All this was before 1968: the Beatles still had short hair. I remember my folks used to say that America was ten years ahead of France. Even the French Revolution happened ten years after theirs! If you wanted to know the future, all you had to do was keep your eyes glued to this idyllic country. Dad read the Herald Tribune, Time, Newsweek, and kept Playboy hidden in his desk drawer. CNN didn’t exist yet, but Time magazine, with its red-framed cover, was like a four-color process CNN. My mother got a scholarship to travel round the States on a Greyhound bus. She told me about the sea breeze, the excitement of the open road, the motels, the Buicks, the drive-ins, the drugstores, the diners, all those radio stations with names that began with “W.” The whole world eyed America enviously, because you always look enviously at your own future. May ‘68 did not come from the East: there was a lot of talk about Trotsky and Engels, but the overriding influence was Western. I’m convinced that the roots of May ‘68 lay in the USA, not the USSR. It was an overpowering urge to say “fuck you” to old-fashioned bourgeois morality. The revolution of May ‘68 wasn’t anti-capitalist, in fact it definitively ushered in the consumer society; the main difference between our generation and that of our parents was that they demonstrated in favor of globalization! I grew up in the decade that followed, in the benevolent shadow of the Star-Spangled Banner floating on the moon and posters of Schulz’s Snoopy. Films were released earlier in the US than they were in France; Dad used to bring back all the spinoff toys when he went on business trips: a Muppet Show lunchbox, Star Wars merchandise, Slime, an E.T. doll…It was during those years, the years of my amnesiac childhood, that the Spectacle of America seduced the rest of the world.
I hope America will always be ten years ahead of us: that would mean the Tour Montparnasse still has ten years.
8:53
From the 104th floor, through the cloud of black smoke, I can make out the crowd rushing toward the sea. A human torrent gushing from the building. What are they waiting for to organize the evacuation? Nobody’s told us what to do. We’re in the stairwell by Cantor Fitzgerald when the smoke becomes unbearable: poisonous, dense, sticky and black like oil (which, of course, is what it is). The heat, too, makes us turn back. The stockbroker couple fall into the arms of their soot-covered colleagues. The whole floor is drenched: the sprinklers are spitting out a safety drizzle. Everyone gets to have a shower. Water is pouring down the stairs, David splashes in the stream.
“Careful! You’re going to slip and break your neck.”
Jerry holds his hand.
“Okay, it was a trick. We obviously weren’t supposed to go downstairs. Jerry, let’s go back up, whaddya think?”
“Mmghpfgmmz.”
I can’t really make out what he’s saying through his blackened napkin, but he nods. So we turn back. Jerry’s my favorite on odd days, David on even. So today I prefer Jerry, particularly because he believes every word when I tell him this is just a game, a piece of make-believe, whereas David is silent but understands everything. We retrace our steps, the faces we meet ever more terrified; in front of us a man starts to giggle nervously, swinging a busted fire hose (some of the pipes must have been burst by the plane). The tension mounts, we’ll have to play a tight game. I deserve an Academy Award! I hold a child’s hand in each of mine and play the part of Father Courage.
“I think it’s great having full-scale fire drills like this. That way when there’s a real fire, people will be prepared. It’s a good way to learn. Just now, for example, that was to teach us that when there’s a fire you shouldn’t go downstairs, but actually get as high as possible. It’s an educational game.”
Then, suddenly, David starts to speak, staring at the river running down the steps.
“Dad, remember when we went to the rodeo in Dallas, and the cowboy got hurt falling off a bull?”
“Um, yeah, yeah…”
“Well, you told us that he wasn’t hurt, that guy, that he was supposed to fall and that it had all been worked out, that he was a professional stuntman and everything, but on TV the next day we saw the cowboy in a wheelchair and on the news they said that he was quarterpleenic.”
“Quadraplegic, Dave, the word is quadraplegic.”
“Yeah, that’s it: the cowboy guy, he was quadra-pleezic.”
