Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  Among the Ashes and the Millionaires.

  I’m scared of dying. I’m proud of my spinelessness. My complete lack of physical courage forces me to live under the permanent protection of the police and the law. My complete lack of physical courage is what distinguishes me from an animal.

  It’s easy to be dead in the future. It’s more difficult to be dead in the present. You have to go on living right up to the moment when you’re no longer living. Say “merci,” never forgetting that in English “merci” is mercy. You’ve got no time to have the last rites or to think up a brilliant epitaph, some stylish last words to issue with your last breath, for posterity. When death takes you by surprise, is there a posterity?

  10:17

  A fat lot of good compassion is to me. By dint of being so compassionate, Judeo-Christian democracies are easy to crush. That’s what the aerial assassins set out to prove. Nobody among the tender, charitable, liberal Judeo-Christians is safe anymore. They wanted the nice, privileged people to know what it feels like to Hate. Like Robert Mitchum’s knuckles in Night of the Hunter: LOVE HATE. Hate is love.

  Jesus turned the other cheek; okay, Jesus wasn’t violent. But he felt hatred, even if he rejected it, even if he did not admit it, it was within him, the implacable thirst for justice. And on the Cross he bawled everyone out and denied his father. Jesus on the Cross didn’t give a toss about compassion.

  10:18

  Far from you, my heart shattered like a window.

  The Mercer Hotel, designed by a Frenchman (Christian Liaigre), is situated downtown in SoHo, a few blocks from the World Trade Center, but I’ve arrived a year too late. The new mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who owns television stations like Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, set himself two objectives: get rid of cigarette smokers and noise pollution. His predecessor had succeeded in getting the whores off 42nd Street and the tramps out of the Village. Soon, Gotham City will be one big pristine shopping mall. An island trade center. You’re not permitted to smoke in bars, restaurants, not even in nightclubs. Sometimes, you’re not permitted to dance! Babylonian sensualists are an endangered minority. This obsession with tranquility and cleanliness seems like an instinctive response to the lessons of purity and virtue of Islamic fundamentalists, those bearded hypocrites. It betrays the terror of a metropolis in danger. When democracy is threatened, Manhattan becomes…Switzerland.

  I no longer leave the Mercer. I live there like a recluse, like Polnareff at the Royal Monceau. I have lunch and dinner in the Mercer Kitchen on the ground floor. At 10:18 PM, I drink my vodka cranberry at the Submercer, the hotel nightclub. I live in autarky in the most fashionable building in New York as if I were living in a family pensione in Tuscany. The porter and the receptionist smile at me pityingly and wonder whether this melancholy Frenchman will have the wherewithal to pay his bill at the end of his stay. The celebrities who hang out in the hotel bar (Benicio del Toro, Amanda de Cadenet) can’t work out why this guy with the beard sits alone humming Cat Stevens’ songs, jotting down their every word, their every move in his little black notebook. Methodically, I drink myself into a stupor, slumped on a designer sofa, talking to no one, often crying, thinking of you, missing you.

  10:19

  They want us to feel guilty. But guilty for what? I’m not responsible for what my country did when it was growing up. Black slavery, the genocide of the Indians, raging liberalism, it wasn’t me, guys, I came along much later! All I did was be born here, in the Big House, but I’m not one of them. The only thing I control is my real-estate office. Okay, I sold apartments for more than they were worth. I’ve got to admit all realtors are crooks: they sell you something you’ll never own. Don’t you understand that here on earth you’ll never own anything? That we’re all tenants? I sold the wind, some temporary square footage that you’d have to slave all your life to pay off. Average American debt is 110 percent of annual salary: a world record. The funniest thing about it is that it’s the young who congratulate themselves that they’re not paying rent anymore but go on making interest payments every month. What’s the difference? A realtor is a man who forces other men to work to pay off something they’re still renting, since a homeowner is just a tenant trapped in his property, a debtor who can’t move house.

