Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  I had to fix what was wrong with my body if I wanted it to work judiciously for and with me. At the moment it behaved like the enemy who had slipped past the ramparts to wage a guerrilla campaign from inside. I felt pressured onto my back foot, always reacting to some new action by my bladder and never able to catch up or anticipate what it would do next to keep me off balance. Now at the front of my mind, now dictating the geography of my diary with regular bathroom pit stops, now waking me up twice a night, now pushing me to the edge of almost afraid to drink. What a song and dance (my mum said this about any aspect of life that gave her the runaround) my bladder led me in.

  I needed to break the partnership with my conundrum and become in effect a solo dancer in charge of all the choreography. I needed someone like the legendary Mr. Bojangles, someone able to move and invent the next move and the next in fluid motion (he tried to patent his dance up and down stairs, and failed, though succeeded in inventing the word copacetic) and make it look not just easy, but good. Or else a Billy Cobham figure with drums, a one-man orchestra, many-limbed like a spider, playing his Total Eclipse extravaganza. Or the anarchic inventions of a cut-to-pieces and scrambled then reassembled modern mind like Jean-Michel Basquiat. You cannot look for long, and you cannot look away for too long either without feeling impoverished.

  Debbie, my wife, had noticed my symptoms some time ago and mentioned it to me, but I was casual in my response to her (not ready to hear her) until now. I told her my suspicions and she grew alarmed. Her response heightened my own sense of doom nursed quietly by me as I sought to protect the children from anxiety over me. Debbie always presented as someone in touch with her feelings in a way that left me in awe and in horror: awe at her facility with difficult emotion, horror that it might be contagious and leave me at the mercy of something out of my control. In contradiction to this taciturn approach of mine on the emotional front, I championed methods like meditation and yoga, and writings about mind and body unity—all disciplines invested in a life of emotional intelligence.

  My ideal for coping with the materialist treadmill turned out to be a pinch of the anarchist with chunks of socialism and utopianism. Blake’s Jerusalem meets Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturism. I really wanted everyone to know themselves and to get along with one another and hug trees too, all in a garden where it was cool to eat the fruit and be naked without compromising the right to be there. As if the garden were an invitation to experiment in community that could never be revoked. No pre-, no post-, just perpetual current good standing.

  And for poise under bladder pressure I conjure Emma Goldman on Ellis Island in December 1919, on the eve of her deportation to Russia for her “un-American” anarchistic activities. She makes sure everyone around her is settled and calm and able to write last messages of hope to loved ones whom they are about to leave behind with no inkling of when they might return and be reunited, messages that she hides in her dress. Her enormous sacrifice for her beliefs turned into a life practice as she tends selflessly to the needs of others in true enactment of her equitable ideals. As with everyone else whom she helps, she too faces the fate of being cast out of her adopted country because of her politics.

  I made the call to see an oncologist. The receptionist asked me a few pertinent questions and I answered as tersely as I could, not knowing to whom I was talking, and not wanting my business out there. At last she said that she needed to ask these things to be sure she matched me with the right person. How long had I been experiencing difficulty urinating? How many times at night did I go to the bathroom? Was it painful to urinate? Did it alter my bowel movement? Could I refrain from sex two days before seeing the doctor? No problem on that last count, I joked. My sexual appetite had waned considerably. She asked me where I worked, and when I said at the university, she piped up, sounded more animated, and wanted to know what I did, and when I said that I was a professor she became positively gleeful, personable, much more accommodating and even said that she would do everything she could for me since I belonged to the UCLA “family.”

  I attended that first appointment alone. Debbie had to be somewhere else and the time was in the middle of my teaching day. I put her off coming with me in the belief that this first meeting was preliminary and I would need her further down the road of the progress of the doctor investigating what was going on with me. How odd to turn up to a waiting room full of people with the same malady. All men. The only difference was that everyone seemed so much older and when someone younger-looking turned up everyone gawked at him with a mix of pity and alarm that so young a body might be facing such an affliction reserved for senior bodies. No one spoke. We sat and waited for our names to be called. And when that happened the person answered quickly but took quite a while to lever the ailing body out of the comfortable chair and catch up with his name.

