To Reach the Clouds, page 9
It was hard to locate one; they’re rare here. In France, it’s a common piece of equipment called le diable, the devil—don’t ask me why.
It has two long, curved handles, like a wheelbarrow’s, at the top, and at the bottom, on each side, three wheels linked by a rubber caterpillar belt. It is specially designed to bring heavy loads up and down stairs.
I stack as many bricks stolen from a nearby construction site as le diable will carry on his shoulders. Furtively, I open the door and sneak onto the carpeted staircase of my sleeping four-story building. I don’t mean anyone any harm; I only want to practice.
I start my ascent quietly, but the machine squeaks under the load, bangs into the railing, and gets stuck every two steps. Plus a bunch of daring bricks try to make it back to the construction site. A particularly bold one manages to run down an entire flight of stairs before I catch her.
Left and right, apartments are waking up.
I take a break on the third floor. I unload le diable one brick at a time, quietly, determined to find out what’s wrong with the caterpillar. I stack the bricks on one of the thick doormats, without a sound.
That’s when old Mrs. Janets in 3-A—her white hair full of pink plastic rollers—opens her door. She looks at the 3-foot-high brick structure a mad, barefoot mason is building in the middle of the night to wall her in. Before slamming her door in terror, she manages to utter, “What the devil … ?”
She’s right.
I keep trying to improve the system, climbing up and down the stairs as discreetly as I can, while worried neighbors spy on me from behind chained doors. At last the Luddite in me decides to bring the impractical machine back to the apartment. I fall asleep with the satisfying fantasy of my crew hoisting nearly a ton of equipment up the towers on our shoulders, like the builders of the pyramids.
Historians, take note: I did bring back the hundred bricks to my fellow masons the following night, but could not resist arranging them on the ground into a pretty question mark.
NEW ACCESSORIES
What better way to find out how heavy equipment enters the towers than to organize a phony delivery?
Barry agrees to receive the goods.
But first I need two new accomplices to replace the Australians.
I learn that Jim Moore is struggling to remove the linoleum flooring of his newly acquired loft at the corner of Hudson and Chambers. We spend two days breaking our nails and dulling blades: the linoleum is glued to the wood with some kind of tar and breaks off only an inch at a time. Each time we take a rest, I discuss WTC. Again I ask my friend to help on the roof. Again the answer is no.
The next morning, two Americans who live in the building bump into Jim in the lobby and ask if his friend the Frenchman—they’ve passed me in the elevator—is the tightrope walker, the guy who’s looking for a place to put his wire. They recognized me from the article and the TV.
“Uh-huh,” mumbles Jim.
“Well, you can tell him we’ve come up with a terrific idea, a site that will blow his mind.”
“What’s that?”
“The top of the World Trade Center!”
Well trained, Jim breaks out laughing, but thinks to ask—in case his friend Philippe loves the idea—would they be ready to help him?
Receiving an enthusiastic chorus in response, Jim arranges a meeting.
Annie and I show up the next day, upstairs in a dark loft.
Donald, with curved shoulders and long, thinning hair in a ponytail, is at the piano whining out a new song in a high-pitched voice; he’s a rock musician. Chester, with thick glasses and a bushy head of hair atop a body too long and too thin, pouts sadly. He is a carpenter.
I show the album, I open the cahiers, I display accordions of WTC pictures. Donald and Chester are astounded by the extent of my preparations. They are ready to take part. I ask them to promise not to tell anyone, and they do.
I don’t suffer dismal faces gladly, and I don’t appreciate rock and roll music, but I have no choice.
ARCHITECTURAL BEQUEST
Without telling me, just prior to his disappearance Paul had written a letter to Emery Roth and Sons, the firm that designed the towers, introducing himself as an architecture scholar and requesting help in his study of WTC.
The protective envelope I tear open this morning spills out its priceless contents all over the sofa: ten off-white sheets, 18 by 25 inches, covered with blueprints:
1ST FLOOR
9TH TO 16TH FLOOR
35TH TO 40TH FLOOR
44TH FLOOR / SKY LOBBY
50TH TO 54TH FLOOR
78TH FLOOR / SKY LOBBY
96TH TO 100TH FLOOR
107TH FLOOR / RESTAURANT LEVEL
There is also a superb 9TH TO 10TH FLOOR/CORE PLAN, plus a gorgeous CROSS SECTION THRU TYPICAL FLOOR detailing men’s and women’s toilets and clearly showing the suspended ceiling and the lost space above it, which I’ve already explored and deemed an excellent hiding place. I measured its height to be 3’6”. Here, the drawing indicates 4’0” from suspended ceiling to the top of the 4-inch concrete slab; that’s a height of 3’8”. Well, nobody’s perfect. I earmark the sheet, though; after the coup I’ll check, maybe it’s their mistake …
A kid on Christmas Day, I rummage through my WTC files and compare the few old and out-of-sequence blueprints (which “fell into my bag” during my countless shadow visits) with the pristine documents destiny has just awarded me.
Although instantly my most prized possession, this bunch of blueprints is perfectly useless. Nonetheless, they make me feel professional: when you plan a bank robbery, first you acquire blueprints, right?
