Of course, I’d felt good about that, because in sci-fi films automatons have consciousness, self-awareness, and feelings. It had also awakened tension and stress. Pulled my nervous system so tight that it created its own vibrations. I only realized that part now. Because it had stopped. I’d taken the first step. It brought me calm. Great calm. Even though I could discern that both ends were…could well be described as…Did not sane…clinically speaking…mean insane? Oh well, this end seemed more pleasing than the other.

—

I woke rested. Having slept deeply and well. I rose to go about my extraordinarily ordinary, bland, and trouble-free routines. Wake, feed the cats, shower, make the bed, go to town, coffee and something, read the paper, in print, not online. Go back home, pick up whatever needed picking up. Turn on the television, realize that I didn’t really want to watch anything that was on TV. Turn off the television.

There was a good, clean, touch of cold. Now that I was going to keep the place, I should be cutting and splitting firewood.

Suddenly I knew that the unknowns vastly outnumbered the knowns. The calm was a delusion. The eye of a hurricane. A trick. Mongol warriors on their ponies coming across the steppe, barbarians circling around a village, Viking longboats landing on the beach. After that first step, the second, or the third, or fourth, would take me back out where the winds were blowing, faster and stronger, faster and stronger, until they were howling.

—

I was alone.

Normally, not an issue. Accepted. Like I accepted the age in my body, that some summer days were heavy with heat and some winter days could be viciously cold, that The New York Times had obituaries in every issue because death never skipped a day. Now, I had a need, a forlorn craving, for someone to talk to, a destitute man holding out one hand for your spare change.

I went back into the house. I picked up the phone. I took a deep breath. I dialed my daughter, in Couzon-au-Mont-d’Or, a village along the Rhône, near Lyon. When she answered, I said, “Hello.”

She said, “Oh, it’s you.” Sounding totally U.S.A., both in accent and attitude. It’s what she’d grown up with. The years away hadn’t erased them.

“I just wanted to talk to you,” I said.

“Is it something terribly urgent?”

“It’s…it’s complicated…” My words found themselves stuck in the muck of family history and tangled in a thicket of waist-high weeds. “…I’m trying to reach out and…”

“Are you calling to say you have cancer, you’re on the verge of death, something like that?” Her voice was dry, flipping through various subjects, on little stiff paper cards, the sort they used in old-fashioned library catalogues.

“Nothing like that. Physically, physically, at least, I’m healthy, very healthy for my age.”

“Well, good for you.”