Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  The only thing I remember is that being middle class doesn’t buy you happiness.

  Darkness; everything is dark. My alarm clock goes off, it’s eight o’clock, I’m late, I’m thirteen years old, I slip on my brown Kickers, pick up my huge army surplus bag full of Stypens, correction pens, textbooks as heavy as they are fucking boring, Mom is already up heating some milk, my brother and I slurp it noisily, bitching because there’s skin on the milk, before taking the elevator down into this dark winter morning in 1978. The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is miles away. It’s on the Rue Coëtlogon, 75006 Paris. I’m dying of cold and boredom. I stuff my hands in my ugly loden coat. I wrap myself up in my itchy yellow scarf. I know it’s going to rain and I’ve missed the 84. What I don’t know is that this whole thing is absurd, that none of this will ever come in useful. Neither do I know that this dismal dawn is the only morning in my whole childhood that I will later remember. I don’t even know why I’m sad—maybe because I haven’t got the balls to cut math class. Charles decides to wait for the bus and I decide to walk to school, past the Jardin du Luxembourg, along the Rue de Vaugirard where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived from April to August 1928 (at the corner of the Rue Bonaparte), but I didn’t know that then. I still live nearby; from my balcony I can see kids with the school-bags rushing to school, spewing plumes of cold breath: tiny hunchbacked dragons running along the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks. They watch their feet, careful not to step on the gaps between the paving stones like they’re walking through a minefield. Bleak is the adjective that best sums up my life back then. BLEAK as an icy morning. At that moment, I’m convinced nothing interesting will ever happen to me. I’m ugly, skinny, I feel completely alone and the sky buckets down on me. I stand, soaked to the skin, in front of the Senate which is as gray as my shitty school: everything about school fucks me off: the walls, the teachers, the pupils. I hold my breath; things are awful, everything’s awful, why is everything so awful? Because I’m ordinary, because I’m thirteen, because I’ve got a chin like a gumboot, because I’m scrawny. If I’m going to be this scrawny I might as well be dead. A bus comes and I hesitate, I really hesitate, I almost threw myself under the bus that day. It’s the 84 overtaking me with Charles inside. The big wheels splatter the bottoms of my stupid pleated pants (beige corduroy with turnups that are way too big). I walk toward normality. I walk, wheezing, across the black ice. No girl will ever love me, and I can see their point, I don’t blame you, mesdemoiselles, I can see your point: even I don’t love me. I’m late: Madame Minois, my math teacher, will roll her eyes to heaven and spit. The cretins in my class will heave a sigh just to make themselves look good. Rain will stream down the window-panes of a classroom which reeks of despair (despair, I now know, smells of chalk dust). Why am I complaining when there’s nothing wrong with me? I haven’t been raped, beaten, abandoned, drugged. Just divorced parents who are excessively kind to me like every kid in my class. I’m traumatized by my lack of trauma. That morning, I choose to live. I walk through the school gates like walking into a lion’s den. The building has a black mouth, its windows are yellow eyes. It swallows me in order to feed on me. I’m completely submissive. I agree to become what they make of me. I come face to face with my adolescent spinelessness.

  From the top of the Tour Montparnasse I can, if I try, make out the School of my Wasted Youth. I still live in this neighborhood where I suffered so much. I do not leave this place which made me who I am. I never rebelled. I never even moved house. From my house, to get to my job at Flammarion, I walk down the same Rue de Vaugirard as the little boy whose ears and hands were frozen. I spew the same plumes of cold breath. I still do not walk on the cracks. I never escaped that morning.