I preferred it when David didn’t say a word. Jerry chimes in; it’s not a mutiny, it’s a revolution.
“Dad, you don’t have to tell us all the time that everything bad is pretend; let’s face it, this time it’s for real.”
David, Jerry, my little boys, how quickly you’ve grown up.
“Okay, okay, kids, maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s not a game, but we should go back upstairs calmly anyway. The rescue services are on their way, so stay cool.”
As I said this, I rolled my eyes as though I didn’t believe a word of it and muttered loudly like I was talking to myself: “Just my luck, if the kids think this thing’s for real, I’m gonna look a complete jerk in front of the other players. Oh, well, never mind…”
David, my baby. Tough guy. A real Texan, I swear; suddenly I feel so old. We’re back on the 105th floor. The herd vacillates in this freshly painted prison with its yellow walls. Terrified faces hesitate between up and down. They’re deliberating: die quickly, die slowly? Panic overcomes me as I listen to the fire alarms from the floors below which are obviously still working and are deafening us. The racket is terrible and it’s getting hotter by the second. Then, suddenly, after about thirty attempts, the cellphone network is back: Candace’s phone is ringing. She’s probably asleep. I leave a message on her answering machine.
“I know you won’t believe this, but I love you. When you wake up in the morning you’ll understand why I’m being all corny.”
I whisper again so the kids can’t hear.
“It doesn’t look good, babe. I’ve been such a fool. If we get out of here, I’m going to marry you. I have to hang up because I need to try and breathe for the three of us. Love you. Carthew.”
8:54
Fifteen years ago, I visited Windows on the World myself, but not for breakfast. It was late one night in July 1986. The lights of the World Trade Center appeared to me like the evening star. I was twenty years old and working as an intern in the analysis department at the New York office of Credit Lyonnais (95 Wall Street). During my placement, my principal preoccupation was how to sleep at the office without Philippe Souviron—a friend of my father’s who ran the New York office—finding out. In those days, after midnight, Windows on the World, under the truly arrogant name The Greatest Bar on Earth, became a meeting place for people you’d happily punch in the face. The Greatest Bar on Earth had started organizing theme nights every Wednesday: Latino beat box, electric boogie, with DJs and a whole ecosystem of arrogant little assholes like me, but, hey, the kitchens were closed, the restaurant was closed and a jacket was still required. I remember the U-shaped red bar and the sneering barmen. The guy in the middle was on good terms with me, though, because I’d accidentally dropped him a huge tip (mistaking a twenty-dollar bill for a five). He served my double Jack Daniel’s with ice piled to the top of the glass and two short straws which I’d quite happily have used for something else if I’d had any blow. The tables of The Greatest Bar on Earth were staggered over several levels, as in Le Ciel de Paris, for the same reason—so that all the customers could admire the colossal, breathtaking, spectacular view which, sadly, was cut into sections since the soaring picture windows were divided into slivers three feet wide. The towers, the brainchild of the Japanese architect (Yamasaki) who was keen to use exterior pillars which had the span of human shoulders, looked like the interior of a vast prison. The Japanese man is perfidious: the vertical steel pillars which ran the length of the towers from top to bottom blocked my view like the bars of a cell (in fact, the only things to survive the collapse were the parallel metal stakes found planted at Ground Zero, like a rusted portcullis among the ruins of a thirteenth-century fortress after a bloody battle, or the beams of a
Gothic cathedral razed by barbarians).
Even so, I drank Bourbon, leaning into the abyss, swaying prophetically, getting drunk among the blinking helicopters in a place that no longer exists. Is it possible that the man standing there so full of himself fifteen years ago is me? Hemmed in by windows, we danced to Madonna’s “Into the Groove.” I spilled whiskey on the dresses of tipsy girls from Riverside Drive who made fun of the “bridge and tunnel crowd.” Back then, I dreamed of a future where I was Donald Trump, Mike Milken, Nick Leeson, pockets stuffed with cash and the world at my feet. That night at Windows on the World I gave it everything I had, but the past is dead and nothing can prove that what no longer exists ever did.
