Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  This morning, I took my daughter to the Tour Montparnasse. Those who don’t have children of three and a half should skip straight to the next minute: they couldn’t possibly understand. First, I had to convince her that it was more interesting to go to the Tour Montparnasse than to the amusement park next door. In the end, we went to both. She insisted on running after the pigeons until they flew away, climbing over the concrete blocks, playing tightrope along the edge of the escalators. First tantrum, crying fit, negotiation, reconciliation. When she finally bored of walking down the up escalator, I managed to drag her to the elevators. She cried because I didn’t let her push the button for the fifty-sixth floor. She giggled when she felt the elevator move off, the pressure mounting against her eardrums. In Le Ciel de Paris, she gamboled between the legs of the waiters in their nylon uniforms. We took a table near the windows. I showed her the City of Light. She wanted to keep her fleece on. Second tantrum, crying fit, negotiation, reconciliation. Since children’s lives aren’t very dramatic, they make them theatrical. Anything is an excuse for dramatics, hysterics, screaming, joy, fits of laughter, furious foot-stamping. There’s very little difference between a toddler’s life and a Shakespeare play. If truth be told, my daughter is Sarah Bernhardt. She can move from utter despair to sublime happiness in the blink of an eye. A rare talent. The waitress (who’s beginning to recognize me since she sees me here every morning) offers her candy? She’s ecstatic, her eyes dazzle, she blows kisses, puffing into the palm of her hand. The hot chocolate is too hot? Violent rage, brows knotted, sullen pout, lower lip stuck out in disgust. Nothing is bland when you’re just discovering life. My daughter’s life is intense. She sings “Une souris verte qui courait dans l’herbe” for the thirtieth time this morning. I can’t stand that awful fucking nursery rhyme anymore. After a few minutes’ silent contemplation of Paris, Chloë turns away from me, more interested in the dog at the next table. She goes to talk to him, nervously at first but relaxed after a minute. She shows him the view, explaining: “It’s very high. An’ I’m on’y liddle.”

  The spaniel agrees. To celebrate this, she tries to tie a bow with his ears. I get up to go over and fetch her, apologizing to the dog’s owners who have noticed nothing.

  “You daughter is just adorable!”

  “Thanks, but give it time, you’ll change your mind.”

  “I WANT to stay with the DOG!”

  Third tantrum, crying fit, negotiation, reconciliation. Deafened by the racket, the people at the next table do indeed change their minds. I try to buy her silence by offering her a Carambar.

  “No, ‘cause s’all sticky.”

  There are times when I’d like to do what my daughter does. The next time someone annoys me, whether on the set of a talk show or some reading panel, I swear, I’m going to burst into tears, scream, and roll around on the floor. I’m sure this would be a very effective technique in politics, for example. “Vote for me, or I’ll scream even louder.” That’s what we should have done with Robert Hue!

  We finished our breakfast apart from the hot chocolate (by now too cold). On the way down in the elevator, my daughter smiled at me and whispered, “I love you, Daddy.” I took her in my arms. I knew she was just trying to get me to forgive her for her unforgivable behavior in Le Ciel de Paris. Never mind: I accepted this gift. Once, when I had a raging toothache, I took a huge dose of morphine. It was astonishing, but less mind-blowing than this hug, my nose in her hair, pressed into the scent of mild almond shampoo, overwhelmed with gratitude.

  9:01

  You can make the trip holding your breath. Take a deep breath and dive into the smoke, arms out in front of you, feel your way down the stairs, turn right after the bar, past the elevators, and keep walking straight ahead to the north face. Climber’s jargon: I feel like we’re on an expedition at the top of the Himalayas with no breathing apparatus. Come down quickly to check on the boys, despising myself for leaving them alone even for a minute. Lourdes is holding a bloodstained Kleenex.

  “Damn! Your nosebleed come back?”

  “It’s okay, Dad, it’ll stop in a sec.”

  “Raise your right arm and press against the nostril. Don’t put your head back, otherwise it’ll just keep running down your throat and it won’t stop. Thanks, Lourdes. Were they well behaved?”

