Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  I was in no hurry for it to be 9:18 again.

  9:21

  I’m sick of my throat feeling sore. It stinks in here. My eyes are burning and my feet are really hot. I try not to cry, but the tears leak out anyway. David says Dad’s just recharging his batteries before doing something, he says the reason he hasn’t done anything yet is because “it’s not easy steering a Corvette one-handed along the edge of the Grand Canyon with your foot on the gas while looking behind you at an erupting volcano as Cameron Diaz arrives swinging from a helicopter wire and John Malkovich screams into a megaphone ‘cause there’s only ten seconds left before the A-bomb on the seabed explodes creating a tidal wave that will submerge New York where his kids are being held hostage by the president’s doppelgänger in a bunker guarded by bloodthirsty dinosaurs reared in a top-secret thermonuclear dump by secret government agents.” In other words, Dave’s convinced Dad’s some guy called Ultra-Dude who’s gonna get reactivated.

  I’m just shit-scared and I’d really like to get outta here. Dad says we gotta listen to Anthony and Anthony says we’re hafta stay here and not panic and that the rescue guys will come get us. What really scares me is that Dad’s even more shit-scared than me. Fuck, it really freaks me out when I get a nosebleed, I’ve always gotta keep pressing on it, that’s one hand, and Dad’s holding the other one and we’re just, like, staring at this door, it’s really creepy. Jeffrey’s praying in Hebrew and Tony’s praying in Arabic, I swear, it’s pretty weird. But the craziest thing about it (apart from David thinking he’s in a some Marvel comic), is Dad’s prayer.

  “Oh Lord, I know I’ve kind of abandoned You lately but there’s the parable about the prodigal son, right? That’s a really useful parable. If I’ve understand it right it means that even heathens and deserters will be welcomed with open arms if they come back to You, so, anyway, I’m feeling pretty prodigal this morning.”

  “See? Toldya he was gonna turn into supersome-thing,” shouts David.

  “Shut up, Jeez, Dad’s trying to pray, it’s holy.”

  All three of us hold hands and Dad keeps on praying.

  “Lord, I’m weak and I’ve sinned and I ask forgiveness. Yes, I got divorced, it was my fault, my grievous fault. I left my family, my two sons who are here with me…”

  “Stop, Dad, don’t say that…Dad, stop, please…”

  He’s really freaking me out, oh shit, it’s no use, I’m gonna cry. I try concentrating really hard on this blotch on the floor, but I just start sniveling. Fuck, this is hard. I just wanna be somewhere else. I want to be a fly flying round on the other side of this door. If someone told me that someday I’d be jealous of a fly. But no shit, it’d be really cool to be some random fly, you get to fly round and you don’t get nosebleeds, a fly is free and it can fuck off and it doesn’t think about stuff. I’d go BZZZ round the towers with my compound eyes and I’d look at all those assholes on the other side of the windows, BZZZ and whaddya know, I flick my wings and I’m outta here without a second thought. That’d be dope.

  “Oh God, I’m a selfish pig, but on my knees I beg you to forgive me…”

  A deaf fly would be best.

  9:22

  In New York, I’m free, I can go wherever I want, pass myself off as whoever I want. I’m anyone: I’m everyman. I have no roots tying me down, no media mini-celebrity to ring-fence me. Fame, like relationships or old age, makes you predictable. Freedom is being single, young and completely unknown. In my whole life I’ve never been as free as I am now: a solitary individual in a foreign city with money in my pocket. And what good is it? It’s a hollow freedom. Since I can do anything, I do nothing. I get drunk in my hotel room, watch X-rated movies with the sound turned down because Mylène Farmer is asleep in the next room. I get depressed in designer bars. It’s got to the point that when people ask how I am, I avert my eyes and change the subject, turning away so as not to cry. A simple “How are you?” is terrifying. “Everything okay?” sounds like a trick question.

  The last time my fiancee left me, I didn’t take her seriously because she’s always leaving me. But this time is definitely the last, I can feel it. This time she won’t come back and I’ll have to learn to live without her when what I’d planned was the reverse: to die with her.

