THE FIRST SONNAGRAM

We -- my wife and I -- we didn't have to wait very long at all. Before we knew it, the door opened; the woman in white called Cherie's name; and we were both quickly ushered down a long hallway until we reached the only open room. I had but a second to read the sign mounted there -- the word "Sonogram" rendered in simple, unornate letters -- and then we were hastily waved inside.

My eyes focused immediately on the Eiffel Tower of monitors, keyboards, and cables pitched haphazardly in the corner. It proved an efficient distraction. Before I could blink or even acknowledge the uneasiness boiling in my stomach, my wife was on her back on the padded table, her shirt yanked up over her belly, her stirrup pants dropped, cold gel remarkably resembling the spearment-flavored stripes in Colgate toothpaste slapped across her belly. The Cottingley sprite posing as a nurse gleefullly fiddled with the knobs and dials, the central monitor flickered into life even as I stood there gaping.

I wanted to say something, anything, but I could do nothing. Events flew past me as if borne on griffon wings. I was an ice sculpture frozen to the floor, I was the Watcher overlooking the Marvel Universe from my lunar haven, I was dour-axed Hurin thrust into a demented perch by the black paw of Morgoth himself, I was a young tousle-haired Jean-Luc Picard doomed to speculation without privilege to interfere. Even as I stared, the microphone plunged like a dagger against my sprawling wife's stomach, impaling her to the table, and images guttered across the screen with the macabre clarity of Fantasia's "Night on Bald Mountain."

"There it is," the nurse tittered, shifting the microphone about on my still wife's belly as if searching for slugs with a metal detector. I bit my lip and tried not to flinch as she scanned back and forth, as if fishing for Nessie herself in the grimy gloomy depths of some rugged scottish loch.

And then the screen flickered into life. A tiny cave, irregular walls, appeared. Then the darkness between stars, of a womb where no light had ever been known. And finally the greyish-white miasma of motion, centered on the monitor face. Even as I watched, a white line -- a stick of chalk to me -- surfaced, sank, then surfaced again as if to breathe.

"That's an arm," chattered the sprite. "It looks good." She twisted the knobs and moved the microphone.

I stared, motionless, as if Medusa contorted before me.

Fluctuations. Round shapes expanding, shrinking, outlines wavering, like watching Windows Paintbrush over the shoulder of some maddened wino. More blurred pictures.

And finally something I recognized, appearing as abruptly and as fearsomely as a banshee released on Halloween night. A skull. Teeth set, clenched as if on a bullet of pain, cheekbones rigid and sharp. Dark pits where the eyes should have been. It was strangely horrific, eerie, completely unsettling there on the screen.

I couldn't think. Everything had happened way too quickly, after months of effort. The pregnancy, Cherie's food cravings, her exhaustion, the emotion swings, the swelling stomach. Then the appointment for this.

And there it was, the baby. At long last. There before me on the monitor. A quick chalk sketch, and yet as real as a marble sculpture. The images left me shaken, speechless, stirred, disquieted...

And so amazingly overwhelmed by the intricate beauty of it all.

The nervousness I felt was negligible, the alienness irrelevant. It was my child, our child, there on the screen before us. Our child and no one else's.

A leg. An arm. The graceful tracing of a hand with a thumb and four fingers. So unsettling and fantastic, simultaneously.

"Even while I was yet in my mother's womb, you saw me and knew me. I was not hidden from you." The words of David, in reverence, to Jehovah the Creator. And I stood there next to my wife, there in that small room, there I stood as a mere man, and yet I was empowered for one brief moment with the eyes of God, seeing what up to that point had been invisible to me.

The images continued. A latticed backbone, a fractal in motion, shifting with each twitch of the baby. A small shadow, the heart, steadily and stolidly contracting and swelling. The body itself rolling gently around like a child asleep in a warm bed, blankets tucked and twisted. As real as if I could reach out and touch it -- that flat smooth image of our baby in utero.

It was almost too much to comprehend -- just an image on screen -- but the image was real and not a fabrication. Our child was in there -- as yet nameless but still named and unique in its own essence. As transient in mortal eternity as its flicker-flamed parents, and yet as perfect, even more perfect than any granite slab that might bear testimony to our lives. Our hopes, our dreams, our foibles and faux paus, the people we currently were and would yet become, all to become bundled up in that small unborn baby. The child that would one day possibly bundle all those intangible Polaroids of us into a baby of its own, starting a chain that could span generations and even centuries. It was longevity in practice.

I had thought of this and of other things before, but everything bobbed to the surface as I stood there in the room, watching the current Beverly Crusher incarnation scan my wife's stomach with her microphone.

I turned over the other thoughts sitting face down in my mind's version of Concentration, wondering what I'd find. Surprise: "A parent once, a parent always." There was that idea, clear as day. How can a sentence so short be so terrifying? But it was true. Cherie and I had claimed the title of Parents, and now it was ours forever; no matter what preferences rule, the assumed mantle can never be relinquished; once chosen, always chosen. Just like Amberle of the Ellcrys, the duty is inescapable. My wife and I would never again not be parents. Until the end of time and memory, our fates were sealed.

I flipped over the next thought, and recognized my small part in the long march of life, one of the myriad generations sliding up the ladder rungs. Grandparents move on, leaving a gap, and children appear to fill it. So parents become grandparents and young adults become parents, and the ladder is once more full. I completely understood, as I stood there staring at the monitor, that Cherie and I were moving inexorably forwards, towards the ladder top, and it was all glorious and terrifying at once. So definitive. When you're driving through the fields of Ohio, you know, it's hard to tell how far you've come; but once you cross the state line into Indiana, you know you're that much close to Illinois. This baby was our road marker, and we were one step closer to the last rung of the ladder. Ascension into unknown eternity, that's what it was.

And other cards lay face down in my mind, piled about like the remnants of a wild game of Fifty-Two Card Pickup, all representing myriad things that I cannot even remember now as I write -- the same things that I think of when it's late at night and I can't sleep and I have to mull over something until the grey haze of exhaustion carries me away. So many things, some of them not even concrete or expressible but just fleeting music that strikes right to the core of a man and bypasses all of his eloquent but inept words and concrete ideas.

But this variety of thoughts was eventually swept away as I stood there, and I was left with one thought and one thought only, and perhaps the only real and best thought that I had ever had in the whole matter:

That image on the screen was my child.

Our child.

I am a person who had burned spontaneous emotion out of himself at an early age, who had only showed caring and love in the context of pure rationality and control, who had never let himself run unfettered or been carried away by unquenchable warmth. Even while creating lasting friendships and courting and marrying my wife, the emotions were carefully filtered and diluted -- and still are. I had thought my control over emotion to be both a freedom and a burden to bear until I died.

But the feeling of overwhelming and unprovoked love that welled up in me at the sight of that child -- of a love that was more like the deeply seated and immediate hearth, rather than a burning match to be snuffed out by a cruel wind -- surprised me even as it consumed. I had never known that I was capable of such spontaneous and unwavering love, nor desired it so much, but there it was. At least amid all the fears of committing myself to my progency, I was reassured that I would at least love him or her no matter how badly I might fail in other areas.

Nothing has changed in me since that day, except for perhaps the deepening of this feeling. I have felt the child kick and prod at the confines of my wife's stomach, and I can only wait in anticipation for the last four months to pass quickly. The fear of not rising up to the role of a good father still exists, sometimes enough to make me tremble, but this strange feeling I'll call parental love more than balances the scales.