And that, Seif—though I couldn’t tell at the time—was some kind of a beginning. Later, I would see that it had given me a path through life, but all I had then was how strange and indefinable it was, my father dying on the very day I’d faced down that wretched memory in which he’d figured. Like it was a punishment, say, or the price for confronting my fears, or that, having managed to actually gain one thing, I had to lose another. Or that both were aspects of the same mysterious whole; that it had to be depleted there to reach completion here.

There are laws that run beneath the surface of events without our noticing them. They only break cover and trip us when we refuse to accept our roles as cogs in the machine—when we decide to swim against the current or confront our fears as I’d done that day. That said, some aspect of these laws—these mechanisms of give and take—still manage to make their way through to us, distorted as though seen through water, garbled like prophecies. Like the heretical notion that we’re each granted exactly twenty-four carats of good fortune, no more and no less, which is parceled out between health and wealth, intelligence and heredity, beauty and luck—between all those things a person hopes will be theirs. It doesn’t take much experience, or a rich long life, to realize that nothing could be more misleading. I’ve seen women with beauty and brains and breeding and happiness, and others who are ugly and sick and poor, begging for bread and circling saints’ tombs in the hope it will bring them children. I’ve seen the disfigured, missing limbs and eating from the garbage, and known mass murderers who died in their beds, a smile upon their lips because they knew there was nothing to come, no punishment and no reward. If there truly is a divine hand then it is not so much steering our course as clutching fistfuls of sand and casting them into the wind to fall as they may. That motion we call our will is just the force of the wind driving upon us: grains of sand whipped through the air.

People who don’t understand this will tell you to stand firm, to fight and test yourself. “Settle down,” they’ll tell you, “build, accumulate.” These things are chains. They’ll hold you fast until fate—let’s call it fate for now—until fate finally finds you, just where it wants you, and deals its blow. Has its revenge for your temerity: your conviction that you could endure. You, with your castle of sand.