LATE JULY. New York City. A bedroom on the top floor of a four-story building in which I installed an air conditioner with several thousand too few BTUs. I barely know what a BTU is. The temperature that day reached into the upper 90s Fahrenheit, with humidity just short of actual water. The tiny weak air conditioner struggled to cool the room down while a few feet away I struggled to fall asleep. And yet I was unable to sleep without some sort of covering. In this case it was the barest edge of my lightest sheet, touching the smallest possible part of my torso.
Why this compulsion to be covered, however minimally, in order to sleep?