Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin Page B

poison and entirely destructive addiction, has vanquished the human soul, spoiled innocence, and destroyed childhood. It is virtually omnipotent: I have never convinced anyone, not even one person, not to drink it.
    Miss Mayevska happened not to drink it, which was pure luck. But maybe, had she drunk it, she would have stopped—she, of all the people in the world—for she really loved me.
    Constance drank, at first in secret. And Marlise.... Although of course Marlise would not drink at home, she drinks every day, several times—expresso, cappuccino, mocha, and God knows what else. She thinks it's perfectly normal and innocent, and has been drinking coffee since she was four. She does it as easily as breathing. That gorgeous body, that I have never been able to resist, has coffee flowing through its interior channels in total hideous corruption, and you would never know it. By the time we kiss, I can't even taste it. But it's there, it's working, it's horrible.
    All over the world, people drink it, blindly, by the million, by the hundreds of millions, by the
billion.
And they must have it, they think they cannot do without it, and yet it is not a food, or water, or oxygen. No one would ever give it up for me, or for anyone else. It is more powerful than love.
    The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to expresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself. Even the voodoo priest consumed his many cups of coffee each day after I had been ignominiously wheeled into the hall.
    At mealtimes the stench was appalling. People cannot even eat without it. They cannot wake without it. Many cannot sleep without it. They refer to it as
my. "My
coffee." On at least one occasion I have assaulted a waitress who approached me, asking, "Would you like your coffee now?"
    "Madam!" I say, "it's not automatic! You assume too much! Just because you and most other people in the world are fiends and addicts does not mean that I am!"
    Though I have made a thousand attempts at resistance and though I have as my model the French Underground, which ultimately was successful, I have not a single ally, not a single friend, and am doomed to fail. The gentle world has been enslaved by the drug and lubricant of the synchronous, the conforming, the coordinated, the collective, and the congruent.
    My one strength, my one victory, is memory, for in memory I purify, in memory I am alone, in memory I appear before the highest judge, far above the static and the clouds, as if in the sunlit clearings of the garden in Niterói, where all is tranquil and the world below is cool, windy, and blue.
    I sank back on my pillows in defeat, remembering my first mortal combat, which in many ways set the tone of my life. It was a melancholy thing brought to me so suddenly and unexpectedly that I have always equated it with an electric shock, something I came to know well soon after the defense of my existence was deemed to have been a sin.
    Perhaps I should begin by telling you, if you don't already know, that cities—and the city of New York is the city I know best, the city of my birth—have a voice. I am not furthering some useless metaphor invented as the engine of a crackpot academic paper that stretches for pages and pages without ever coming to rest upon a concrete noun, or a color, or the story of something that really happened (or might have).
    No. The city has a voice, and a song, that change over its history and can actually be heard. In 1950, when Manhattan had virtually no air conditioners, when office windows opened, and there were elevated trains, the white sound that lifted off the streets was very different from that of a quarter of a century later, when, as in São Paulo, the buildings no longer baffled sound, and millions of air conditioners were humming at a high pitch.
    The presence or absence of automobiles, and then