  “‘Course they were, but just because I’m black doesn’t mean you can assume I’m their nanny, okay?”

  “But, uh…no, of course n—”

  “Did Anthony find the way up to the roof?”

  “Yeah. We’ll head up soon as Jerry’s nose stops bleeding. I hope you can hold your breath for sixty seconds.”

  How did I get to be a bastard? Was Mary suddenly less of a turn-on than the secretaries at Austin Maxi? When exactly did I go off the rails? When Jerry was born, when David was born? I think it happened the day I looked in the mirror in my walk-in closet and realized I’d started dressing like my father. It had all happened so fast—job, marriage, kids. I didn’t want this life anymore. I didn’t want to be like my father. When I was little and he insisted on wearing his Stetson in the street in Austin, I was ashamed of him, just as Jerry is ashamed of me when I wear my Mets cap.

  Paterfamilias is a full-time job; the problem is, I know fewer and fewer men who are prepared to take it on. We’ve been shown too many images of men who are free, poetic and attractive, exhausted with pleasure; rock‘n’roll types running from their responsibilities straight into the arms of girls in dental-floss bikinis. How could anyone want to be like Lester Burnham when society idolizes Jim Morrison?

  I like to watch Candace dance. She cranks up the volume on her stereo and sways and twirls barefoot on the rug, her hair wheels and she looks me straight in the eye as she takes off her T-shirt…I think it’s the most beautiful thing I know: Candace in her push-up bra on my king-size bed, dancing or painting her toenails. She had bought a CD of “music to make love to,” a collection of “lounge music,” and every time she put it on, I knew I was a goner…I miss her much more now that I’m not sure I’ll ever see her again.

  Come on, kids, come with Dad. Hold your breath, like in the swimming pool, okay? Take a deep breath and dive into the smoke, arms out in front of you, past the elevators, turn left after the bar, and feel your way up the stairs…

  On the 110th floor, Lourdes points out a poster to me: IT’S HARD TO BE DOWN WHEN YOU’RE UP. No comment.

  The good thing about being single is that you don’t have to cough to cover the splash when you take a dump.

  One day, Mary brought a hand up to my face, her cold hand to the rosy cheek of her bashful lover. She told me I was her lover; I said no, I’m your husband, it just came out. It never occurred to me that one day I’d need someone else. A tear trickled from my left eye to warm her right hand. I knew that I would have a child with this woman. I was young, pure, manipulated maybe, but utterly optimistic. Sincere. Alive. Dumb.

  “Dad, I did a whole minute without a breath, I beat my record!”

  Jerry’s timed himself all the way to the emergency exit on the roof.

  “Dead easy, huh? I could do it standing on my head.”

  “Liar! I heard you coughing, that means you must have breathed.”

  “Not true—you’re the one that cheated.”

  “Dad, tell him I didn’t cheat, Dad!”

  “Take it easy, kids, let’s just sit down and wait for Anthony—he’ll open this damn door for us. Okay?”

  “Okay, but I didn’t cheat.”

  “Did too.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  I never thought that one day I’d come to enjoy their constant squabbles, that these sterile arguments would be like a mountain-rescue team. Our kids are like Saint Bernards. Jerry was sitting in the lotus position. He’d dried his tears, I smiled at him. Turn and turn about: now I was the one who felt like crying. Let’s just say we were taking it in turns.
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  9:02

  In the South Tower, the one which hadn’t been damaged, the instructions were clear: do not evacuate. No way was anyone going to risk having a molten-steel girder from the North Tower landing on their heads. So the security guards ordered anyone who came down to the lobby to go back up to their offices. As they did Stanley Praimnath. He went back up to the eighty-first floor, to his office with the Fuji Bank. And he looked out the window. At first, it was simply a gray arrow on the horizon. A plane passing behind the Statue of Liberty. Which grew slowly bigger. He had time to see the red logo on the fuselage: UNITED AIRLINES. Then the plane lifted its nose and headed straight for him. It was 9:02 AM. Lousy day. Lousy fucking day.

