Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  Despair is one of many faces of doubt, just one of its many masks. Despair feeds my sickness, helps it along the marathon road as the disease metastasizes. I aim to stop that spread with a firewall of meds and positive vibes and ultimately drive it back and banish it from my body. Despair breaks down that firewall and doubt is the parent of despair. The same doubt that powered me to shepherd a poem to a point of many questions and leave it poised as unfinished business for the reader to complete and augment, that doubt sides with my cancer.

  A reader of my body, I no longer feel right about my body. As the saying goes for the reader of the text, the reader is always right, but not this reader, my dear reader. Instead my reading of my disease is as untrustworthy as the obligatory unreliable narrator of fiction. Excoriating self-doubt is an agenda item where the writer is absent from the discussion. The self that remains is so mired in doubt that it forgets the uses of doubt that brought it to this point in its life. It’s as if doubt makes the self forget that in an earlier time the self worked in harmony with doubt. Cure may rest in acceptance of the limits of the power of the sick body to summon wellness. Cure may be the wrong term altogether for a condition of permanence, of dying anyway, and this diagnosis may just be a question of a specified path, well lit and announced in advance, and available to me as my disease, whether I’m ready for it or not. I am ready. I am not. Depends on the day that my disease catches me.

  Catch me on a rainy day with the water inveigling paths down my shirt collar, water coming at me at a slant, and my outlook matches the sky leaden with water. I move slower. I think like a spoon moving through thick porridge. I keep my eyes planted at my feet. My shoulders slump. As if I were a smoldering campfire doused by a bucket. There is only the memory of fire. There I am cooling fast with no room to think outside my condition. The part of me that cherishes water on my skin loses out to the part of me that feels cramped by the bleak and cold and wet.

  Catch me on a day full of sun and I shine with it. I bounce along. I look up at the birds and the trees. I sniff the air for more than traffic fumes. Every thought in me is a sensory record of delight. And from that arises the notion that nothing can stop me in this life except its corollary, death. And death always looks light-years away on a sunny day. If I could whistle, you would hear me coming up the path before you see me. A bird whose wings though missing, nevertheless soars in song. A body made lighter by the bright and the blue.

  And if the day is a bit of both, then I am your in-between person, by turns cheery and somber, head down eyes up, ready to hop over a puddle or shatter my reflection if my hop drops short. Prepared to remain in that place of having embarked and never able to arrive, always on the journey and so always on the move. Flux that includes stillness; thought with room for contemplation. What luxuries amid this clamor of our days. How kind of disease to remind me of what counts in this short sprint of a life. Thank you, for now, for nothing. The season of my affect is the reason for my days.

  For now I must gather all my reverberating strings of being and pool them into one emboldened self of understanding, fight, and cure. Cure may be trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Perhaps I need another conclusion to my diagnosis, not one that erases it as if cancer never existed, but some new state of being with the disease under my control and no longer in control of me, present in me without imminent danger to me, my companion of sorts, one who holds both halves of the door ajar for me to catch up as it walks over the threshold and into oblivion.

  The image that goes with this is of a jazz figure resembling Miles playing with his back to the audience in part disdain for their insistence that they dictate his output rather than learn from his innovations of sound and to hear the members of his band and signal swift and subtle changes to them. There is a funky rhythm section to the jazz horns and keys straying into strange auditory territory. And I am rolling across the floor to those ministrations, I mean on my feet and on the move, arms swinging this way and that, head bobbing and my body trying to separate ribs and spine according to the push and pull of muscles in my back and torso.

  If there is color for all this frenzy then the palette must be rainbow, rainbow, rainbow, as Bishop chants at the end of her poem “The Fish.” For it signals continuous renewal. The spirit lifts to levels only color can map with any accuracy. For the rest of my days that I wake in the disease I’ll be forced to breathe it in and out, and see inside it too and look out at the world from my insider’s location. This condition of living with the disease, and inside it as well, provides perspectives on the disease and on the routine of my world, as if looking out of windows in a large house and those windows permit iterations of landscapes of the disease. So I had better find something recuperative in what I see out there and in what I feel about my life inside cancer. Both. Or else I perish in a living death of being trapped on the inside looking out and seeing my reflection as I look through it to the scene outside.