  8:43

  My childhood takes place in the verdant paradise of a fashionable suburb of Austin, Texas. A house that looks just like the neighbors’, a garden where we drink from the fountain, an open-top Chevy driving toward the desert. Through the window, a sofa and the faces of two children reflected in a TV, and at this time of the day it’s the same all over town, all over the country. My parents try their best to live life like a Technicolor movie: they hold cocktail parties at which the mothers compare notes on interior decoration. Every year, we consume an average of four tons of crude oil. High school? Nothing but spotty white kids in baseball caps listening to Grateful Dead and squashing beer cans against their foreheads. Nothing too serious. Sunshine, coffee bars, football tryouts, cheerleaders with big tits who say “I mean” and “like” in every sentence. Everything about my adolescence is squeaky-clean: lap-dancing bars don’t exist yet and motels are R-rated. I eat lunch on the grass, play tennis, read comics in the hammock. Ice cubes go “clink-clink” in my father’s glass of Scotch. Every week there are a couple of executions in my state. My childhood unfolds on a lawn. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not talking Little House on the Prairie, more Little Bungalow in the Suburbs. I wear braces on my teeth, take my wooden Dunlop tennis racket and play air guitar in front of the mirror with the radio full blast. I spend my vacations at summer camp, I go river rafting in dinghies, hone my serve, win at water polo, discover masturbation thanks to Hustler. All the Lolitas are in love with Cat Stevens but since he’s not around they lose their cherries to the tennis coach. My greatest trauma is the film King Kong (the 1933 version): my folks had gone out and my sister and I secretly watched it in their bedroom despite our babysitter’s injunction. The black-and-white image of this enormous gorilla scaling the Empire State Building, snatching military planes out of the sky is my worst childhood memory. They did a remake in color in the seventies which uses the World Trade Center. Any minute now I expect to see a huge gorilla scaling the towers—believe it or not I’ve got goose bumps right now, I can’t stop thinking about it.

  You can thumb through my life in high school yearbooks. I thought it was happy at the time but thinking back on it, it depresses me. Maybe because I’m scared that it’s over, scared because I left my family to make a killing in real estate. I became successful the day I realized a very simple thing: you don’t make money on big properties, you make it on little ones (because you sell more of them). Middle-class families read the same magazines as rich ones: everyone wants that apartment in Wallpaper, or a loft just like Lenny Kravitz’s! So I did a deal with a credit union who agreed to lend me a couple of million dollars over thirty years, then I found a bunch of old cattle warehouses in an old cowboy section of Austin and transformed them into artists’ studios for idiots. My genius was my ability to convince couples who came to me that their loft was unique when in fact I was shifting thirty a year. That’s how I climbed the greasy pole at the agency, stole the job of the guy who hired me, then set up my own company, “Austin Maxi Real Estate.” Three point five million, soon be four. Hardly Donald Trump but it’s enough to take the long view. Like my dad used to say: “The first million is the hardest, after that the rest just follow!” Jerry and David are financially comfortable though they don’t realize that yet because I always play the part of an aristocrat on his uppers in front of Mary so she doesn’t force me to quadruple the alimony. Strangely, money is the reason I left her: I couldn’t keep going home when I had all that dough burning a hole in my pocket. What was the point of earning all that money if I was going to be stuck with the same woman every night? I wanted to be the antithesis of George Babbitt, that dumb schmuck incapable of escaping his family and his town…

  “Gimme the camera,” says David.

  “No, it’s mine,” says Jerry.

  “You don’t know how to take photos,” says David.

  “You don’t either,” says Jerry.

  “You didn’t even set the flash,” says David.

  “You don’t have to when it’s bright,” says Jerry.

  “An’ you didn’t set the speed,” says David.

  “Who cares, it’s only a disposable,” says Jerry.

  “Take one of the Statue of Liberty,” says David.

  “Already took one,” says Jerr
y.

  “Last time they were all blurry,” says David.

  “Shut up,” says Jerry.

  “Gimp,” says David.

  “Gimp yourself,” says Jerry.

  “Jerry’s a gimp, Jerry’s a gimp, Jerry’s a gimp,” says David.

  “Takes one to know one,” says Jerry.

  “C’mon,” David says, “gimme the camera.”

  8:44

  If they could carefully study the photos they’re taking (photos that will never be developed), behind the Empire State Building, Jerry and David would notice a white dot moving on the horizon. Like a dazzling white gull against the blue skyline. But birds don’t fly this high, nor this fast. Sunlight ricochets off the silver shape like when one of the FBI guys in Mission Impossible flashes a mirror in his partner’s eyes to silently signal to him.