  The doctor, a retired oncologist who worked part time, put me at ease immediately by acting as if he were a plumber who needed to examine my faulty fixtures and offer his diagnosis. He asked me to drop my trousers and underpants. He stared for a long moment at the distribution and arrangement of my genitalia. He focused the way I do when I visit a gallery and stare for ages at a painting that I close my eyes to see in my mind’s eye, and look at again to augment my memory of it, and again close my eyes to add to what I remember and so on before I build a story about how it works on me, and what I think and feel about those influences. I had showered longer than usual that morning for this very reason—his face was close to my crotch—and picked my newest pair of underpants. He pulled on a pair of gloves. There was an immediate pungent smell of rubber as if I had woken on the inside of an inner tube, like the gigantic one for the rear wheels of the tractor that cruised the farm of my paternal grandparents in Guyana.

  Next he slapped on copious amounts of what looked like jelly onto his fingers. He asked me to lean over by resting my elbows on the chair and he unceremoniously stuck his index and middle finger into my anus and up my rectum, and swiped along the tube as if to wipe my interior clean. That was a new feeling, of some blind, double-proboscis creature released in my rectum and bumping into its architecture to forge deep into me. To cope with my shock of his prodding around inside me I visualized my arm wiping the steamed-up inside of the car windscreen on a winter morning in South London, or on the East Coast, say, Massachusetts or Virginia, a crucial act to see where I was driving, just as he needed to know what was happening to my body.

  I felt shock at the intrusion and a modicum of discomfort, it must be said, not pain exactly but the start of a painful procedure if it continued unchecked. He worked swiftly, deeply, knowledgeably. Mercifully, he extracted his fingers in a deft move and wiped them and dispensed with his glove, rolled it off his hand by pulling it inside out. He informed me as I wiped myself and pulled up my underpants and trousers that my prostate was more than twice as large as it should be. Instead of roughly walnut size, it was two and a half walnuts.

  I could visualize that. Most mornings since around 2005 I’d been eating a little helping of walnuts—enough to cover the palm of my hand—in the sound belief that their high quotient of antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids (good guys) strengthened my aging heart. I hardly ever ran out of them, because I bought the walnut halves in bulk and filled a tall jar with them. I wondered if that two and a half was with or without the pesky shells, whose pieces sometimes stole into the shelled batch and shocked teeth that clamped down and experienced a shard. Two and a half times bigger than the usual outcrop of prostate growing inside me. Conjoined twins fused to another single; sick little triplets; a ballooning time bomb; a crab growing in a shell it cannot jettison and so destined to meet some impasse with; something I never gave a second thought to before, now center stage in my life as if to tax me for my neglect of it.

  The doctor ordered a blood sample—two ampoules of the bright-red stuff—and a nurse drew it from me. She told me I had good veins. People say that a lot. I hardly felt the needle’s plunge into the folded space just
above the crook of my inner right arm. I complimented the nurse, told her she was an excellent phlebotomist. She smiled and weighed me. We joked that my clothes and boots amounted to about 4 pounds to be taken off 160. The nurse took my blood pressure. I asked her if it mattered that I was left-handed. She said no. I sacrificed my right arm. She wrapped a sleeve around it, held in place by Velcro. She inflated the sleeve to a point that bordered the uncomfortable and just at that point, held it, and began the slow deflation back to comfort and relief: 115 over 90. I wondered if the caffeine heightened the diastolic first reading. She said it was fine. In the form about my history I said my father had died at fifty-three from a bad heart—so I was told.

