There was a time when my daughter was curious about my nipples. She was seven or eight and she noticed my bare chest when I walked around the house on a hot summer’s day. She said my nipples were narrow and protruding (her word). She pressed on one to push it back into place and it sprang back up. She wondered if it was alive and worked independently of me. I told her that nipples came in all shapes and sizes and that mine varied depending on if I was cold or hot, at rest or exercising. This carried on for some months. She would see me and start a conversation or try to sink my nipple into my chest with her index finger and a lot of concentration on her part to land on her target.
At some point I said enough of the talk and touch and that she needed to take my word for it and examine her own and her mother’s chest and leave my nipples alone. Was it inappropriate behavior that I sought to correct with a deflection? I think she made me aware of my body and of my allocation of a special status to nipples on bodies. My daughter was naturally curious about me for her age and was experimenting with knowledge and the limits of it socially as is fitting for a child. My response to her was the noteworthy thing and not her curiosity about me. I take the lesson all these years later as I face the possibility of growing breasts of my own to wonder if my nipples would grow in proportion to my breasts or remain the two sprigs that they have always been to me.
In a dream I dress as a man, leave the house, not walking but airborne, like one of those blue figures in a Chagall painting. I land and I undress in public, say, at a local pool or gym, only to discover that I have breasts. I wake with a start and reach up to cover my shy nipples and check on my status. I associate breasts, rather than the complete absence of testosterone in my body, with being a woman. I think I would have to find cover for them or hide them from all eyes and any notion that I was not a man. My cancer is in my worry. My cancer has shifted its shape to a worrisome thought. There is no evidence of cancer in the thought. What is cancerous is the way it occupies my mind. I think I am willing to pay the price of breasts to rid my body of the cancer, but the way I worry about having breasts tells me something different. Though I admire them a great deal, I do not want them on me.
Their status as “out there” as belonging to an “other,” not me, may have something to do with my gratification of them. In fact, they are among a cluster of expressions that add to my ideal construct of my desire. In my mind’s eye I need a number of body parts to be in sync to meet my stringent notion of a love object. Breasts are one important part of the equation. They would grow on me and remind me of my battle with cancer. They would not have the kind of love from me that I associate with their presence on a healthy subject. I would resent them daily and want them off me. I would see the cancer as having captured a part of my body, another part, given my retreat from its occupation of my prostate and its creep into my nearby lymph nodes.
Those promised and not forthcoming breasts of mine that are a source of fascination and horror to me, signal a body too easily amenable to change, and they signal my burgeoning Anansi shape-shifting sympathies. If I should turn into someone else—I mean transform in terms of one key gender marker, breasts—I might trick the cancer into thinking I was no longer present in my body, no longer the body in which the cancer started, a body now abandoned as a home for some other, more healthy place. Left behind in that way and tricked into thinking that the host has died, has fled, either or both, the cancer might wish to follow by dying to resurface as a new life, given its shape-shifting qualities, rather than perish in the abandoned shell of a body. I assume that breasts are akin to a cloaking device, a power that grants invisibility to male bodies, that once these breasts have grown in place they make the male bodies appear to be no more.
Breasts on my body, the threat of them, challenge my male gender outlook. I have nothing to defend about being male. It can just as easily perish if it means I change shape and trick the cancer into thinking it has nowhere to live because it no longer recognizes its host. The cancer brings about its own death in me, thinking me dead ahead of it. My male body appears to vanish, made invisible by my sudden sprouting of breasts, or so I posit in my search for Anansi trickster emblems to befuddle the cancer.
Which brings me to my fear of shrunken testes. In attacking my inflamed prostate and by blocking the production of testosterone, the two drugs, bicalutamide and tamoxifen, respectively, each taken once daily, along with the Lupron Depot, a three-month injection, have conspired to reduce my scrotum contents to the size of two marbles. And the sack itself has contracted to sit back and up against my body in the area behind the uppermost part of my penis as if in hiding from some malicious threat.
Bicalutamide works by fooling the cells that make testosterone into thinking that they do not need to work at all since the body is flooded with the stuff. The message sent by the drugs to the cells is that their work is done and the body is fine without their need to send more of the energizing chemical. The injection works against testosterone in the same way. The cells get the message and they lay down their tools and stop their production. The body soon runs low of testosterone, and organs that feed on it start to look the worse for wear. The good thing is that cancer cells relish testosterone. They too starve. Their growth halts without it, their spread stops. My testes shrink as well, starved and left to wither away like the capitalist state under surplus value gone rampant.
Flomax does better. It relaxes the muscles that control the urge to pee and allows the stream to widen for a better flow of urine. I found myself able to pee as before with this drug and with the bicalutamide even better off, as the prostate gave up its real estate around my urinary tract. Unfortunately, the side effects from the other three medications extended their efficacy to my testes, where they were not wanted but where they had to go to catch as much of the area as possible that might be afflicted by the spread of cancer cells. Between the four—Flomax, tamoxifen, bicalutamide, and the Lupron Depot injection—I have these four chemical incarnations of Anansi working their trickster magic for me.