“Hey, you!”
One of Annie’s feral kittens is walking on the 78th floor—peeing on the elevator shaft! I grab the trespasser by the tail and send it flying into the garden. The cliché is true: they do always land on their feet.
Then I take a look at the handwritten message from one Joseph H. Solomon, the fourth name on the firm’s letterhead, wishing Paul the best and concluding, “If you ever receive a commission to do a 110-story building in Australia, we will be happy to act as consultants or co-architects.”
Thank you, Paul, thank you, Joseph, thank you, God.
WORLD PREMIERE
I am ready to try the false delivery to Barry’s office. As it is just a drill, I decide to keep it simple: four or five hefty but manageable cardboard boxes should do the trick.
As always, I start with the garbage piles. Back home with a good selection of empty cardboard boxes and a bag full of junk, I manufacture a few packages, which I seal with wide brown strapping tape, the kind that is crisscrossed internally by nylon fibers and cannot be torn by hand. I call Annie to admire the professional-looking result.
Suddenly, I have a nightmarish vision, a scene from those escape movies I’m so fond of: a uniformed guard approaches a group of prisoners pushing a cart, orders them to stop, and asks them to open one of their bundles; upon their refusal, he plunges in his bayonet.
“If they ask us, we have to be able to open the boxes and show what’s inside!” I say, tearing open the boxes with a razor blade and pouring their contents back in the garbage bag. Annie shakes her head in disbelief at such idiotic paranoia.
When I share my worries with JP, and insist upon borrowing a dolly full of reams of Xerox paper from his store, he also thinks I’m ridiculous, but he complies. The new boxes I fashion and seal with regular tape satisfy me: they are guardproof.
Twice I must push back the delivery date, because twice the Americans announce at the eleventh hour that they won’t be able to make it.
Finally it’s the day. Definitely. A time of 1 p.m. is confirmed.
No. Donald calls, he’ll be here at 2:00.
He calls again. Scratch that! Make it 2:30.
At 2:25, Chester calls. “Sorry, I won’t make it before three-thirty.”
I know that Barry’s office closes at 4:45.
At 4:25 p.m., our rented van heads down the ramp beneath the towers. It’s a world premiere! JP drives. Donald and I, seated on the floor in the back, will play underpaid delivery boys, languidly pushing our dollies. Chester, in the front seat, will act as the boss. Barry is at his desk on the 82nd floor of the south tower and will not move until we show up. His phone number is on our delivery slip—modeled on a form from JP’s store—in case a security employee wishes to check with the recipient.
In the security booth at the bottom of the ramp, the guard looks up from his newspaper and frowns in disdain at the paperwork JP shoves under his nose.
“Delivery, south tower,” announces JP, not gracing the man with a look.
The guard does not even answer, but points his chin toward a loading dock at the end of a tunnel.
When I get out of the van, I see the word POLICE written in large white letters, twenty feet away from me. So this is the famous precinct under the towers that I’ve heard so much about for so long.
There’s only one problem: we can’t use our dollies to unload. The floor of our van is lower than the loading dock. I’ll have to check on that prior to renting a truck for the coup.
JP slams the doors and drives away as planned, leaving Donald, Chester, and me with the boxes. Keeping my head down to avoid being recognized, I cannot observe the landscape as much as I want. Before I know it, we’re in a freight elevator operated by a gum-chewing WTC employee who hears Chester say “Eighty-two!” and does not even bother to check our delivery papers.
The freight cage has no ceiling. Above my head, I watch each of the dim lights separating the floors pass me by—another world premiere—and bite my lips, so not to reveal my huge smile.
On the 82nd floor, we roll our merchandise to Barry’s office. He signs our slips, does not so much as wink at me—I like that—and with pride, like an extra on a movie shoot who’s been granted his first line of dialogue, hands the papers back to Chester, saying with impeccable Shakespearean delivery, “There you go! Thank you. I’ll take it from here.”
DIRTY LAUNDRY
I seldom use the word “fun,” but this afternoon, it describes my mission. For once, I won’t be covered in sweat, climbing for hours inside the towers; instead, festively dressed in white for a change, I stroll to the south tower lobby, open a forbidden door, and let gravity pull me down the stairs. Feeling carefree and innocent—I’m only looking for a bathroom, after all—I wander deep inside the basement’s levels.
Soon I find what I’m looking for.
Standing in front of the loading platform, I pull out my measuring tape. To my right, the door of the police station opens and the chief leans out. He lights a cigar and distractedly sets his eyes on me. No measuring tape today, let’s go!
But not before a sudden instinct makes me lean forward and press my chest against the sharp edge of the platform. Waving at an imaginary fellow at the other end of the loading alley, I shout, “ … and make sure you tell Pierre!” all the while discreetly rubbing my chest left and right against the edge to imprint a line onto my shirt.
Outside, I measure from the dirty line on my chest to the bottom of my shoes: 4 feet exactly.
Back home, while I repeatedly wash the white shirt, unable to completely erase its grease-and-rust mark, the perfectionist in me can’t help critiquing the choice of the name Pierre. Joe or Charlie would have been better.