  Okay, so I’m not innocent but I’m not a criminal either. I didn’t deserve to be executed. I don’t know whether I am the embodiment of Good, but I never wished Evil on anyone. I’ve sinned, cheated on Mary, divorced, abandoned Jerry and David; okay, so I’m far from perfect, but since when do they burn people alive for that? What could I do if Guatemalan kids were working fifteen hours a day for slave wages to do the job for me? And I wasn’t even born when Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened, for God’s sake! Fucksake, in what sense am I complicit in what goes on in Palestinian refugee camps with all those swarthy guys throwing rocks at tanks and suicide-bombing themselves all day long instead of going to work like everyone else? I mean, shit, it’s miles away and we haven’t got a clue what it’s about. Hairy, bearded sand eaters, crouching round in sandals with a machine gun in one hand, shouting slogans that are as hateful as they are incomprehensible. There’s too much dust in those countries, and they die from the heat, it’s annoying to be so hot first thing in the morning when you’re eating insects for breakfast, you’re dying of thirst, in the end, either you go and lie down or you top yourself and take everybody else with you.

  Who’s behind the attack? Arafat? The Unabomber? You might say, what difference does it make whether you’re murdered by bin Laden or Timothy McVeigh, al-Qaeda or the Ku Klux Klan? Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a Saddam! Violence is part of man’s nature. In theory, culture, religion, society, civilization are supposed to subdue it. In theory. Have pity on us. Oh Lord, take pity on Jerry, on David, on Carthew Yorston of Austin, Texas. Have mercy on us. What about Arabic, how do you say “mercy” in Arabic?

  10:20

  A port is a charming sojourn for a soul worn out by the struggles of life. The amplitude of the sky, the mobile architecture of the clouds, the changing colors of the sea, the sparkling of the beacons, are all a prism marvelously suited to amusing the eyes without ever wearying them. The slender forms of the ships, with their complicated rigging, upon which the swell of the sea imprints harmonious oscillations, serve to preserve in the soul a taste for rhythm and beauty. And then, above all else, there is a sort of mysterious and aristocratic pleasure, for he who has neither curiosity nor ambition, in contemplating, while lying on the belvedere or leaning his elbows against the pier, all of the movements of those who leave and those who return, of those who still have strength of will, the desire to travel, or to enrich themselves.

  (Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, 1865. It should be retitled New York Spleen.)

  10:21

  Since David died, Jerry won’t let go of him, cries on his cold forehead, strokes his closed eyelids. I stand up, take him in my arms, a little prince with blond, lifeless hair. Jerry reads my thoughts, he shudders with grief. I’m tired of playing the hero. Like the receptionist said: not trained for that. Jerry’s hand tightens on my arm, in the other he holds David’s limp hand which dangles, swinging in the void. I hug this beloved flesh to my smoke-blackened shirt, his little face black like the time he used matches to burn a cork to make Indian war paint, summer 1997, Yosemite National Park. I wish I could stop remembering, my heart is bursting. C’mon, c’mon kids, let’s get out of here, let’s do what we should have done long ago, beat it, hit the road again, adios, amigos, hasta la vista, baby, the glass is broken, look through the Windows on the World, look, Jerry, freedom, no, Jerry my little hero, don’t look down, keep your blue eyes fixed on the horizon, New York harbor, the ballet of helpless helicopters, you never saw Apocalypse Now, you were so young, how could those murderers, c’mon, darling, come on, my little lambs, Space Mountain will be like nothing compared to this, hold on tight to me, Jerry, I love you, come with Daddy, we’re going home, we’re taking your little brother home, com
e and surf the clouds of fire, you were my angels and nothing will ever split us up again, heaven is being with you, take a deep breath and if you’re scared, all you’ve gotta do is close your eyes. We know what self-sacrifice is too.

  Just before we jump, Jerry looks me straight in the eyes. What was left of his face twisted one last time. It wasn’t just a nosebleed anymore.

  “Will Mom be sad?”

  “Don’t think about that. We have to be strong. I love you, honey. You’re a hell of a kid.”

  “I love you too, Dad. Hey, Dad, you know what? I’m not scared of falling—I’m not crying and neither are you.”