  In Le Ciel de Paris, everything is designed to constantly remind you that you are higher that the normal. Even in the restrooms, the walls with the urinals depict the skyline of the City of Light, so that male customers can piss all over it.

  I should come back and have dinner here: the menu is pretty tempting. “Autumn in Le Ciel de Paris as interpreted by Jean-François Oyon and his team”: among the appetizers is Seared foie gras on pain d’épices with a cream of ceps (€25.50); fish dishes include Fillet of grey mullet à la plancha with a bouillabaisse reduction and eggplant remoulade (€26.00); if you prefer meat, Jean-François Oyon suggests Pigeon roasted in honey and spices with caramelized cabbage (€33.00). For dessert I’d be tempted to go for the Luxurious warm, chocolate “Guanaja” with hazelnut cream ice. I realize it’s hardly good for your health—Karl Lagerfeld would disapprove—but I prefer something luxurious to the Tonka and morello cherry surprise or even the Roasted figs with Bourbon vanilla butter.

  Behind me, a terrible drama is unfolding: an American couple are demanding ham and eggs with mushrooms for their breakfast, but the waitress in her orange uniform says, “I’m sorry, nous ne servons que du continental breakfast.” A repast composed of toast, croissants or pains au chocolat, fruit juice and coffee, the continental breakfast is rather less substantial than the breakfast Americans are accustomed to ingesting in the mornings. Accordingly, they stand up, cursing loudly, and walk out of the restaurant. They can’t understand how such a touristy place can be incapable of serving a decent, ample breakfast. From a strictly commercial viewpoint, they’re not wrong. But what’s the point in traveling if it’s to eat the same things you eat at home? In fact, it’s a terrible misunderstanding—everyone is right. Le Ciel de Paris should give its customers a choice, offer as wide a selection at breakfast as they do at dinner. And Americans should stop trying to export their lifestyle to the entire planet. That said, that’s two people who would survive if an airplane did crash into the Tour Montparnasse at 8:46 this morning, as it did into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11,2001.

  What is staggering is that a plane had already flown into a New York skyscraper. On a foggy night in 1945, an American B-52 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building between floors 78 and 79. Fourteen dead and a colossal inferno several hundred feet high. But the Empire State did not collapse because the building’s steel structure did not buckle as the World Trade Center did (steel loses its rigidity at 840°F and melts at 2,500°F, whereas the heat given off by the two Boeings is estimated to have been 3,600°F). In 2001, the 10,500 gallons of flaming jet fuel destroyed the metallic structure of the buildings, and the upper floors collapsed onto those beneath. In order to build the Twin Towers, Yamasaki had used a new technique: instead of using a maze of internal columns, he chose to rest the greater part of the weight on the external walls, which were composed of tightly spaced vertical steel pillars connected by horizontal girders which girdled the towers at each floor. This architecture allowed him to maximize the interior space (and thereby earn more money for the property developers). It was these pillars, covered with a thin coating of aluminum, which gave the two towers the banded appearance of two hi-fi speakers.

  Conclusion: the Twin Towers were built to withstand the impact of a plane without fuel.

  Welcome to the minute before. The point at which everything is still possible. They could decide to leave on the spur of the moment. But Carthew thinks they still have time, they should make the most of their New York jaunt; the kids seem happy. Customers are leaving: at any moment, customers come and go. Look, the old lady Jerry and David were pestering earlier—the one with the lilac hair—is getting up; she’s already paid the check (not forgetting to leave a five-dollar tip); slowly she makes her way to the elevator, the two badly behaved children have reminded her that she needs to buy a present for her grandson’s birthday; she says “Have a nice day” to the receptionist and presses the button marked “Mezzanine,” the button lights up, a bell goes “ding;” she decides she’ll stroll around the mall for a little. She thinks she remembers seeing a branch of Toys Us but can’t remember whether it was in the basement or the mezzanine, this is what she is thinking as the doors to the elevator close noiselessly. For the rest of her life, she will believe it was the Lord God who told her to leave at this precise moment; for the rest of her life she will wonder why He did so, why He spared her life, why He made her think of toys, why He chose her and not the two little boys.

