For the Time Being Read online

  We have no chance of being here when the sun burns out. There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening. In fact, we are witnessing a mass extinction of animals: According to Oxford’s Robert M. May, most of the birds and mammals we know will be gone in four hundred years. But there have been five other such mass extinctions, scores of millions of years apart. People have made great strides toward obliterating other people, too, but that has been the human effort all along, and our cohort has only broadened the means, as have people in every century. Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy—probably a necessary lie—that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?

  A hundred years ago, Americans saw frenzy consuming their times, and felt the whole show could not go on much longer. Those people had seen electricity come and buffalo go. They had settled the country from shore to shore, run telegraph wires across the sea, and built spanning railroads that shortened the overland trail journey from five months to five days. America had surpassed England in the production of steel. Surely theirs were apocalyptic days. Rushed time and distance were converging on a vanishing point before their eyes. They could, by their own accounts, scarcely bear their own self-consciousness. Now they seem innocent; they sang “A Bicycle Built for Two” and endured their times’ moral and natural evils. Since those evils no longer threaten us close to home—neither slavery, civil war, nor bacterial infections—they do not, of course, seem so vividly terrible as our own evils.

  The closer we grow to death, the more closely we follow the news. Year after year, without ever reckoning the hours I wasted last week or last year, I read the morning paper. I buy mass psychotherapy in the form of the lie that this is a banner year. Or is it, God save us from crazies, aromatherapy? I smell the rat, but cannot walk away.

  It is life’s noise—the noise of the news—that sings “It’s a Small World After All” again and again to lull you and cover the silence while your love boat slips off into the dark.

  The blue light of television flickers on the cave wall. If the fellow crawls out of the cave, what does he see? Not the sun itself, but night, and the two thousand visible stars. Once, I tried to converse with him, the fellow who crawled out of his blue-lit cave to the real world. He had looked into this matter of God. He had to shout to make himself heard: “How do you stand the wind out here?”

  I don’t. Not for long. I drive a schoolkids’ car pool. I shouted back, “I don’t! I read Consumer Reports every month!” It seemed unlikely that he heard. The wind blew into his face. He turned and faced the lee. I do not know how long he stayed out. A little at a time does for me—a little every day.

  CHAPTER TWO

  B I R T H Memoirs of a Cape Breton Doctor describes, among many more dramatic incidents, the delivery of a transverse-presenting baby. “I looked after the baby…. I think I had the most worry because I had to use artificial respiration for a long time. I didn’t time how long I was using mouth-to-mouth breathing, but I remember thinking during the last several minutes that it was hopeless. But I persisted, and I was finally rewarded when Anna MacRae of Middle River, Victoria County, came to life.” She came to life. There was a blue baby-shaped bunch of cells between the two hands of Dr. C. Lamont MacMillan, and then there was a person who had a name and a birthday, like the rest of us. Genetically she bore precisely one of the 8.4 million possible mixes of her mother’s and father’s genes, like the rest of us. On December 1, 1931, Anna MacRae came to life. How many centuries would you have to live before this, and thousands of incidents like it every day, ceased to astound you?

  Now it is a city hospital on a Monday morning. This is the obstetrical ward. The doctors and nurses wear scrubs of red, blue, or green, and white running shoes. They are, according to the tags clipped to their pockets, obstetricians, gynecologists, pediatricians, pediatric nurse practitioners, and pediatric RNs. They consult one another on the hoof. They carry clipboards and vanish down corridors. They push numbered buttons on wall plaques, and doors open.

  There might well be a rough angel guarding this ward, or a dragon, or an upwelling current that dashes boats on rocks. There might well be an old stone cairn in the hall by the elevators, or a well, or a ruined shrine wall where people still hear bells. Should we not remove our shoes, drink potions, take baths? For this is surely the wildest deep-sea vent on earth: This is where the people come out.

