From “Phone Calls from the Apocalypse,” an essay in the collection Thin Places, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Nearly every day now, my phone rings from numbers unknown to me. The area codes are always Californian, and always different. The calls started from cities in or near Los Angeles: Culver City, Inglewood, Marina del Rey. Then, once I stopped picking them up, they’d come from farther north: Merced, Turlock, Patterson, Stockton.

My parents still live in California, so when I’d see these unlisted California numbers, I’d think that one of them was in…