Windows On The World
Frédéric Beigbeder

Pardon me, Chloë For having led you Onto this devastated land

To the 2,749

Epigraph

Lightning Rods:

“A novelist who does not write realistic novels understands nothing of the world in which we live.”

Tom Wolfe

“The function of the artist is to plunge into the depths of hell.”

Marilyn Manson

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Author’s Note

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Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise for Windows on the World:

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

“And thou, thy Emblem, waving over all!

Delicate beauty! a word to thee, (it may be salutary;)

Remember, thou hast not always been, as here today, so comfortably ensovereign’d;

In other scenes than these have I observ’d thee, flag;

Not quite so trim and whole, and freshly blooming, in folds of stainless silk;

But I have seen thee, bunting, to tatters torn, upon thy splinter’d staff.

Or clutch’d to some young color-bearer’s breast, with desperate hands,

Savagely struggled for, for life or death – fought over long,

‘Mid cannon’s thunder-crash, and many a curse, and groan and yell and rifle-volleys cracking sharp,

And moving masses, as wild demons surging – and lives as nothing risk’d,

For thy mere remnant, grimed with dirt and smoke, and sopp’d in blood;

For sake of that, my beauty – and that thou might’st dally, as now, secure up there,

Many a good man have I seen go under.”

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, September 7, 1871

“KILL THE ROCKEFELLERS!”

Kurt Cobain, Diaries, 2002

8:30

You know how it ends: everybody dies. Death, of course, comes to most people one day or another. The novelty of this story is that everyone dies at the same time in the same place. Does death forge bonds between people? It would not appear so: they do not speak to each other. They brood, like all those who got up too early and are munching their breakfast in a lavish cafeteria. From time to time, some take photos of the view, the most beautiful view in the world. Behind the square buildings, the sea is round; the slipstreams of the boats carve out geometric shapes. Even seagulls do not come this high. The customers in Windows on the World are strangers to one other for the most part. When, inadvertently, their eyes meet, they clear their throats and bury their noses in their newspapers PDQ. Early September, early morning, everyone is in a bad mood: the holidays are over, all that’s left is wait it out until Thanksgiving. The sky is blue, but no one is enjoying it.

In Windows on the World a moment from now, a large Puerto Rican woman will start to scream. A suited executive’s mouth will fall open. “Oh my God!” Office workers will be stunned into silence. A redhead will scream, “Holy shit!” A waitress will keep pouring tea until the cup overflows. Some seconds are longer than others. As though someone has pressed “Pause” on a DVD player. In a moment, time will become elastic. All of these people will finally come to know one another. In a moment, they will all be horsemen of the Apocalypse, all united in the End of the World.

8:31

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

It’s half past eight. Okay—it’s a bit early to drag your kids up a skyscraper. But the kids really wanted to have breakfast here and I just can’t say no to them: I feel guilty about splitting up with their mother. The advantage of getting here early is you don’t have to queue. Since the 1993 bombing, security controls on the ground floor have been tripled, you need special badges to work here and the security guards who search your bags don’t fuck around. Even the buckle on Jerry’s Harry Potter belt set off the metal detector. In the high-tech atrium, fountains gurgle discreetly. Breakfast is by reservation only: I gave my name at the Windows on the World desk when we arrived. “Good morning, my name is Carthew Yorston.” Immediately you get a sense of the place: red carpet, tasseled velvet rope, private elevator. In this vast airport lounge (350 square feet under glass), the reservation desk stands like a First Class check-in. It was a brilliant idea to show up early. The queues for the telescopes are shorter (pop a quarter in and you can stare at the secretaries arriving for work in the neighboring buildings: cellphones glued to their ears, dressed in pale gray figure-hugging pantsuits, coiffured hair, expensive sneakers, pumps stuffed into their fake Prada handbags). This is the first time I’ve been to the top of the World Trade Center: my sons both loved the Skylobbies—the high-speed elevators which ascend the first seventy-eight floors in forty-three seconds. They’re so fast you can feel your heart leap in your chest. They didn’t want to leave the Skylobby. Finally, after four round trips, I was annoyed.

“Okay, now, that’s enough! These lifts are for people going to work, it’s not marked Space Mountain!”

One of the restaurant hostesses, identifiable by her lapel badge, escorted us to the other elevator which whisks you to the 107th floor. We have a busy schedule today: breakfast at Windows on the World, then a walk in Battery Park where we’ll catch the Staten Island ferry to have a look at the Statue of Liberty, later a visit to Pier 17, a bit of shopping at South Street Seaport, some photos of the Brooklyn Bridge, a tour of the fish market just for the smell of it, and finally a medium-rare hamburger at the Bridge Cafe. The boys love big juicy hamburgers smothered in ketchup. And large Cokes full of crushed ice—as long as they’re not Diet. Kids think of nothing but food, parents of nothing but fucking. On that score things are pretty good, thanks: shortly after my divorce, I met Candace who works at Elite New York. You know the type…She makes J-Lo look like a bag lady. Every night she comes to the Algonquin and climbs all over me, moaning (she prefers Philippe Starck’s Royalton which is just down the block) (it’s because she’s never read Dorothy Parker) (remember to give her a copy of the Collected Dorothy Parker, that’ll put her off relationships).

In two hours I’ll be dead; in a way, I am dead already.

8:32

We know very little of what happened in Windows on the World that morning. The New York Times reports that at 8.46 AM, the time at which American Airlines flight 11 flew into floors 94 to 98, there were 171 people in the top-floor restaurant, seventy-two of whom were employees. We know that the Risk Water Group had organized a working breakfast in a private dining room on 106, but also that, as they did every morning, a variety of customers were having breakfast on 107. We know that the North Tower (the taller of the two, crowned with the antenna which made it look like a hypodermic syringe) was the first to be hit and the last to fall, at 10:28 AM precisely. There is therefore a time lag of exactly an hour and three-quarters. Hell lasts an hour and three-quarters. As does this book.

I am in Le Ciel de Paris as I write these words. That’s the name of the restaurant on the fifty-sixth floor of the Tour Montparnasse, 33 Avenue du Maine, 75015 Paris. Telephone: +33 1 40 64 77 64. Fax: +33 1 43 22 58 43. Métro station: Montparnasse-Bienvenue. They serve breakfast from 8:30 AM. For weeks now I’ve been having my morning coffee here every day. From here you can look at the Eiffel Tower eye to eye. The view is magnificent since it’s the only place in Paris from which you can’t see the Tour Montparnasse. Around me, businessmen shout into their cellphones so their neighbors can eavesdrop on their brainless conversations:

“Listen, I can’t babysit this anymore, it was actioned at the last meeting.”

“No, no, I’m telling you Jean-Philippe was crystal clear, it’s not negotiable.”

“Look, the stock’s printing on the ‘O.’”

“Look, take it from me, sometimes you melt and you don’t even cover your nut.”

“Well, you know what they say: Rockefeller made his fortune always buying too late and selling too early.”

“Okay, we don’t want to get whacked on this. I’ll get my secretary to snail you a hard copy and we’ll nail it down.”

“Like a shot, the value split.”

“I’ll tell you something, if those assholes don’t shore this fucker up, the stock is going to tank.”

“I was tracking the CAC 40 but everything started crunching through the price level and I got jigged out.”

They also misuse the adverb “absolutely.” As I jot down the musings of these apprentice Masters of the Universe, a waitress brings me croissants, a café-crème, some individual pots of Bonne Maman jam and a couple of boiled eggs. I don’t remember how the waitresses in Windows on the World were dressed: it was dark the first—and last—time I set foot in it. They probably employed blacks, students, out-of-work actresses or maybe pretty little New Jersey girls with starched aprons. NOTE: Windows on the World wasn’t Mickey D’s, it was a first-class joint with prices to match (brunch $35, service not included). Tel: 212-938 1111 or 212-524 7000. Reservations recommended some time in advance. Jacket required. I’ve tried calling the number; nowadays it goes to an answering machine for some company specializing in event management. The waitresses must have been pretty, I suppose, the uniform sophisticated: a beige outfit embroidered with the initials “WW”? Or maybe they were dressed like old-fashioned chambermaids, with those little black dresses you just want to lift up? A pantsuit? A Gucci tux designed by Tom Ford? It’s impossible to go back and check now. Writing this hyperrealist novel is made more difficult by reality itself. Since September 11, 2001, reality has not only outstripped fiction, it’s destroying it. It’s impossible to write about this subject, and yet impossible to write about anything else. Nothing else touches us.

