Windows on the World. Frédéric Beigbeder

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