  Here, on the obstetrical ward, is a double sink in a little room—a chrome faucet, two basins and drains, just like any kitchen sink. There is a counter on the left, and a counter on the right. Overhead, a long heat lamp lights and warms the two counters and the sink.

  This is where they wash the newborns like dishes. A nurse, one or another, spends most of an eight-hour shift standing here at the sink.

  Different nurses bring in newborns, one after another, and line them down the counter to the sink’s left. The newborns wear flannel blankets. Knit hats the size of teacups keep sliding up their wet heads. Their faces run the spectrum from lavender through purple and red to pink and beige.

  Nurse Pat Eisberg wears her curly blond hair short in back; her thin neck bends out of a blue collarless scrub as she leans left for the next bundle. The newborn’s face is red.

  “Now you,” she says to it in a warm voice, unsmiling. She slides it along the counter toward her, plucks off its cap, unwraps its body and leaves the blanket underneath. This baby is red all over. His tadpole belly is red; his scrotum, the size of a plum, is fiercely red, and looks as if it might explode. The top of his head looks like a dunce cap; he is a conehead. He gazes up attentively from the nurse’s arms. The bright heat lamp does not seem to bother his eyes, nor do the silver nitrate eyedrops, which prevent gonorrhea. His plastic ID bracelet, an inch wide, covers a full third of his forearm. Someone has taped his blue umbilical cord—the inch or so left of it—upward on his belly. A black clamp grips the cord’s end, so it looks like a jumper cable.

  The nurse washes this boy; she dips a thin washcloth again and again in warm water. She cleans his head and face, careful to wash every fold of his ears. She wipes white lines of crumbled vernix from folds in his groin and under his arms. She holds one wormy arm and one wormy leg to turn him over; then she cleans his dorsal side, and ends with his anus. She has washed and rinsed every bit of his red skin. The heat lamp has dried him already. The Qur’an says Allah created man from a clot. The red baby is a ball of blood Allah wetted and into which he blew. So does a clown inflate a few thin balloons and twist them lickety-split into a rabbit, a dog, a giraffe.

  Nurse Pat Eisberg drains the sink. She drops the new-born’s old blanket and hat into an open hamper, peels a new blanket and hat from the pile on the right, and sticks the red baby on the right-hand counter. She diapers him. She swaddles him: she folds the right corner of the blanket over him and rolls him back to tuck it under him; she brings up the bottom blanket corner over his chest; she wraps the left corner around and around, and his weight holds it tight as he lies on his back. Now he is tidy and compact, the size of a one-quart Thermos. She caps his conehead, and gives the bundle a push to slide it down the counter to the end of the line with the others she has just washed.

  The red newborn looks up and studies his surroundings, alert, seemingly pleased, and preternaturally calm, as if enchanted.

  “We move between two darknesses,” E. M. Forster wrote. “The two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so.”

  How I love Leonardo da Vinci’s earliest memory! “As I was in my cradle a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.” The European kite, two feet long, has a deeply forked tail. Soaring like a swallow, it swoops hawklike
to snatch reptiles; it also eats corpses.

  Every few minutes another nurse comes in to pick up whichever washed baby has reached the head of the line. The nurse returns the parcel to its mother. When the red boy’s number is up, I follow.

  The mother is propped on a clean hospital bed. She looks a bit wan. When I was on the ward a few hours ago, I had heard her cry out, thinly, aaaa!—until the nurse shut the door. Now the mother is white as the sheets, in her thirties, puffy, pretty, and completely stunned. She accepts compliments on the baby with a lovely smile that costs her such effort it seems best not to address her further. She looks like the cartoon Road Runner who has just had a steamroller drive over it.

  The skinny father is making faces at his son. He keeps checking his watch. “You are thirty minutes old,” he tells him. The nurse has put the baby on his back in a bassinet cart. Americans place infants on their backs now—never on their stomachs, lest they smother in their sleep and die. Ten years ago, Americans placed infants on their stomachs—never on their backs, lest they choke in their sleep and die.

