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.
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