  I hadn’t loved her enough, now she didn’t love me anymore; women often take the initiative; I’ve no intention of suffering in silence:

  “You were the greatest love of my life.”

  “I loathe past-tense declarations of love.”

  I’ve lived with women since I left my mother. Now, I’ll have to get used to living on my own like my father. I wish my life was more complicated. Sadly, life is humiliating in its simplicity: we do everything we can to be rid of our parents; then we become them.

  The stock market is plummeting. The Dow will soon be 7,000, 6,500, lower? Unemployment is rising. New York City is bankrupt (it has a $3.6 billion deficit)—quick, start a war, get the economy moving. Every TV channel talks about bombing raids in Iraq. In return, every New Yorker waits for a nuclear terrorist attack. In the schools, children are given leaflets explaining how to seal doors with insulating tape in case of a chemical attack. Many families have equipped themselves with survival kits: torches and spare batteries, rope, water, losat pills (medically developed to protect against radiation sickness). The yellow alert has been raised to an orange alert. And me, I’m wandering the streets of a threatened city looking for my navel.

  Every decade brings with it a new illness. The eighties: AIDS. The nineties: schizophrenia. The noughties: paranoia. A single suicide bomber in the subway station at Times Square would be enough to trigger mass panic. But there have been no attacks in the United States since September 11. Americans should feel reassured by this. But no. Every day that goes by without a terrorist attack makes it more likely that there will be one. Alfred Hitchcock said it again and again: Terror is mathematical. This morning, the Americans arrested Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the brains behind al-Quaeda. They should feel reassured by this. But no: the government braces itself for reprisals.

  It’s insane how much at home I feel in the most threatened city on earth. Terrorism is a permanent sword of Damocles, piercing buildings. I’m in my element here. In any case, without you, nowhere is bearable. When you’re dragging your own Judgment Day around, you might as well be somewhere apocalyptic.

  What did I come here to find? Me.

  Will I find myself?

  9:23

  Terrorism does not destroy symbols, it hacks people of flesh and blood to pieces. All these commingled tears. Jeffrey’s, Jerry’s, mine. David, thankfully, lives in his own imaginary world. He has good reason to shrink from hostile reality. Lourdes brings bottles of Evian she’s found who knows where. God bless her. We fall on them. With all the smoke we’ve inhaled, the fumes and the fuel, we’re close to asphyxia, but we’re extremely dehydrated too. It’s at this point that Anthony has an asthma attack. Poor guy rolls around on the floor and we don’t know what to do to help. I feel distraught. Lourdes pours mineral water into his mouth but he coughs it right back up. Jeffrey gestures to me and we carry Anthony downstairs to the restrooms on the floor below. I take his legs and Jeff holds him by the armpits (one of his arms has been badly burned). Again I entrust Jerry and David to Lourdes. Anthony struggles to inhale, to exhale. I’m shaking like a fucking idiot; Jeffrey is calmer, more collected. He puts Anthony’s head under the faucet. Anthony vomits something black. I take some paper towels from the machine to wipe his face. When I turn back, Jeffrey’s holding Anthony’s head against his chest. Anthony isn’t moving.

  “Is he…dead?”

  “Fuck, I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. He’s not breathing, I think maybe he just passed out.”

  He shakes Anthony, slaps him. He doesn’t like the idea of giving mouth to mouth (because of the vomit): so I take charge. It’s useless. Silence. I tell Jeffrey we have to leave him here, that he might come round, that I’ve got to get back to
my kids. He shakes his head.

  “You don’t get it—this guy was our only hope of getting out of here. It’s over. We’ve let him die and pretty soon we’ll be joining him.”

  I open the restroom door. I think: wow, the three-ply toilet paper matches the pink marble. I have time to notice even this. My brain keeps hoarding insignificant details when I’ve got better fucking things to do.

  “I’ve gotta go.”

  I never saw Jeffrey again. The last image I have of him, he’s sitting on the gray tiles smoothing Anthony’s hair. The pink door closes. I rush back to the kids. I jostle people who, like me, are wandering aimlessly trying to find shelter, an exit, a smoke-free lounge, a way out of the labyrinth. But there’s no “no smoking area” in Tower One this morning. This isn’t L.A.

