Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  10:02

  The air pirates lived comfortably in Florida in small seaside resorts with beaches and shopping malls. I need someone to explain this to me. One day, someone will have to explain to me how fifteen young, Westernized Saudi graduates in suits, whose families lived in Germany and later in America; guys who drank wine, watched TV, drove cars and flight simulators, ate at Pizza Hut, occasionally visited prostitutes, sex shops; how men like this could slit the throat of the stewardess with a craft knife (you have to hold the girl with one hand, a stewardess wriggles a lot, shrieks, loud piercing screams, you have to press the blade hard against the carotid and the trachea, pierce the skin, cutting the nerves, blood spurts everywhere, she struggles, kicking her heels into your shins, digging her elbow into your solar plexus)…no, it’s not an easy thing to do, how these guys could take control of four Boeings only to destroy them by flying them into buildings in the name of Allah. I’m quite prepared to accept that Allah is great, but even so. Claude Lanzmann says that the Shoah is a mystery: September 11 is too. Were they on drugs, and if so, what? Coke, speed, alcohol, hash, EPO, Belgian skunk? Had they been promised something other than the thousand virgin sluts of Paradise? Hard cash for their next of kin? And how many of those in the unit knew about the suicidal nature of the mission?

  When I was little, Jacques Martin used to present a show on Antenne 2 called Incredible but True. You’d see him haranguing pensioners bussed in to the Théâtre de I’Empire.

  “Incredible but…”

  And in unison, they’d all chime in: “…TRUE!”

  I think he could have done a special edition on September 11. It was an event which was unforeseeable because it was impossible. It is, quite literally, incomprehensible, by which I mean it passes human understanding. Who are these men capable of such a thing? Who are Mohammed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Marwan al-Shehhi, and their buddies?

  Are they (tick box as applicable):

  Towel-head fundamentalists?

  Psychotic madmen?

  Neo-fascists?

  Saints in turbans?

  Morons manipulated by a billionaire who is an ex-CIA agent?

  Heroes of the exploited Third World?

  Hard-core postpunks drugged up to the eyeballs?

  Camel-fuckers who need to be napalmed pronto?

  Depressed nihilists?

  Militant anti-globalization activists?

  Kamikazes?

  (C’mon now, all together!)…Incredible but…TRUE?

  10:03

  I made two mistakes:

  1) Having children;

  2) Bringing them here for breakfast.

  I’m starting to see things differently. As if they’re not happening now, as if they’re already memories. It’s strange observing everything from this distance which confers on it a sense of imminent self-destruction. The world is so much more beautiful when you’re no longer really a part of it. I know that I’ll remember even when I no longer have a memory. Because, even after death, others will remember for us.

  10:04

  The “killer cloud”, a tornado of rubble, hundred-foot steel girders like train tracks falling from the sky, sheets of glass a hundred feet square, sharp as giant razor blades, the killer cloud moved like a tidal wave at fifty miles an hour through the alleys onto Fulton Street, and this, too, is an image lifted from disaster movies: we’ve seen this same scene in The Blob, Godzilla, Independence Day, Armageddon, in Die Hard 2 and in Deep Impact: that morning, reality contented itself with imitating special effects. Some bystanders didn’t run for cover, so convinced were they that they’d seen it all before.

  10:05

  One last time, the telephone manages to get through. It is Mary in tears. I didn’t try to reassure her.

  “We’re not going to make it out of here. Pray for us.”

  “Couldn’t you have used the stairs?”

  “There’s no way out, no rescue services. Please, you have to believe me, don’t ask any more questions, I swear I’ve done everything I possibly could. Keep calling 911. Tell them to open the door to the roof.”

  “WAIT! Don’t hang up! Please, PLEASE!”

  The line went dead. The building roared like a wounded dinosaur, like King Kong at the end of the movie. Laughing, I tossed bundles of money out the window. Nothing but hundred-dollar bills. Must have been about five or six thousand bucks, whipped away by the wind. And everyone laughed, a frantic laughter, a liberating fit of the giggles which began with me and pealed around me on the top floor of the glass penitentiary.

