Nine Times (Among Countless Others) I’ve Thought About the People Who Came Before Us in My Brief Career as a Father

Photograph by Andrew Billington, vitalphoto.co.uk

1

We’re in New Jersey, my wife is pregnant with twins, and I’m walking home from the library on a dark and relentlessly cold afternoon. The row of brick-and-siding apartments we live in comes up on my left, originally built as barracks, old railings and old steps, a capsized tricycle in a snowbank, door after identical door, window after identical window, apartments built with GIs in mind, their cigarettes, their wives, their red-white- and-blue children.

I have spent the morning reading about some footprints in Tanzania, seventy impressions fossilized across twenty yards, left by three bipedal hominids trudging barefoot through volcanic ash three and a half million years ago. Two runty adults and someone smaller.

“It is tempting to see them as a man, a woman, and a child,” Mary Leakey, who found the footprints, writes. One of the walkers veers to the left momentarily before continuing on. The spatters of raindrops have been preserved in the mud around the tracks.

A wet day, a volcano erupting nearby, mud pressing up between their toes, and someone—a father?—has a second thought, or stoops to pick up something, or looks back at what has been left behind. Then they’re gone.

In New Jersey twenty yards of ice crunch beneath my shoes. I climb our three steps. Through the front window I can see Shauna inside, bearing her huge abdomen from kitchen to couch, her feet swollen bright red, her body stretched to its limits. The two creatures that will be our sons are crammed against the underside of her skin, twisting, she tells me sometimes, like snakes.

I stand in the cold and a flight of geese cruises overhead, honking above the trees, and I think: My sons might see Paris, Cape Town, Saigon; they might get in fights, swim the English Channel, cook banana pancakes, join an army, fix computers. They might kill someone, save someone, make someone. They might leave tracks in the mud to last three and a half million years.

2

Owen is born with acid reflux and has to be given Zantac every few hours. Henry has to be strapped to an apnea monitor the size of a VCR that squeals like a smoke detector any time his breathing pauses or the adhesive on a diode slips off his chest. The doctor makes us put caffeine in his milk to stimulate his breathing.

They are five pounds, fraternal, wormy-armed, more blankets than flesh, no eyebrows, no kneecaps, and they need to be fed every three hours: three, six, nine, noon, three, six, nine, midnight. Most nights I take the shift from midnight to three a.m. I change diapers, fill bottles, listen to the BBC. The traffic light out the back window makes its mindless revolutions, green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red. No cars pass for hours.

One April night, two in the morning, I come out of a half dream on the sofa. Henry and Owen are in their Moses baskets on the carpet beside me. They’re lying on their backs, wearing cotton hats, eyes open, neither making a sound, their gazes trained on some middle distance in the gloom. Henry’s monitor flashes green, green, green. Owen shifts his eyes back and forth. In the dimness I can watch expressions flow gently across their faces; they assume enchanted, glassy, mysterious looks, then frowns, then their eyes widen. They are partly me and partly their mother, but they are partly strangers too, tiny emissaries from forgotten generations, repositories of ancient DNA; there are genes in them from Shauna’s great-great- grandfather, from my great-great-grandmother. Who are they? They are entirely new human beings, genetic combinations the universe has never seen before and will never see again. They are little brothers arrived from the mists of genealogy to lie in wicker baskets on the floor...