Beyond the windows, my eyes are drawn to every passing plane. For me to be able to describe what took place on the far side of the Atlantic, a plane would have to crash into the black tower beneath my feet. I’d feel the building rock; it must be a strange sensation. Something as solid as a skyscraper rocking like a drunken boat. So much glass and steel transformed in an instant into a wisp of straw. Wilted stone. This is one of the lessons of the World Trade Center: that the immovable is movable. What we thought was fixed is shifting. What we thought solid is liquid. Towers are mobile and skyscrapers first and foremost scrape the ground. How could something so colossal be so quickly destroyed? That is the subject of this book: the collapse of a house of credit cards. If a Boeing were to crash below my feet, I would finally know what it is that has tortured me for a year now: the black smoke seeping from the floor, the heat melting the walls, the exploded windows, the asphyxiation, the panic, the suicides, the headlong stampede to stairwells already in flames, the tears and the screams, the desperate phone calls. This does not mean that I do not breathe a sigh of relief as I watch each plane fly off into the white sky. But it happened. This thing happened, and it is impossible to relate.

Windows on the World. My first impression is that the name is slightly pretentious. A little self-indulgent, especially for a skyscraper which houses stockbrokers, banks and financial markets. It’s possible to see the words as one more proof of American condescension: “This building overlooks the nerve center of world capitalism and cordially suggests you go fuck yourselves.” In fact, it was a pun on the name of the World Trade Center. Windows on the “World.” As usual, with my traditional French sullenness I see arrogance where there was nothing but a lucid irony. What would I have called a restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center? “Roof of the World”? “Top of the World”? Both are worse. They stink. Why not “King of the World,” like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, while we’re at it? (“The World Trade Center is our Titanic,” declared the mayor of New York, Rudi Giuliani, on the morning after the attack.) Of course, in hindsight, the ex-ad exec in me hardly misses a beat: there would have been a great name for the place, the perfect brand, unassuming yet poetic. “END OF THE WORLD.” End meaning not only the culmination, but also the farthest point. Since the restaurant was on the roof, “End of the World” could simply mean “at the top of the North Tower.” But Americans don’t like that kind of humor; they’re very superstitious. That’s why their buildings never have a thirteenth floor. All things considered, Windows on the World was a very appropriate name. And a very effective slogan. Why otherwise would Bill Gates have chosen to dub his famous software “Windows” some years later? As a name, Windows on the World was “all that,” as the kids say. It certainly wasn’t the highest view in the world: the summit of the World Trade Center was 1,353 feet, whereas the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur rise to 1,482 feet and the Sears Tower in Chicago to 1,450. The Chinese are currently building what will be the world’s tallest building in Shanghai: the Shanghai World Financial Center (1,510 feet). I hope the name won’t bring them bad luck. I’m very fond of the Chinese: they are the only people on earth capable of being both extremely capitalist and supremely communist.

8:33

From here, the taxis look like yellow ants lost in a gridiron maze. Under the watchful eyes of the Rockefeller family and the supervision of the New York Port Authority, the Twin Towers were imagined by architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1982) and Associates with Emery Roth and Sons. Two concrete-and-steel towers 110 stories high. Almost 10,000,000 square feet of office space. Each tower boasts 21,800 windows and 104 elevators. Forty thousand square feet of office space per floor. I know all this because it’s my job in some sense. Inverted catenary of triangular cross-section measuring fifty-four feet at the base and seventeen feet at the apex; footing, 630 feet; steel lattice columns on thirty-nine-inch centers, weight 320,000 tons (of which 13,357 tons is concrete). Cost: $400 million. Winner of the Technological Innovation Prize from the National Building Museum. I would have liked to be an architect; in reality, I’m a realtor. Two hundred and fifty thousand tins of paint a year to maintain. Sixty thousand tons of cooling capacity. Every year, more than two million tourists visit the WTC. Building work on the complex began in 1966 and lasted ten years. Critics quickly dubbed the towers “the Lego blocks” or “David and Nelson.” I don’t dislike them; I like seeing the clouds reflected in them. But there are no clouds today. The kids stuff themselves with pancakes and maple syrup. They fight over the butter. It would have been nice to have had a girl, just to know what it’s like to have a tranquil child, one not permanently in competition with the rest of the universe. The air conditioning is freezing. I’d never get used to it. Here, in the capital of the world, in Windows on the World, a high-class clientele can contemplate the acme of all Western achievement, but they have to freeze their balls off to do it. The air conditioning makes a constant droning noise, a blanket of sound humming like a jet engine with the volume turned down; I find the lack of silence exhausting. In Texas, where I come from, we’re happy to die of heatstroke. We’re used to it. My family is descended from John Adams, the second President of the United States. Great-granddaddy Yorston, a man named William Harben, was the great-grandson of the man who drafted the Declaration of Independence. That’s why I’m a member of the “Sons of the American Revolution” (acronym SAR, as in Son Altesse Royale). Oh yes, we’ve got aristocrats in America. I’m one of them. A lot of Americans boast of being descended from the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. It doesn’t mean anything, but we feel better. Contrary to William Faulkner, the South isn’t just some bunch of violent, alcoholic mental defectives. In New York, I like to ham up my Texas drawl, to say “yup,” instead of “yeah.” I’m every bit as much a snob as the remaining survivors of the European aristocracy. We call them “Eurotrash”: the playboys down at the Au Bar, the lotharios who take pride of place in Marc de Gontaut-Biron’s catalog and the photo section of Paper Magazine. We laugh at them. We yank their chain, but we have our very own, what? American Trash? I’m a redneck, a member of the American Trashcan. But my name isn’t up there with Getty and Guggenheim and Carnegie because instead of buying museums my ancestors pissed everything up the wall.

Pressing their faces up against the glass, the kids try to scare each other.

“Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat—can’t even look down with your hands behind your back.”

“Wow, this is weird!”

“You’re just chicken!”

I tell them that in 1974, a Frenchman called Philippe Petit, a tightrope walker, illegally stretched a cable between the Twin Towers at exactly this height and walked across in spite of the cold and the wind and the vertigo. “What’s a Frenchman?” the kids ask. I explain that France is a small European country that helped America to free itself from the yoke of English oppression between 1776 and 1783 and that, to show our appreciation, our soldiers liberated them from the Nazis in 1944. (I’m simplifying, obviously, for educational purposes.)

“See over there—the Statue of Liberty? That was a gift to America from France. Okay, it’s a bit kitsch, but it’s the thought that counts.”

The kids don’t give a damn, even though they’re big fans of “French fries” and “French toast.” Right now, I’m more interested in “French kissing” and “French letters.” And The French Connection, with the famous car chase under the L.

Through the Windows on the World, the city stretches out like a huge checkerboard, all the right angles, the perpendicular cubes, the adjoining squares, the intersecting rectangles, the parallel lines, the network of ridges, a whole artificial geometry in gray, black, and white, the avenues taking off like flight paths, the cross streets which look as though they’ve been drawn on with marker, tunnels like red-brick gopher holes; from here, the smear of wet asphalt behind the cleaning trucks looks like the slime left by an aluminum slug on a piece of plywood.

8:34

I often go and stand before the marble plaque at 56 Rue Jacob. All American tourists should make a pilgrimage to 56 Rue Jacob, instead of having their photo taken in front of the tunnel at Pont de I’Alma in memory of Diana and Dodi. It was here, on September 3, 1783, at the Hôtel d’York that the Treaty of Paris was signed by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, putting an end to the War of Independence with the British. My mother lives nearby; a little farther up, hidden behind a tree, are the publishers Le Seuil. People cross the road in front of this old building without realizing that it was here, a stone’s throw from the Café de Flore, that the United States of America was born. Perhaps they prefer to forget.

Le Ciel de Paris at 8:34 AM. The luxury of skyscrapers is that they allow human beings to rise above themselves. Every skyscraper is a utopia. The age-old fantasy of man has been to build his own mountains. In building towers into the clouds, man is proving to himself that he is above nature. And that’s exactly how you feel at the top of one of these rockets of concrete and aluminum, glass, and steel: everything I can see belongs to me, no more traffic jams, gutters, sidewalks, I am man above the world. It is not the thrill of power, but of pride. There is nothing arrogant about it. Simply the joy of knowing that one can raise oneself higher than the tallest tree and:

You vapors, I think I have risen with you, moved away to distant continents, and fallen down there, for reasons,

I think I have blown with you you winds;

You waters I have finger’d every shore with you,

I have run through what any river or strait of the globe has run through,

I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas and on the high embedded rocks, to cry thence: Salut au monde!

What cities the light or warmth penetrates I penetrate those cities myself.

All islands to which birds wing their way I wing my way myself.

Toward you all, in America’s name,

I raise high the perpendicular hand, I make the signal,

To remain after me in sight forever,

For all the haunts and homes of men.

The title of Whitman’s poem is “Salut au Monde!”. In the nineteenth century, American poets spoke French. I am writing this book because I’m sick of bigoted anti-Americanism. My favorite French philosopher is Patrick Juvet: “I Love America.” Since war has been declared between France and the United States, you have to be careful when choosing sides if you don’t want to wind up being fleeced later.

My favorite writers are American: Walt Whitman and therefore, but in his own right, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Fante, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, Charles Bukowski, Lester Bangs, Philip K. Dick, William T. Vollmann, Hunter S. Thompson, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Philip Roth, Hubert Selby Jr., Jerome Charyn (who lives in Montparnasse), Jay McInerney (whom I met in Paris).

My favorite musicians are American: Frank Sinatra, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, Burt Bacharach, James Brown, Chet Baker, Brian Wilson, Johnny Cash, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Randy Newman, Michael Stipe, Billy Corgan, Kurt Cobain.

My favorite film directors are American: Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Blake Edwards, Stanley Kubrick, John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Russ Meyer, Sam Raimi, Paul Thomas Anderson, Larry Clark, David Fincher, M. Night Shyamalan.

American culture dominates the planet not for economic reasons, but because of its quality. It’s too easy to ascribe its influence to political machination, to compare Disney to Hitler or Spielberg to Satan. American art is constantly renewing itself, because it is profoundly rooted in real life. American artists are constantly searching for something new, but something new which speaks to us of ourselves. They know how to reconcile imagination and accessibility, originality with the desire to seduce. Molière was in it for the money, Mozart wanted to be famous: there’s nothing shameful about that. American artists churn out fewer theories than their European counterparts, because they haven’t got time, they’re too busy with the practice. They seize the world, grapple with it and, in describing it, they transform it. American authors think of themselves as realists when in fact they’re all Marxists! They’re hypercritical of their own country. No democracy in the world is as contested by its own literature. American independent and underground cinema is the most subversive in the world. When they dream, American artists take the rest of the world with them, because they are more courageous, more hardworking and because they dare to mock their own country. Many people believe that European artists have a superiority complex when it comes to their American counterparts, but they’re mistaken: they have an inferiority complex. Anti-Americanism is in large part jealousy and unrequited love. Deep down, the rest of the world admires American art and resents the United States for not returning the favor. A compelling example? Bernard Pivot’s reaction to James Lipton (presenter of the program The Actor’s Studio) on the last Bouillon de Culture. The host of the finest literary program in the history of French television seemed completely intimidated by Lipton, a pompous, toadying hack who chairs sycophantic discussions with Hollywood actors on some minor-league cable channel. Pivot, who created Apostrophes, a man who has interviewed the finest writers of his generation, couldn’t get over the fact that he was quoted in the States by a sycophantic creep.

What bothers us is not American imperialism, but American chauvinism, its cultural isolation, its complete lack of any curiosity about foreign work (except in New York and San Francisco). France has the same relationship with the United States nowadays as the provinces do with Paris: a combination of admiration and contempt, a longing to be part of it and a pride at resisting. We want to know everything about them so that we can shrug our shoulders with a condescending air. We want to know the latest trends, the places to be seen, all the New York gossip so that we can emphasize how rooted we are in the profound reality of our own country. Americans seem to have made the opposite journey to that of Europe: their inferiority complex (being a nouveau riche, adolescent country whose history and culture have, for the most part, been imported) has developed into a superiority complex (lessons in expertise and efficiency, cultural xenophobia, corporate contempt, and advertising overkill).

As for the cultural exception to American cultural hegemony that is France, contrary to what a recently dismissed CEO had to say, it is not dead: it consists in churning out exceptionally tedious movies, exceptionally slapdash books and, all in all, works of art which are exceptionally pedantic and self-satisfied. It goes without saying that I include my own work in this sorry assessment.

8:35

The lobby in Windows on the World is beige. Everything important in America is beige. The walls are comforting, the carpet is thick, eggshell with a geometric pattern. Your loafers sink into the deep wool pile. The ground seems soft; that should have set us thinking.

“Keep it down!”

Half past eight and already the kids are hyper. How old are we when we start to wake up exhausted? I can’t stop yawning while they’re running around all over the place, zigzagging between the tables, almost knocking over an old lady with lilac hair.

“Stop it, guys!”

I try glaring at them, but still they don’t behave. I have no control over my sons; even when I get angry, they think I’m just kidding. They’re right: I am kidding. I don’t really believe it. Like all parents of my generation, I’m incapable of being strict. Our kids are badly brought up because they’re not brought up at all. At least, not by us, they’re brought up by cartoon channels. Thank you, Disney Channel, the world’s babysitter! Our kids are spoiled rotten, because we’re spoiled rotten. Jerry and David wind me up, but they have something over their mother; at least I still love them. That’s why I’m letting them cut class this week. They’re completely ecstatic about skipping school! I slump into my rust-colored chair and look round at the incredible view. “Unbelievable,” the brochure said: for once the advertising doesn’t lie. I’m blinded by the sunlight on the Atlantic. The skyscrapers carve out the blue like a cardboard stage set. In America, life is like a movie, since all movies are shot on location. All Americans are actors and their houses, their cars, and their desires all seem artificial. Truth is reinvented every morning in America. It’s a country that has decided to look like something on celluloid.

“Sir…”

The waitress is none too pleased at having to play cop. She brings back Jerry and David, who’ve just stolen a doughnut from a pair of stockbrokers and are using it as a Frisbee. I should slap them, but I can’t help smiling. I get up to apologize to the doughnut’s owners. They both work for Cantor Fitzgerald: a blonde who is sexy despite her Ralph Lauren suit (do girls really dress like that anymore?) and a stocky dark-haired man who seems cool in his Kenneth Cole suit. You don’t need to be a P.I. to work out they’re lovers. Would you take your wife to breakfast at the top of the World Trade Center? No…You leave your old lady at home and invite a colleague from the office for an early-morning tryst (the yuppie version of an afternoon tryst). I eavesdrop, I love listening at keyholes, especially when there aren’t any.

“I’m pretty bullish about the NASDAQ at the moment…” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“Merril’s been upgrading the banking sector just on spec,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“Leave your wife,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“So we can be a normal couple?” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“We’d never be a normal couple,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“You don’t hear me asking you to leave your husband,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“I would if you asked me to,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“What we’ve got is special because it’s impossible,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“I’m sick of only getting to see you in the morning or the afternoon,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“I’m worse at night,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“Jeffrey Skilling invited me to L.A. in his private jet this weekend,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“Yeah? And how are you going to get that one past your husband?” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“None of your business,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“If you do that, you’ll never see me again,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“You’re jealous of Mike but you don’t care about my husband?” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“You haven’t fucked your husband for two years,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“Leave your wife,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“You really feel bullish about the NASDAQ?” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

8:36

“The Windows of the World” is the title of a song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David released by Dionne Warwick in 1967. The lyrics? They were written in protest at the Vietnam War.

The windows of the world are covered with rain.

Where is the sunshine we once knew?

Ev’rybody knows when little children play

They need a sunny day to grow straight and tall.

Let the sun shine through.

The windows of the world are covered with rain.

When will those black skies turn to blue?

Ev’rybody knows when boys turn to men

They start to wonder when their country will call.

Let the sun shine through.

I wonder whether the owner of Windows on the World was familiar with the song.

8:37

The kids are bored now and it’s my fault, bringing them to places for oldsters. But they were the ones who insisted! I thought the view would keep them occupied, but that’s done and dusted pretty quickly. They’re like their dad: they get bored with everything pretty quickly. A generation of frantic channel-hopping, schizophrenic existentialism. What will they do when they find out they can’t have everything, be everything? I feel sorry for them, because it’s something I never got over myself.

I always feel weird when I see my kids. I’d like to be able to say “I love you,” but it’s too late. When they were three, I would tell them I loved them until they fell asleep. In the morning I’d wake them by tickling their feet. Their feet were always cold, always sticking out from under the duvet. But they’re too macho now, they’d tell me to get lost. And I hardly ever look after them, don’t get to see them enough, I’m not part of their routine anymore. Instead of saying “I love you,” this is what I should say:

“There are worse things in life than having an absent father: having a present father. Someday you’ll thank me for not smothering you. You’ll realize I was helping you find your wings, pampering you from afar.”

But this time, it’s too soon. They will understand when they’re my age: forty-three. It’s strange, two brothers who are inseparable but always fighting. There’s no need to pity us this morning. The Rice Krispies keep them occupied for a bit: Snap, Crackle, Pop. We talk about this stolen vacation when they should be back at school. David wants to go to Universal Studios again. He spent the whole year showing off in his “I survived Jurassic Park” T-shirt. He didn’t even want to put it in the wash. Is there anything more arrogant than a seven-year-old? Later, kids learn self-discipline, there’s less showing off. Take Jerry for example, two years older and already he’s a man, he has self-control, he knows how to compromise. He thinks he’s all that, too, in his Eminem sweatshirt, but at least he makes less of deal of it: he’s the big brother. David’s always sick with something, I hate hearing him coughing all the time, it winds me up, and I can’t work out if it’s the sound of the coughing that winds me up, or whether it’s anxiety, some sort of paternal love. Deep down, what annoys me is never being sure that I’m good, but being absolutely certain that I’m selfish.

A Brazilian businessman lights a cigar. You have to be mad to smoke at this time of the morning. I beckon the maître d’, who rushes over to him since, like every other public space in the city, Windows is non-smoking. The guy pretends this is the first he’s heard of it, pretends to be shocked, demands to be shown the smoking section. The maître d’ explains that he’ll have to go down to the street! Rather than stub out his cigar, the smoker gets up and does just that, sprinting toward the elevator; no doubt a matter of principle.

8:38

…thereby proving that a cigar can save your life. They should put a new health warning on cigarette packs: “Smoking can cause you to leave buildings before they blow up.”

I would like to be able to change things, to scream at Carthew to get the fuck out of there, fast, GET OUT, TAKE THE KIDS AND MAKE A RUN FOR IT, TELL THE OTHERS, QUICK, GET A FUCKING MOVE ON, THE WHOLE PLACE IS GOING TO BLOW! GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE FUCKING BUILDING!!

Powerlessness, a writer’s vanity. A useless book, like all books. The writer is like the cavalry, always arriving too late. The Maine-Montparnasse tower is wider on the Rue du Départ side: if you wanted to fly a plane into it, you should aim for that side. I’m beginning to fall in love with this building that everyone loathes. I love it at night as much as I loathe it in daylight. Darkness is good for its complexion. In daylight, it is grayish, sad, hulking; only the night makes it brilliant, electric, with the little lights at each corner like a lighthouse in Paris. At night, the tower makes me think of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey: the tall, black rectangular slab which is supposed to symbolize eternity. Last night, I took my fiancee to the nightclub in the basement of the tower. The club used to be call Inferno, but they’ve just renamed it Red Light. There was a twenty-fifth anniversary party for VSD magazine: the place was heaving, queues for the coat check, sponsors, DJs, a couple of VIPs, nothing special. I hugged my darling to me and kissed her at the French equivalent of Ground Zero. I’d quite happily have had her in the restroom, but she refused. “Sorry, tonight my pussy is observing Ramadan!”

I’d like to apologize to the Muslim authorities in advance for the preceding joke. I know perfectly well that it is permitted to eat at night during Ramadan. Be magnanimous. There’s no need for a fatwa: I’m famous enough already. The year 2002 was a pretty complicated one for me. I had a great time and made a complete fool of myself. Let’s not add to that in 2003, if you don’t mind. Apparently, the Tour Montparnasse is in no danger of an attack by Islamic fundamentalists because it houses the French offices of al-Jazeera. I focus on this lightning rod as I dip my toast into my coffee.

The Tour Montparnasse is 656 feet high. To get an idea of the size of the World Trade Center, stack one Tour Montparnasse on top of another and it would still be smaller than the World Trade Center. Every morning, the elevator takes thirty-five seconds to take me to Le Ciel de Paris (fifty-sixth floor); I’ve timed it. In the elevator my feet feel heavy and my ears pop. The rapid elevator creates the same sensation as a plane in an air pocket—without the safety belt. Le Ciel de Paris is all that remains of the Windows on the World: an idea. The preposterous and pretentious idea of a restaurant at the top of a tower which dominates the skyline. Here, the decor is black with a ceiling mimicking a starry sky. There aren’t many people this morning because the weather is miserable. People cancel their reservations when visibility is poor. Le Ciel de Paris is in a sea of fog. You can see nothing but white smoke from the windows. Pressing my nose up against the glass, I can make out the adjoining streets. When I was little, people often told me off for having my head in the clouds; nothing’s changed. The Parker Knoll chairs probably date from the seventies; they’ll be back in fashion soon, the black-and-tan carpet looks like something out of a no-budget indie movie. There is a continual background noise: the air conditioning purrs like a nuclear reactor. I press my face to the glass: a layer of mist shrouds the Rue de Rennes. I’m sitting in a booth padded with brown leather like the ones in the Drugstore Publicis in Saint-Germain (a place which, like Windows on the World, has also disappeared), I’ve ordered freshly squeezed orange juice and some “viennoiseries” (three shriveled mini chocolate croissants), the waitress wears an orange uniform (she’ll come back into fashion too). She brings me the croissants wrapped in a beige napkin. Maybe the al-Qaeda terrorists are simply sick to death of beige, orange uniforms and the businesslike smile of the waitresses.

I feel like shit, sitting here all alone in Le Ciel de Paris at 8:38 AM, a long way above the motorists honking their horns in front of the cinemas in Montparnasse, high above the employees of the Banque National de Paris, 656 feet more stratospheric than ordinary mortals. My life is a disaster, but nobody notices, because I’m too polite—I smile constantly. I smile because I think that if you hide your suffering, it disappears. And it’s true, in a sense: it is invisible, and therefore it does not exist, since we live in a world that worships what is visible, demonstrable, material. My suffering is not material; it is hidden. I am my own revisionist.

8:39

As I finish my cappuccino, I look at the other customers, who do not look at me. A lot of sporty redheads. There’s a table of Japanese tourists taking photos of each other. There’s the adulterous stockbrokers. There are American tourists like me, nouveau riche rednecks and proud of it, WASPs wearing suspenders, yuppies with brilliant-white teeth. Boys in striped shirts. Women with ultra blow-dried hair, their pretty hands sporting long manicured nails. Most of them look like Britney Spears twenty years from now. There are Arabs, Englishmen, Pakistanis, Brazilians, Italians, Vietnamese, Mexicans, all of them fat. What the customers of Windows on the World have in common is their paunches. I wonder whether I wouldn’t have been better off taking the kids to the Rainbow Room, on the sixty-fifth floor of the NBC building. The Rainbow Room: twenty-four windows in the heart of the city. The architects of the Rockefeller Center wanted to call it the Stratosphere. But my kids wouldn’t have appreciated the thirties mirrors, the reflections of Manhattan, the legacy of jazz big bands, the whiff of the roaring twenties. All Jerry and David want is to stuff themselves with sausage and muffins in the highest restaurant in New York. Luckily for my wallet, the Toys Us in the lobby was closed otherwise they’d have cleaned the place out. My kids are tyrants and I have to follow their orders to the letter. As I bolt my breakfast, I look down: from this height it’s impossible to make out people. The only moving things in Lower Manhattan are the cars coming and going across the Brooklyn Bridge, tourist helicopters over the East River, and the boats passing each other under the suspension bridges. I’d copied a quote from Kafka into the guidebook: “The bridge connecting New York with Brooklyn hung delicately over the East River, and if one half-shut one’s eyes it seemed to tremble. It appeared to be quite bare of traffic, and beneath it stretched a smooth empty tongue of water.” Amazing how he can so accurately describe something he never saw. Directly in front of me, I can see the Chase Manhattan building, to the left Manhattan Bridge, and to the right, at the end of Fulton Street, South Street Seaport, but I would be incapable of describing them. And I realize that I love this crazy country of mine, the fucked-up times we live in, my annoying kids. A surge of affection overwhelms me—probably last night’s vodka catching up with me. Candace took me to Pravda, and we kind of overdid it on the cherry vodka. Candace did a photo shoot for Victoria’s Secret, I mention it just to give you an idea of how hot she is. But things aren’t going too well between us: she wants us to get married, have a baby, live together, and these are precisely the three mistakes that I want to avoid making again. To punish me for wanting to stay single, she doesn’t come anymore when we fuck. They say some women say no when they mean yes, Candace is the opposite: when she says yes, she means no.

“Why are you so bullish about the NASDAQ?” asks the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“You can’t lose now the Internet bubble’s burst,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren, “pretty much anything’s gonna run up three sticks, the stocks have completely crunched.”

“Yeah, but look at the cash flows, it’s all off-balance-sheet transactions,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “I’d be worried about getting jigged out.”

“I bought some stock in Enron,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “The company’s a scalper’s dream. Have you seen their earnings?”

“I’m with you there, almost worth holding a position on. WorldCom, too. Their EBITDA is sweet as a million-dollar bill,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “Otherwise I don’t fancy being a bottom fisher in that market.”

“Yeah, well, one way or the other, 2001 is gonna be shit, all the bonuses are going to be slashed,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “You can kiss your villa in Hawaii goodbye.”

“I think it’s pretty simple: fuck the Porsche, I’m holding liquid,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole. “But 2002 has got to be better, we just have to wait and see what Greenspan does on rates.”

“I love you,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“God, I want to launch a hostile takeover bid on you,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“Leave your fucking wife,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“Okay, okay, I promise I’ll dump her tonight, soon as I get in from the gym,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

And they launch into a pretty hot kiss, all tongues and spit like a good California porn movie or a perfume ad.

8:40

The guidebooks all gave Windows on the World glowing reviews. Here at the top of the Tour Montparnasse on a September morning in 2002, I leaf through them. A year after the tragedy, they take on a strange resonance. For example, the Michelin Green Guide 2000 writes:

Windows on the World, One World Trade Center (107th floor). This elegant restaurant bar boasts the most stunning panoramic views of New York. Since the infamous bombing attempt in 1993, considerable renovation has allowed it to reinvent itself with a sumptuous new interior.

The World Trade Center was a target; something even the guidebooks realized. It was no secret. On February 26, 1993, at 12:18 PM, a bomb in a pickup truck in the parking lot exploded. The basement of the World Trade Center collapsed. A deep crater, six dead and a thousand injured. The towers were refurbished and reopened within a month.

Frommer’s Guide 2000 is more effusive:

Windows on the World (West St between Liberty and Vesey). Main $25-35; Sunset menu (before 6 PM) $35; Brunch $32.50. Cards: VISA. Subway: C, E, World Trade Center. Valet parking on West Street, $18. The interiors are sober but pleasing. In any case, they are of little importance as, just outside the “Windows” all of New York is unfurled! The restaurant offers unassailable views of the city. And with Michael Lomonaco, former chef at Club 21, now at the helm, the Modern American cuisine is second to none. The cellar, too, is full to bursting. The sommelier is happy to point you in the right direction, whether you are a connoisseur or simply an amateur looking to perfectly complement your Char-grilled cutlets or Homard de Maine, two of Lomonaco’s specialties.

In a magazine article, I read that two inseparable brothers worked side by side cleaning shellfish in the kitchens. Two Muslims.

What we know now leads us to look for portents everywhere; it’s a foolish exercise which gives a restaurant review written in 2000 a prophetic significance. If we pick apart the second review word by word, the text reads like something out of Nostradamus. “Just outside the ‘Windows’“? An oncoming plane. “Unassailable views”? On the contrary, they were all too assailable. “The cellar, too, is full to bursting”? Absolutely: it will soon have 600,000 tons of rubble piled on top of it. “The sommelier is happy to point you in the right direction”? Like an air-traffic controller. “Char-grilled cutlets”? Soon to be charred at 1,500 degrees. “Homard de Maine,” you mean Omar the Mullah? I know, it’s not funny, you don’t joke about death. I’m sorry, it’s a form of self-defense: I write these jokes at the top of a tower in Paris, flicking through pages and pages of reviews for a sister site that no longer exists. It’s impossible not to see portents everywhere, coded messages from the past. The past is now the only place where you can find Windows on the World. This unique restaurant where you could enjoy haute cuisine at the top of the world; where you had to reserve a table to take your mistress to admire the view so you could leer into her low-cut blouse as she leaned down to check she had condoms in her handbag, this magnificent place, unique, unscathed, this place is called the past.

The Hachette Guide 2000 commented, oblivious to the cruel irony that the remark would one day have:

The restaurant operates as a sort of private club at lunchtime, but for a small consideration, will admit you even if you are not a member.

Sic.

The paradox of the Twin Towers is that it was an ultramodern complex in the oldest neighborhood in New York at the southernmost tip of Manhattan island: New Amsterdam. Now, the New York landscape has once more become as it was when Holden Caulfield ran away. The destruction of the Twin Towers takes the city back to 1965, the year in which I was born. It’s strange to realize that I am exactly as old as the World Trade Center. This is the Manhattan in which Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which takes place in 1949. Do you know where the title of The Catcher in the Rye comes from?

It comes from a Robert Burns poem: “Gin a body meet a body coming thro’ the rye.” Holden Caulfield (the narrator) mishears the poem: he believes it runs “if a body catch a body coming through the rye”. He decides he is “the catcher in the rye.” This is what he would most like to do in life. On page 179, he explains his vocation to his little sister, Phoebe. He imagines himself running through the fields of rye trying to save thousands of kids. This would be his ideal profession. Darting around the field of rye, catching all the children running along the clifftop, clusters of innocent hearts tumbling into the void. Their carefree laughter whipped away on the breeze. Running through the rye in the sunshine. “Ev’rybody knows when little children play / They need a sunny day to grow straight and tall” (“The Windows of the World”). The most perfect of all possible destinies: catching them before they fall. I too would like to be the catcher.

The Catcher in the Windows.

8:41

I pretend to sneer at the people at the nearby tables. It’s one of my favorite games when the kids are getting on my nerves. Look at this bunch of nonentities: they’re forgetting they’re descended from Dutch, Irish, German, Italian, French, English, and Spanish settlers who came across the Atlantic three or four centuries ago. Well Yee Ha! I hit the big time! I’ve got a house on Long Island, two rosy-cheeked kids who say “shoot” instead of “shit”! I’m not some hick off the boat anymore. Soft expensive sheets, soft expensive TP, soft expensive flower-print curtains, and enough domestic appliances to make my wife with her lacquered hair drool. The American dream: American Beauty. Sometimes I think the movie’s hero, Lester Burnham, is me. The cynical, phlegmatic guy bored shitless with his perfect family is “so me” a couple of years ago. Carthew Yorston walked out on his life from one day to the next. Actually, I arranged to have myself kicked out of my own house: I’m not sure if it was cowardice or respect for Mary. In the film, his wife wants to kill him but in the end he’s murdered by his homophobic ex-army neighbor. Let’s just say that for the moment, at least, I’m doing better than Lester. But, Jesus, I jerked off so much in the shower. And then there’s that brilliant phrase in the voice-over: “In a year, I’ll be dead, but in a way, I am dead already.” We have a lot in common, Lester Burnham and me.

Before long, I hope, my sons will be introducing me to their girlfriends. Uh-oh, I’m not too sure I’ll be able to resist hitting on them like some dirty old man. I wonder what Jerry and David Yorston will do when they grow up. Will they be successful artists, rock stars, Hollywood actors, TV presenters? Maybe industrialists, bankers, ruthless businessmen? As a father, I hope they choose the second option, but as an American, I can’t help but fantasize about the first. And, in reality, they’re most likely to end up realtors like their father. Forty years from now when I’m incontinent and bedridden in Fort Lauderdale they’ll be changing my diapers. I’ll eat dry crackers and fritter away their inheritance in some Florida gulag! It’ll be great: I’ll have my groceries delivered, order food online and some hooker who looks like Farrah Fawcett in Charlie’s Angels will suck my cock and smile. I love this country. Oh, yes, I forgot: I’ll play golf, if I can still walk. Jerry and David will caddy for me.

Looking down through the telescope I can see a white cube: the piazza where minuscule restaurant employees are putting chairs out on the terraces for people to lunch in the midday sunshine. I assume ice-cream sellers are putting out their blackboards, and hot-dog and pretzel vendors are setting up their carts round the WTC Plaza. That tiny cube? A stage for open-air rock concerts. That metal ball? A bronze globe sculpted by Fritz Koenig. There’s a bunch of hideous contemporary sculptures: mountains of tangled, stacked, warped metal girders. I have no idea what the artists were trying to say. It’s Indian summer; I hum “Autumn in New York.”