  10:06

  The morning after the terrorist attacks, American flags blossomed throughout the megalopolis. One year on, they have wilted. Has the tide of nationalism been stemmed? No: fear has returned, it’s important to do nothing to attract the attention of an eventual enemy. Too many people are allergic to the Stars and Stripes, no point getting them riled up. The United States of America continues to account for 40 percent of global defense expenditure. I’ve been wondering for some days now what it is about New York that has changed. I’ve just worked it out: America has just discovered doubt. They never knew René Descartes. Freud brought them a plague, but the land of my forefathers, the land of milk and honey, had never experienced doubt. And now, whichever way I turn, I see doubt being sown in the American dream. Not only in the people. Cars doubt. Supermarkets doubt. Parking lots aren’t sure of anything anymore. Deconsecrated churches transformed into nightclubs doubt themselves. Traffic jams are no longer convinced of their certainty. Designer stores wonder whether it’s all worth it. Traffic lights don’t stay red for long. Billboard ads feel ashamed. Airplanes are frightened of frightening people. Buildings put the past behind them. America has entered the age of Descartes.

  10:07

  The women had won: no one wanted to grow old with them anymore.

  I spent so much time jerking off that in the end I got a hard-on just looking at a box of Kleenex. I was a forty-year-old single man. I had orgasms nonstop. I thought this was freedom, but no; it was loneliness. I had given up on love. I had chosen pleasure over happiness. Couples depressed me. I saw married men as eunuchs and prisoners. I thought: you’re not a man unless you fuck a different woman every day.

  I was incapable of living for anyone but myself.

  10:08

  On September 11, 2001, a branch of Burger King was transformed into a morgue. Brooks Brothers looked as though it had been whitewashed. Towering over Pier A, two colossal Apple billboards illustrated with photos of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt bear the slogan THINK DIFFERENT. (Roosevelt was President of the United States when Pearl Harbor happened, but that’s a coincidence.) On West Street, they laid torn sheets over the dismembered bodies, but the ground was still strewn with exposed flesh. “I saw a whole heart stuck to one of the mezzanine windows. Arms, legs, guts, severed bodies, human organs all over the plaza. I couldn’t stop thinking: it’s not real, it’s a film. It can’t be real. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it.” (Testimony of Medhi Dadgarian, a survivor from the seventy-second floor.) Everything below 14th Street was cordoned off. In all of Lower Manhattan, there was neither electricity nor gas. At the foot of the Twin Towers they found pieces of Rodin sculptures, bronze bodies mingled with broken human corpses. Beneath the rubble, hundreds of pagers bleeped in the jackets of crushed firefighters. Beneath Ground Zero: a subway station in darkness, the ceiling ripped open by the debris, girders twisted, concrete powdered. A newspaper kiosk beneath the fine white powder, charred cables hanging above the magazines and the candy bars. A gaping trench running diagonally across WTC plaza, where the scattered columns of the towers look like branches of trees ripped off by a hurricane. New Yorkers of every age, creed, race, and social class waited patiently in a line that stretched for four blocks just to make an appointment to donate blood.

  The earth slumps under the weight of rubble like a ballroom on the morning after a party. Things need to be tidied up, but no one knows where to start. Faced with the enormi
ty of the task, we sigh, empty an ashtray; the champagne has gone flat. The windows of the world are dark, their eyes gouged out. It might have been funny, before, while the night laughed. Now the streets are cold, the people hurrying. They are running because they are afraid to stop. They can no longer remember why they are so determined to be rich. A car glides between the towers like a toy on an electric circuit. On the sidewalk, we act as if we had not all been seriously injured. All convalescing.

  From here, we can penetrate the unspeakable, the inexpressible. Please excuse our misuse of ellipses. I have cut out the awful descriptions. I have not done so out of propriety, nor out of respect for the victims because I believe that describing their slow agonies, their ordeal, is also a mark of respect. I cut them because, in my opinion, it is more appalling still to allow you to imagine what became of them.

  10:09

  I would so like it to be yesterday. To go back to just before. If I had to do it all again, I wouldn’t. “Oh, I believe in yesterday” (a Beatles song).

  The helicopters flew past us, watched us dying. (Paragraph cut.)

  “The only thing I can do now is pray to God that nothing like this ever happens again.”

  When you were born, I cried with joy just looking at you.

  “Dad,” says David who is very pale, “I’ve got a pain in my tummy. Can you call the doctor?”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart, he’s on his way.”

  He has 40 percent burns to his stomach.

  “I’m tired…can I go ‘sleep?”

  “NO! David, listen to Daddy! David?”

  “You can wake me up when the galaxy has been saved.”

  10:10

  In Windows on the World, the customers were gassed, burned, and reduced to ash. To them, as to so many others, we owe a duty of memory.

  (Page cut.)

  10:11

  Death of David Yorston (1994-2001)

  “A child in himself, changed by eternity”

  Edgar Allan Poe

  10:12

  It is at this point that I whip out another of my famous ITNNOTs (Instant Though Not Necessarily Original Theories). This hatred which America inspires is love. Someone who despises you so much is someone who wants your attention, consequently someone who subconsciously loves you. Bin Laden does not realize it, but he worships America and wants to be admired by it. He would not make so much effort if he did not want America to take care of him.

