Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  And why hasn’t airline security changed? Security staff still cast a vague glance as your bags go through the X-ray machine. Sometimes they rummage through a piece of luggage on a hunch. On planes, they’ve replaced metal knives with plastic. But they still have metal forks! Like you couldn’t kill someone with a fork. Just aim for the eyes or the throat. Haven’t they seen Joe Pesci in Goodfellas?

  Why aren’t there security guards on every plane? They’ve got them outside every nightclub! Are nightclubs so much more dangerous than planes? At the moment, passenger safety is left in the hands of air hostesses with easily pierced throats.

  It would also have been possible to throw ropes to the victims which they could have used to escape, like crooks tying sheets to the bars of their cells to slide down the walls. Why didn’t they try something like that? Or rope ladders thrown toward the side that wasn’t burning. Or organize huge inflatable airbeds like in Lethal Weapon to break the jumpers’ fall.

  The fact is, nobody believed the towers could collapse. Too much faith in technology. Singular lack of imagination. Confidence in the supremacy of reality over fiction.

  “It’s like being inside a chimney,” says one of the firefighters in John Guillerman’s The Towering Inferno (released in 1974, the year the World Trade Center was inaugurated). The fact that they didn’t attempt an air rescue is probably because the cops had seen the movie in which police drop cables from a helicopter in an attempt to save people trapped by a fire on the top floor of a skyscraper. In the film, the chopper crashes onto the roof. At 9:14, the police probably didn’t want life to imitate art.

  9:15

  For half an hour now we’ve had a plane under our feet

  Still no evacuation

  We are metal shrieking

  People hanging out the windows

  People falling from the windows

  An abandoned wheelchair

  Brokers’ offices but no brokers

  A stapler forgotten on a photocopier

  Filling cabinets overturned with the files still filed

  A diary full of urgent appointments

  A weather forecast predicting clear skies and a high of 79° F this morning

  All the windows blown out

  Blazing fuel in the elevator shafts

  Ninety-eight elevators, all out of order

  White marble in the open spaces stained with blood

  Two corridors lit with small halogens like dotted lines in the ceiling

  Ocher flames with blue curls of smoke

  Scraps of paper dancing in the air like the Fourth of July

  The trash of the peoples of the whole world

  United Colors of Babel

  Hands in tatters

  skin hanging from arms

  like an Issey Miyake dress

  Pretty women weeping

  Pieces of fuselage on the escalators

  Pretty women coughing

  No contact with the outside world

  Plates and cups, white and blue, in pieces

  Everything is hazy dusty dead filthy

  Silence pierced by alarms

  Carved-up faces by the coffee machine

  A closed space with a fire down below

  We roast

  We are being roasted like chickens

  Smoked like salmon

  Alarms full tilt

  Dust in the wind

  All we are is

  Dust in the wind

  In the heat, the figurative paintings melt

  And become abstracts

  A rain of bodies over the WTC Plaza.

  9:16

  I’ve often thought about what makes people jump in a fire. It’s because they know they’re going to die. They have no more air, they’re suffocating, they’re burning. If they’re going to die, they might as well die quickly and cleanly. “Jumpers” are not depressives, they’re rational people. They’ve weighed the pros and the cons and prefer the dizzying freefall to being burned alive. They choose the swan dive, the vertical farewell. They have no illusions, even if some try to use a jacket as a makeshift parachute. They take their chances. They escape. They are human because they decide to choose how they will die rather than allow themselves to be burned. One last manifestation of dignity: they will have chosen their end rather than waiting resignedly. Never has the expression “freefall” made more sense.

  9:17

  Bullshit, my dear Beigbeder. If somewhere between thirty-seven and fifty people threw themselves from the top of the North Tower, it was simply because everything else was impossible, suffocation, pain, the instinct to survive, because jumping couldn’t be worse than staying in this suffocating furnace. They jumped because it was not as hot outside as it was inside. Ask any firefighter, they’ll tell you. Jumpers are people who have been pushed to the limits, they no longer have any sense of danger. Barely conscious, pumped up on adrenaline, they’re so terrified, in such a state of shock that it’s almost a state of ecstasy. You don’t jump 1,300 feet because you’re a free man. You jump because you’re a hunted animal. You don’t jump to preserve your humanity, you jump because the fire has reduced you to a brute beast. The void is not a rational choice. It’s simply the only place that looks good from up there, somewhere you ache for, somewhere that doesn’t slash your skin with white-hot claws, doesn’t put out your eyes with searing hot pokers. The void is a way out. The void is welcoming. The void beckons you with open arms.

  9:18

  Okay, Carthew, if you’re going to be like that, I’ll go to New York. I realize the Tour Montparnasse isn’t the third World Trade Center tower. Anyway, my life’s like a disaster movie right now: at 9:18 AM this morning, my lover left me. Flaubert said: “I travel to verify my dreams.” I need to verify my nightmare. In a suicidal gesture, I decide to take Concorde. I remember that the supersonic plane, created by de Gaulle in the sixties but inaugurated under Giscard d’Estaing in 1976, has an irritating tendency to crash into hotels in the suburbs of Paris. So I booked my seat because I like to live dangerously. I’m an adventurer, an extreme sports buff. Price of the ticket? €6,000 one way—the price of a Chanel dress—obviously time travel is cheap. Because Concorde flying Paris-New York is the machine imagined by H. G. Wells: it takes off at 10 AM and lands at 8 AM: before Amélie dumps me, to be precise. Three hours from now I’ll be in New York two hours ago.

