Under the tarp, Jean-François and I are left to our immobility and our sight impairment.
For a while, eyes closed, I pay attention to the serene breathing of the tower and to the distant humming of the city. But soon I find myself galloping through memories of the adventure. I go to the dentist, I see my towers for the first time, I take my helicopter flight, I go see Francis and Papa Rudy, I do the Hundred Meters at Vary â¦
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Time has no grasp in my thoughts, but suddenly I'm pulled from my reverie by the crackling of a walkie-talkie.
A guard is coming toward our hiding place. Has he seen the tarp move? He is getting closer. He reaches the tarp. I cannot see Jean-François, but I feel his legs go rigid.
God! The guard is leaning against a column, an inch from my shoulder. I hold my breath.
Is he waiting for us to give ourselves up? No. He is lighting a cigarette! He is so close I can hear the dry scratch of the match, the sulfur tip bursting into flame, and the man's breath as he exhales the first puff. Holding even my thoughts, I remain a statue for a long, long time. Then suddenly the guard is gone. Or has he fallen asleep right behind me? No, he's gone. I'm not sure.
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To ease the torment, I return to my memories, the gold-and-mud years of dreaming, months of organizing. I encounter the magician at customs, I'm “arrested” on the roof, I taste despair, I look in vain for another site. From time to time, I return briefly to reality, trying to estimate how long it has been since we hurled ourselves under the tarp. Is it still daylight outside? What if the guard is still around? What if he is toying with usâcomfortably sitting in his chair facing us, waiting for us to make the slightest sound, the slightest movementâbefore he pounces on us and arrests us? We must wait.
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After an eternity, I can't keep myself in the past anymore. I need to know if the sky is getting darker.
With infinite precautionsâI'm convinced the guard is still thereâI pull a pencil from my shirt pocket (a process that, with the canvas resting on my wrist, must take ten minutes). I bring the sharp lead in contact with the heavy cotton canvas and, rolling the pencil back and forth between my fingers, slowly, gradually work the point between the tightly woven fibers of the tarp. I'm afraid if the point goes through the canvas all at once, it will create a tiny
plick.
Another ten minutes.
I remove the pencil and slowly bring one eye to the hole, but it is too small for me to see anything. My fingers creep back to my pocket in slow motion, to retrieve a fat ballpoint pen. By twisting its metal cone into the existing canvas hole, after an excruciating amount of time I manage to enlarge the pinhole into a quarter-inch porthole.
The hole is still too small to record anything with precision,
but panning around I can make out a maze of beams, the familiar clutter of a floor under construction, a faraway broken panel revealing a patch of sky, and no silhouette of a guard. I do notâoh, how exasperatingâdo not see the sky becoming darker.
I retreat once again to the film of my memory. Where was I? AhâJean-Louis arrives. We fight, I fail. I start my “new organisation.” I find Barry, I lose Barry. Annie's sandals, Annie's cats, Annie's tender understanding ⦠I forget time for another eternity, until Jean-François breaks the spell by tapping his heels against my groin.
Transgressing our vow of silence for the first time, I whisper, annoyed but in the softest voice, “
Whaaaat?
” My friend wants to know when we're getting out. I let go an extremely faint and trailing,
“Shuuut uuup!”
and retire to my recollections.
I find Barry again, I visit the hiding place he discovered, I hunt for accomplices â¦
Such mental vagabondage must do away with a few hours, but I am still not rewarded with a dark sky. Instead, I get a sky wanting to become darker ⦠and a terrifying ophthalmic migraine for stupidly having left my retina glued to the minuscule hole for so long: eyes open or closed, I see little accordions of bright silver floating around. Will this problem affect my equilibrium on the wire?
Why worry?
I dive back into the past for a long while until Jean-François hits me again. The immobility is torturing him, he must change position. I forbid him. He could fall; a shift in the canvas could alert a guard. He begs me to remove his shoes. I would kill to free my own feet. If only someone could see us, how absurd and grand: we spend probably half an hour untying each other's shoelaces and pulling off the four heavy construction boots, one by one, without perceptible movement, without a sound. The steel I-beam is still cutting through my butt, but what a relief to move my toes, and it's not completely unpleasant to have Jean-François's naked feet resting on my crotch.
It's still daylight; I go back to the story of my adventure. I make the phony I.D.s, take that pitiful trip to upstate New York â¦
Once more Jean-François interrupts, demanding to know if night has come. “No,” I growl, in the lowest possible tone.
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I'm at the point of Jean-Louis's most recent arrival and the discord that followed, when Jean-Francois is at it again: he wants to know what time it is. “How would I know?” I reply, fingering through my pants my sturdy pocket watch.
The exercise of pulling out the watch and bringing its face under the dim light emanating from the hole seems to occupy half an hour. I confess to Jean-François, “I've got a watch!” “Bastard!” he whispers back.
The ray of light is not wide enough to illuminate a whole numeral on the face of the watch. Slowly, I promenade each number under the lightâIs that a 3? A 2?âuntil, guessing more than reading, I can tell what figure it is. It's my bad luck that at this moment, the two thin hands of the watch are far apart from each other, so I must chase them with my tiny fading spotlight across the face of the watch. When I see one hand, I lose the other, and they keep moving on their own! When I lose a number, it takes me a great deal of time to trap its shape and read it again. By now my pounding headache has me half blind.
No doubt, if I survive this ordeal, I'll give lectures on the infinitesimally small and the relativity of time.