  Who is mad? Who is sacred? Our God is crucified. We worship a bearded man in a loincloth tortured on a cross. It is time to found a new religion whose symbol would be two towers ablaze. Let us build churches of parallel parallelepipeds in which, at the moment of communion, two remote-controlled scale models of planes would be crashed. At the moment when the planes pierce the towers, the congregation would be asked to kneel.

  10:13

  Liberalism has nothing to do with morality. The motto of the French Republic should apply to the whole world: “Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood.” The problem is that this human principle is an inhuman falsehood.

  The West booms that we must be free! Free! Shout from the rooftops how free we are, brag about how free we are. Die to defend that freedom. All well and good. But I am not happy when I am free. I’ve studied the problem from every angle but in vain. In spite of my Texan insincerity, now that it’s too late to go back, I’m forced to admit it. I liked Mary better in my dad’s car, her slender fingers and her nails and the smell of flowers everywhere and the twilight round her eyes. Moments gleaned until the last moment. I liked Jerry better when he was born, his repulsive, swollen, blue head, oh my God, I’m going to have to take care of this filthy thing my whole life, and then he opens his eyes and smiles. I liked it better having Candace hold me in her arms, so that I could forget the terror of being me.

  I wasn’t happy when I was free.

  10:14

  “I’m on a plane / I can’t complain”

  Nirvana

  In his History of French Literature (1936), Albert Thibaudet explains that a generation is an age group who, at twenty, lived through a historic event from which they will never recover and which will forever mark them. In his own case (Thibaudet was born in 1874), it was the Dreyfus affair. For the succeeding generations, there were the two world wars, the war in Algeria, then May 1968. My parents’ generation was irrevocably marked by 1968. Their society was turned upside down: morals changed and with them behavior. Nothing was ever as it had been before: the way people dressed, the way they spoke, customs, education. Everything they had been taught was no longer of any use to them. For my parents, 1968 was like being born again, hence their inevitable divorce. They no longer had any reference points, their parents were squares, they didn’t understood their religion anymore, didn’t know how to talk to them. How can you expect to stay with someone when everything is disintegrating? For my generation, it was 1989: I was twenty-four and the fall of the Berlin Wall sounded the death knell of ideologies. A reckless hope was born: liberalism would conquer the whole planet. So I got a job in advertising, the military wing of capitalism. I pulled through, but that’s another story, one I’ve already told. Like all the writers of my generation, I was forever marked by the eighties religion of money, hypnotized by the glamor, the arrogance of yuppies, synthesizer music and designer furniture, fashion shows and the democratization of porn, the taste for discotheques and the poetry of airports. That’s how it goes: my generation is the generation of François Mitterand, of Globe magazine, which saw the left embrace realism and abandon utopias. My generation despises May ‘68 because all generations have a duty to destroy that which came before. My generation will remain forever traumatized by the death of communism, supermodels, and cocaine. The generation that followed, those born in the 1980s, which will destroy my own, was twenty on September 11, 2001. In thier eyes, I am the living embodiment of jet-set superficiality, of the entryist paradox, media corruption, and self-important vacuousness. I wonder how they will survive the World Trade Center: can they grow up in the smoldering ruins of materialism? What will they build in the place of the global Shopping Mall. What will their dreams be made of, other than molten steel and charred entrails? How can they build on the ruins of my generation, the destruction of the seventies and the failure of the eighties, the breakdown of the designer-label society? What will they see from their window on the world? Did the creed of comfort and consumption and therefore of money as the sole hope truly die in New York in 2001?

  Our future has vanished. Our future is the past tense.

  10:15

  The two traders are in the conference room, they know it’s all over, they’re up to their thighs in water but it is the smoke that is drowning them. Chairs overturned, purple corpses around them, those of suffocated colleagues and bosses.

  They clambered onto the oval, ebony, thirty-foot conference table. He dropped his pants and she took off her blouse. Their bodies are salon-tanned; despite the stench of death and the unbearable heat, it’s really hot to watch them.

  “I’m dying of happiness,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “I’m dying loving you.”

  “Death is better than Viagra,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “You were my reason for living; you’re my reason for dying.”

  In heaven, there were no thousand virgins, but there were once two. It’s not only in hell that passions blaze.

  10:16

  Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s “notebooks” have recently been translated into French. I discovered the title he almost gave The Great Gatsby: