For the Time Being Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 possiblemixes 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, carefulto 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