  I say “so I was told” due to the notorious unreliability of information by word of mouth about my immediate family. Acrimonious divorces, migration, and early deaths might be to blame for the unknowable family epidemiology. My parents married young, emigrated from Guyana to England, and divorced early while in England as their five young children lived with grandparents in Guyana. I should write that twice for clarity. The whole experiment of bettering themselves by striking out into the unknown together ended in hostility. They quibbled over photographs and my dad got most of them as memorials because she got us, the real thing. The result of my past is a lot of hearsay, conjecture, and plain, willful ignorance—no longer in a position to care for the other party given the bad history between them. My genealogy resembled a time bomb. Not the flowering of unknown gifts into creative biography but the detonation of a grenade. The possibility that I might have cancer and that it would become the measure of my life.

  My maternal grandmother died of bone cancer. Another mine buried in my field of genes. The cancer started in her hand. She resisted surgery partly out of vanity and partly practicality. My grandfather was long dead. A new handsome gentleman courted my grandmother. Apparently, he was so well groomed that you could smell his cologne before you spotted him, and not one starched stitch on him was out of place in the most casual of settings. He had Mister, always Mister, before his name. The house full of grandchildren always reconfigured into a child-free zone when he appeared and my grandmother in her starched and perfumed fineries met him at the door. We piled on the covered back stairs and played with matchsticks for people (chewing gum on the tops of the matches for women with big hair) and bottle tops for vehicles, and we partied with those matchsticks and took them to drive-in film shows and street drag races without saying so much as a syllable or bumping into each other’s cars and people, or scraping against the stairs and railings.

  My grandmother worked with her hands all day. Mostly housework, and she talked with her hands, gestured a lot, and she had a lot to say, so her hands were occupied all day. This made her hands indispensable. (Not that we should think of our hands as dispensable, say like the smallest outer toe or the smallest finger.) Not indispensable as tools, though she proved that, more as expressions of her. She could not do without even one little finger. Meanwhile the cancer marched on and up her arm. She held out against surgery for as long as she could. And when she accepted losing the hand, too late, after the amputation she continued to decline from the metastasized disease, with further surgeries to remove more of her arm. She was dead at forty-six. Her handsome suitor migrated to Canada a while before the cancer took hold of her and knocked her for six (as local parlance phrased it, a term lifted from cricket, the national sport of most former British colonies).

  The doctor says my enlarged prostate concerns him. Concern in another setting might be casually deployed to mean that a thing is on one’s mind though not central to one’s thinking. As used by the doctor I know it packs much more power. In fact, concern takes on the air of a lab setting, something scrubbed of emotional resonance as a deliberate qualification for its use in a patient-and-doctor exchange. He has my full attention. He says only further tests can really tell him what is going on. He adds that I should not worry ahead of the results of those tests and that when they come back and he has a chance to look at them we will speak again. As a precaution, he schedules me to see a surgeon. He says I should not be alarmed, he has to make the appointment early because openings are hard to come by, and my date can just as easily be canceled if it proves unnecessary. The date with the surgeon is in two weeks. The doctor shakes my hand goodbye. I wonder if his light touch—soft and glancing—has anything to do with my compromised longevity. His heavier grip reserved for persons with more time on their hands.

  2.

  I Do Not Want to Alarm You

  Debbie and I are in the kitchen and abutting breakfast room with our three children when I broach the subject of my cancer. Christopher, aged twenty-two, our eldest, is searching Debbie’s partially completed puzzle, spread on the breakfast table, for a corner piece that only he seems able to find, every time, hidden among the mass. Nicholas, aged nineteen, the second, as I like to think of him to avoid the middle-child stigma, is at the stove concocting his famous three-egg omelet into which he sprinkles an array of powders, onion, garlic, salt, black pepper. Debbie is seated on the sofa that is next to the breakfast table. I am microwaving a cup of coffee that I reheat periodically throughout the morning and top up with almond milk and fresh coffee. Liliana, aged thirteen (the baby girl of the household, mollycoddled by us as a result of our shock at the ultrasound that revealed she was a she and not the expected dominant family requisite male), is seated at the center island eating her bowl of ramen noodles.