  My gaze at the outward world launches from a blaze of nerve endings. I land on objects that send back signals of their names and in those names are the sounds of moods: happy, sad, calm, and more. I do this looking-out thing to separate my disease from what I see, as if sight could ever be independent of the mood generated by the reality of my sickness.

  The inward gaze that begins my day operates with my eyes shut and my ears blocked against the outside world. A dreamscape. Next, my nerves dig deeper into my body to defy the dimensions of my five-feet, ten-inch, one-hundred-and-fifty-eight-pound frame. Those nerves open a psychic space of awareness. My mood floats in that space in the company of my disease. I am Gloucester sans eyes, blind, and in possession of a powerful inward gaze, able to “see it feelingly.” The inward gaze is a tune-up for the outside world. When I open my eyes my muscle memory and nerve-based intuition charge everything that I see.

  I start to walk around my neighborhood with alacrity. (Alacrity sounds like a character out of a Dickens novel but I am thinking of Dickens’s nighttime walks around London.) No detail misses my eye and my feet take on eyes in the way each picks a place to land. The map of the place becomes layered like a wedding cake, one layer for each walk, one memory for each sense each time I walk, and never the same walk twice, never once if the Zen maxim is to be believed, a walk made by each sense on its own terms and so never able to create a single take of the journey, more a plural happening bundled from each sense. My cancer with eyes, ears, nose, tongue tunes to that walk those layers made for my cancer.

  Is this what dying looks like? Am I on the last rites of my days as a way to face the end of my time on earth? Hell, no. What has kicked in for me is my poetry. It grows nerves out of every second that I live this crisis. My poetry senses want to rescue me from catatonic shock and stasis. Poetry insists on charging the everyday by bequeathing attention to it. The everyday wants to bat away focus by playing possum with boredom as its principal trait. Poetry does not fall for the trick and so zeroes in on the most humdrum detail in recognition of its live wire charge. And my cancer appears to copy my actions as it continues its shadow play of me.

  Take that urban cockerel that announces the dawn every day without fail. City ordinances clearly state that no such fowl should inhabit the city limits. No one told the owner, or the owner doesn’t care. No one told that cockerel who sees around concrete and brick buildings and through glass that something outside matches an interior clock and in obedience to the two forces, one inside, the other out, that cockerel crows his lungs and heart out. And on a good day I want to run out the front door and stand in the street with my arms outstretched, and join in with that cockerel and crow as well: to announce the new day, to lay to rest the old, in celebration of my breath, pulse, inward gaze, and outlook. Cock-a-doodle-do!

  * * *

  My office is sick after the building flooded and a lot of my books turned to pulp (I see it as ecological literary criticism). The plaster had to be cut away to remove the insulation and banish all mold. The city is sick with the COVID-19 virus
. The globe is shutting down with countries and with commerce. How to turn that global pattern around and at what cost? Imagine the planet as this ailing body. Forget triage, if only because triage admits a trajectory of dying that must be turned around. What is left? What remains for that body to do to save itself from extinction? This is where wellness, collective wellness performed on behalf of all parts of the body, comes into its own.

  I am a neighborhood, a city, a state, a region, and a country, and ultimately the globe. The big systems all pass through me in miniature, all of me mimic all of it. As a river flows with fish and fresh water meets salt to become a sea and ocean, so my blood flows around my body from capillaries to veins to arteries and into and out of the great pump, muscle, nerve bundle, and thought-drum of my heart. It is this connected, interlinked sense of my life that makes me invest in my body as the world and everybody as me, and every other living thing, including that feisty cockerel.