Autumn in New York

Why does it seem so invitiiiing?

Glittering crowwwds and shimmering clouuuds

In canyons of steeeel

Autuuuum in Neeeew Yorrk

Is often mingled wiiith pain

Dreaaamers with empty haaands

May sigh for exoootic lands…

Oscar Peterson on piano; Louis Armstrong on trumpet; vocals by Ella Fitzgerald.

I really must make an appointment to have a vasectomy. In the beginning, with Candace, everything was perfect. I met her on the Internet (on www.match.com). These days Internet dates are dime a dozen. Match.com has eight million members worldwide. If you’re visiting a foreign city, you set up a couple of dates before you arrive, it’s as easy as booking a hotel room. After dinner on our first date, I invited her up to my room for a drink so we could chat some more, and normally, that’s where she should have turned me down, because that’s the rule: never fuck on a first date. You know what she did? She looked me right in the eye and said: “If I’m coming up, it won’t be to chat.” Wow. Together, we went too far too fast: X-rated movies, a few sex toys. It was all too much. Ever since, the sex has been good, but a bit healthier. Like a merger between two lonely egomaniacs, we use each other’s bodies to get off and sometimes I think both of us are forcing ourselves. Hmm. She’s probably cheating on me. These days couples cheat on each other earlier and earlier.

8:42

I’ve got a problem: I don’t remember my childhood.

The only thing I remember is that being middle class doesn’t buy you happiness.

Darkness; everything is dark. My alarm clock goes off, it’s eight o’clock, I’m late, I’m thirteen years old, I slip on my brown Kickers, pick up my huge army surplus bag full of Stypens, correction pens, textbooks as heavy as they are fucking boring, Mom is already up heating some milk, my brother and I slurp it noisily, bitching because there’s skin on the milk, before taking the elevator down into this dark winter morning in 1978. The Lycée Louis-le-Grand is miles away. It’s on the Rue Coëtlogon, 75006 Paris. I’m dying of cold and boredom. I stuff my hands in my ugly loden coat. I wrap myself up in my itchy yellow scarf. I know it’s going to rain and I’ve missed the 84. What I don’t know is that this whole thing is absurd, that none of this will ever come in useful. Neither do I know that this dismal dawn is the only morning in my whole childhood that I will later remember. I don’t even know why I’m sad—maybe because I haven’t got the balls to cut math class. Charles decides to wait for the bus and I decide to walk to school, past the Jardin du Luxembourg, along the Rue de Vaugirard where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived from April to August 1928 (at the corner of the Rue Bonaparte), but I didn’t know that then. I still live nearby; from my balcony I can see kids with the school-bags rushing to school, spewing plumes of cold breath: tiny hunchbacked dragons running along the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks. They watch their feet, careful not to step on the gaps between the paving stones like they’re walking through a minefield. Bleak is the adjective that best sums up my life back then. BLEAK as an icy morning. At that moment, I’m convinced nothing interesting will ever happen to me. I’m ugly, skinny, I feel completely alone and the sky buckets down on me. I stand, soaked to the skin, in front of the Senate which is as gray as my shitty school: everything about school fucks me off: the walls, the teachers, the pupils. I hold my breath; things are awful, everything’s awful, why is everything so awful? Because I’m ordinary, because I’m thirteen, because I’ve got a chin like a gumboot, because I’m scrawny. If I’m going to be this scrawny I might as well be dead. A bus comes and I hesitate, I really hesitate, I almost threw myself under the bus that day. It’s the 84 overtaking me with Charles inside. The big wheels splatter the bottoms of my stupid pleated pants (beige corduroy with turnups that are way too big). I walk toward normality. I walk, wheezing, across the black ice. No girl will ever love me, and I can see their point, I don’t blame you, mesdemoiselles, I can see your point: even I don’t love me. I’m late: Madame Minois, my math teacher, will roll her eyes to heaven and spit. The cretins in my class will heave a sigh just to make themselves look good. Rain will stream down the window-panes of a classroom which reeks of despair (despair, I now know, smells of chalk dust). Why am I complaining when there’s nothing wrong with me? I haven’t been raped, beaten, abandoned, drugged. Just divorced parents who are excessively kind to me like every kid in my class. I’m traumatized by my lack of trauma. That morning, I choose to live. I walk through the school gates like walking into a lion’s den. The building has a black mouth, its windows are yellow eyes. It swallows me in order to feed on me. I’m completely submissive. I agree to become what they make of me. I come face to face with my adolescent spinelessness.

From the top of the Tour Montparnasse I can, if I try, make out the School of my Wasted Youth. I still live in this neighborhood where I suffered so much. I do not leave this place which made me who I am. I never rebelled. I never even moved house. From my house, to get to my job at Flammarion, I walk down the same Rue de Vaugirard as the little boy whose ears and hands were frozen. I spew the same plumes of cold breath. I still do not walk on the cracks. I never escaped that morning.

8:43

My childhood takes place in the verdant paradise of a fashionable suburb of Austin, Texas. A house that looks just like the neighbors’, a garden where we drink from the fountain, an open-top Chevy driving toward the desert. Through the window, a sofa and the faces of two children reflected in a TV, and at this time of the day it’s the same all over town, all over the country. My parents try their best to live life like a Technicolor movie: they hold cocktail parties at which the mothers compare notes on interior decoration. Every year, we consume an average of four tons of crude oil. High school? Nothing but spotty white kids in baseball caps listening to Grateful Dead and squashing beer cans against their foreheads. Nothing too serious. Sunshine, coffee bars, football tryouts, cheerleaders with big tits who say “I mean” and “like” in every sentence. Everything about my adolescence is squeaky-clean: lap-dancing bars don’t exist yet and motels are R-rated. I eat lunch on the grass, play tennis, read comics in the hammock. Ice cubes go “clink-clink” in my father’s glass of Scotch. Every week there are a couple of executions in my state. My childhood unfolds on a lawn. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not talking Little House on the Prairie, more Little Bungalow in the Suburbs. I wear braces on my teeth, take my wooden Dunlop tennis racket and play air guitar in front of the mirror with the radio full blast. I spend my vacations at summer camp, I go river rafting in dinghies, hone my serve, win at water polo, discover masturbation thanks to Hustler. All the Lolitas are in love with Cat Stevens but since he’s not around they lose their cherries to the tennis coach. My greatest trauma is the film King Kong (the 1933 version): my folks had gone out and my sister and I secretly watched it in their bedroom despite our babysitter’s injunction. The black-and-white image of this enormous gorilla scaling the Empire State Building, snatching military planes out of the sky is my worst childhood memory. They did a remake in color in the seventies which uses the World Trade Center. Any minute now I expect to see a huge gorilla scaling the towers—believe it or not I’ve got goose bumps right now, I can’t stop thinking about it.

You can thumb through my life in high school yearbooks. I thought it was happy at the time but thinking back on it, it depresses me. Maybe because I’m scared that it’s over, scared because I left my family to make a killing in real estate. I became successful the day I realized a very simple thing: you don’t make money on big properties, you make it on little ones (because you sell more of them). Middle-class families read the same magazines as rich ones: everyone wants that apartment in Wallpaper, or a loft just like Lenny Kravitz’s! So I did a deal with a credit union who agreed to lend me a couple of million dollars over thirty years, then I found a bunch of old cattle warehouses in an old cowboy section of Austin and transformed them into artists’ studios for idiots. My genius was my ability to convince couples who came to me that their loft was unique when in fact I was shifting thirty a year. That’s how I climbed the greasy pole at the agency, stole the job of the guy who hired me, then set up my own company, “Austin Maxi Real Estate.” Three point five million, soon be four. Hardly Donald Trump but it’s enough to take the long view. Like my dad used to say: “The first million is the hardest, after that the rest just follow!” Jerry and David are financially comfortable though they don’t realize that yet because I always play the part of an aristocrat on his uppers in front of Mary so she doesn’t force me to quadruple the alimony. Strangely, money is the reason I left her: I couldn’t keep going home when I had all that dough burning a hole in my pocket. What was the point of earning all that money if I was going to be stuck with the same woman every night? I wanted to be the antithesis of George Babbitt, that dumb schmuck incapable of escaping his family and his town…

“Gimme the camera,” says David.

“No, it’s mine,” says Jerry.

“You don’t know how to take photos,” says David.

