Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  9:54

  I’m bored with writing dead-end novels. Bored of sterile postexistentialist meanderings. Bored of being a catcher in the rye catching nothing. I need to find the new utopia.

  It seems increasingly clear to me that the terrorists were mistaken in their target. Why didn’t they attack the United Nations buildings on First Avenue between 42nd and 48th Streets? Because it’s an international zone? But the organization has clearly failed in its mission. The UN is really to blame for wars, injustice, and inequality. It allows nations to believe that justice exists when it’s never enforced. Target your Boeings on thinga-majig. The world needs an effective government, an international army capable of imposing order. The Blue Berets in Yugoslavia? Nothing more than unarmed soldiers paid to watch massacres without turning a hair. The United Nations was discredited the moment it appointed Libya president of the Commission for Human Rights. This bureaucratic, sclerotic, corrupt, and impotent organization needs to be reformed. The UN was founded on the ruins of the League of Nations; what are we going to build on the ruins of the UN? Why not global democracy of the type called for in the speeches of Garry Davis, founder of the World Citizens Movement in 1948 (with the support of Albert Camus, André Breton, and Albert Einstein)? There is a solution to the horrors of terrorism and ecological catastrophe: a global republic governed by an international parliament elected by universal suffrage. I dream of abolishing nations. I would love not to have a country. John Lennon droned “Imagine there’s no countries.” Could this be why New York assassinated him?

  In the UN sculpture garden, I take a photo of a statue of St George slaying a dragon which looks uncannily like the fuselage of an airplane. Numerous TV outside-broadcast trucks make it difficult to see. Entitled Good Defeats Evil, this massive sculpture was a gift to the United Nations from the USSR in 1990. It is sculpted from the remains of two missiles, one Soviet, one American. “Good Defeats Evil:” it is a battle that rages in each of us every day and presently throughout the world. In this square building, the members of the Security Council are gathered to vote on a resolution about the war in Iraq. At a press conference last night, President Bush said something rather fine: “Since September Eleventh, our home is a battlefield.”

  The weird melting pot which works in New York should serve as an example: a world without frontiers must be possible since it’s been tried and tested successfully on this tiny island. The results are dirty, complicated, dangerous, and noisy, but the system works: it is possible to live with people of all races and origins, from all over the world: it’s feasible, it can be done. Look at Sarajevo.

  I’ve met Troy Davis a number of times in Paris. My first impression was of a tall, lanky man exhausted by the mission conferred on him by his father. Nevertheless, he seems very methodical: he lugs his briefcase round countless countries. The first time I met him, he was looking for money from Pierre Bergé. I found him less entertaining the second time, since he was looking for money from me. Troy Davis is permanently broke: he spends all his money on airline tickets since he quit his job to dedicate himself to the cause of World Democracy. He had a plan for a “Protest for World Democracy.” I remember putting him in touch with Jean-Paul Enthoven, mostly in an attempt to be rid of him. After that, we communicated mostly by email. He wanted to hit on my brother for money, he bugged me until I gave him Thierry Ardisson’s cell number…As soon as he found out I was going to be a publisher, he returned to the fray with his book project. To be honest, he was starting to get on my tits, him and his World Democracy. Even so, though I racked my brains I couldn’t think of any other post-September 11 utopia.

  9:55

  Internet dating will soon to have a new twist. Soon you’ll be able to upload a mini-bio filmed with a webcam spelling out exactly what you’re looking for in a person: age, location, hobbies, eye color, etc. Soon, you won’t meet anyone by accident anymore. You’ll introduce yourself on the Internet with a photo or a video and say, “I’m looking for a sex-obsessed bisexual redhead with big tits and a tight pussy into partner-swapping, Cat Stevens records, basketball, Tarantino movies, and the Republican Party.” You’ll receive an email or SMS alert when someone matching your criteria is in your neighborhood. No need to go to dumbass bars anymore. It’s a pity I won’t live to see this brave new world where dating is as logical as real-estate advertising. I wanted to live in a virtual world; I’m dying in a real one.

  9:56

  Here on Brooklyn Bridge, I feel as though I’m standing on the edge of a cliff. I marvel at the East River, at the tugboats that whistle and inscribe white crested waves on the sea. The white lines of boats on the sea mirror the white lines of planes in the sky. Since I stopped taking cocaine, I see white lines everywhere. Are there powdered humans still in the New York air? Everyone living in the city knows that he must have breathed in some microscopic part of World Trade Center debris. In my first novel, Octave snorts his boss’s ashes. To a greater or lesser extent, New Yorkers too have done this: become involuntary cannibals, contaminated by a form of anthrax containing high-grade volatile humanity. There were outbreaks of illness in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn (everywhere the cloud of smoke passed). Mayor Giuliani apparently decided to play down the health risks so as not to further panic the populace.

  A photographer on board one of the helicopters stated: “We made a number of passes over the roofs to see whether anyone had managed to get up there. There was no one. Given the situation what could we have done? It would have been dangerous to land, especially as the smoke made any kind of maneuvering risky. What we should probably have done was let down a rope. Sadly, I was pretty sure that the doors to the roof would have been locked for security reasons. The heat was horrendous. We could feel it from the cockpit and the pilot could read it on the external thermometer. We couldn’t see anything inside the towers, but I could see people leaning out of the shattered windows, some of them covered in blood, their clothes ripped or burned. Some of them were signaling to us, but what could we do? I often remember one woman, she was hanging on with one hand and waving to us with the other…But what could we do?”

  “What could we do?” is a question he will probably ask himself until his dying day. What could they do? The advantage of writing this much later, a Parisian tourist writing from the comfort of my armchair, is that I can answer without panicking, without risking my neck. What they should have done was contact the security staff and get them to open the doors to the roof, or get a message to the firefighters in the building who were on the twenty-second floor, then organize a series of helicopter airlifts like they do with rescues at sea or in the mountains. It should have been fairly routine, given the dangers helicopter pilots face rescuing people from avalanches or hurricanes. In my mind I have a recurring image which I find deeply moving: a helicopter winching people clinging to a rope ladder to safety above the World Trade Center. The image would have been the most beautiful response to the suicide planes. Unfortunately, it’s an image we never got to see.

  9:57

  I had a bad idea, though born of the best of intentions: I offered the kids the Windows on the World lapel badge that Lourdes gave me when she said goodbye. The problem is that she only had one. Jerry and David started squabbling over who should get it. In the end, Jerry got to keep it, because physically he’s the stronger of the two. I didn’t have the heart to impose some alternative justice. David sulked, but strangely, the quarrel changed his mood and to my great relief he stopped crying. He was plotting his revenge. A couple of seconds later as Jerry was pinning the thing on his T-shirt, David elbowed him so that he’d prick himself with the pin. There was a drop of blood. Jerry gritted his teeth, David smiled. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Jerry accepted it: that was life. I tousled his hair: I had just worked out the problem with this planet. There weren’t enough lapel badges for everyone.

  9:58

  In the end, I tracked down Troy Davis with his gray tweed suit, his gray coat, his gray briefcase. Like all uto
pians, Troy doesn’t care about fashion since he lives in the future, decades from now. Lenin looked like an accountant too, eating complimentary bread at La Closerie des Lilas. We’re sitting in the Life Café with some sandwiches, the floor is tiled, the clientele stu-denty, clusters of cheerful girls, and slightly kitsch paintings on the walls. Troy is two years older than me. He went to Harvard, like my father, though he studied physics.

  “I’m shattered, but at least we’re getting somewhere: the action committee for the World Parliament has the support of Edgar Morin, Jacques Delors, Sonia Gandhi, Felipe Gonzales, Nelson Mandela, Shimon Peres, Danièle Mitterrand, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Léa Rabin, Michel Rocard, Raymond Barre, Amartya Sen (winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics 1998), Alejandro Toledo (President of Peru), Marcel Marceau, l’Abbé Pierre…”

  “Very classy. Sounds like the guest list for a drinks party at Jacques Chirac’s.”

  “Yeah. Maybe you want to be on the committee just to get an invite?”

  “I don’t need to do that to get an invite, all I have to do is publish some bestsellers. In concrete terms, can you explain to me how setting up new institutions will speed up the implementation of the Tobin tax, or wipe out Third World debt, for example?”