  Guys, I do not want to alarm you but I do have a health issue.

  They turn from their respective tasks, Nicholas pushes the pan off the flame, Christopher looks at me and keeps a puzzle piece in his hand, Liliana places her spoon in the bowl and clasps her hands and glances at her mother, who looks up at me and rests her phone in her lap.

  I saw a doctor and I have an enlarged prostate and an elevated PSA from a blood sample. It is most likely cancer, though I have to take more tests to confirm that.

  The three of them do a double take of wanting me to repeat what I just said even though I said it and they heard it and want to disbelieve their ears. I pause and busy my hands with setting the microwave to one minute.

  Does it hurt? Nicholas wants to know. I shake my head, no pain, just a weird feeling of pressure.

  Can you die from it? my daughter asks. Again, that dismissive headshake and I reassure her that what I have is treatable.

  Just wanted to give you guys a heads-up, since the coming weeks will be busy for me.

  Christopher half smiles and shoots me his thumbs-up of understanding, and goes back to his puzzle. Nicholas looks at me for a moment and I nod and he pulls his omelet over the flame. I smile at Debbie and she smiles back. Liliana forks curlicues of her ramen to her face. I retrieve my coffee from the microwave the moment it beeps.

  The next week I have an MRI (I googled it), a.k.a. the magnetic resonance imaging machine. It resembles a capsule for sending me into the future, or for sealing me in a deep century-long sleep. The clinical all-white room, meant to reassure me, makes me feel like a huge germ in a germ-free zone. That the whole of me, not just my unruly prostate, is in question seems apposite as my dark skin tone pops out, spotlighted, in the contrasting white space. I want the machine to be accurate in the way it assesses me, to make transparent a covert disease in my body, a disease about to stage a coup.

  Debbie insists on accompanying me. (I am not sure she should bother.) I do not want to trouble her and embarrass her and me by having a witness in the room. The fact of our marriage does not diminish this feeling of inadequacy at all. In secret I am glad to have her by my side. She waits outside for me. I undress and put my clothes into a locker and keep on my underpants but don a hospital gown (I am told to wear it with the opening at the front so that I can keep it closed and stay warmer).

  The radiologist asks me to recline on the gurney. He hooks me up to a drip and feeds the dye into it. The dye enables the magnetic waves to highlight the bloodstream and the dye travels and
draws this map of my blood system. He tightens a sheet around my body so that I feel as if I am encased in a condom with only my head peeping out. He plugs my ears with two sponge plugs. I’ve never had someone insert plugs into my ears before. What a trust exercise. How intimate. His touch is light and businesslike, gently probing as he settles the sponge pieces into place. He is a friendly guy. From Vietnam. We chat briefly about the legacy of America coming to a foreign land and the good fortune for those of us able to reap the benefits rather than the penalties of a colonial or imperial encounter. He feeds me on the gurney into the wide, round mouth of the MRI contraption.

  As instructed by him, I hold my breath at the right time for a few seconds as the machine resonates—quite loudly, hence the earplugs. What exactly is the noise? Think of a jackhammer that the road workers lean into bodily to break up a road. Short bursts, as if discharging armor-piercing rounds. Is that just my impression, seeing red in every situation pertaining to my condition? I will myself to breathe deep past my sternum and visualize the tall neck of a vase into which I pour air rather than water to flower the stems of my ribs, or some such reasoning, just to defray the rising sense of panic and urgency about what must happen to me in the coming weeks to save me from my malady.

  Given my prostate-specific antigen (PSA) reading—which is one hundred times higher than what it should be—I wonder if I will experience all my waking hours with increased concentration and razor-sharp clarity, if the ordinary, the quotidian, the routine of my day, will become supercharged by my awareness of the suddenly limited number of days on a measurable calendar. My research on prostate cancer highlights the possibility that time may not be on my side or time could be mine only if I act quickly.