“You don’t either,” says Jerry.

“You didn’t even set the flash,” says David.

“You don’t have to when it’s bright,” says Jerry.

“An’ you didn’t set the speed,” says David.

“Who cares, it’s only a disposable,” says Jerry.

“Take one of the Statue of Liberty,” says David.

“Already took one,” says Jerry.

“Last time they were all blurry,” says David.

“Shut up,” says Jerry.

“Gimp,” says David.

“Gimp yourself,” says Jerry.

“Jerry’s a gimp, Jerry’s a gimp, Jerry’s a gimp,” says David.

“Takes one to know one,” says Jerry.

“C’mon,” David says, “gimme the camera.”

8:44

If they could carefully study the photos they’re taking (photos that will never be developed), behind the Empire State Building, Jerry and David would notice a white dot moving on the horizon. Like a dazzling white gull against the blue skyline. But birds don’t fly this high, nor this fast. Sunlight ricochets off the silver shape like when one of the FBI guys in Mission Impossible flashes a mirror in his partner’s eyes to silently signal to him.

In Le Ciel de Paris, everything is designed to constantly remind you that you are higher that the normal. Even in the restrooms, the walls with the urinals depict the skyline of the City of Light, so that male customers can piss all over it.

I should come back and have dinner here: the menu is pretty tempting. “Autumn in Le Ciel de Paris as interpreted by Jean-François Oyon and his team”: among the appetizers is Seared foie gras on pain d’épices with a cream of ceps (&euro;25.50); fish dishes include Fillet of grey mullet à la plancha with a bouillabaisse reduction and eggplant remoulade (&euro;26.00); if you prefer meat, Jean-François Oyon suggests Pigeon roasted in honey and spices with caramelized cabbage (&euro;33.00). For dessert I’d be tempted to go for the Luxurious warm, chocolate “Guanaja” with hazelnut cream ice. I realize it’s hardly good for your health—Karl Lagerfeld would disapprove—but I prefer something luxurious to the Tonka and morello cherry surprise or even the Roasted figs with Bourbon vanilla butter.

Behind me, a terrible drama is unfolding: an American couple are demanding ham and eggs with mushrooms for their breakfast, but the waitress in her orange uniform says, “I’m sorry, nous ne servons que du continental breakfast.” A repast composed of toast, croissants or pains au chocolat, fruit juice and coffee, the continental breakfast is rather less substantial than the breakfast Americans are accustomed to ingesting in the mornings. Accordingly, they stand up, cursing loudly, and walk out of the restaurant. They can’t understand how such a touristy place can be incapable of serving a decent, ample breakfast. From a strictly commercial viewpoint, they’re not wrong. But what’s the point in traveling if it’s to eat the same things you eat at home? In fact, it’s a terrible misunderstanding—everyone is right. Le Ciel de Paris should give its customers a choice, offer as wide a selection at breakfast as they do at dinner. And Americans should stop trying to export their lifestyle to the entire planet. That said, that’s two people who would survive if an airplane did crash into the Tour Montparnasse at 8:46 this morning, as it did into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11,2001.

What is staggering is that a plane had already flown into a New York skyscraper. On a foggy night in 1945, an American B-52 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building between floors 78 and 79. Fourteen dead and a colossal inferno several hundred feet high. But the Empire State did not collapse because the building’s steel structure did not buckle as the World Trade Center did (steel loses its rigidity at 840°F and melts at 2,500°F, whereas the heat given off by the two Boeings is estimated to have been 3,600°F). In 2001, the 10,500 gallons of flaming jet fuel destroyed the metallic structure of the buildings, and the upper floors collapsed onto those beneath. In order to build the Twin Towers, Yamasaki had used a new technique: instead of using a maze of internal columns, he chose to rest the greater part of the weight on the external walls, which were composed of tightly spaced vertical steel pillars connected by horizontal girders which girdled the towers at each floor. This architecture allowed him to maximize the interior space (and thereby earn more money for the property developers). It was these pillars, covered with a thin coating of aluminum, which gave the two towers the banded appearance of two hi-fi speakers.

Conclusion: the Twin Towers were built to withstand the impact of a plane without fuel.

Welcome to the minute before. The point at which everything is still possible. They could decide to leave on the spur of the moment. But Carthew thinks they still have time, they should make the most of their New York jaunt; the kids seem happy. Customers are leaving: at any moment, customers come and go. Look, the old lady Jerry and David were pestering earlier—the one with the lilac hair—is getting up; she’s already paid the check (not forgetting to leave a five-dollar tip); slowly she makes her way to the elevator, the two badly behaved children have reminded her that she needs to buy a present for her grandson’s birthday; she says “Have a nice day” to the receptionist and presses the button marked “Mezzanine,” the button lights up, a bell goes “ding;” she decides she’ll stroll around the mall for a little. She thinks she remembers seeing a branch of Toys Us but can’t remember whether it was in the basement or the mezzanine, this is what she is thinking as the doors to the elevator close noiselessly. For the rest of her life, she will believe it was the Lord God who told her to leave at this precise moment; for the rest of her life she will wonder why He did so, why He spared her life, why He made her think of toys, why He chose her and not the two little boys.

8:45

A minute before, the state of affairs was recoverable. Then suddenly I got the jitters.

“Hey, what’s the difference between David Lynch and Merrill Lynch?” asks the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“Um…no, don’t know that one,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“There isn’t one: nobody has a clue what either of them are doing and both of them are losing money,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

They burst out laughing, then think better of it and revert to their professionalism.

“It’s more volatile but the volumes are down,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“Standard & Poor’s futures are scary,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“The margins are killing us all,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“I’m going long on the NASDAQ,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“The squiggly lines aren’t looking good,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“Sometimes you gotta know when to cut your arm off,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“We got whacked on the yen,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren.

“Well, my position on the Nikkei is covered,” says the guy in Kenneth Cole.

“Oh my God,” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “OH MY GOD!”

Her eyes grow wide, her bottom lip has fallen as far from her upper lip as it can, she’s brought her trembling hand up to her frozen mouth.

“What? What is it? WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?” demands the guy in Kenneth Cole, before turning round.

The weather had been so beautiful: through the telescope, Jerry could count the rivets on the fuselage. He turned to me, all excited.

‘Look, Dad! See the plane?”

…but already my hands had betrayed me. In a split second I’d contracted Parkinson’s. Other customers realized what was happening: an American Airlines jet, a fucking Boeing, was flying low through New York, heading straight for us.

“Shit! What the fuck is he doing? He’s far too low!”

I hate disaster movies: the good-natured blond guy with the square jaw, the pregnant woman whose waters break, the paranoid guy who freaks out, the coward who turns out to be a hero, the priest giving the last rites. There’s always some idiot who gets sick and the stewardess goes looking for a doctor:

“Is there a doctor on the plane?”

And some medical student puts his hand up, he feels really useful. “Don’t sweat it, guys, everything’s gonna be fine.”

This is what you think when there’s a Boeing heading straight for you. What a pain in the ass, starring in a turkey like that. You don’t think anything, you hang onto the armrests. You don’t believe your eyes. You hope what’s happening isn’t happening. You hope your body is lying to you. For once, you hope your senses are wrong, that your eyes are deceiving you. I’d like to tell you my first thought was for Jerry and David, but it wasn’t. I didn’t instinctively try to protect them. When I dived under the table, I wasn’t thinking of anyone except little old me.

8:46

We now know with reasonable certainty what happened at 8:46 AM. An American Airlines Boeing 767 with ninety-two people on board, eleven of them crew, flew into the north face of One World Trade Center, between floors 94 and 98, and 10,500 gallons of jet fuel immediately burst into flames in the offices of Marsh & McLennan Companies. It was flight AA11 (Boston-Los Angeles) which had taken off from Logan airport at 7.59 AM and was moving at 500 m.p.h. The force of such an impact is estimated as being equivalent to an explosion of 265 tons of dynamite (a twelve-second shock wave measuring 0.9 on the Richter scale). We also know that none of the 1,344 people trapped on the nineteen floors above survived. Obviously, this piece of information removes any element of suspense from this book. So much the better: this isn’t a thriller; it is simply an attempt—doomed, perhaps—to describe the indescribable.

“Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.”*

8:47

When a American Airlines Boeing 767 slams into a building below your feet, there are two immediate consequences. Firstly, the skyscraper becomes a metronome and I can assure you that when One World Trade Center starts to think it’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it feels pretty strange. This is what experts refer to as the shock wave; it makes you feel like you’re in a boat in a roaring storm or, to use a metaphor my kids would understand, like being inside a giant blender for three or four seconds. Glasses of juice shatter on the floor, lights come away from the walls and dangle from wires; wooden ceilings collapse and the sound of breaking crockery comes from the kitchens. In the bar, bottles roll and explode. Bouquets of sunflowers topple and vases shatter into a thousand pieces. Champagne buckets spill onto the carpet. Dessert trolleys skate down the aisles. Faces tremble as much as the walls.

Secondly, your ears burn as the fireball passes the window, then everything is swathed in thick smoke; it seeps from the floor, the walls, the elevator shafts, the air vents; tracking down an incredible number of openings designed to let in fresh air and now doing the reverse: the ventilation system becomes a fumigation system. Immediately, people start to cough and cover their mouths with napkins. This time, I remember the existence of Jerry and David: all three of us were huddled under the table. I doused napkins in the jug of orange juice before giving one to each of them.

“Breathe through the cloth. It’s a test: they do this kind of thing in New York—they call it a fire drill. There’s nothing to worry about, darlings, actually it’s pretty fun, isn’t it?”

“Dad, did the plane crash into the tower, Dad, WHASHAPPNINGDAAD?”

“No, of course not,” I smile. “Don’t worry, boys, it’s all special effects, but I wanted it to be a surprise: it’s a new attraction, the plane was a hologram—George Lucas did the special effects, they do a false alert here every morning. Really scared you though, huh?”

“But, Dad, the whole place is shaking, and the waitresses are scared and they’re screaming…”

“Don’t worry, they use hydraulics to make the restaurant shake, like they do in theme parks. And the waitresses are actors, they’re just plants put in among the paying customers, like in Pirates of the Caribbean! Remember Pirates of the Caribbean, Dave?”

“Sure, Dad. So what’s this ride called?”

“‘Tower Inferno’.”

“Right…Fuck, sure feels real…”

“Dave, we don’t say fuck, even in a towering inferno, okay?”

Jerry seemed less reassured than David by my Benigni-style playacting, but since it was the first thing I could think of, I decide I have to run with it, so that he wouldn’t immediately start crying. If Jerry started crying, I couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t cry too and then David was likely to get in on the act. But David never cries, and he certainly wasn’t going to start now.

“You have to admit the special effects are pretty mind-blowing: the smoke coming out of everywhere, and all the customers who’re paid to panic, it’s pretty well put together!”

Around us, people were getting to their feet, still staring at each other, petrified. Some, who’d dived under the table like we did, look up now, a little embarrassed that they weren’t hero material. Jerry’s pancakes were lying on the floor, covered with bits of porcelain. The pot of maple syrup dripped between the overturned chairs. Outside the Windows on the World, you couldn’t see a thing: a dense black curtain blocked the view. Night had fallen, New York had disappeared and the ground rumbled. I can tell you, everyone in the place had only one idea, neatly summed up by the head chef:

“We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

Now I think about it, I would like to have been in one of those brainless disaster-movie blockbusters. Because pretty much all of them have a happy ending.

8:48

Other possible names for the World Trade Center restaurant:

 Windows on the Planes

 Windows on the Crash

 Windows on the Smoke

 Broken Windows

Sorry for that bout of black humor: a momentary defense against the atrocity.

The New York Times collated a number of eyewitness accounts of Windows on the World at that moment. Two amateur videos show smoke seeping into the upper floors at incredible speed. Paradoxically, the restaurant is more smoky than the floors just above the point of impact because the smoke has taken some fifty feet to thicken. We have fragments of a call made by Rajesh Mirpuri to his boss, Peter Lee at Data Synapse. He says he can’t see more than fifteen feet. The situation is rapidly deteriorating. At Cantor Fitzgerald (on the 104th floor), fire blocks the elevators. Employees take refuge in the offices on the north face, fifty of them in a single conference room.

At that moment, the majority still believe this is an accident. There is considerable evidence to suggest that most of them were still alive until the building collapsed at 10:28 AM. They suffered for 102 minutes, the average running time of a Hollywood film.

Extract from Against the Grain by Huysmans:

It was the vast, foul bagnio of America transported to our Continent; it was, in a word, the limitless, unfathomable, incommensurable firmament of blackguardism of the financier and the self-made man, beaming down, like a despicable sun, on the idolatrous city that grovelled on its belly, hymning vile songs of praise before the impious tabernacle of Commerce.

“Well, crumble then, society! perish, old world!” cried Des Esseintes, indignant at the ignominy of the spectacle he had conjured up…

I knew it. The person really responsible for this attack wasn’t Osama bin Laden, but the incorrigible Des Esseintes. I thought that decadent dandy was behaving a little oddly. Having for so long found nihilism cool, spoiled children now root for serial killers. All those weird little boys who sniggeringly advocate hatred now have blood on their shirt fronts. No dry cleaner will ever get the blood spatters out of their designer vests. Dandyism is inhuman; the eccentrics, too cowardly to act, prefer to suicide others rather than themselves. They murder the ill-dressed. Des Esseintes, with his pale hands, murders children whose only crime is to be ordinary. His snobbish contempt is a flamethrower. How can anyone forgive the murder of the old woman in Florida on page 201 of my previous novel? We point the finger at those who are indirectly guilty, anonymous, impersonal pension funds, dummy organizations. But at the end of the day, those who scream, who plead, who bleed, are real. At the end of the world, satire becomes reality, metaphor becomes truth, even political cartoonists feel embarrassed…

8:49

Your first instinct is to grab your cellphone. But since it’s a first instinct, everyone else has had the same idea and the networks are jammed. As I anxiously press the green “redial” button, I try to convince the boys that this suffocating darkness is just a funfair ride.

“You’ll see: any minute now they’ll send in a fake rescue team, it’s gonna be wicked! That black cloud’s really well done, isn’t it?”

The stockbroker couple look at me pityingly.

“Jesus!” says the blonde in Ralph Lauren. “Let’s get the hell out of this sauna.”

The dark-haired guy gets up and runs for the elevators, dragging his lover by the hand. I fall in behind, a child on each arm. But the elevators are out of order. Behind her desk, the receptionist is sobbing.

“I’m not trained for this kind of thing…We’re supposed to evacuate via the stairs. Follow me…”

The majority of Windows on the World customers haven’t waited for her. They’re already crammed into the smoke-filled stairwell. They cough in single file. A black security guard throws up in a trash can. He’s already been down four floors.

“I’ve just been down there, it’s hell, don’t go, the whole place is blazing!”

We go anyway. It’s utter chaos: the crash has knocked out all means of communication with the outside world. I turn to Jerry and David who have started whimpering.

“C’mon, kids, if we’re gonna win the game, we can’t let them think they’ve fooled us. So, no panicking, please, otherwise we’ll be eliminated. Just follow your dad and we’ll try and get downstairs. You both played Dungeons and Dragons, right? The winners are always the ones who are best at bluffing the enemy. If we show any signs of weakness, we’ll lose the game, got it?”

The two brothers nod politely.

I realize I’ve forgotten to describe myself. I used to be striking, later I was handsome, later still, not so bad, now I’m all right. I read a lot of books, and underline the sentences I like (like all autodidacts) (that’s why autodidacts are often the most cultivated people: they spend their whole life preparing for an exam they never took). On a good day I look like Bill Pullman, the actor (he was the President in Independence Day). On a bad day I look more like Robin Williams if he was prepared to play a Texan realtor with a funny walk, a receding hairline, and crow’s feet around the eyes (too much sun, yeah!). In a couple of years’ time, I’ll be a perfectly good candidate for the “George W. Bush lookalike contest”; if I survive, that is.

Jerry’s my oldest son, that’s why he’s so serious. The first-born have to put up with the teething problems. He reminds me of my mother. I like the way he takes everything so seriously. I can get him to believe anything, he’ll swallow anything, but afterwards, he hates me for lying to him. Honest, sincere, brave: Jerry is the man I should have been. Sometimes I think he despises me. I think I disappoint him. Oh well: it’s a father’s destiny to disappoint his son. Look at Luke Skywalker, his father is Darth Vader! Jerry is exactly like I was at his age: he believes in the order of things, he’s impatient for everything to come good. Later, he’ll lose his illusions. I hope he doesn’t. I hope his eyes will always be so honest, so blue. I need you, Jerry. In the old days, kids depended on their parents to guide them. Now it’s the opposite.

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