Read To Reach the Clouds Online

Authors: Philippe Petit

To Reach the Clouds (14 page)

Americans slouch all evening in front of their television sets, absorbed by a Movie of the Week or a baseball game. Not I.
I crave only a specific segment of the news: the weather. It's on almost every channel. It's short.
Sometimes I cannot find it.
Sometimes I just miss it.
I never understand it.
I know it concludes with the five-day forecast, a fast-paced, off-camera monologue illustrated by five vertical columns clearly showing each day's expected conditions.
The commentary is too rapid for me to catch a single word. And the captions—well, I try to make sense of temperature and wind speed, but degrees Fahrenheit and miles per hour still confuse me, plus I've always been uneasy with east and west. (Don't laugh, I still mix them up.)
When I try to jot down the figures, the chart is gone before I copy the first column.
 
So here I am, just days before the walk, often till two in the morning, attempting to make sense of the elements upon which my life depends.
Who believes that?
As if the weather—or anything, or anyone—could stop me now!
I have those rare moments when I contemplate the equipment. They are precious to me. I let my hands, my eyes distractedly brush by, surveying the tools of the trade. Call it technical daydreaming: a way for me to show appreciation for the craftsman's tools, sometimes subconsciously pursuing a solution, considering an improvement, foreseeing the perfect rigging, imagining the outcome, being satisfied.
 
Take the fishing-line spool, for example. It will link the flying arrow to the next line. It will perform the most important phase of the rigging: joining, for the first time, the ever-separated twin towers. It will allow me to pass the cable. Look how cleverly the—
“
What!?
” I scream in disbelief, as the cats run for cover.
I have just noticed that the 300 feet of transparent thread have been wound the wrong way on the spool. The arrow would have been brought to a halt by the drag! I pay out the fishing line and respool it, recalling that it was Paul who proudly volunteered for the task.
It's nobody's fault. I should be the one checking and rechecking everything.
Hypnotized by the monotonous process of coiling, I drift back into a state of contemplation. I imagine Jean-Louis missing the first shot. I see the arrow being pulled back up to the roof, I hear it bang against the windows at each floor, I watch the guard's response …
Even if my friend retrieves the arrow safely, he won't have the hour it takes to respool. Am I seeing it all wrong? Should we have two arrows, three bows, four extra spools, five balancing poles? I dismiss such absurdity. The coup relies less on equipment than on knowledge, on skills, on tenacity, and yes, on faith.
I believe Jean-Louis has trained properly; he'll shoot the arrow like a Zen master.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 4, 1974
Worried about being even a minute late, I take one of the first trains to Boston. I won't let anyone know how early I arrive at the airport; I would have time to install a long red carpet for my VIP friends.
When it is announced that the flight from Paris is delayed, I laugh. And wait.
 
Finally, here comes Jean-Louis—in his disguise for the coup, a brown three-piece suit.
And here comes … Jean-François! I recognize him by his gentle smile. With his frayed pastel-blue pants rolled to midcalf, his Tunisian sandals, and an off-white shirt open to the navel, sleeves rolled to midbicep, he looks like an aborigine who missed his connection to Teti'aroa.
I welcome my friends in my arms.
 
During the train ride to Manhattan, Jean-Louis hands me an orange box. Inside, a collection of 8-by-10 photographs of WTC stairways and doors, arranged in order of his descent with Annie two months ago, awaits my admiration. I congratulate him on the quality of the prints.
Do I have a surprise for him? Oh yes, I say. I tell of the fake I.D.s, New Paltz, the blueprints.
Despite my show of enthusiasm and the fanfare with which I introduce each story, Jean-Louis turns somber. He asks me a few questions and understands he is not about to get the answers he expected.
We're about to argue again. Hell, it's war!
 
Noting that the coup is still not organized, Jean-Louis proposes changing all my plans. As soon as we enter the hiding places on our respective 82nd floors—allowing for a brief respite to regroup—we should go to the stairs and climb all the way to the 110th floors. Then we wait until nightfall to go up to the roof. The stairs are the area where we're most likely to be caught, he argues. Better to climb in broad daylight when the offices are open, when it's normal to meet people there.
“Yes,” I say, “but since in broad daylight we're almost sure to meet people in the stairways, it increases the chances of getting caught.”
“But at night, if we get accosted, we have no excuse for being there. And at night, there's a ninety percent chance that person will be a guard wanting to know what's going on.”
“But by day, when we're sure to pass a whole bunch of people,
there's going to be somebody asking us where we're going.”
“Shit, Philippe! Don't tell me you don't know what to say to that person! In broad daylight, you say, I don't know … You say you're going to such and such office, you've got to see so and so .
.. But at night, what are you going to say? And if you are caught during the day, you have plenty of time to try again. But at night—you're caught, you're dead.”
The argument is never-ending. Jean-François, smiling across from us, follows the bout as if it were a Ping-Pong match, turning his head left and right.
 
The first stop in Manhattan is to see Albert. Like me, Jean-Louis instinctively mistrusts his apparent humorlessness, and surely Albert picks up on his mistrust.
At home, the happy reunion between Annie and the two heroes of the day does not postpone our duel for long. Jean-Louis tries to lift one piece of equipment after another and criticizes my being satisfied with a hiding place so far from the roof. “Do you really see yourself carrying all this, extremely fast and silently, from the eighty-second floor to the hundred and tenth?”
“You've got a better solution?” I ask ferociously.
“It was
your
job to find the solutions—not mine! The only reason I'm back is you swore everything was ready this time. Except, big surprise, we're in exactly the same mud as before. We're not one hair further. To the point that I—I don't even know if—I don't know if I'm interested in throwing myself into a suicide operation!”
I disappear for a while into the bedroom, trying to catch my breath, trying to catch my mind; Annie tries as well. But each time I come out of the bedroom the absurd battle continues. Jean-François is no longer smiling, although my repeated withdrawals into the bedroom to rage and emergences to fight must belong to the repertoire of early comic cinema.
 
MONDAY, AUGUST 5
Jean-Louis and I clash until 5 a.m., when our bodies collapse in
unison on the sofa—another funny tableau, if only we had the good humor to appreciate it.
Two hours later, I wake up in the bedroom. I don't know how I got there.
I escape the sleepy apartment to meet JP, who is helping me rent the truck. I painstakingly choose one with a loading platform exactly 4 feet off the ground.
I return home at ten to a houseful of laughter. It quiets down when Albert and Donald stop by, uninvited, to share a quick breakfast with us. I see the way Jean-Louis sizes up Donald's personality with a glance—and I can almost read his verdict in the air: “Another of your great finds, bravo!”
 
By 11 a.m., it's time to go to JP's store for the I.D. pictures. We line up to pose one by one in front of a dirty white sheet as JP professionally clicks away and yells “Next!” after each flash.
Next, Albert brings us to a giant store close to the World Trade Center. Brilliant! They have everything from washed-out T-shirts and second-hand pants for the delivery crew to an impeccable businessman's outfit for Albert. Except that Albert chooses the most expensive (and ugliest) three-piece suit, and then adds to the bill an ugly tie and an ugly expensive shirt and comes back for an ugly pair of socks.
“Consider yourself lucky he has his own shoes, your
genius
accomplice!” whispers Jean-Louis.
I let the Americans go, reminding them there is a final rehearsal meeting at 9 p.m. at West 22nd Street.
 