  I’d like to have done that: made jokes, said fuck it and just given up, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have the right. I was convinced that I had to save my kids; though in fact they were the ones who saved me, since they stopped me from giving up. The soles of my shoes were sticking to the floor like they had chewing gum on them: I think they were starting to melt.

  9:24

  To me, New York was the wOOOO-wOOOO of sirens contrasting with the French NEE-naw. That dazzling extra light that makes them seem serious, that scares you shitless. New York: a city where they speak eighty languages. The victims of the attack were of sixty-two different nationalities.

  First thing I do when I arrive: tell the taxi driver to take me to Ground Zero.

  “You mean the World Trade Center site?”

  New Yorkers don’t like to say “Ground Zero.” The driver heads down to the end of the city and drops me in front of a fence. At 9.24, New York is a wire fence hung with photos of the missing, candles, wilting bouquets. A black plaque enumerates the names of the “heroes” (the victims). The more exact term would be: the martyrs. In fact, a cross has been planted at the memorial, even though not all the dead were Christians…Flowers strew the snow-covered ground. It’s very cold: fifteen degrees below zero. “Less than zero”: I think briefly of Bret Easton Ellis. Less than Ground Zero. I go into One World Financial Center, the only building in the neighborhood still standing. No search, no security checks, I could be caked with dynamite. In the Winter Garden, under a glass dome inspired by the Crystal Palace in London, I walk toward the picture window that looks directly onto the gaping hole. Ground Zero: a crater filled with bulldozers. Thousands of workers have already begun rebuilding. On the ground floor, the various architectural submissions are displayed. Daniel Libeskind’s proposal won the competition: the tallest tower in the world, four crystals forming a U surrounding a bathtub, like a smashed piece of quartz. No one would want to blow it up: it’s already in pieces. Pity: I really liked the World Cultural Center project submitted by THINK Design. The other side of the World Financial Center overlooks the sea, the wind, the spray, and a branch of Starbucks.

  I note the presence of a number of garbage cans. French police clearly haven’t informed local authorities about the modus operandi of Islamic terrorists in Paris: nail bombs in garbage cans, that kind of thing…For some time now in France we’ve learned to live with fear in our bellies. Over here, there are cops with shades and walkie-talkies everywhere, but they still have too much faith in mankind. One hundred feet from Ground Zero, the Pussycat Lounge (96 Greenwich Street) and its naked creatures attest to the fact that life goes on. One vodka tonic later, I walk past the Federal Reserve, where 22,285,376 lb of gold are stored eighty feet below ground. Then I wander into Saint Paul’s Church, which is miraculously unscathed: it dates from 1762. An exhibition pays tribute to the rescue services: photos of the missing, objects found in the rubble are lined up in glass cases, tubes of toothpaste, diapers, bandages, candy, a crucifix, sheets of paper, and hundreds, thousands, of children’s drawings. I bring my hand to my mouth. I no longer feel sorry for myself. Here in the midst of this terribly saccharine suffering stands a cynic in tears.

  Later still, a little farther uptown, at the Carousel Cafe, another strip joint, a dancer wearing a thong tells me that in the weeks following the Eleventh the Salvation Army came twice a day to get ice so they could serve cold drinks to the families of the victims at the Armory, and to rescuers working in the oppressive heat of the smoldering site.

  “When the club opened again a week after the attack, the girls couldn’t believe it: it was full of blue-collar workers dead on their feet who snapped up the free drinks, and us, too! They wanted to talk. There were ambulances and fire trucks screaming all the time outside the door. Everything was burning, These guys needed something to take their minds off things. I remember when I’d bend down to pick up my clothes, they were caked in white dust.”

  9:25

  Restaurants cook up all kinds of stuff, just usually not the customers. Up here, we’re the barbecue. Dad came back with a face six foot long. Lourdes looked at him inquisitively and he shook his head.