  Just as I posit my body for the city, state, country, globe, so my office flood and COVID-19 join forces with my cancer to battle against me. The fall of water from the upper floors to my third-floor office, a reverse flood in miniature. The large sweep of COVID-19 infecting cities, countries, continents, and the globe. Fear of the cyclone of COVID-19 empties the streets of the city and shutters commerce. The dead pile up. That fear grips me as my cancer already rooted in me. All I have to do is breathe in COVID-19 to inhale another manifestation of my cancer, a pincer attack on my life from outside and from within.

  Flooded office and worsening COVID-19 crisis conspire with my disease to ruin my days. It’s early March and the hare turned up with an increased level of madness. I start to have a string of bad days with my disease. Outdanced by cancer, my toes stepped on by it, in a system that does not see me and sees only the disease at a certain stage of help or hopeless. Am I finding it hard to come to terms with my body as viewed in the latter camp, not open to cure but in need of accepting my lot as doomed? The bell rings for me—not a toll but a ding-dong of the overly dramatic, and a call for me to pull back on the reins of that six-horse-drawn wagon that gallops out of control. Giddyup, despair. Ride me. I am wild. Break me. I may throw you. Hold on for dear life.

  What happened? No energy. I feel cold. Old. No longer bold. My body zooms into a swarm of heat that makes me peel off the sweater that I pulled on to keep warm. I sweat. My armpits itch. My back too. I avoid chemicals on my skin and make sure the deodorant is natural as natural can be; that is, no Es and no parabens. I olive oil hands and limbs and head too, to obliterate those dry patches that trouble my skin and scalp. No hangnails that tell the story of my dry skin, that make my nails look exactly my age against the presentation of my sixty as fifty, which I value, vaingloriously.

  Be humble, I hear Kendrick Lamar intone. Sit down. Humility works if it stands up for social responsibility, if it does not mean surrender to a certain vibe of authority that insists on keeping me in the audience so that it can remain onstage and hog the limelight. Humility is a white flag to my disease whose virulence depends on my passivity. Not today. I may feel tired but my mind remembers what it means to be energetic. If I act full of energy maybe my body will follow my example and jump up from its slouch and take its place onstage. No more the poor me. No more dress me with a sign on my back that says kick me up the butt.

  I am that person Maya Angelou sings about who insists against all odds on surfacing above oppression. Who comes up for Orwellian air in a time of stifling despair. Who may be in Sontag’s America but not ensconced in its reptilian values. So as I rise I take with me the best of me for the rest of us that is part of me. Solve that riddle on behalf of wonder and in celebration of puzzlement. The up in me tells the down in me to ease up and let go of my flow. How did we put it in Airy Hall, East Coast Demerara, Guyana? ’Low me leh me bubble like a surf! Step back so that I can breathe this COVID-19 air, sure, but air unburdened of LA’s usual traffic. Give me elbow room. Count me down but do not count me out. I have a knee on the canvas, granted, and cancer stands menacingly over me, alongside COVID-19, but can’t you see that I am about to push back up to my feet? Look again, more closely this time. I hesitate to draw deep on this reduced exhaust air for its trace of sweetness brought nine miles inland from the sea with the gulls gathered in the parking lot at the mini mall.

  All of the above to stave off the bitter feeling that my disease settled for me to claim my body. All that freshness surfaces in me as well as that bitterness, and I find confirmation for two opposite registers in the world around me. Crows on the lookout for empty nests with juicy eggs chased off by mockingbirds. A lone hawk adrift, wings fixed like a jet’s, riding currents overhead. I feel lethargic as the sky emptied of airplanes. I look outside and the flight of parrots across my field of vision staggers in slow motion as if out of bandwidth. A car passes and as I stare the wheels spin in reverse. A person in layers of clothing, ready for all seasons as the homeless must be to survive the cold nights, pushes a cart brimful with things (could be tins and plastic returns) and the slow crawl switches from passing in front of me to circling in my head. I swallow and taste bile. I blink dust away that feels like razor blades. A heat wave, another drug-induced hot flash, engine of mine robbed of testosterone, sweeps me off my feet. An instant film of sweat makes me peel off my shirt.

