about his superpowers. It’s true, though: superheroes don’t usually have kids, so he’s gotta keep shtum all the time, it’s pretty tough on him. What will he do once he’s operational? An excellent question, thank you for asking. Well, he’ll start off by melting the steel door with his laser-piercing eyes. After that, he’ll break through to the roof, pick up the whole tower using his ultraforce and plunge it into the Hudson to put out the flames. It’ll go PSCHHHH like when Mom runs water over the pan after she makes popcorn. Then he’ll put the tower back where it was and do the same with the tower next door. Or maybe if it’s too dangerous and the people inside would get bruises and stuff, he’ll do the opposite: he’ll suck up 100 billion gallons of water from the sea and spray it all over the Twin Towers. He could do either. Or else, he could make a slide out of plastic sheeting from one of the building sites, there’s loads round here, and people can slide down to the bottom, or make a bridge between the towers by stretching his elastic body, or (but he’d only do this as a last resort if the other things didn’t work) he could spin the earth in the opposite direction and make time go backward two hours, that way none of this would have happened and all you need to do is tell the people not to go to work and everything’s cool. That’s what my dad’s gonna do when he gets his trajectorial hyperpowers.