  There are six of us in this room—the parents, the baby, two nurses, and I. Four of us cluster around the baby. The mother, across the room, faces ahead; her eyes are open and unmoving. Winter light pours through a big window beyond her bed. Everyone else is near the door, talking about the baby.

  A nurse unwraps him. He does not like it; he hates being unwrapped. He is still red. His fingernail slivers are red, as if someone had painted nail polish on them. His toenails are red. The nurse shows the father how to swaddle him.

  “You’re forty minutes old,” the father says, “and crying already?”

  “Aaaa,” says the baby.

  “I’d just as soon not go through that again, ever,” says the mother to the air at large. Presently she adds that it was an easy labor, only twelve hours.

  “… and then you wrap the last corner tight around the whole works,” the nurse says. As she finishes binding him into his proper Thermos shape, the baby closes his mouth, opens his eyes, and peers about like a sibyl. He looks into our faces. When he meets our eyes in turn, his father and I each say “Hi,” involuntarily. In the nurses, this impulse has perhaps worn out.

  A hole in the earth’s crust releases clear water into the St. John’s River of central Florida at the rate of one hundred million gallons a day. Salt water issues from deep-sea mouths as very hot water and minerals. There iron and sulfur erupt into the sea from under the planet’s crust, and there clays form black towers. In Safad, Isaac Luria began prayers by saying, “Open thou my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.”

  I visit neonatal intensive care. A nurse lifts a baby from a clear plastic isolette. She seats the tiny girl on her lap and feeds her. This baby needs only an ounce more weight to go home. I watch her drain a little milk bottle, three ounces’ worth. She sucks it down in a twinkling. “Did you ever taste that stuff?” one nurse asks another. “Isn’t it awful?” he says. “Bitter. I don’t know what they put in it.”

  The male nurse is holding a boarder baby—a baby whose mother abandoned it in the hospital, saying she would be back. Social workers try to track down such women, who often leave false addresses. This boarder baby is a boy the nurses call Billy. Billy has lived here for two weeks; his fifteen-year-old mother visited him once, early, and never returned. Unlike many boarder babies, Billy is free of fetal alcohol syndrome; he is a healthy, easygoing redhead. Every nurse totes Billy around whenever possible, and the male nurse is now holding him up to his shoulder as he hurries from room to room, fetching and carrying. Billy is awake, looking over that shoulder at the swirling scene. His eyebrows have not yet come in, but I can see the fine furrows where they will sprout. He will soon join a foster family. The nurses will not let me hold anyone.

  Outside the viewing window, a black woman in her fifties is waving, and with her a white woman in her twenties is jumping up and down. They are trying to attract the attention of what looks to be a baked potato, but is in fact a baby wrapped in aluminum foil. This baked potato weighs three pounds, a nurse tells me; his body is a compressed handful. The aluminum foil is “to keep the heat in.” Intravenous feeding lines, a ventilator tube, and two heart monitor wires extend into the aluminum foil. He is doing well.

  Above this baby a TV screen hooked to his monitors traces their findings in numbers. The nurses read these numbers once a minute.

  Behind the window, in the hall, the black woman, dressed to the nines, has been reduced to pointing and exclaiming. The jumping white woman, wearing jeans, has been reduced to waving. After all, the baby is plainly asleep. The nurse reaches into the isolette and lifts the baby—and foil, wiring, tubes—to display him to his visitors. She pushes his knitted cap back, so a bit more of his face shows. His face is the size of a squash ball. Both visitors tilt their heads to match his angle. Just above the nurse’s head, four Mylar balloons strain against the ribbons tied to the isolette: “It’s a boy!” the balloons say. There on a shelf with syringes and thermometers is a carton of Reynolds Wrap.

  Giacometti said, “The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.”

