Читать книгу Windows on the World - Frédéric Beigbeder - Страница 25

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…