Windows on the World

figure-hugging pantsuits

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.

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

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).

This building overlooks the nerve center of world capitalism and cordially suggests you go fuck yourselves.

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

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, September 7, 1871

makes less of deal of it: hes the big brother. Davids always sick with something, I hate hearing him coughing all the time, it winds me up, and I cant work out if its the sound of the coughing that winds me up, or whether its anxiety, some sort of paternal love. Deep down, what annoys me is never being sure that Im good, but being absolutely certain that Im selfish.
A Brazilian businessman lights a cigar. You have to be mad to smoke at this time of the morning. I beckon the matre 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 hes heard of it, pretends to be shocked, demands to be shown the smoking section. The matre d explains that hell 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.

You know how it ends: everybody dies

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.