The Speed of Sound
Against a square black sky in a windowless white room, strange puffs of smoke morphed into clouds and disappeared-then reformed. I was watching a fantastic internal landscape unfold before me at the speed of sound and at first, all I could see were puffs of smoke. I held my breath. I held my wife's hand in mine, hard enough to break it. The clouds came together in stormy flashes, and now I recognized them as bits and pieces of me, of her. Eyes and nose. The line of a mouth. Arms and legs. Ten fingers and toes. I was staring into the future and it was moving impossibly fast. I was looking at an ultrasound image of my daughter, seventeen weeks past conception. The doctor told us that at this point she was just under nine centimeters long. Every detail was already in place and still she could have fit in my pocket. Against the black sky that would be her entire world for another five and a half months, she waved a little hand in front of her face as if she were hot, as if mosquitoes were after her. Then we heard the heartbeat. Whoosh whoosh whoosh… This was my blood, my wife's blood — our blood — pulsing rapid and fierce through this tiny unborn creature like a secondary electric current beneath my wife's skin. It was so fast there was just a barely discernible silence between beats, as if each pulse was trying to catch up to the last. The sound of that racing heart filled the room and it was this that truly overwhelmed me, and felt like it could break me.
I realize that everything moves too fast. Even standing perfectly still, holding my breath, the molecules that hold my vital parts together vibrate at such extreme speeds that with the just the smallest violent nudge to the electrons, I could be vapor. The planet, meanwhile, spins on its axis at a thousand miles an hour, a notion that delighted and terrified me equally as a child. And time is a river so fast and furious I don't even notice it swallowing me up, spinning me ever closer to my final destination. Time disappears around me. The years slip away. I take off my shoes and pause to examine my toes and two days turn to dust. I wander into the bathroom to brush my teeth and a week is gone. I pour myself a cup of coffee and change the channel on the TV and a month floats by. The years tumble past like bits of paper blowing on the street and I may not even feel the breeze at my back but then something catches my eye, a twist of black hair or a dog leaping to catch a tennis ball, and a whole lifetime crashes through my head. I hear the splintered chorus of a stupid pop song from twenty years ago echoing from the neighbor's window and I am brutally reminded of just how much time I've lost.
I have a son, Elias. He is eight years old, but in my mind he is still five. He's a sturdy little guy — four and a half feet tall and seventy pounds — but in my mind, he still fits into my pocket. The boy is a strong swimmer and is never more fearless than when he is in the water. Even at three, before he could actually swim, he never hesitated to throw himself into the shallow end of the swimming pool, trusting that some primal knowledge would kick in-his muscles would respond and his arms and legs would somehow know what to do. He was four when he first went off the high dive, splashing down like a tiny paratrooper who I immediately had to rescue. And now when I take him to the ocean, he always wants to swim out past the buoys, as if these mark an invisible passage, a borderline to another life. I don't imagine he could yet verbalize it, but I think that on some subconscious level he believes that if I allow him to swim past the buoys, he won't be a child anymore. He will leapfrog even further into the future. And of course this is the great irony, the paradox of growing up. The child is always in such a desperate hurry to grow up, to be older. The child wants to be big. The child blinks and the years whirl past and the child becomes a man, and before he knows it he's confronted by a startling three-dimensional ultrasound image of his own child, and his head is spinning with the sound of her beating heart.
My wife felt the baby kicking for the first time the other day, so we know she's getting restless to escape the womb. I haven't met this girl yet, but I've dreamed of her more than once. She looks exactly like her mother, a tiny replica of her with wild dark hair and Mediterranean skin that never burns. But she has blue eyes — she has eyes the color of the ocean. She has an angel's voice and already I can hear her humming to herself in the bathtub. And if she comes into the world blessed with my wife's hummingbird metabolism and competitive spirit plus even a mild dose of my reckless abandon and complete disregard for personal safety, she will no doubt be a fierce swimmer like her brother. She is already living at the speed of sound. And if I blink, change the channel, pour myself a cup of coffee — she'll be walking. Take the dog for a run and when I come back the girl will be climbing a tree in the front yard. Make a sandwich, take a nap, stop on the way home to get a haircut — she'll be swimming for the buoys. And there will be no recourse. Her mother and I can do nothing but hold onto her while we can, and keep our eyes on the days and years as they vanish around us.
-will christopher baer, june 2004