  The physics of my disease tightens into the metaphysics of thinking about it at all times so that it becomes a condition for my consciousness. Writer in America. Teacher in America. Black in America. Parent, husband, friend in America. Under COVID-19 and with cancer in America. What started out as physical becomes a state of mind, no longer reliant on the body. My cancer grows wings. I know I am in Fanon territory, where racism injures the psyche of those who live under its pressure. How is my cancer forged in the crucible of my race? If the former is real and the latter is a construct? A body-forged manacle for a disease in a mind-forged manacle of a body stigmatized by race—two versions of Blake’s hell on industrial earth inhabit one space. It converts Fanon’s intangibles that afflict Black bodies and minds into the currency of despair. Fanon with a stake in every malady of the body whose dimensions extend to the mental plane and operate so far from its origins as a physical disease that I might almost forget that I have an ailment, given how rapt with cancer I have become in my outlook.

  Just as my state of mind is dependent on my cancer, so my cancer depends on my state of mind. The gravity of my cancer relies on my ability to control how much it influences my thoughts and feelings. If I capitulate to cancer, then it claims me as its own and takes my life. I am to rise above the pool of the disease in which I am immersed, propel myself out of that pool and float in defiance of gravity, over that water, and look down on the scene as a way to regain perspective on my disease and retain control over my mind. My shadow ripples across the face of that pool and I am out of reach of the element of my cancer. I cannot countenance how much real estate my mind must devote to my disease. I am frustrated with thinking all the time inside the disease. I search for ways to look at my illness as if located outside it. I search for a way to be on the inside of my disease while looking out and, simultaneously, on the outside of the disease while looking in at it.

  4.

  Fred, Do Not Be Afraid

  I beg your pardon, I hear my disease answer in reply to my many charges leveled against it—of trespass, hijack, squatting, invasion, vandalism, anxiety, psychosis, psoriasis (of the mind), catatonia (of the spirit), a Gordian knot (of my reason), poisoning, pollution, warping—I did not grow in you uninvited by the way you lived and the life that you were given to begin with. I started in you with time and from time. I opened my eyes thanks to you finding the combination to unlock my presence in you by the way you lived your life. I had no intention to riot against you, my host, upon whom I depended for sustenance and a quiet life—which is all I ever wanted. I did not intend to finish you and me in the process. As long as you lived on, so would I. As long as you left me undisturbed, I would
keep quiet and dormant in you until the end of your days.

  You see me as spikes, barbed wire, and broken bottles, all cutting edges in you, and you forget that you set me going, turned me on and cut me loose in your body. I did not expect it. All your talk, reading, and tree-hugging company, and demonstrations for good, signaled to me that I would not have a hectic life that charged to a rapid end for my host and for me, but that I would be in a quiet place, unseen and ignored and quite content to amble to an octogenarian’s crawl and walker decked with tennis balls for a snail’s mobility, staggering brakes and watch-paint-dry stoppage. I could see it when you meditated or did your yoga or ran or lifted weights or ate greens, lots of them, with poker-faced enjoyment. I stopped thinking of a day when I would be free to run to my end and in the process, bring about yours preternaturally early.

  That would have been that had you kept your days free of poisons. I mean situations of stress in which you stared down a blank page and filled it and scrapped it only to fill it again and kept at it into the small hours and from dawn to midnight. For what? The glory of your name at the front of a book. Or some sense of what your days might be if strung out across the page or in broken lines patterned on the page. That was you poking my cage with a stick. I ignored you for as long as I could take your teasing. You kept on facing the ineffable. You persisted in your provocation of nothing for the something it might surrender if you put it under the duress of your concentration.

  As you persisted your body fired all manner of tensions around it. I could not dodge or retreat to some safe place. I depended on the shelter you provided. I was written into your biology—by your father and maybe your grandmother as well—even if the writing had to be provoked into meaning or invoked by you for it to mean something to your life. Your insistence on a writing life in the middle of a life to be lived added to the duress I experienced in you. Your choices lit me up. I stirred, looked up from my prostate bed and rolled up my sleeves, and here we are in a fight started by you and to be finished by me.