The Dark Path Read Online Free PDF

feet extra hard as I cross the shoddy wooden bridge over the creek on the second hole, and the mother duck under the girders flaps out and bitches,
Seriously? Again? I’ve got kids here!
    At the end of each lap I zip through the woods and up the hill on the dark path. I can feel around me cool shadows touching my skin. I breathe these shadows in and they’re more than oxygen, they’re a dark essence thrilling my blood. When I charge along the path like this, alone, I feel words gathering at the tip of God’s tongue. If I can just run fast enough or purely enough or with the whole of my being, He’ll let loose the words. He’ll speak and tell me my one sentence. He’ll tell me my life.

Chapter Two
    IT’S SEPTEMBER 1987, and my parents are dropping me off for my freshman year at Georgetown University. As they’re preparing to leave, my father hugs me close.
    â€œDon’t get mono,” he warns. “Schickler men are highly susceptible to mono.”
    â€œAll right, Dad.”
    We’re standing in my dorm room. My mother is getting something from the car while my father gives me last-minute advice.
    â€œHave adventures.” He pulls me close once more. I smell his aftershave and another smell that’s just him. I’ve always loved the mix of these smells.
    â€œI love you, David. Don’t get mono.”
    â€œI won’t.”
    A week later I have mono. I lie alone in my dorm room all day each day, missing classes, losing weight, spitting up blood, staring at my Morrissey poster.
    I’ve never been so sick. My neck is hugely swollen, and any word I try to speak scrapes like a razor blade in my throat. Despite being bedridden, I can’t sleep day or night. Even just raising my head off the mattress is a blinding-white mistake, so I just lie here, scared that I’m dying.
    My father knew what he was warning me about. He had mono severely once and it almost killed him.
    He too attended McQuaid High School, back in the fifties, and he worked his ass off there to get a full college ride to General Motors Institute. At GMI his nickname was Saint Jack because he got flawless grades and never slept around or did anything to impede his path toward marrying his sweetheart back home—my mother—and rising like a comet through the GM ranks. He pulled all-nighters in the library and lab, and this frayed him so badly one season that he collapsed with mono and ended up in the hospital.
    I guess I’ve frayed myself, too. At McQuaid I did five hours of homework each night and graduated fourth in my class. Over this past summer I put in ten-hour days at an auto dealership to earn college tuition money. Weird older men customers kept gripping my shoulders and saying I was bound for great things. One imparted to me what he described as the key truth of living.
    â€œA nigger will work for ya,” he said, “but not a nigra. Learn the difference. There’s niggers and nigras, and nigras are useless. Remember that.”
    Another man frowned when I told him excitedly that I’d spoken on the phone the night before with Adam Goldman from Bethesda, Maryland, my soon-to-be roommate.
    â€œAdam Goldman,” the man repeated. “I bet he’ll be a very earthy and unspiritual person. They all are.”
    â€œHoyas?” I asked.
    â€œJews,” he said.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    I LIE LIMP in my dorm bed, all energy sucked from my body. I’ve been here a month, but all I’ve seen of campus so far are my room’s concrete walls. Painted pale yellow, they look jaundiced and sickly. They look like the mucus I keep spitting up.
    â€œDo you need blankets?” asks my roommate. “Should I call the doctor again?”
    Adam isn’t earthy and unspiritual. He’s kind and funny and on the football team. When his mom finds out about my mono, she moves Adam out of our room for a while, but she drives in from