  The time travel begins as soon as you walk into the seventies lounge. I think I’m writing about September 11 but actually I’m writing about the seventies: the decade that spawned the WTC, the Tour Montparnasse and Concorde which connects them: of these three, two no longer exist. Air hostesses in beige uniforms with botoxed lips, salon-tanned stewards, white armchairs, padded walls like a psychiatric hospital, businessmen glued to their cellphones, businesswomen unsheathing their Palm Pilots: everything looks dated, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 was two years ago: Kubrick’s seventies dream didn’t come true. People don’t travel to the moon to the music of Strauss waltzes; instead Boeings skyscrape to the music of muezzin.

  Through the window at Orly airport, I come face to face with the supersonic. Its beak is even more hooked than mine. Blue CONCORDE logos insist that it is a source of great national pride—an endangered species. The other day, a Concorde lost its rudder in mid-flight. I board the minuscule cabin: the VIPs bow their heads. Since the Gonesse crash, technical hitches have been plentiful: engine failures, cabin damage; the seventies are slowly giving up the ghost and I might wind up trapped in the years of my forgotten childhood. Furthermore, the plane is almost empty. You really have to be a kamikaze like me to climb aboard this deltawinged bird. Given that my bravado is somewhat limited, I’m already on my fifth miniature of Absolut. I slump into seat 2D. It’s raining and I look like a complete gonzo, dead drunk on a stationary Concorde.

  Stewardess: “Sir, may I suggest a glass of Krug to accompany your caviar…?”

  Me: “Nnyesss, that would be most agreeable.”

  I’m disappointe
d to die trapped in something that feels like a budget hotel in the middle of an industrial estate, but at least I’ll have made the most of it to the bitter end. To top it off, it’s Iranian oscietra: Islamic caviar!

  You have to be absolutely crazy to blow 6K just to cut three hours off your flying time. Were the guys who invented this thing completely out to lunch or did they really think that saving that sliver of time was worth burning the extra tons of fuel? Who were these sixties engineers? The world they dreamed of seems so obsolete…so twentieth century…A smooth, white, high-speed, plastic world in which triangular planes thumb their noses at time zones…No one believes in it anymore…my bald neighbor yawns, reading L’Express…Everything was invented back then, in the last optimistic era…answering machines…jet lag…news magazines…It used to be really cool to complain about jet lag, nowadays it’s so tacky nobody mentions it…I’m drunk as a skunk as Concorde takes off with an earsplitting racket accompanied by some suspicious shuddering…If I were a girl, all I’d have to do is jam my pussy against the armrest to have multiple orgasms…I’m flattened into my seat like a pancake…The inflight magazine boasts: “The rated thrust of each engine is 38,050lb…” I’m wondering whether I’m about to upchuck my caviar…“The thrust to weight ratio of the plane is 1.66 times greater than that of a Boeing 747…” Excuse me, stewardess, but I think I’m about to caviarize the pressurized cabin…“This considerable thrust is obtained using a standard jet engine combined with an afterburner reheat system designed to heat the exhaust fumes, speeding up their exit. This has the effect of increasing thrust by 17 percent…” I throw up everything into my paper bag…I feign nonchalance as we break the sound barrier over the Atlantic…In front of me, a liquid-crystal display tells me we are flying at Mach 2…I must be looking pretty green round the gills when we pierce the stratosphere at 1,350 m.p.h…I’m incapable of being the efficient, multitasking decision-maker dreamed of by the (probably mustached, given the time) inventors of Concorde. Maybe it’s the booze, but I find the fact that they were in such a hurry heartbreaking…Since the Americans were frolicking on the moon, they had to find something else to do…The French are childish…Here were adults, high-minded scientists, aeronautics specialists; and yet they were kids, ‘ickle babies playing with their ‘ickle toys. Now, the only place their plane still flies is in the pages of this book.

  9:19

  Atop a rocky cliff of artificial stone, a pair of lovers hold hands.

  “I always hated Tuesday. It’s still the beginning of the week, but it’s even more depressing than Monday,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

  “I can’t fucking believe they can’t get us out of here,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “You haven’t got a couple of Advil?”

  “Sorry, I took the last two when I got that lungful of burning carpet,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “It ripped my throat out.”

  The ventilation ducts were spitting clouds into the meeting room. Smoke rose from the carpet in fine wisps at first, and then in thick columns along the walls like mist over swampland, or will-o’-the-wisp designed by an Italian interior decorator.

  “When I think you’ll never get to see my home cinema system…plasma screen the size of Lake Superior,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “Yeah. Too bad…But don’t be so negative, the firefighters will get here, it’s only a matter of time,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

  They start to giggle and their laughter becomes a coughing fit. Or maybe they were coughing from the start.