I figure at some point soon I will not need the Flomax thanks to the success of the bicalutamide. My muscles, sphincter and others near it, can go back to their former efficiency with the bicalutamide reducing the size of the prostate and clearing the area near the urine-flow-controlling muscles of all obstructions. If only the drug could accelerate its shrinkage of the cancer cells, I mean bombard them or chip away at them until they disappear from my body.
My testes might come back after all this is over and done. They might swell to twice their size and hang somewhat as if absolved by some higher authority from the need to hide away. I look forward to it. I hold them a few times a day in the palm of my left hand to let them know that I have their back, that this is a temporary state of affairs, and that the fight to recover them to their former glory will be won by me with my cohort of pharmaceutical Anansis. They are cool to my palm, my testes, not cool to me, cool as they need to be under conditions imposed before my chemical bombardment of them. I do not need their populations anymore. I just need what they bring to the table of desire and lovemaking. I took my testes for granted. I called them block and tackle, as if they were bundled with my penis forevermore. They have distinguished themselves as independent emissaries and in need of my particular attention in my cancer state. They are not equipment for a job. They have a status as driving engines of my sexual economy.
If I were a knitter I would knit my testes a special outfit to demarcate them from the organs around them. It would resemble a bonnet fitted upside down and tied around the front and uppermost part of my penis with a bow, or perhaps a navy knot of some complexity and authority, rather than a savoy knot. Why not try for a sheet bend? Use two different-colored threads to make that bonnet. A poet might write them an ode to coax them back to life and instill in them a sense of their former glory. Something like, Oh twin sacks of a sex sacrament, upon whose bed a horrible lime has fallen, hear me! And so on. I would mount a monument in a village square f
or them. National occasions would have a special version of a salute for them, some gesture such as grabbing the crotch area as an affirmation of its pride of place in the national psyche, assuming nationalism is desirable in this instance and not a cancer in the first place.
I attach too much importance to my mutable body, as if all I know starts and ends with it. What do I do with the ineffable? I swore by the salt-over-the-shoulder, superstitious lifestyle of my grandmother in Airy Hall, of my childhood, that I would not turn my back on such things, that I came to know more than my body could contain, and that more of these intangible things thrived outside me and my ability to detect them, and that since I could not see them or subject them to rational judgment, or scientific intelligence, I had to trust in their veracity. That a sixth sense occurs independent of my ability to register it and that just because I can’t quantify it doesn’t mean that there aren’t conclusions that I can draw from that lack of hard evidence on my part, other than that if I ignore something of such importance to my Guyanese childhood, my life would be the poorer for it. This outsider existence continues unabated despite my body’s decline and death, just as it was ongoing before my birth.
Somewhere in that phenomenon there reside aspects of my physical life in metaphysical modes of being that I feel and sense, and so must be true. It races ahead of me and falls behind me and mimics my shadow ahead, behind to my left or right or exactly under my feet. I see it out of the corners of my eyes as the thing that I glimpse and cannot define. I continue in the form of that numinous life when my body decays. My body belongs not to me but to my cancer. As the cancer rises in me I see that I must leave my body sooner rather than at some other deferred time. Cancer knocks at my door. I have to answer its call, not to accompany it right away as it demands. I can take my time to get ready for it. I might even play a trick or two with cancer to pass the time before I give myself over to it.
All my senses lead to this road where Anansi waits for me. While I may languish in perpetuity in the sensory and in reasonable deductions made from it, and while it may prove enough for a life, it is not enough for me. I see otherness as an asset in my fight with my cancer, my dance, my tandem bicycle ride, and my copilot in my flight. You see, I relish the first chance to be airborne and free of gravity and its demands on flesh and blood and sense and reason. I take it as a compliment that my heart may dictate a rhythm that when followed excels in tempo into other realms of being. Those modes are springboards for me, moments of departure, starting points rather than ends themselves.
That is why my body breaks down and brings about not an end but a transition. I cannot name where I am going. Not to name the unknown is not to discredit its veracity. I send this notion to the oceanic gates of my cancer, to let it know that there is no winner in its domination of my body, just a change of the guard, as I relinquish my hold on my life and the cancer takes over, and I expire in my bodily form for this other place that waits for my arrival. Do not call it heaven or an afterlife. There is no alternate place or end of life for another life. My body falls and I land in a place that accepts me in whatever shape I happen to be in after I depart my body. It is this Anansi aspect to my transformation that may evade the winner-takes-all game that cancer wants me to play with it. I refuse.
As a result of cancer, my body delights with its sensory engagement with the world, it speculates about this world as conjecture and fantasy. And the world obliges with a promise of no end to the time that can be spent with it. On one hand my flesh is fragile and temporal, on another there is the edifice of thought this flesh and bone and blood of my thinking builds that intimates an immortal life span. If only my body is not seen by me as the limit of life. If only the spirit can ascend to its rightful place of permanence as if still in a temporal body, though not confined to temporality. I wish this into my life as my doubt that this is all there is, this body, though my flesh and blood, imbued with spirit, tell me that though some magical everlasting life is enough for most, it just is not sufficient for me.
