Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin Read Free Book Online

thinking in parallel and in secret. In the end, I seemed to have lost my enthusiasm, for, among other things, the scheme was as implausible as one would expect of a plot hatched in a bar of the Hotel Hassler by four opera singers and an investment banker who had spent part of his boyhood in a mental institution. But, though I concealed it well, I was burning with excitement.
    I'm getting ahead of myself, which is strange to say when one is speaking of events of almost half a century gone, as the only real way to get ahead of oneself is to tell the future and report from death. Is approaching death what has driven me to write this memoir? Certainly not.
    If things work out well, then you will come to understand exactly why I have written it, although I use the words
written
and
said
almost interchangeably—not because I am unaware of the difference, but because I have found, even at the start, that the power of a memoir is to turn voice to word and word to voice until they are fused together as smoothly as a sheet of oil upon a slab of ice.
    My motive, as you will come to know if you are who I hope you are, is very plain. Perhaps my words will have some other effect, but my purpose is as simple as a machine designer's urge to diagram his engine, or the explorer's desire to draw a map. I have a homely task to fulfill, and this is my method of fulfilling it.
    Should you be someone entirely unknown to me, well then, the arrow has been lost, the seed driven by its sad and diaphanous parachute to a vastly different realm, where it will sparkle in barren silence for an infinity. The decision is not mine. It belongs, as does everything, to the wind.
    Let us assume for a moment that I missed the target, and that I will never know who you are. Still, I will address you as
you.
If you are a man, then perhaps we could have flown together, or robbed a bank, two activities that are always absorbing and enjoyable if done properly. In the case of flying, the great thing is to be carried where you could not have imagined you would ever be, and to come back alive. In the case of robbing a bank, the requisite is that no one be hurt, which is actually as difficult as or more difficult than extracting the money. Ideally, the reallocation of funds should not come at the expense of honest citizens, banking organizations, the government, or the polity, but, rather, purely by a swift attack upon what is corrupt, illegitimate, and untenable.
    And, if you are a woman, perhaps I would have loved you. That is not to say that you would have loved me. I don't assume that. In fact, I assume the opposite. I have been difficult and objectionable, some would say absolutely impossible, since I was born, well, since I was ten—and yet I had in me far more than my expected share of love. Perhaps this was because, in a life that was a paradigm of unrequitedness, with so much investment and so little expenditure, love grew upon itself and was many times multiplied.
    If you doubt the veracity of my story, remember that in the compression of eighty years into so short a span as this memoir the time between events is lost, and it is only the grace of time slowly unfurling that gives to the shocks of one's life the illusion of expectedness.
    I had planned to write chronologically, but then realized that, of course, I don't think chronologically. Writing a memoir is like fishing. You cast your line and you pull on it when a fish strikes, but you never know what will be on the other end, for the ocean is deep and is filled with marvelous creatures that do not break the surface in expected order. Nor do they swim under the waves with the whales leading and the minnows at the end of long straight lines. A memoir, like a fish, will not thrive under every discipline. Another way of putting this is that if you alphabetize the Iliad you will have approximately the Athens telephone book. When I think back, things don't line up, they stand out, so I will take them as they