Daniel Stillman has 42 Facebook friends. His cell phone contains 18 contacts, two of them for pizza delivery. Six people follow him on Twitter. Four readers subscribe to his blog; he's pretty sure one of them followed him on accident.

And now a category 5 storm is about to wipe all this away.

In its wake will be left a single girl, a neighbor he never knew, and a new reprieve from the digital maelstrom of his life, a great silence like the eye of some terrific storm.