An eternity after having pulled out the watch, I am victorious: “It is eight o'clock!” I share the news with Jean-François, who, aware of my struggle, replies, “Yeah, or twenty to twelve!”
Another triumph: through my minuscule porthole, the sky is decidedly turning dark. Soon, soon, this waiting will come to an end.
I rest my eyes and return to my story. But now I'm confused. Too many players, too many scenesâthe film overlaps, then fades to black. Much time has passed. Why, when I decipher the watch again, does it read only 8:30?
From now on, each time I bounce out of the story, the pain is excruciating: my muscles are crushed by the steel, my eyes are
burning, my head is exploding, immobility zigzags cramps all over my body, and my patience has evaporated. Jean-François is in similar agony.
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Repeatedly, I nail the cable's crate shut. Over and over, I order “One-oh- four!” in a freight elevator that goes nowhere. I force the train of my memories to keep running, but the facts refuse to march past. Glued to the pinhole, glued to the pocket watch, listening to the pain, I count each second of each minute. An eternity, indifferent to us, calmly stacks them on the scaffold of time, until it is pitch-black outside and my watch reads nine o'clock.
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To hell with precautions! Forgetting to whisper, I tell my friend to get out, to stay barefoot, and to grab with me the two linked coils of the enormously heavy walk-cable. I lift the canvas carefully, I look around. “Let's go!”
Stiff and fragile, we tiptoe in painâbut in complete silenceâthe twenty feet separating our hiding place from the ministaircase leading to the roof. At the base of the stairs, we put our hands on the coilsâ
Stop! We hear loud conversation coming from the roof, laughter, what sounds like the clash of beer bottles.
Terrified, we dash back to the hiding place.
There seems to be a party on the roof, probably a group of construction workers celebrating. How could this noisy group have brushed by us without our hearing? Could the tarp have muffled the sound so perfectly? Probably the happy gathering is illegal, and they tiptoed their way to the top. Did our guard play a part in that scheme? We were right to stay dead like stones. We cannot even share our bewildermentâwe're back to strict immobility and muteness. For how long? Don't the gods take pity on us?
I am back to my thoughts, but no longer in the past. I think if the merrymakers up there decide to party through the night, there will be no dancing wirewalker in the morning. I liberate one ear from the tarp to track the faint coming and going sounds of
the party. After an eternity it becomes quiet. Have they gone, as silently as they had come? To be safe, I force us to wait, still and silent, for another hour, our ultimate torment.
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Gently lifting the canvas, I'm about to get out when a faint talking-and-laughing murmur reaches my ear and grows and grows and comes toward us.
I instantly replace the canvas over my head and freeze, hitting Jean-François in the groin with my feet. I had forgotten: there is always a time in a party when people calm down and fall silent. The happy procession passes very close to us, then moves away. The echo of footsteps fades from our floor.
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Now the path should be clear. But what if ⦠?
For good measure, indifferent to our bodies' pain, their plea for motion, I order an extra quarter of an hour of dead stillness. Now, that is an eternity, and that you could call torture.
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It's 9:45. I gather my strength. I concentrate.
With infinite precautionsâI no longer trust my earsâwe slide silently out of our cocoon. We stumble invisibly to the staircase. Each of us grabs and lifts a coil of the walk-cableâI don't know how, they're too heavy for a mule. In a mad, obstinate gesture, I pick up the bag full of cavaletti lines and add it to my load. Jean-François is six feet ahead of me, his legs trembling, and like prisoners chained to each other, we inch our way up, one step at a time.
On the third step, my heart stops.
In front of me, visible through the skeleton of the staircase, barely fifty feet away, leaning his elbows on a small table under a naked light bulb, a man in uniform is staring at me with semiclosed eyes. On the table, I see a large flashlight, a walkie-talkie, and a guard's cap.
I lean back to halt Jean-François's climb. If I stop him, he's going to look back. If he looks back, I'll give him the most dramatic glance, alerting him that a disaster is in the making,
signaling with only my eyes, “Don't move, don't breathe, but keep gliding up, keep climbing, invisible and still!”
It's eerie, the guard has his eyes set on my person, but he does not seem to see me ⦠as if his eyes were looking through my body. Maybe he's sleeping ⦠with his eyes open? Maybe he's watching us and thinks we're a couple of workers earning overtime ⦠without helmets or shoes? Maybe he's under the influence of some drug?
But Jean-François will not stop! On the contrary, he's pulling me to the roof. I resist. For an instant, we're playing a surreal tug-of-war ⦠He wins!
Escaping the guard's field of vision has taken no longer than three seconds.
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Slapped in the face by a fresh wind, and despite the enormous load, we noiselessly collapse on top of each other on the roof, like rag dolls. Jean-François victoriously whispers in my ear in the fastest French: “I had seen your silly guard long before you, but thought we better not stop, that's why I pulled you!”
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I imagine what a ruckus we would have made if we had kept our shoes on. Another miracle!
A half miracle, actually ⦠since we are now on the roof, barefoot, three hours late, with only the walk-cable and cavalettis in our possession while the rest of the equipment is kept hostage by a guard who might stand post all night, who might come up to the roof at any moment.
My instinct is to bring my friend to his knees, force his head down through the staircase opening, and order him to stay like that, upside down, keeping the guard under surveillance until he leaves and we can retrieve our equipment, or until he comes to the roof and I can â¦
I do exactly that.
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Above a kneeling Jean-Francois, a concert of stars has started, just for me.
I know the coup is a failure. But I am happy to be on the roof, and I am insane.