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.”

“Spiritually…” I said, not entirely sure if I was saying it because that’s what I actually thought was at issue, or because spirituality was something she’d always believed in to such a degree that we’d constantly quarreled about it. Nor was I entirely sure if that was meant as a genuine gesture toward reconciliation or an attempt at being manipulative. “I guess that would be the word…”

In any case, it didn’t work. “Don’t talk to me about that,” she dismissed it. “Spiritually you were always a disaster. That’s you. Don’t worry about it. I have some things to do.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m sure,” she said. “Goodbye.”

—

I stood outside. It was a moment—and they are few—when I wished I could pray—to some hard-core version of a monotheistic top-of-it-all deity who had all the answers.