The Book of Why Read Online Free PDF

different. You try to breathe, but nothing. You try again. Nothing. And then you stop trying. The dark gets darker. Silence. Nothingness.

 
    Y ou know, I always tried to avoid the dark. I sought out light; I created it any chance I had, whether day or night, but especially night, with a push or turn or flick of a switch. I knew where every source of light was. There was a standing lamp beside my bed—still there today, four decades later, used only when I visit my mother in Queens. At night I’d bear the dark until my parents turned on the TV. I hoped the sound would drown out my movements in bed, my reach for the lamp, the click of the switch. But my mother always heard. She would call up for me to turn out the light, and I would, or I would turn the switch twice in rapid succession so that it sounded like one click. Some nights she would come upstairs and turn off the light for me.
    In the dark, anything could happen. My eyes never quite adjusted. Some nights I would get up to use the bathroom, or pretend to use the bathroom, and would leave on the night-light above the sink. This small light from down the hall was just enough to allow me to see the paneling that covered my walls. I tried my best to find friendly faces in the wood. You could find any kind of face you wanted, and it took great concentration to ignore the scary faces—wide eyes, mouths open in fear or disbelief. Some nights my mother called up for me to turn off the bathroom light, and I would tell her that I felt sick, and would lie on the bathroom floor, and sometimes in the morning I was sick, as if I’d created the illness with my mind.
    Desperate, I stole my father’s matches and hid them in a pair of purple striped tube socks I never wore. I coughed to cover the sound of the match struck, then counted down the seconds before the flame reached my hand.
    There was a light on my bedroom ceiling, controlled by a wall switch by the door. There was a bright hallway light seldom used. There were two lamps in my parents’ room set on nightstands on either side of their bed. There was an overhead light, but long ago the bulbs had blown and my father hadn’t bothered to replace them. There were three lamps in the living room, and the light from the TV, and the almost constant glow from the embers of my father’s cigarettes. Through the small square window in our front door came the moon and, on clear nights, the stars. In the dining room were a chandelier and a row of lights inside the breakfront that held my parents’ good china, seldom used. There was a light above the kitchen table beneath which I ate and did homework, and a small stove light, perhaps my favorite, because it was kept on always. No matter how dark my room, I could, as a last resort, imagine that halogen stove light, below it a clock suspended at 2:22, a time to which I attributed special, almost magical meaning, its significance unclear to me until many years later, when I met you on February 22. It was bright the night we met—lightning outside, stage light inside—and it was meant to be, I remember thinking: everything had been leading to that moment.
    There was a light in our yard, and a light in each neighbor’s yard, a row of lights I could see over the fences dividing our properties, and beyond the farthest yard were the lights of Manhattan, what those of us in Queens called the city, even though we were the city, too.
    There was the problem of the basement light. The switch was at the bottom of the stairs; you had to go down into the dark to feel for it (it always seemed to be moving), and when you were finished changing the laundry, you had to turn off the light and run up the stairs before something pulled you back into the dark.
    I was often in trouble for turning on lights that didn’t need to be on, or for leaving on lights I’d been told how many times to make sure I turned off.
    But you already know all this about me. You