TWENTY-ONE PAGES
A postcard with two lines, a thirty-second phone call—since Jean-Louis’s departure, I have been informing him of the ups and downs of the coup, but today I start a long letter. Today, once and for all, I decide when to walk.
Flipping through my French datebook, which lists the saints’ days, I notice I have already moved the date eleven times. I erase the latest entry, August 1, as boring and too soon. I like the seventh, it has a ring to it. The day before—when we’ll be sneaking in with the equipment—reads: “Mardi 6 Aout 1974, Transfiguration.” I do not know what the name means in the iconography of Christianity, yet when I imagine entering the dark viscera of WTC, emerging from its crown, hanging a wire in total darkness, and, sometime later, appearing flooded with light, balanced atop the world, I find transfiguration a fitting epithet.
“The walk is August 7, in exactly three weeks … ,” the letter begins.
The outcome of the false delivery; the fact that Barry found a large hiding place on his floor for men and equipment; the evidence that such a place must exist on the 82nd floor of the other tower; the simplicity of hiding there until nightfall, of using the stairs to hoist peacefully, one floor at a time, half a ton of equipment to the roof—all the heavy stuff goes with me in the south tower … Everything, I write everything to Jean-Louis.
Following the main lines of the new plan, I cover every detail of the rigging. I note each move Jean-Louis will have to make. I draw each knot he’ll have to tie. I list every tool he’ll need.
In conclusion, I compose a French-English lexicon of useful terms and advise my friend to copy it onto an index card he’ll slip into his pocket. That way, he’ll be able to communicate with his American accomplice.
The letter runs to twenty-one pages; it takes me four days.
I reread the missive again and again, each time adding details and sketches and making corrections.
Before I lick the envelope, I can’t resist going through the letter one last time. I’m particularly fond of the lexicon, which, besides pull, push, lift, over there, right here, also translates, Be careful, it’s going to slide! Hold on, be quiet, I heard something! and, in an eerie premonition, Don’t give up!
Four days without sticking my nose out of the house, four days reduced to eating yogurt and smelling the cat piss of Annie’s protégés!
DUSTIN HOFFMAN
A woman in the front row attempts to strike up a conversation with me as I am passing my hat after my performance outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She’s a casting director, working on a project with Dustin Hoffman.
I mime “not interested” and pass. She trots after the hat to drop in her business card. I pick up the card, smell it, bury it in my pocket, and, lifting one eyebrow, present the hat to her. She throws in a dollar.
Much later I remember the card. I call.
On the top floor of a Madison Avenue skyscraper, I am invited into a comfortable wood-paneled office and left alone.
I press my nose to the window, admiring the view from fifty stories up. Hoffman comes in and holds out his hand to me, but lost in the void, I make him wait before shaking his. “Hey, it’s pretty nice up here!” I say.
The actor is relaxed and smiling. He offers me some wine, then explains that he is directing a theatrical production having to do with circus arts, and because his collaborators admired my street-performing, he wanted to meet me, and he proposes to hire me for …
Almost from the beginning I lose interest, and the corky young wine annoys my palate. “I’m not only a street-juggler, I’m also a high wire walker, look!” I say, flipping the pages of the huge photo album I brought with me. “See? Here in Paris, here in Sydney, all without permission!”
I explain I cannot consider his offer because I’m busy working on a surprise high wire walk.
He asks where, when.
“Oh, that I can’t tell. It’s a secret! I’m going to put a wire without permission between two buildings, somewhere in New York City!”
“Well, I can tell you a great place to put a wire,” says the actor, beaming.
“Where?”
“The World Trade Center!”
“You mean those two big towers all the way downtown? Brilliant idea!” I comment, discreetly pouring my wine into a crystal vase full of roses when the actor is not looking.
On my way to the door, I ask if he would like to come to the show.
“Oh, absolutely!” he replies, frowning in puzzlement at the purple water in the vase.
I tell him that once the cable is up and I’m ready to walk, I’ll have accomplices calling the press and then a list of friends. I offer to add him to the list.
“Yes, please, that would be nice.”
“But it’s possible they’ll call you at six a.m.”
“It doesn’t matter. I want to be on the list! I want to be on the list!” the actor says with amused disbelief, giving me his phone number.
ALBERT
Usually, when I decide to gather everyone at West 22nd Street to rehearse the coup, the Americans arrive late or cancel at the last moment. When I do manage to assemble everyone, invariably Donald interrupts by playing the piano. He insists that I add padding to the equipment going to the roof, so that he and his friend won’t hurt their shoulders. And Chester has been growing increasingly distant.
Today, he announces he is no longer able to help me in the towers.
Panic-stricken, I call Jean-Louis, who has someone else in mind.
But the Americans have a friend to replace Chester: someone brisk and agile who has worked on a boat, someone who knows all kinds of knots.
They’ve told him everything!
My first meeting with Albert—a nimble young man with short black curls and moustache, wearing glasses—leaves me with an intuition of distrust. I like his intelligence and seriousness, I sense he can follow any adventure, get out of any trap, and he shows me a few knots I’m not familiar with; but his enthusiasm is guarded and he chooses his words as he speaks.