  “A new, democratic world order would have the political clout to enact those kind of laws. To set up tax on carbon emissions, regulate arms sales, or set up a Global Environmental Agency. The problem of our times is that we have a globalized economy but no globalized government. There has to be a revolution in order to enact new laws. People have forgotten that the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 were the basis for the subsequent financial revolution.”

  “You really think you’ll see something like this in your lifetime?”

  “History makes intermittent leaps (the most recent example being the collapse of communism). And then there’s the ICC (International Criminal Court): that’s the first time world citizenship has been legally recognized. With an intelligent public awareness campaign, we could create a World Parliament within ten years.”

  “And where do you set it up, this parliament? In the States, like the UN?”

  “No, on a man-made island which is constantly moving between the five continents. A massive project for the. shipyards of the world.”

  “You know what I like about you? You’re mad. What about a novel? Do you think a novel could help?”

  “Sure—unless you’re the author! Hundreds of thousands of young people already demonstrate out of sheer idealism, though no one has put forward a coherent plan. When they find out about this plan for peace and unity, there’ll be millions of them. The World Protest against the war in Iraq on February 15, 2003, rallied 15 million people on the planet. February 15 is a date which is just as important as September 11: the first worldwide protest march. The global demo!”

  “You don’t think it’s too late, that we’re already living through the apocalypse, that cynicism will always triumph over utopianism? That we should just leave Jimmy Carter to worry about world peace?”

  “Whichever way you look at it, even from a cynical point of view, we have to find some nontotalitarian way of solving the problems of globalization. The problem of world hunger could be resolved in less than five years but it isn’t because there are too many conflicting interests getting in the way. Then we’ll come to the wars over water. Decisions have to be taken by the people of earth as a whole, not just a handful of politicians in the pay of water and power companies. If not, then we should tell it like it is: we’re living under the yoke of a global dictatorship.”

  “‘Global dictatorship’? Listen to you! People are free, in rich countries at least.”

  “It’s not my phrase, it’s from Camus.”

  “Oh, right, well, if it’s Camus that changes everything. Okay, remind me to take you to 56 Rue Jacob next time you’re in Paris. That’s where it all started, the birth of a nation as Griffith used to say.”

  “Please! Don’t bullshit with your mouth full. It started a long time before that, you have to go back to the Sumerians. Until 5000 BC we lived in paradise. There were no states. It was a bunch of Sumerian kings who invented war and absolutist nationalism. And you know where it happened? In Iraq! Since the Kingdom of Sumer, it’s been war. Right now, in his dealings with Saddam Hussein, Bush is behaving like a petty Mesopotamian kinglet.”

  “Don’t be too hard on the Sumerians. They invented writing, too. Without the Sumerians, I’d have to be a TV presenter.”

  The Life Café is aptly named; full of highbrow claptrap that makes you want to change the world and girls with squeaky-clean hair called Sandy.

  “Tell me, Troy, what are you going to call this idea of yours? You know you’ve got to have an ‘ism,’ otherwise no one will take your utopia seriously. I suggest ‘Alt-globalism’ to contrast with globalization, or maybe ‘Internationalism.’ Except that sounds too commie…‘Multilateralism’? ‘Cosmopolitism’? ‘Globalism’? No, sounds too capitalist.”

  “Well, I hadn’t really thought about it, but it seems to me it’s pretty incidental—”

  “Oh, no! Not at all, it’s very important to have a name that makes people want to get involved. ‘Universalism’? No, sound too much like Vivendi. I’ve got it: ‘Planetarism’. There you go. We’re Planetarists.”

  “Sounds like some suicidal sect.”

  “Too bad. You’re the Charles Fourier of the new century. You’re our non-Raelian guru. Oh, Saint Troy, show us the way!”

  “Frédéric?”

  “Yes?”

  “How many caipirinhas have you had?”

  “Oh, shut up, I suppose you think Karl Marx drank mineral water?”

  We were talking nonsense, just bullshitting; all the same, it felt good to believe in something.

  9:59

  Another tremor.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “The other tower has just collapsed,” says someone who has been leaning out to breathe.

  The cloud is so thick it’s impossible to tell smoke from dust. The tower that was struck after ours collapsed first. Not trying to figure out but figuring out all the same: that means our tower will implode in a few minutes.

  “Let us pray. Lord God, I pray to You even though I don’t believe in You. Bring us unto You, in spite of our opportunism.”