Back at the house, Jean-Louis and I resume our argument.
Jean-Louis accuses me of having concentrated too much on the south tower, my tower; he is furious to have no intelligence about
his
82nd-floor hiding place, in the north tower.
“But the hiding places are the same. They're
twin
towers!” I tease.
“Don't give me that bullshit! Did you go and check?”
I did, with Barry, and Albert scouted it before he spent the night in my tower, but that doesn't appease Jean-Louis.
“Yeah? Then you can tell me how to go from my hiding place to the roof.”
“Of course! It's the same as in my tower! There's a staircase—”
“That staircase, you tried it? Can you tell me if I have to go left or right when I get out of the hiding place? Can you tell me which corridor I have to take and which door I have to open at the end of it? Can you tell me how many steps there are to the first landing, or how many landings there are to the summit? Can you show me on one of your fabulous blueprints where it opens out to the roof? And what about the guards? Do you know how many there are, on which floor they sit? When they change shifts?”
I am speechless.
“Okay. You know I'm here for four days only! Go and see right now!”
“But I can't!” I say in despair, explaining briefly my brush with the press and my innumerable visits.
Annie saves the day. She'll go with Jean-François. They'll come back with information.
“A naive French tourist couple going to the top to take a snapshot of the city, that's it! It's three-thirty. Quick! Go! Go! Go!” I applaud.
Jean-Louis has the bright idea of waiting for their return before reopening hostilities, while I find an activity in tune with my mood. I go to the garden with four newly purchased helmets and proceed to “age” them by kicking them in a furious soccer game and dragging them back and forth on the concrete slab and brick walls. Annie and Jean-François are back at 7 p.m., exhausted but victorious.
Jean-Louis gets most of his answers, but the fresh information reignites his battles with me. Before long, he's repeating his ultimatum: either I do things as he says, or he's out.
Annie wants me to reason with him, but I decide otherwise. I can't afford to lose him, so I'm going to agree with him. And after the coup, I'll never see him, I'll never talk to him again.
I walk to Jean-Louis and conclude softly, looking at the carpet
to avoid his eyes, “Okay, let's climb by daylight. Let's do things your way.”
He smiles. “Let's start packing.”
 
At 9 p.m., Albert shows up for the briefing. He frowns at the alterations in the plan and starts challenging them one by one. Clearly he does not appreciate Jean-Louis's power.
Two hours late, Donald arrives from one of his concerts, accompanied by Chester. They're both drunk and stoned, and after Donald goes to the keyboard and launches into his longest song, there's not much of a briefing. Jean-Louis fumes and looks at me with disdain.
Shortly after midnight, the Americans leave. Jean-Louis helps me tag the equipment, blue for north tower, red for south, and we continue to prepare, and—the slightest detail becoming an issue —to argue.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 1974
4 A.M.
Everything is ready. Everyone is asleep except me.
I, exhausted, disgusted, contemplate the moon mocking me.
 
I go and wake Annie. “We just fought like hell again. He refuses to take with him the wood to protect the beam. He keeps telling me, ‘If you don't like it, find somebody else!'”
“You're not going to change Jean-Louis. It's almost five a.m., go to sleep.”
“No, but you know what? I don't give a shit if Jean-Louis leaves. I can do it by myself!” I whisper in a rattle, “Actually, that's what I want. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do it all by myself. I need nobody.”
I collapse on the mattress.
Minutes later, I spring up: “Shit! I forgot to nail the crate holding the cable!”
The wee-hour mist finds me in my underwear, the cold concrete of the yard digging into my naked knees as I frantically drive steel points into the crate, reluctantly imprisoning my friend the wire in its coffin. My hammering, or perhaps my screaming when I hit my fingers, brings a few irate neighbors to their windows.
 
6 A.M
I rest on the crate for a moment, my mind wandering, then rush back inside and wake Annie again. “Annie, you know … This whole thing is madness! It's true, nothing is organized! I know what's gonna happen! You want to know what's gonna happen? What's gonna happen is”—my voice takes a strange tone, I'm shaking with fatigue, I'm shivering with insanity—“we're going to drive down the ramp, we're going to unload, and there, right there, we're going to get caught. I'm sure of that. I'm certain. It's a suicide. An absolute suicide.”
Annie whispers back: “If you don't believe in it, why go for it? It's stupid to start a coup when you're sure to get caught!”
“No! I have to do it. I don't give a shit if I am caught; let them catch me! I prefer to be thrown in jail than not to try.”
Annie buries herself under the sheets. Once again, I begin to review mentally every detail of the operation, but almost instantly I collapse, and this time I steal half an hour of sleep.
 
I wake up screaming at Annie: “Shit! I asked you to wake me up at eight. It's eight-thirteen!”

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