  As I took the Tour Montparnasse elevator again, I felt my stomach heave into my mouth. I should have taken the stairs to see what it’s like to walk down fifty-six floors while the sky is on fire. But I’m a writer, not a stuntman, and my daughter would have started crying after five floors. I’ll do it tomorrow morning.

  At 9:02 and 54 seconds, United Airlines flight 175, another Boeing 767, another Boston-Los Angeles flight, dipped slightly to the left before entering the second tower between floors 78 and 84, causing a shock measuring 0.7 for a duration of six seconds. There were sixty-five people on board, nine of them crew, and the plane was flying faster than American Airlines flight 11 (580 m.p.h.). Computer simulations have show that at this speed the aluminum wings and fuselage, together with the steel engines, traveled straight through the tower almost without slowing. The concrete floors split the plane like an ax before disintegrating into dust. Some experts claim that the damage to the second tower was such that it should have collapsed immediately. Indeed, it was the first tower to collapse, at 9:59 AM.

  “A silver flash of lightning coming from the south, a Paleolithic bird, a spear point, a scimitar glittering in the morning sunshine,” Russell Banks would write in his diary. Couldn’t have put it better.

  9:03

  Another thunderclap, another earthquake, another fireball.

  Lourdes received an SMS from an automated news service telling her a second plane had crashed into the adjacent tower. And so it was not an accident but a terrorist attack. Who was responsible? It could be so many people. It’s insane, the number of people who hate America. Including Americans. And yet I don’t hate the rest of the world. I just think it’s filthy, ancient and complicated, that’s all. Sheer madness…Jeffrey breaks down again, Anthony takes him aside. My kids are sensible, better behaved than I’ve ever seen them. But they can’t help asking awkward questions.

  “Dad, when are we gonna leave?”

  “Is Mom gonna come and get us?”

  “Even if it is a ride, it’s way too long, isn’t it?” And so it happened: all those things I didn’t understand, that I didn’t want to understand; the foreign news stories I preferred to switch off, to keep out of my mind when they weren’t on the TV; all these tragedies were suddenly relevant to me; these wars came to hurt me that morning; me, not someone else; my children, not someone else’s; these things I knew nothing about, these events so geographically remote suddenly became the most important things in my life. I didn’t want the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of foreign states, but events in the outside world had just exercised their right to interfere in mine; I didn’t give a shit about wops and their homeless, drugged, raped kids with disgusting dung flies all over them, but they’d just forced their way into my house, they’d killed my fucking kids, MINE. I have to explain something: I was raised in the evangelical, Episcopalian, Methodist Church of “Born-again Christians”—70 million members in the United States, including George Walker Bush, former Governor of Texas, currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Our credo is that Americans are the Chosen People. Europe is our Egypt, the Atlantic is our Red Sea and America is Israel, you get the picture? Washington = Jerusalem. The Promised Land is right here. “One Nation Under God!” We don’t give a shit about other people.

  You didn’t want them to be part of your life?

  They’ll be part of your death.

  Lourdes collapses, she’s gone to pieces. She repeats the SMS newsflash over and over: “Breaking News: a second plane has crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center;” she hands the cellphone round so all of us can read the message on the screen. Each of us reacts differently: most people let out a bewildered “Fuck!”, some sit down, take their heads in their hands. Anthony takes it out on the wall, kicking it so violently he winds up kicking a hole in it! Jeffrey cries harder, dribbling on his pink shirt. And I just crouch down, pressing my babies’ heads hard against my forehead so they don’t see me losing hope.

  “Jerry, Dave. Look, I have to come clean. This isn’t a game.”

  “It’s okay, Dad. We already knew, don’t get upset.”

  “It’s not okay, Jerry. This isn’t a game, d’you get it? It’s all real.”

  “Don’t worry, we worked that out ages ago,” says David, between coughing fits.

  “Oh Jesus. Guys, listen to me. Maybe it’s not a game, but we’re gonna win anyway, together, deal?”

  “But why are planes flying into the towers? Are they crazy or what?”