Cancer brings this home to me. Cancer says my exit from this life may be early and I must find a way to make it palatable somehow. Accept the end of days as the termination of my gaze. As if the value of this body happened just for me for this brief time, and all the lives before my own added up to a plunge into nothingness and only the legacy of our acts to be taken up by those who follow us. And why not just this life? Why must there be an afterlife? What need is there for some haven after the sacredness and profanities and secular riches of this life? What manner of life after death could continue this consciousness tied to this vulnerable body? The certainty that it is lights-out, kaput, when we die, that clear conclusion evades me. I cannot settle on it definitively. And not because I lack the proof of a life after death; I don’t care for proof. I turn away from certainty as a natural response of my thinking in part due to my creative practice of cultivating uncertainty to bring about poetry.
Meditation settles my mind. Who says that my body must surrender to the facts of its hungers? While I value my body for what it provides and I see it as holding in common the fact of my consciousness, I do not see that consciousness as the function of a certain number of chemicals and electrical impulses. That seems reductive. While chemicals and electricity drive my consciousness, they do not limit it. Consciousness alters as the body alters and when the body ends consciousness finds another shelter or expression for it. Or so I dupe myself into believing in what is a loose version of spiritual secularism.
I admit that I may be deluded and my reasoning along these lines keeps company with the magical thinking of religious types. It may be my inability to accept the limited value of my body in the face of its limitless capacity for thinking that keeps me on the side of the mystical. If I dismiss this spiritual realm on the basis that it cannot reasonably be known, would that dismissal not be an act of limitation by me? Just when I need to be accepting of mystery I shirk it in preference of the limited scope of science and my senses and language.
I call on Minnie Riperton’s five-octave coloratura soprano versatility for my cancer analysis. Anansi gave shape to my thinking around my cancer. My body’s changes encapsulated my need for versatility and depth to my thinking and feeling in the face of my cancer. Her worship of the sensory attachment to her lover in her hit track “Lovin’ You,” instructs me about my need to serve my body as the principle harbinger of my mind and not become divorced from the mutual dependence of the two. Riperton tapers off her praise of her lover with a rarely attained falsetto note to signal her abandonment of explaining herself in preference of the thing that drives her to sing about it. Her turn from charting her joy to her voicing of a note to denote her ecstasy switches from testimony to Rasta livity.
That condition of livity brings me to my wife, Debbie, as we scoot over in our bed to meet each other halfway to nestle, her back pushed into my front, my crotch pushed against her bottom, my arm draped over her to clasp her hands held at her chest, and settling with my breathing and hers working together like rowers in a long boat. And for this livity I thank the cathedral of my body. I pray for the morning to hold off a little while longer, keep me as still and close with Debbie for as long as I have flesh to feel and blood dancing around my body to keep me warm. Let my formation with my partner last through the night and beyond as we waltz in our sleep, our breathing joined and separate, catching up and falling behind, shallow and nasal in turn and then the settle of our breaths to hardly any rise and fall and their coupling in unison.
Until the crow of the Mid-City cockerel pulls us apart or the cats jump on us to wake us to feed them, or the dog barks to go out into the backyard. Or just this morning light shouldering through the curtains to crowbar the lids of our eyes open from our double-coffined sleep. Where we wish to remain undisturbed. Where whatever is good about flesh in unity resides. For the one body that is our two joined bodies, to stay planted that way in confirmation of the body’s rule over our lives. For us to keep love warm as if we
were both the eggs and the sitters who must keep them viable, sitting and benefiting from that warmth at the same time.
I call on my body for help to lift my spirits. Here, body, here, come to me, I am waiting for you. And the body trots up to me and nuzzles me and says that it is mine and at my disposal. The moment it arrives in the form of a burst of energy, I send my body away on the grounds that the help that it brings to my attention cannot cure me, may serve only to create an illusory sense of well-being. I take such loyalty as given and bank it until I see that my cancer sneaks in behind my body’s ramparts and feels vindicated. My body has cancer. Cancer is my body. The shape of my body gives that cancer its shape. As I move, the cancer moves, harder than a shadow, with more purpose, steering me in any direction it wants to take. I have an enemy and that enemy is in me. Is me.
I do with it what I would do with any invasion: First I try to placate it with wishful thinking on my part, that the invader doesn’t really mean its invasive action and that it might consider retreating and returning to where it came from. Second, I offer it peace entreaties—there is nothing to conquer here, and what little I possess I am ready to offer a fair share. Third, I consider raising a white flag of surrender: come and take what you want and leave when you grow bored, as you surely will in such bland territory. These tactics summarize my prescription for the cure of my cancer, the invader that has taken up residency in my body with fortifications that imply a long siege and a conquest without empathy or one that intends to win at all costs however Pyrrhic the victory, or earlier than that if I lay me down in those rancid pastures and die.
Year of Plagues Page 11
