Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin Read Free Book Online Page B

the time I exited his jurisdiction I had scarred my teacher, scalded him, lamed him, and punched out his pointed and drooping tooth.
    Others were worse. When I was not yet ten, an art teacher whose name was Sanco Demirel ordered me to have my hair clipped. I threw back at him a simple flat
no.
He immediately charged through the rows of desks, lifted me into the air, and transported me to the book-storage room. Rage often builds upon itself, and his was no exception. As I flew, painfully gripped, high above my accustomed altitude, I feared for my life.
    He slammed the door of the book room and took a cane from the top shelf. "Bend over!" he commanded.
    For me, this was a defining moment. I decided then and in an instant that defiance and death are preferable to subjugation, and I narrowed my eyes, signaling for a fight. Irritated beyond measure, he began to chase me around the room, flailing with the cane. Books flew about like chickens, but I was able to escape. It did not take long to make him apoplectic, and I knew that if he caught me he was going to kill me. I rattled the door. It was locked, the latch frozen, and I hadn't the strength to move it, but he thought I was about to escape.
    He was at the other end of the room. So much lay littered between us that he despaired of catching me, and threw the cane in frustration. It missed, it clattered, and it was soon in my hands.
    He remained unfazed, for I was only half his size. The straight end of the cane was quite narrow. As soon as I realized this, and that my possession of the cane gave him an excuse to beat me to smithereens, I put it in the pencil sharpener.
    As I began to turn the crank, his jaw dropped. Had he moved quickly he would have had me, but he hesitated. When I removed the bamboo shaft from the gray sharpening machine, I was no longer a fourth-grader about to be turned the color of blotched jam, I was
Achilles.
    The shaft was three feet long, with a six-inch tapered point of razor-sharp, hard, blond bamboo—and I was as agile as a gnat. I could jump and twist unlike any grown man, and my reflexes were so fresh that I was able to toss five pennies from the back of my hand and catch them one at a time before they hit the floor. I will never forget the light and uplifting moment when the power fled from him to me. A beam of sunlight came through the windows above the highest shelves and enveloped me in a bright golden disc.
    The first thing he said, shrinking back, was, "I didn't intend to hurt you."
    My answer to that lie was, "Sanco Demirel, you are going to die."
    I have always been fiercely protective of children, especially myself, as the task was almost exclusively mine from a rather early age. I had not then the moderating experience that later years would fail to bring, and I fully intended to kill him, right then, in the book-storage room. I jumped the piles of overturned primers, fragrant pine drawers that had flown from cabinet carcasses like extracted elephant teeth, and chairs turned helplessly on their sides. And, by God, the ray of sun followed me, shining upon the golden sword that I was ready to thrust into any one of a hundred terrible places in Sanco Demirel's cruel bullying body.
    He threw a textbook of physiology at me, and as it flew through the air—easily dodged, I might add—a red and blue diagram of the circulatory system flashed from the flipping pages. Thus, I decided to stab him in his Psoas Quadratus Anastimositum. The sadness, loneliness, and determination of my eyes half-closed against the roaring sunlight convinced him that I was going to reach him and that I really was going to kill him, and he climbed the bookshelves in an attempt to escape through the narrow windows above. This exposed his Psoas and I felt the surge of grace and rage that is the mark of a warrior. As I closed for the kill, the door was smashed open by our rotund headmaster, whose expression I shall never forget.
    As I grew older I grew subtler,