  Looking at David’s bewildered face, I can’t hold back my tears anymore. I become Jeffrey. I fall to my knees. I grit my teeth, I wipe my eyes, I bend, I am a curve.

  “Fuck, how can people do this kind of thing to other people?”

  “You shouldn’t say ‘fuck,’ Dad.”

  Jerry turns away. He’s ashamed to see me like this.

  For more than half an hour now we’ve been at the top of one of the tallest skyscrapers in the world. But it’s only now that I start feel dizzy.

  9:04

  From Le Ciel de Paris, I gaze out over the capital of France and its glorious, ancient monuments: the only thing Uncle Sam left us is our seniority. The French are so proud of their seniority, like time-serving employees calculating their pension funds. We are weighed down by the centuries. France, Egypt, England, Spain, Morocco, Holland, Portugal, Turkey, and Arabia have in their turns ruled the planet and colonized the earth. We’ve all been there, thanks: good riddance, it only gets you into shit. America, with its youthful enthusiasm, still wants to see what it feels like to rule the world. The Old World gave up on this long ago, but the Americans are touchingly forgetful: after all, they too were colonized, they ought to remember how resentful they were being occupied by a foreign power.

  America hounds those they oppress into a corner, to the point where, as Brigitte Bardot purred on Gainsbourg’s “Bonnie and Clyde”: “The only way out was death.” We live in strange times; war has shifted. The battlefield is the media: in this new war Good and Evil are difficult to tell apart. Difficult to know who the good guys and the bad guys are: they change sides when we change channels. Television makes the world jealous. In the past, the poor, the colonized, didn’t spend their nights in shantytowns staring at wealth on a screen. They didn’t realize that some countries had everything while they slogged their guts out for nothing. In France, the revolution would have happened a lot earlier if the serfs had had a little screen where they could see the opulence of kings and queens. Nowadays, all over the world, filthy countries hover between awe and contempt, fascination and disgust for the clean countries whose lifestyles they watch on satellite with hacked decoders, using sieves for satellite dishes. It is a recent phenomenon: we call it globalization, but its real name is television. Economics, broadcasting, cinema, marketing are all globalized, but the rest—the politics and the social policies—doesn’t follow.

  Okay, I’ll stop there, not being competent to analyze everything. If you want to unravel the geopolitical tangle of terrorism, call the offices of Spengler, Huntingdon, Baudrillard, Adler, Fukuyama, Revel…But I can’t guarantee that things will immediately become clearer.

  The view this morning is magnificent. The view depends on the day. This morning at 9:04 AM, the Eiffel Tower glitters on my right, the s
teel edifice built by the same Gustave who buttressed the Statue of Liberty. To the right, Les Invalides, where Napoleon Bonaparte is laid, the man who sold Louisiana to the Americans for $15 million (say what you like: the Emperor was a better businessman than the Algonquin Indians who handed over Manhattan to Peter Minuit, a French-born Huguenot, for twenty-four bucks). Between them, the Arc de Triomphe on the Place de I’Étoile, far off in the white, Triumph off in the distance. All those stone blocks so fragile…I have done what I promised myself: I have gone down the stairs. Fifty-six floors. My first impression is monotony, then dizziness. Then, rapidly, fear and claustrophobia mount. Alone in that stairwell, I try to imagine what the passing minutes were like for the hundreds descending. Almost all of those who worked on the floors below the point at which plane entered the building emerged unscathed. They didn’t panic because they did not know what I know now. They had faith in the solidity of buildings. They took their time. They followed the orders of firefighters who would die in the minutes that followed. They left calmly and then, as they turned, they saw this solid building collapse into a pile of rubble.

  The good thing about going back down Tour Montparnasse without your daughter is that the Rue de la Gaieté is nearby. So you can wander round the sex shops, the theaters, the Japanese restaurants. The embarrassing thing is if someone recognizes me and asks me for an autograph as I’m walking out of a peep show. It’s embarrassing shaking hands with someone when I’ve just wiped my own with a Kleenex. It’s stupid but I can’t help blushing: fucking Catholicism is still part of me.