The night I went, New York was overcast, but the towers pierced the clouds. The Greatest Bar on Earth floated on a sea of cotton. To the right, the rich could look out at the lights of Brooklyn reflected in the sea; to the left, you could see nothing except the same white, cotton carpet you can see from an airplane window during a flight. The World Trade Center was striped: imagine a pair of columns 1,350 feet tall. The DJ blasted out dry ice, a cold white mist that glided across the dance floor. We were dancing on a freezing flying carpet.
Me and my partner in crime back then, a guy called Alban de Clermont-Tonnerre, were on a promise: some girl called Lee he’d picked up in a singles bar—the famous Second Avenue pickup bars the French found so exciting. He’d got her to agree to a threesome, but she hadn’t shown up yet.
“Aaaw—all dressed up and been stood up!”
Alban was pretty miserable and I wasn’t much better. Our potential threesome seemed, like the Bourbon, to be on the rocks. Even so, a couple of Jack Daniel’s later I found them wrapped round each other by those windows which have since been shattered. They were making out, and I made the most of it, copping a feel of Lee’s nipples, which were hard under her indigo dress. She jerked round to look, and what did she see? A big, ham-fisted, sallow guy in a Prince of Wales check suit far too big for him; a pale, spotty little guy with long greasy hair and a seriously deformed chin who was about as charming as a tubercular gargoyle. Serial killers were a new thing back then, and I looked a lot like one. A death’s-head mask in a dead restaurant.
“Who is this guy? Are you crazy? Get your fucking hands off me!”
When I saw Alban’s embarrassed expression I realized the threesome clearly hadn’t been on the cards so he’d settled for a twosome. I didn’t really care: she was dark-haired, a bit tubby, really—nothing to write home about—she worked so hard she didn’t have time for a serious relationship; that’s why she hung out in singles bars where she knew the only guys she’d ever meet were frustrated dweebs like us. Here I was playing gooseberry again, later I’d go home drunk in a yellow contraption driven by a Haitian voodoo master. I went back to the dance floor, now disappeared. I probably looked a bit depressed; in fact, I was paralyzed with shyness. The chicks rubbed up against the Brooks Brothers shirts of millionaire stockbrokers. I had another buddy back then, Bernard-Louis, a bit of a playboy—all the girls called him Belou. Belou this and Belou that. I decided to hang out with him. Not being in love was exhausting; you constantly had to work at being attractive, and the competition was stiff. It was creepy, needing so desperately to be loved. It was at that moment, I think, that I decided to be famous.
8:55
Smoke stings the kids’ eyes.
“Put the napkin over your eyes as well—eyes, nose and mouth—cover your whole face, do you read me?”
Jerry and David dressed like Casper the Friendly Ghost, napkins over their heads, as the blue sky of Armageddon brought the first tears to our eyes. Thank God the napkins meant the boys didn’t see the human torches on 106: two bodies in flames near the elevator doors, skin red and black, lidless eyes, hair turned to ashes, faces peeling away, covered in blisters fused to the melted linoleum. From the movement of their chests we could tell they were still alive. The rest of their bodies were still as statues.
I had to pull myself together. It was becoming difficult to perform the simplest of tasks: breathing. If only because of the stench, which was unbearable. The dense smoke stank of melted rubber, burning plastic, charred flesh. The cloying scent of airplane fuel, sickly and terrifying, powdered bones and human flesh turned to ashes. A mixture of toxic waste, pungent jet fuel, and the crematorium; the sort of thing you might smell driving past a factory, the sort of smell that makes you hold your breath and step on the gas. If death has a smell, it must be this. Rubble from a collapsed ceiling blocks the way back up to Windows. At least ten of us set about moving a concrete slab. In the end we manage to squeeze through to get back to the roof of this city in the sky.