  The collapse of the other tower made the sound of a handful of broken spaghetti strands, nothing more. I suppose it’s the same sound an avalanche makes. A sharp snap. Mass murder doesn’t rumble like thunder, mass murder makes the sound of a cookie being crunched. Or Niagara Falls, if you replace the water with concrete.

  At some point, Jerry looked round at the water cooler which was making a strange glug-glug noise. Bubbles were starting to form in the clear plastic water bottle. Inside, the water was about to boil.

  10:00

  Lower Manhattan without the two towers is a different city: thirty-seven years have gone up in smoke. It was at these docks that Lafayette put ashore.

  Lower Manhattan is the only part of the city where the streets don’t have numbers, the only part where one can get lost, retrace one’s steps; the Financial District is the one which most resembles the jumble of a European city. At ten o’clock in the morning, I walk down Wall Street, the street of the wall of money. So named because this was where they built the ramparts to protect the city from the Indians. Now, someone needs to add another brick to the wall, like the Pink Floyd song. In Israel, they’re building a wall like the one in Berlin. Soon, it won’t be “Wall Street” but “Wall City,” “Wall Country,” “Wall World.”

  Right here, two towers rose up to touch the heavens but before that there was a wooden stockade to protect our Dutch ancestors from Algonquins, bears, and wolves. Built in 1653, the city wall was regularly dismantled by the residents who used the logs and the posts to buttress or heat their houses with their tiled gable roofs. Under my feet, in New Amsterdam, the World Trade Center has joined the ruins of colonial buildings, the win
e pitchers, the bricks, the glass and nails of centuries gone by, the fields of wheat, barley, and tobacco, the remains of the pigs that gamboled through the dark lanes between the hovels, and the bones of sheep and men who came from the other side of the world to this land. Once, long, long ago, Indians planted rye here where the World Trade Center once stood.

  10:01

  The rescue services reached us. You never saw us on TV. Nobody took photos of us. All you know of us are disheveled figures scrambling down the walls, bodies hurled into the void, arms waving white tablecloths in the ether like scraps of cloud. The thunderous noise of the falls in the documentary by the Naudet brothers. The only film about the tragedy is the work of two Frenchmen.

  But they didn’t show the falling limbs, the fountains of blood, the melded sections of steel, flesh, and plastic. You didn’t smell the burning electrical cables, the whiff of a short circuit amplified by 100,000 volts. You didn’t hear the animal cries, like pigs with their throats cut, like calves torn limb from limb; only these were not calves, but minds capable of pleading.

  I’m sorry? Decency? Important not to upset children? Morally wrong to turn victims’ suffering into tabloid television? Offensive to the families of the victims? It’s not as if we use kid gloves when the carnage takes place overseas. Plane crashes are routinely photographed and the images sold everywhere but in New York. Journalists—especially American journalists—are not much bothered by so-called “respect for the families.” What? This carnage of human flesh is disgusting? It is reality which is disgusting, and refusing to look at it, more so. Why did you see no pictures of our dislocated legs and arms, or severed torsos, our spilled entrails? Why did the dead go unseen? It was not some ethical code of practice, it was self-censorship, maybe just censorship, period. Five minutes after the first plane crashed into our tower, the tragedy was already a hostage to fortune in a media war. And patriotism? Of course. Knee-jerk patriotism made the American press swagger about, censor our suffering, edit out shots of the jumpers, the photographs of those burn victims, the body parts. You could call it a spontaneous omertà, a media blackout unprecedented since the first Gulf War. I’m not sure that all of the victims would consent to be expunged in this manner. I would have liked us to be shown for all the world to see. People should have the courage to look at us, just as we force ourselves to witness the images in Nuit et Brouillard. But already it was war; in time of war, you hush up the damage done by the enemy. It’s important to put up a good show, it’s part of the propaganda. The victims were hugely compensated. Mary is rich now, what with my life insurance, the relief fund, social security contributions, and the boys’ inheritance. Candace will get nothing, Candace will have to do a lot more lingerie photo shoots. And it was thus that one of the greatest postwar campaigns of media disinformation was perpetrated. Don’t show the blood, I can’t bear to look at it. When a building collapses, feel free to repeat the footage endlessly. But whatever you do, don’t show what was inside: our bodies.