Not magic, he explains: When the sun is behind us and low enough, some of the rays striking the water are reflected back from the inside surface of each droplet. But since different wavelengths of light are refracted a little differently, the light is separated, as through a prism. Depending on where we’re standing, only some of these rays reach our eyes, from droplets that lie in a narrow arc, the reds from the outside of the arc, and the violets from the inside.

We’re each seeing a slightly different rainbow, he says. A rainbow, like beauty, is in the beholder’s eye.

15

At some point, when the hydrogen in its core is exhausted, the sun’s nuclear reactions will cease. The sun will have expanded to more than a hundred times its current size by then, engulfing the earth and its moon. Perhaps that is the description of the dawn of Qiyamah, the day of resurrection.

But this is billions of years in the future, and the inventories of my own futures interest me more.

In the normal course of events, this is what should happen after my lungs expand for their first taste of air: My vocal cords will quicken for their first cry. My lips will seek a nipple for my first suckle of mother’s milk. In a few hours, my bowels will move. In a few days, my stomach will increase from the size of a marble to the size of my fist.

I’ll learn to recognize voices, faces, smells, in a couple of months. My eyesight will become capable of distinguishing primary colors, then the full rainbow spectrum, over a period of five months. I’ll sit up, then crawl, then take my first step, then walk, then run, over a period of two years. I’ll gurgle, then babble, then speak, first in words, then in sentences that will grow more confident, more complex, over a period of six years.

My first set of teeth will erupt, then fall away one by one, to be replaced by a permanent set, by the time I’m twelve. Sometime around then my testes will increase in size, my scrotum will descend, the shaft of my penis will grow longer, thicker, and pubic hair will begin to sprout. My testicles will produce the first of the millions of sperm they’ll churn out over my lifetime. I’ll experience my first ejaculations. My vocal cords will shorten, and my voice will drop an octave lower, to my adult voice. I’ll be sixteen when these changes are complete. I’ll have grown from my current height of twenty inches to my adult height by the time I’m twenty-one.