Nine Eleven

Jean-Jacques Greif

Nine Eleven

jjgreif.com

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Hi, Ken! “Eureka!” Nikita shouts. “You found the secret of teleportation?” Igor asks. “Not yet… But this tiny green rectangle I’ve been wondering about for days, down there on the terrace, I know what it is: a ping-pong table!” “Or maybe a piece of fake grass. You know, all these Wall Street guys play golf during the week-end.They install a putting-green on their roof to practice.” “I should bring a telescope.” “We could borrow one. I bet there are thousands in the World Trade Center.” Nikita always spends a few minutes at the window before checking his elder brother’s computers. When you look at Manhattan from the 78th floor, you discover another town: a patchwork of terraces, an embroidery of spherical andcylindrical water tanks, a lace of antennas and cables. Nikita doesn’t find this hidden city as much fun as the great metropolis that rocks and rolls around the clock at street level. There’s lots of life up there, actually, but you must raise your eyes to see it. The sky kneads and stretches clouds, frays them, gathers them like a flock of white sheep. Its powerful breath shakes the tower. Nikita remembersspending whole nights in the office to track bugs in bad software. At dawn, a fuzzy gray band above the horizon becomes pearly, then seems to blush when the sun prepares to emerge naked from the ocean. This morning, the sky looks like a piece of blue fabric without any sign of a white thread. Someday, Nikita thinks, I’ll go and take a closer look at this Barbie doll who stands in the harbor, withher flashy green dress. She raises her arm to salute her boyfriend. Hi, Ken! Igor smiles. “Checking that the Statue of Liberty didn’t fly away?” “If we had arrived on a boat, it would have welcomed us to New York City.” “People don’t come by boat anymore. They’re not looking for freedom, either.”

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“Dollars?” “You bet! From the airplane, I remember, I saw these towers thatflaunt America’s power.” “And you thought: someday, I’ll have an office in one of them.” “No—I wondered how people could distinguish them, since they were twins. I thought they looked like chopsticks emerging out of a rice bowl.” “They were there already?” “Ten years ago? Of course. You saw them too, actually. You stuck your nose on the window… You said: Good morning, good morning! The only words ofEnglish you knew.” “I don’t even remember not knowing English.” “You were seven. You were so funny!” Nikita looks at his big Timex watch. 7:46 AM. All the computers display the same time. They’re supposed to, as he synchronizes them himself. “Anything unusual, Igor?” “Yesterday, the big server crashed again. A subscription screen for Fiddle Diddle came in empty. A violinist in Chicago or San Diegothinks he has subscribed, but he won’t receive his weekly newsletter.” “He’ll try again… Let me check the server. It’s getting temperamental with age, anyway. You’ll have to renew your hardware, you know.” “I barely finished paying for it.” “You wanted to become a capitalist entrepreneur! Otherwise, you should have stayed in Belarus… All right, I’m going to school.” “So how’s senior year?” “Justbeginning. We spent the two days last week filling up forms and listening to speeches. Today is only the second day of real class. We’re still getting acquainted with our teachers… You know what, if you talk to the violin guy, you should tell him to record sound samples for each instrument. We could digitize them and insert them into Fiddle Diddle.” In the middle of the 78th floor, there is a 2,600square-foot hall called Sky Lobby, a kind of transfer station between express and local elevators. Nikita enters a downward express cabin. It takes him a minute to reach the ground floor. He exits the tower at 7:55. He runs along West Street. Six hundred yards. A good thing my brother’s company is so close, he thinks. He crosses West Street on the Tribeca Bridge. At 7:59, he enters Stuyvesant...