An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World Read Online Free

I knew that if I jumped out of bed even now, and dressed and ran off to school breakfastless, then I might perhaps arrive before the teacher called off my name, which, beginning as it did with “V,” was at the bottom of the attendance list. And I knew that my father, too, if he had not already leftfor the office, was also looking at the clock, thinking that it might not be too late to force me out of bed and take me to school in the car; but he did his best to judge my case fairly, and reconsidered the evidence which he had seen me exhibit: Was my temperature genuinely high, and did I look all that pale? Eventually he decided that yes, I was sick; or that at any rate it would be difficult to establish that I was not well; and it would certainly be too late to take me to school; for achieving that would involve first confronting and then besting my mother, who stood with her back toward him, also looking at the clock, but only unobtrusively, between the breakfast dishes, so as not to give my father an excuse for reopening the subject; and then eight o’clock had come and the issue was decided. It was only then that the hands of the clock stopped once again, and I became completely absorbed in my state of sickness.
    The world outside blurred in the sunlight, in the same way that a streetlamp, seen through tears, becomes a bright, vague star; and this lack of definition seemed to me a
force
with a self, swelling until it pushed against my windowpane, halted at first by the smooth, cold surface, but waiting there, growing stronger and more determined, until it was able to seep in through some edge-crack. My desk, my schoolbooks and the few toys which I had not yet given up slowly became enveloped in its luminous sparkle; the closet’s black mouth filled with it; and then it flowed around me from three sides, and into me. Charged with it, I began to forget the cues and sensations of health, as in health I could not imagine myself as feeling sick, nor could I have much empathy for my sister Julie when she had the measles, nor keep from getting angry at my teacher when she did not come in that day and we had to have a substitute. The idea of a world beyond the window, which was now a translucent slab of light, or for that matter of any other possibility than that of lying in my bed immobile, became as dry and strange as some ontological argument of the Middle Ages, and by degrees ever less likely, until when at mid-morning, my mother came in to bring me a cup of tea or some soup, I refused politely, in the same way that I would have done if she’d come to ask whether I would be willing to study lawat the university. This inability to grasp my own state of existence of the day before would have possessed me so much that by midafternoon, when my mother came in to read to me, I no longer shifted my position beneath the blankets at all, but lay absolutely still in the hot faintness of my malady as though I were one of those people one reads about in old books who are always getting becalmed in the tropics.
    As soon as I was old enough to read by myself I stopped having my mother read to me at night, because I always disagreed with my sister as to what should be read to us that evening; and it was so much better for me to read what I wished while Julie sat on my mother’s lap and listened to her reading from
Just So Stories
or a poem from
A Child’s Garden of Verses
(both of which I now found childish) in her slow, soft voice; and when I was sick my mother would simply buy me a book, such as
Captains Courageous
, which I was too proud to ask her to read to me. But when I did still like having my mother read everything to me, and I was absorbed by poems like the one about the fight between the gingham dog and the calico cat, or the one that described a voyage to Africa, in which the traveler sees the knotty crocodile of the Nile (but I used to think that it was the N AUGHTY C ROCODILE that had eaten people up and so must be