  8:45

  A minute before, the state of affairs was recoverable. Then suddenly I got the jitters.

  “Hey, what’s the difference between David Lynch and Merrill Lynch?” asks the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “Um…no, don’t know that one,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

  “There isn’t one: nobody has a clue what either of them are doing and both of them are losing money,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  They burst out laughing, then think better of it and revert to their professionalism.

  “It’s more volatile but the volumes are down,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

  “Standard & Poor’s futures are scary,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “The margins are killing us all,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

  “I’m going long on the NASDAQ,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “The squiggly lines aren’t looking good,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

  “Sometimes you gotta know when to cut your arm off,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “We got whacked on the yen,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

  “Well, my position on the Nikkei is covered,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “Oh my God,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “OH MY GOD!”

  Her eyes grow wide, her bottom lip has fallen as far from her upper lip as it can, she’s brought her trembling hand up to her frozen mouth.

  “What? What is it? WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?” demands the guy in Kenneth Cole, before turning round.

  The weather had been so beautiful: through the telescope, Jerry could count the rivets on the fuselage. He turned to me, all excited.

  ‘Look, Dad! See the plane?”

  …but already my hands had betrayed me. In a split second I’d contracted Parkinson’s. Other customers realized what was happening: an American Airlines jet, a fucking Boeing, was flying low through New York, heading straight for us.

  “Shit! What the fuck is he doing? He’s far too low!”

  I hate disaster movies: the good-natured blond guy with the square jaw, the pregnant woman whose waters break, the paranoid guy who freaks out, the coward who turns out to be a hero, the priest giving the last rites. There’s always some idiot who gets sick and the stewardess goes looking for a doctor:

  “Is there a doctor on the plane?”

  And some medical student puts his hand up, he feels really useful. “Don’t sweat it, guys, everything’s gonna be fine.”

  This is what you think when there’s a Boeing heading straight for you. What a pain in the ass, starring in a turkey like that. You don’t think anything, you hang onto the armrests. You don’t b
elieve your eyes. You hope what’s happening isn’t happening. You hope your body is lying to you. For once, you hope your senses are wrong, that your eyes are deceiving you. I’d like to tell you my first thought was for Jerry and David, but it wasn’t. I didn’t instinctively try to protect them. When I dived under the table, I wasn’t thinking of anyone except little old me.

  8:46

  We now know with reasonable certainty what happened at 8:46 AM. An American Airlines Boeing 767 with ninety-two people on board, eleven of them crew, flew into the north face of One World Trade Center, between floors 94 and 98, and 10,500 gallons of jet fuel immediately burst into flames in the offices of Marsh & McLennan Companies. It was flight AA11 (Boston-Los Angeles) which had taken off from Logan airport at 7.59 AM and was moving at 500 m.p.h. The force of such an impact is estimated as being equivalent to an explosion of 265 tons of dynamite (a twelve-second shock wave measuring 0.9 on the Richter scale). We also know that none of the 1,344 people trapped on the nineteen floors above survived. Obviously, this piece of information removes any element of suspense from this book. So much the better: this isn’t a thriller; it is simply an attempt—doomed, perhaps—to describe the indescribable.

  “Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.”*

  8:47

  When a American Airlines Boeing 767 slams into a building below your feet, there are two immediate consequences. Firstly, the skyscraper becomes a metronome and I can assure you that when One World Trade Center starts to think it’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it feels pretty strange. This is what experts refer to as the shock wave; it makes you feel like you’re in a boat in a roaring storm or, to use a metaphor my kids would understand, like being inside a giant blender for three or four seconds. Glasses of juice shatter on the floor, lights come away from the walls and dangle from wires; wooden ceilings collapse and the sound of breaking crockery comes from the kitchens. In the bar, bottles roll and explode. Bouquets of sunflowers topple and vases shatter into a thousand pieces. Champagne buckets spill onto the carpet. Dessert trolleys skate down the aisles. Faces tremble as much as the walls.