Read To Reach the Clouds Online

Authors: Philippe Petit

To Reach the Clouds (11 page)

It starts with Chinatown.
After three hours of inundation by colors, smells, and noises, Annie pulls me aside for respite at a little stone arch with benches, next to a phone booth that looks like a pagoda. Suddenly I spring up. “My god! This is one of the best places in Manhattan to view them, look!” I exclaim, pointing excitedly at the twin towers.
 
Next, the arts.
We hop from gallery to gallery in SoHo, do MoMA until the closing bell rings. But here, there, everywhere, I am oblivious to the treasures I run past. I am brought to a stop only by an image of the city's skyline, unmistakably featuring the World Trade Center. “Hey … that's a neat piece!”
 
We wait on line with the tourists—argh, I hate that!—to reach the observation deck atop the Empire State Building, where Annie allows the telescope to steal all my change. The first thing, the only thing I look at when it's my turn, is of course—“Annie! Incredible! My towers … You can see every detail of the roof with this! Wouldn't it be incredible to find myself up there one day? Wouldn't it be magnificent?”
Annie, sheltering her eyes from the sun, is not looking at WTC. She's examining my face, wondering if I can survive without attacking those giants.
 
The nightmare that wakes me the next morning gives her the answer.
I sit up suddenly, covered in sweat, and rip the sheets from
my body. I have been screaming my despair in my sleep.
“Listen,” Annie whispers, caressing my face. “Since it's impossible for you to forget the coup, then go for it! But remember, all the preparations you've done so far have been of no use. So go back. Start fresh, redo everything. I'll go with you, I'll help you!”
The garden is full of birds conversing through the thick foliage, the street full of kids screaming at play until dinnertime. The city is singing its early-summer song.
I grab my new sketchpad: 9 by 12 inches, fifty sheets of extraheavy paper, glued and bound. FOR PASTELS WATER COLORS CRAYONS PENCILS INKS, reads the cover. AND HIGH WIRE, I add.
 
You open, you see: twin towers drawn with one continuous line; a wire on top; on the wire, a little five-pointed star—you know, the kind you doodle quickly, without lifting the pen. And under the drawing, in caps, “WTC” with a subtitle in lowercase: “new organisation” —French spelling, you have a problem with that?
How to start anew?
By getting what's missing.
I become a habitué of Canal Street, the mecca of hardware stores, where I rummage incessantly for tools and equipment. I visit warehouses in the different boroughs. I crisscross Manhattan, now teeming with tourists unfazed by the unbearable heat and the piles of garbage obstructing the sidewalks.
Annie follows me everywhere.
“We're losing time!” I complain each time the laces of her sandals break, forcing me to look in the garbage for something to repair them.
 
Today, to celebrate the “new organisation,” I escape, alone, open to influence. I've decided to drift freely through the city.
And I find myself … guess where?
I'm strolling through the lobby of the towers, daydreamingly indifferent to the lunchtime rush, when someone calls my name.
A tall man in a three-piece suit walks toward me. He is young and slender, with long black hair and an outrageous handlebar moustache above a long, narrow beard. Something about this intelligent-looking man strikes me as challenging, as mysterious. His voice, as I expected—isn't that odd?—is calm and sober, with a je ne sais quoi … He says he saw me street-juggling in Paris last year. The sound of my voice surprises him; inside my circle of chalk, I never say a word. He congratulates me on my performance, which he describes eloquently, then inquires, with a cryptic smile, “But what are you doing in this neck of the woods? You don't belong to the world of trade. This isn't the sort of place one would expect to make your acquaintance.”
I return his question.
He explains that he works in the buildings.
“Which building?”
“The south tower.”
“Which floor?”
“Eighty-second floor.”
Only 28 floors below the roof!
He introduces himself. We exchange a firm handshake. He goes back to the group of businessmen he was with and disappears, absorbed by the crowd.
 
Fantastic!
I am going to befriend this strange fellow who works on the 82nd floor and knows me. I am going to make him an accomplice.
Almost dancing with delight, I run home, impatient to announce the miracle to Annie. But on the way, I freeze: I have forgotten his name. I have forgotten which tower! I did not ask for his phone number.
I share with Annie victory and defeat.
 
What to do?
I can't go to the 82nd floor of each tower, questioning people and staring at every employee's face.
For three days, I hide inside a telephone booth at lunchtime, watching intently the comings-and-goings of hundreds, thousands of hungry employees in search of a snack.
No black-bearded giant.
Whenever hopelessness sets in, the antidote is street-juggling.
 