  “Anthony stayed downstairs with Jeffrey,” he said, hoping David and me wouldn’t understand. I don’t know about Dave, but I know exactly what the score is. We’re trapped in this tower with no way of going up or down. And this hellacious heat. I’m so totally boiling I can’t think about anything else. I figure I’m too young to die. I want to study astronomy and investigate the stars with my telescope and be an astronaut with NASA so I can float up there above the blue planet. It’s cooler in space.

  I really need to take a piss so I let go Dad’s hand—he’s trying to explain to Dave that he’s not Batman.

  “But if you were Batman you’d still say you weren’t Batman,” David says.

  “Where you going?” Dad asks me.

  “I hafta go pee,” I answer.

  “Wait…don’t…”

  Too late, I run down the smoky corridor and bang! I come across Anthony lying on the floor and Jeffrey standing looking at himself in the mirror.

  “Is he dead or what?”

  “No, he’s asleep.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Thinking.”

  “Okay, well, while you’re thinking I have to go pee.”

  But I couldn’t pee. I tried and tried but it wouldn’t come. Happens to me sometimes, I can’t pee when there’s people around. Jeez, I look like a complete schmuck.

  “C’mon, you gonna piss or what?” said Jeffrey.

  “I can’t. I’m stuck.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m stuck too, we’re all stuck.”

  I zip up my flies. I did my best to put up a good show but Jeffrey could tell I’d been crying. We just stood their staring at each other. Jeffrey kept on starting sentences I couldn’t make out: “There’s too much…I didn’t…I was the one who brought them all…What are we gonna…I can’t…” I could tell he needed to talk but he couldn’t do it. That’s when I pissed my pants.

  When I left the john, Dad was there and he had David in his arms and I was megaglad he was there. He carried us back to the emergency exit. I told him Anthony was resting and Jeffrey had gone down.

  “What d’you mean ‘gone down’?”

  “He said he was gonna do some stuff for the guys from his work, then he left. He was really weird. He was talking about going through the windows to get down. You think that’s possible?”

  Dad looked nervous. He could tell I’d peed my pants but he didn’t say anything. Lucky for me, ‘cause otherwise David would have ragged me, like, forever. Soon as I got a nosebleed, he’d be right in there.

  “Kids, I don’t think we’re gonna see Jeffrey again.”

  9:26

  I order a white wine at the Pastis, the hip restaurant run by Keith McNally who also owns Balthazar, another French restaurant. Balthazar. I like the decor, it’s perfect—a French brasserie recreated right in the middle of the “Meat Market.” I told the woman I love that I had to go to New York alone; that’s what gave her the idea of dumping me for good. People think my life is funny, but it’s not. I can’t stick at anything. I got marr
ied, I got divorced. I had a kid, but I don’t parent. I’m in love, I run away to New York. I’m handicapped, and I’m not the only one. I live in a no man’s land: neither an INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOY or MARRIED AND PROUD OF IT. I’m indecisive and no one feels sorry for me. I’m fucked up and I’ve no right to complain. I have a crippled heart: like the song by Enrico Macias, “Le Mendiant de I’amour.” Still, it’s amazing how many thirtysome-things I know are in the same boat. Emotional cripples. Grown, vaccinated men behaving like kids. Underneath the dashing exterior is an emotional cripple. With no memories, no plans. They want to be like their fathers and at the same time they’re determined not to end up like their fathers no matter what. Fathers who abandoned them and whom they never found. I’m not criticizing them: I blame society. The sons of 1968 are men with no role models. Men with no instruction manual. Men with no solidity. Defective men. When they’re in a relationship, they feel smothered, when they’re single they’re miserable. Even their psychoanalyst is lost; he doesn’t know what else to tell them. There’s no example for them to follow. There’s no solution to the tragedy of my generation. I’m someone who only enjoys beginnings yet I’ve forgotten my childhood. I’m someone who only enjoys beginnings yet I don’t look after my child. For thousands of years we did things differently. Mom and Dad and their kids lived in the same house. Barely forty years ago, we decided to do away with the father and we want things to carry on as before? I’m the product of that disappearing father. I am collateral damage.