On the 107th floor, the waitress and the two brothers who work in the kitchen have smashed a window with a pedestal table (helpful hint: to break a large picture window, do not use a chair or an iMac. The best solution is to run at it using the cast-iron leg of a pedestal table as a battering ram). At 1,350 feet up, they lean out the windows waving white tablecloths. The murky smoke is thick as blotting paper soaked in axle grease. Even so, there are gaps through which I can pick out images of the outside world. What fascinates me most are the sheets of paper floating in the blue: files, photocopies, urgent memos, duplicated company listings on letterhead paper, registered mail, confidential files, portfolios, four-color laser prints, self-adhesive envelopes, Jiffy bags, printed labels, piles of stapled contracts, plastic binders, multicolored Post-it notes, invoices in triplicate, graphs and charts and balance sheets, all this scattered paperwork, this stationery on the wing, and the comparative magnitude of our signaling. These thousands of fluttering pieces of paper remind me of the showers of paper so dear to New Yorkers during Broadway tick-ertape parades. What are we celebrating today?
“Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves…’”*
8:56
Everyone knows precisely where they were on September 11, 2001. Me, I was in the basement of my publisher Grasset, giving an interview for Culture Pub at 2.56 PM French time, when the presenter, Thomas Hervé, was informed via cellphone that an airplane had just flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. At the time, we both thought it was a small tourist plane and went on with the interview. We were talking about cultural marketing. How do you publish a book? Should you play by the rules? To what extent? Are television, marketing and advertising the enemies of art? Is the word necessarily in opposition to the image? I had just agreed to host a weekly literary TV show on a cable network. I was attempting to justify the contradictions in my role as writer/critic/ presenter.
“The role of books is to record what cannot be seen on television…Literature is under threat, we have to fight for it, this is war…People who enjoy reading and writing are more and more scarce, that’s why we have to hedge our bets…Use every weapon at our disposal to defend literature…”
Suddenly someone from the publisher’s came to tell us that a second plane had flown into the other World Trade Center tower. My littéro-military perorations suddenly seemed ridiculous. I remember reciting aloud a simple mathematical (though hardly Euclidian) equation: “1 plane = 1 accident. 2 planes = 0 accident.”
Thomas and I agreed that my prime-time-struggle-to-defend-the-epistolary-arts-against-media-repression could wait. We went upstairs to the office of Claude Dalla Torre—one of the PR people and the only person with a working television. TF1 was rebroadcasting LCI which was rebroadcasting CNN: we watched as the second plane headed straight for the intact tower; the other tower looked like an Olympic torch, like the tornado on the poster for Twister. The inexperienced TV news anchors seemed disbelieving. They were reluctant to stick their necks out, content to let the live feed run uninterrupted, terrified of saying something that would be on every blooper reel for the next thirty years. Claude’s office quickly filled up—at Grasset, any excuse is a good excuse not to work. Each had a different reaction to what w
as happening.
Narcissistic: “Fuck—I was just up there a month ago!”
Statistical: “My God, how many people are trapped in there? The death toll must be 20,000!”
Paranoid: “Jesus, well, since I look like an Arab, I’m bound to get stopped by the cops every five minutes for the next couple of weeks.”
Anxious: “We’ve got to call our friends over there, make sure they’re all right.”
Laconic: “Well, this is no joke.”
Marketing: “This is going to be great for the ratings, we should buy space on LCI.”
Bellicose: “Fuck! This is it, it’s the Third World War.”
Security conscious: “They need to put cops on all the planes and bulletproof doors on the cockpits.”
Nostradamus: “You see? I told you this would happen, I even wrote it.”
Media savvy: “Shit, I have to get over to Europe 1 and give my reaction.”
Knee-jerk anti-American: “This is what happens when you try and control the world.”
Fatalistic: “It was bound to happen some day or other.”
Windows on the World Page 6