  “I’ve never known anyone as brave as you, Jerry. Never. You ready, buddy? On three…”

  “One, two…three!”

  Our mouths gradually distorted from the speed. The wind made us make curious faces. I can still hear Jerry laughing, holding tight to my hand and to his little brother’s, plummeting through the heavens. Thank you for that last laugh, oh Lord, thank you for Jerry’s laugh. For a split second, I really believed we were flying.

  10:22

  Zweig wrote: “Unconsciously, New York mimics the mountains, the sea and the rivers.” And Céline speaks of a “standing city” because he never saw the World Trade Center lie down.

  Americans walked on the moon, but on the days that followed September 11, 2001, there was no need to go so far: New York had become a dead planet. A carpet of white dust covered the asphalt. All that remained of a 110-story building were two metal girders, twisted like fingers clawing at the sky. Like a crushed space module. The silence pierced by police sirens. In America, everything is bigger, even terrorist attacks. In France, a Métro station blows up, a clothing store is destroyed, but the buildings remain more or less vertical. Here, the first foreign terrorist attack is instantly the most murderous in Western history: the greatest number of civilians massacred in one fell swoop since the founding of the United States.

  I had planned a chapter here called “Death: A User’s Manual.” As if Georges Perec had exchanged 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier for the corners of Church Street, Vesey, Liberty, and West. By now I’m in too much of a hurry to get home; I want to eat my wedding cake, I want to snuggle up to you, if you’ll have me.

  I look up and give a knowing wink to Carthew, Jerry, and David who may be looking down on me through the gray winter fog. The sea carries off the sound of the sirens, of the gulls, of the cranes and the tourist helicopters. New York in black and white, granite and marble, annihilated, disappears in the mist suspended from the steel pylons. Even so, I’m alive. No need to make a mountain out of a molehill.

  10:23

  Sometimes I dream of a heap of thousands of tons of smoldering bodies and melted steel in which are fused man and stone, computers and severed arms, elevators and charred legs, believers and atheists, fire and the sword…And then it passes. And then it returns: I see walls with eyes embedded in them, heads split open by glass, bodies broken on fax machines, brains trickling onto photocopiers. God created this too. And I dream that I’m floating, with my two children in my arms, over a mountain of rubble. And perhaps I’m not dreaming. Perhaps we’re floating over WTC Plaza, forever windswept, emptier still now the towers are gone. Now they call it “the site,” and give guided tours. The wind still blows, between zero and the infinite. We are within it, we are the wind.

  Once, in this place, man built two towers on this earth. “Rest in Peace:” here we rest in war. Only death can make us immortal. We are not dead: we are prisoners of the sun or of the snow. Broken rays of sunlight dart between the snowflakes which fall in slow motion like a rain of confetti. Shards of glass apparently migrate beneath the skin. Put some glass in your veins. Do this in memory of me. I died for you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you.

  10:24

  I truly don’t know why I wrote this book. Perhaps because I couldn’t see the point of speaking of anything else. What else is there to write? The only interesting subjects are those which are taboo. We must write what is forbidden. French literature is a long history of disobedience. Nowadays, books must go where television does not. Show the invisible, speak the unspeakable. It may be impossible, but that is its raison d’être. Literature is a “mission impossible.”

  The singular interest of living in a democracy is to criticize it. In fact, this is how we know we are living in a democracy. One cannot criticize a dictatorship. Even when it is attacked, threatened, scorned, democracy must prove that it is democratic by speaking ill of democracy.

  In saying that, I realize that I’m not being honest. I am also obliged to concede that in leaning on the first great hyperterrorist attack, my prose takes on a power which it would not otherwise have. This novel uses tragedy like a literary crutch.