I'm making quite a scene every afternoon on the tiny sidewalk of Grand Army Plaza, near the circular steps of the lovely white fountain overlooked by the ritzy Plaza Hotel.
I usually get a crowd of two or three hundred. People stand four rows deep into the street, people climb on the hoods of parked cars. The police are restless to catch me; I escape them with my unicycle.
People bring their friends. The word gets around. The press hears.
Today, June 24, 1974, there's a nice interview on page 57 of the
Daily News
by the columnist Sidney Fields. And a nice picture of my face, too.
I give details of the preparations I made for my illegal wire walks in Paris and Sydney. I'm quoted as planning one for New York City, “between the roofs of the world.” I refuse to give the location, call it “a big surprise.” I do give the times and places of my upcoming street performances.
 
The next day, a professional mike and a television camera with its little red light on show up in the front row.
Not saying a word, I invite the woman holding the mike into the circle. She's desperate to have me talk. Instead, I mime playfully around her before I return her to her place, presenting her with a departure gift—her watch! When the applause calms down, she turns to the camera: “This is Melba Tolliver for Channel 7 Eyewitness News, live in front of Grand Army Plaza: I did not get my interview, but I got my watch back!” Waving the
Daily News
, she concludes by mentioning my upcoming illegal high wire walk—“but when and where … Nobody knows!”
 
Later, in a dark office, several employees take their eyes away from a wall of electronic screens under their surveillance and break into a noisy exchange. One of them holds up an article from the
Daily News
for his coworkers to read. Another says he saw the same guy on TV, stealing a watch. The newspaper clipping is pinned to the bulletin board. “Okay fellas, this one is for us. He's gonna put his wire here soon. We better watch out.”
They are still laughing when someone passes his head through the door. “Hey guys, got a minute? Come see what I found in the stairs on the seventy-fourth floor, some kind of weird fresco …”
Everyone leaves. The door slams shut, rattling the pane of glass that reads:
WORLD TRADE CENTER
SECURITY HEADQUARTERS
“So you're happy now? You got what you wanted?” Annie reproaches me after reading the article and watching the news.
True, I might be recognized, I might have to work ten times more cautiously, a hundred times harder. But now that I have announced the coup to millions of New Yorkers, there is absolutely no way I can give up!
More impetuous than ever, I keep planning, religiously logging my progress in the “New Organisation”
cahier
. I keep hunting for the mysterious man with the handlebar moustache, showing up at lunchtime in the lobbies, incognito under a Tyrolean hat and large sunglasses.
Got him!
I literally run to him and block his path.
He repeats his surprise at seeing me here, and again observes I do not belong in such a crowd … Why the persistent smile?
His name is Barry Greenhouse, he works on the 82nd floor of the south tower, his direct number is …
 
Annie and I take him to dinner, along with my thick photo album.
Before the appetizers, Barry has seen everything of my performing past.
Why is he grinning so much? Does he guess?
In the middle of the main course, I start blabbing about my love for the city, about its skyline. Barry leans back, like a cigar aficionado before exhaling smoke. He smiles intently and stares calmly at me, waiting for me to tell him what he already knows.
 
I throw onto his plate the entire coup, raw.
He asks two or three pertinent questions and, satisfied with my answers, gently, almost elegantly, whispers, “I'm in.”
I order three desserts, all for me.
Here and there, up and down, left and right—meandering the path of my dreams, I often wake up lost.
Not tonight.
It's 3 a.m. and it has been decided. In my sleep.
I will start walking from the south tower.
And if I walk more than once, I will conclude the performance at the south tower.
Why?
 
Some will see in my choice the ocean breathing encouragingly behind me at the time of the first step, and, in front, my eyes set upon a multitude of roofs, of homes sheltering the inhabitants, my audience.
Some may remember that the south tower was the first with which I came into contact, with my chin, long ago. The tower I never visited at first, the mysterious one.
And some, more pragmatic, might say, “It's because of that damned wind, always blowing from the Verrazano Bridge …”
I shrug to Annie, “I know it's 2 a.m.! But I must return it in the morning, I rented it.”
 
Yesterday, I spotted a piano and refrigerators being moved into the neighborhood. Otherwise I never would have had the idea of using a mover's intricate hand dolly to bring the equipment up the stairs of WTC on the day of the coup.
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.

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