  S A N D September, 1923: They rode back into Peking. The mules carried 5,600 pounds of fossils and rocks in sixty wooden crates. The paleontologist Teilhard carried a notebook in which he had written, among other things, a morning prayer: “Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.”

  The realm of loose spirit never interested Teilhard. He did not believe in it. He never bought the view that the world was illusion and spirit alone was real. He had written in his notebook from a folding stool in the desert of the Ordos, “There are only beings, everywhere.”

  Matter he loved: people, landscapes, stones. Like most scientists, he was an Aristotelian, not a Platonist. When he was still in college, he published articles on the Eocene in Egypt and the minerals of Jersey. In his twenties he discovered a new species of fish, and a new owl. His major contributions to science came after this Ordos trip, when he dated Peking Man and revised the geology of all the Quaternary strata not only through China and Mongolia but also through Java, India, and Burma. He spent twenty-three years of his adult life far from home in China, almost always in rough conditions. Why knock yourself out describing a dream?

  “If I should lose all faith in God,” he wrote, “I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.”

  C H I N A Before me, at my feet, the clay men swam fully formed from walls. Beyond me, in the distance, living farmers worked fields. The farmers in the distance walked, bent, lifted, dug, and carried. Aerial perspective made the men and women hazy. Their skeletons’ motions—a neck’s bend, an arm’s thrust—showed their force or fatigue, their hurry, their boredom, their spring. One farmer was pregnant; one limped. I saw the long parallel burial pits point to them in the distance, those twig figures working fields. I saw here below me the born and the buried stuck motionless, and beyond them walked the breathing, getting around. Above the buried I walked too, but I did not notice that then: I witnessed the generations. It was a Chinese thing, I fancied—generation after generation. Every seventh person on earth is a Chinese peasant.

  I saw these farmers better later: The women let the strings dangle from their straw hats. The day had heated up; most men and women shucked their blue tunics. They wore long-sleeved shirts and loose slacks. Like me, they were alive at the moment—today’s samples from the current batch of Cro-Magnon man. There were almost five billion of us specimens alive that morning in 1982. We who were awake were a multitude trampling the continents for our day in the light—feeling our lives and stirring about, building a better world a jot, or not—and soon the continents would roll us under, and new sets of people woul
d trample us.

  Later that day I saw cliffside caves of loess where modern people lived. Other humans, I knew, had lived far below them, before the loess blew in. Now the modern people’s laundry dried outside. They drew water and held toddlers’ hands. “Here were the children of the earth—the real Chinese. Mother earth … gave them shelter in her very womb. This strange golden soil—loess—was everywhere around them.” Peter Goullart wrote this when he first entered the terraced, gorged, and caved landscape around Xi’an. He was a Russian aristocrat whom the revolution stranded in China. “The very color of men was like the soil—pale golden, and the air was filled with golden dust. This was holy ground. Here the whole race of Han—the core of China—had come into being.”

  The Chinese empire grew from the loess soil. Loess deposits in China are the deepest soils in the world. The fertile loess plains around Xi’an are thick layers—up to four hundred feet thick—of fine windblown sand and rock flour. The deposits run to fine textures; they absorb water and feed minerals to plants’ roots. All you have to do is irrigate. Irrigation requires that many people cooperate; it requires civilization. The Chinese have been irrigating this region for twenty-three centuries. The first irrigation canal, said an ancient historian, made poor lands into rich ones “without bad years.” Emperor Qin’s farmers were rich, and so was he; he funded his armies by taxing their grain.

  Even now China needed this particular land for food so badly that at another underground army site, across the river, farmers had refilled the dug pits and sowed wheat on them; after they harvested the wheat, they would let archaeologists return for a while. Consequently, the digging has gone slowly. In 1989 experts guessed there might be as many as six thousand terra-cotta soldiers here in underground vaults. A few years later, they were guessing seven thousand soldiers. By 1995 they had confirmed seven thousand, and were guessing ten thousand.