  There is another reason. My American genealogy goes back to the “patriot” Amos Wheeler, hero of the American Revolution, born in Pepperell, Massachusetts, in 1741, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 21, 1775, from a wound to the thigh sustained at the battle of Bunker Hill five days earlier. His name appears on the Bunker Hill Monument as well as on the monument in Washington, D.C. A posthumous son was born a month later, in July 1775: Amos Wheeler II. His daughter, Olive Wheeler, married a man named Jobe Knight and gave him a son, Eldorado Knight, who married Frances Matilda Harben, whose daughter, Nellie Harben Knight, was the mother of Grace Carthew Yorstoun, my paternal grandmother. I’m an eighth-generation descendant of Patriot Amos Wheeler, born 228 years after his death. Grace Carthew Yorstoun married Charles Beigbeder, my father’s father. She moved to France, gained 110 pounds from eating foie gras and died in Pau in the Béarn having given birth to two daughters and two sons (among them, my father), all this without ever losing the Southern drawl that made the Rotary Club members of Pyrénées-Atlantique smile.

  If you go back eight generations, all white Americans are Europeans. We are the same: even if we are not all Americans, our problems are theirs, and theirs ours.

  10:25

  That morning, we were at the top of the world, and I was the center of the universe.

  I was right when I told Jerry and David that we were on an imaginary theme-park ride: now, there are guided tours of Ground Zero. It has become a tourist attraction, like the Statue of Liberty which we will never get to visit. Tickets for the WTC site are available from the Sea Port; they’re free. There is a long line to climb a wooden podium which overlooks the desolate esplanade. The guide hurries the voyeurs. But there’s nothing to see except an immense expanse of concrete, a parking lot with no cars, the biggest tombstone in the world. The night blushes with embarrassment at times to think of it; the surrounding buildings refuse to twinkle. And the darkness keeps us warm. The river is violet and blue; seen from above it’s very beautiful.

  We’ve become a tourist attraction. See, kids? It’s us they’re coming to see now.

  10:26

  At Noche (the new restaurant opened by Windows on the World owner David Emil on Times Square), I collar one of the former employees of Windows.

  “I’m a French writer and I’m currently working on a novel about your old restaurant.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my grandmother was American, her name was Grace Carthew Yorstoun and I didn’t go to her funeral. I was in Switzerland with my father and my brother when we got the news. I preferred to ski, the weather was beautiful, my father was on pretty bad terms with his brother, we didn’t go to Pau.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “I never really knew her. Her name was Grace, like Grace Kelly, but we called her Granny. She was from one of the grand old families of the American South. At the end of her life, she looked like Mister Magoo. You see my chin? I get that from her.”

  “Listen, I’ve got work to do. And I don’t care about your grandmother. You’re bothering me, mister!”

  “She was a descendant of John Adams, the second President of the United States.
I’ve got cousins, the Harbens, in Dallas. I haven’t seen them for twenty-five years. They told me I’m also descended from a famous fur trapper: Daniel Boone.”

  “So what?”

  “We do not hate you. You scare us because you rule the world. But we’re blood relations. France helped your country to be born. Later, you liberated us. And my cousin died in your restaurant on September 11, 2001, with his two sons.”

  I don’t know why I lied like that. I wanted to move him. Cowardice makes you a pathological liar. Carthew Yorstoun was my grandmother’s family name. Take out the “u” and you have Carthew Yorston, a fictional character.

  “Excuse me, but I’m so sick and tired of Nine-Eleven…”

  “Don’t worry, I’m going, I don’t want to bother you. Just one question: do you know the Dionne Warwick song?”

  “Of course.”

  And there we are, two citizens of planet earth, humming, “The windows of the world are covered with rain.” At first we feel like fools, the customers think we’re drunk, we don’t sing very loudly, then the chorus comes and we howl like piglets, like tramps, like brothers.

  10:27

  There’s nothing to understand, my little ghosts with your delicate little hands. We died for nothing. The collapse of the North Tower will occur in one minute (a tremor of eight seconds registering 2.3 on the Richter scale) but we won’t see it because we’re no longer on board. In the smoke and the rubble, the TV antenna remains vertical as it falls before tilting slightly to the left. The spire sank into the smoke like a ship’s mast into the ocean spray. Tower No. 1 took ten seconds to collapse completely, straight as a rocket at take-off with the film running backward. Remember us, please. We three are the burning phoenix which will rise from its ashes. Phoenix isn’t only in Arizona. (Page cut.)