  “What’s the difference between Microsoft and Jurassic Park?” asks the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “Don’t know, but I bet it’s pretty feeble:”

  “One is an overrated high-tech theme park based on prehistoric information and populated mostly by dinosaurs, the other is a Steven Spielberg movie.”

  This time she really does laugh. The guy in Kenneth Cole gets a fit of the giggles. He can’t stop, he’s choking on his own joke, he’s turning purple. The blonde explodes as well, they’re gasping for breath at the guy’s gag, it’s nervous laughter. I suppose if you’re going to choke to death, might as well be laughing. But they pull themselves together. The blonde takes off her jacket. Her striped blouse is half open. A thin gold chain hangs between her breasts with a little heart on the end. Outside the windows, America is ablaze.

  “Did you phone your mom?” asks the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “No,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren, “better not, no point in worrying her for nothing. Either we get out of here and I call her, or we don’t and I don’t. I mean, what do you want me to say to her?”

  “Bye, Mom, I love you. Tell the family I love them too,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

  “You dumb asshole,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

  He wasn’t a dumb asshole. He sat down on the table. He’d taken his jacket off too. He was having difficulty breathing. He loved this woman. He didn’t want to lose her. He didn’t want her to suffer. He thought about all the times he met her at the office, all the cafes, all those spur-of-the-moment drinks, all those hotel rooms. He thought about her velvety skin with its scent of moisturizer. His heart was not only beating from fear; he was capable of emotion. He felt that it was all over, that it would never come back. He slowly realized their affair would end here, in this room with its off-white walls. She was a ravishing blonde, he could imagine her as a child, her pink cheeks, her hair blown back, a cornfed blonde running through a meadow in a flower-print dress, a field of wheat or rye, holding a kite, that kind of shit.

  9:20

  Having picked the plane most likely to crash and the destination most vulnerable to terrorist attacks, under normal circumstances, I should have been done for then and there.

  Regardless of speed, taking a plane to New York City will never feel the same again. Once upon a time: a sense of weightlessness, a childlike enthusiasm, a mixture of fascination and jealousy, feigned tiredness masking excited trepidation, naive wonder, a sense of adventure and that good old cliche “the electric energy of the Big Apple” galvanized by the lyrics of “New York, New York” (“I’m gonna be a part of it…” “If I can make it there / I’ll make it anywhere”). Nowadays: a sense of being in a B movie, paranoia, saccharine pity, a nonchalant air masking your absurd terror, an obsessive interest in every passerby—especially anyone with a beard or a mustache—intense awareness of the most minute details, a foretaste of the end of the world, unwarranted smugness at emerging alive when the plane finally lands.

  Before we land, the stewardesses handed out green slips. All aliens are required to fill out the U.S. Immigration Service questionnaire:

  —Do you have a mental disorder? YES NO

  —Are you carrying drugs and/or arms? YES NO

  —Are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities? YES NO

  —Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were you involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies? ?JA ?NEIN JA NEIN

  —Have you ever sought immunity from prosecution in exchange for testimony? YES NO

  Lucky break: there’s no question asking: “Are you intending to write a novel about September 11?”

  My advice: always reply in the negative. Something tells me that a YES might invite administrative complications.

  The U.S. Department of Justice might want to add some new questions:

  —Are you a pedophile? YES NO

  —Are you a member of the bin Laden family YES NO

  —Do you regularly masturbate in front of photographs of dismembered corpses? YES LINO

  —Do you smoke cigarettes? YES NO

  —(If you’re a woman) Are you intending to blow the President of the United under his desk? YES NO

  I suppose you think I’m spitting in the soup again? I suppose you think I should be grateful for my rich-kid lifestyle and shut up? Sorry, I’m
investigating the obliteration of the seventies. The utopia of the seventies is one in which the majority of Earthlings refuse to live. Three hours from Paris to New York, that’s the time it takes to go from Paris to Marseille by TGV. Concorde is an AGV getting us nowhere. It’s just one folly among many and hardly seems the most dangerous. But the Avion à Grande Vitesse embodies an ideology best symbolized by Concorde’s nose-up as it lands, that graceful tilt as though looking down its nose at those not on board.

  There is a communist utopia; that utopia died in 1989.

  There is a capitalist utopia; that utopia died in 2001.

  During the flight, I constantly harassed the stewardess: “Are we there yet? Jeez, it’s a really long flight…Hey, aren’t we running late? I’ve got the feeling we’re running late…No, it’s just, you know, I’m the only one here not traveling on expenses…”

  At John Fitzgerald Kennedy airport, a fluorescent sign indicates “Gates 9-11.” They really should change it, it’s in questionable taste. We arrived on time, that is to say before we left. It was raining as we left; I arrive in a rain of tears. Everything is more beautiful in the rain which washes away nothing, especially not our sins. 8:25 AM: Amélie hadn’t left me yet. I’d pretended to be pressed for time to annoy the flight crew, but it wasn’t true.