Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin

Author:Mark Helprin [Helprin, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Well, so what, I thought. I felt alive and angry in that wonderful taxing way in which you feel alive and angry when someone is firing a gun at you. I suppose that, early on, the wires in my brain were crossed, because when someone shoots at me I tend not to run away from the gun but toward it. I feel then, and only then, peace and joy. Even when I flew, when the world seemed full of light and all its edges were so well defined that they glowed like silver, I myself did not come afire until the sound of the cannon, and then it was as if a switch had been thrown and the lights of a great city had all come on at once.

After a moment of brief reflection and prayer, I ran to the side of the building and leapt up to the fire escape ladder. I thought my tremendous jump was, somehow, funny, and I weakened with laughter as I hung from the last rung of the ladder until I almost lost my grip. Then I scolded myself and began to climb. I think that if the sniper had been aware of my chortlings and ya-hoos he might have surrendered, but he was too far above me and probably too crazed to hear.

The fire escape dripped with chunks of masonry, iron, and lead, like a shot tower, or a waterfall breaking through a tangle of fallen trees. Each spent bullet, chip of stone, or piece of iron rail jingled not once or twice but a hundred times as it fell, striking different surfaces at different angles and velocities in a great concert of chimes and clinks. I myself was the only upward-moving pachinko ball pushing against this fragmented tide, rising story by story. It was perfectly safe. Because of the kindly suppressive fire of the police, the sniper was unable to shoot downward.

He was on the tenth floor, and when I got to the ninth, I stopped. Even I will not go straight at a gun at close range in a narrow field. There's no joy in that. I followed the fire escape as it wrapped around the building. Only then did I go up to the tenth floor. But you couldn't just round the corner, for the tenth-floor catwalk stopped abruptly at a turret window. I might have tiptoed across the ledge, but the sniper would have seen me in the window, shot through the glass, and I would have died like a bird in flight.

I climbed the roof until I sat at the very top, at the peak of a wedge of slate shingles, with my feet hanging out over the slope. To get to the ledge above the fire escape where the sniper had positioned his rifle, I would have to slide about twelve feet down the slate. I couldn't see beyond the end of the slide except to the plaza a hundred feet below.

My problem was how to get there without being launched into space in the last and most spectacular toboggan ride of my life.

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