Entry into the post-empire

September 2001.

A studious pupil with no particular physical hang-ups, I arrived in the sixth form with relative self-confidence. A few days later, in the middle of the afternoon of the 11th, I was attending one of my first English lessons when the teacher informed us of the terrorist attack on the New York business centre and various other strategic points in the United States. It was the first time I had heard of the Twin Towers, Manhattan and the Pentagon.

In the class there are two twin sisters, two half-portions; they're celebrating their birthday that day. We hardly know each other, and the event creates a strange kind of attention around them.

The first tower collapsed at around 4pm as I was walking home. The weather was fine and warm. When I arrived at the empty house, I turned on the TV and sat down behind the computer in the living room. The computer is positioned so that all I have to do is tilt my head slightly to one side to see my parents' cathode-ray tube TV, contained in a rectangular piece of furniture made of fake wood.

I connect to the Internet via the modem still connected to the telephone socket. As soon as the crackling sound − familiar to anyone who lived through the early days of the network − dies down, I open the browser of my Internet service provider Wanadoo. Methodically, on a Logitech keyboard, I type the following address into the search bar: http://www.sex.com.

Over the previous summer, I'd watched a couple of original VHS-quality video clips that had caught my attention.

In the first, a girl, obviously from Eastern Europe, is sodomised in a bedroom with walls lined with mirrors by a dark, tanned, dry guy. Slightly muscular, with a plump ass and flat stomach, she shows off her small, realistic breasts. The actor holds a camcorder in his left hand, and the editing alternates between his point of view and that of a third-party cameraman.

In the second clip, two teenage twins, this time of African descent, with measurements and proportions comparable to those of the Balkan actress in the first clip, find themselves caught up in an interracial threesome with an older, heavyset white man with a huge cock, who licks, fingers and fucks them in turn while having his asshole and balls massaged with a frozen grin.

As I watch one of the two girls cry with joy under the repeated strokes of the furious actor, Pujadas, hosting the special news programme, manages to capture my attention. I gradually turn my gaze away to the unedited images of the attacks, interspersed with comments from columnists and last-minute guests. Against a clear blue sky, the plane's trajectory curves and a fireball emerges from the tower. The sequence runs on a loop.

A few minutes later, the implosion of the second tower is announced and everything seems to be unfolding like something out of a J. G. Ballard novel. I sat there for a long time, hypnotised by the flow of photons. One detail caught my eye: mysterious black drops were slowly trickling down the sides of the collapsing towers. Eventually a commentator came up with the explanation: "trapped employees are jumping endlessly into the void".

In a way, for my young brain, these images resonated with those that scrolled across the external monitor of the family PC. The sheet metal crushed between the glass walls, the tanks exploding, the thick smoke − it was all quite fascinating. I was contemplating the economic-porno-industrial world into which, following in my parents' footsteps, I was also going to have to immerse myself.

I've forgotten what I did next. My English homework, some reading, a GameBoy game? Above all, I wonder what analyses I had to make for myself in the weeks that followed, and what words my parents might have uttered to express their point of view on this tragedy.

I sometimes return to the famous photograph, The Falling Man. A worker in a suit is falling upside down down along the walls, with their blinding reflections and endless geometric patterns. He is immortalised in a posture that is easy to imagine at the coffee machine.

I suggest the following experiment:

• download the photo
• rotate it vertically (with the guy's head at the top)
• look at it for a few seconds
• zoom in on the silhouette until all you see is a cluster of pixels