This is medicine at work, an invasive force with a signature arrival no sense can ignore. However I wish to see my cancer, as a dance, a play in perpetual rehearsal, a healthy dose of insecurity that negates the bombastic ego, this machine that covers my body now with my arms raised over my head looks nothing short of a battle cry and charge at an enemy. I hold my breath as the intercom voice of the nurse instructs, and the machine spins, with a red and blue light and the lowest imaginable whir, and I breathe out when she says that I can. This happens three times. The doughnut moves along my body, stops, and works some more.
Cancer, if you can hear me, now hear this: A clarion plays on my behalf that hopes to drive your forces back and out of me. Chemical numbers assembled in my body now distribute gamma rays, the most destructive form of battle of the modern age if we take Nagasaki and Hiroshima as benchmarks. 68Ga radiates inside me in waves that stop just short of washing my bones clean and purifying my blood. Instead they seek out and leave an identifying mark on each and every manifestation of my cancer in the most efficient reconnaissance ever. I cannot ask for a bigger advantage than to have my enemy under spotlights.
The weird thing about being nuked is that there is an assessed safe level to the process. I find it hard to believe that a portion of the radiation will not stray into my brain or spinal column and stick there for long enough to start a new crop of my disease. I conjure the image of a trusty flu shot—planting the very thing in my body that I hope to evade but in safe quantity to trigger my inoculation against the virus. Gamma rays work like this for me. Be the guiding lamplight for my surgeon to see his way around my insides.
I swallow pooling saliva and grit my teeth as nausea shimmers at the margins of my senses. In my effort to think of something other than vomiting, I imagine the theme music to Hawaii Five-O, the seventies television series syndicated in the UK, in which a long boat of Hawaiians muscle-paddle on one side of the wood craft and change sides, in unison, making a splash to the finger-clicking, head-nodding theme song. It works. The announcement of the end of the session, this time by a male technician, brings the machine to a stop and the door of the room opens and he enters and stands next to me. He talks about me sitting up slowly and gathering my clothes and dressing in the next room and in the middle of his talk and fiddling with blankets and examining my arm he pulls off the plaster and detaches the IV in a quick swipe. I say nothing but I inhale loudly and stifle a comment about the unexpected pain since I’m sure he thought it was best not to warn me about it. I decide as a consequence that I’m one of those people who prefer to be warned about impending pain rather than be surprised by it.
He opens the door and points to the changing room and bathroom, and the exit sign for the waiting room, where he tells me to wait for about twenty minutes while he burns a CD for me with a copy of the 68Ga-PEP-CT scan. I feel a slight headache and lethargy as from a long workout on the stationary bike. The nuclear test works its quiet ministry inside me and exacts a toll on my body. I pee copiously, seemingly more than the 1,000 mL that I took on board. I find the waiting room and it is empty. One lone figure passing through the room pulls a sleeve over a hand to open the door and disappear. I pick a chair near to the front desk, where the clerk is on the phone constantly.
Where is the air that I am breathing now in this basement filtered and generated? What if COVID-19 in its next iteration finds a way to travel in molecules attached to this air? I look around at the physical space and imagine it coated in the virus. I have a ziplock sandwich bag with four sheets of disinfectant wipes in my jacket’s left side pocket. I reach for it and sink my hand into the wet interior of the bag and wipe my hands together. I bring my wet hand to the front of my painter’s mask and hope my touch neutralizes any virus on my mask. I text Debbie to come and get me and return my attention to my phone, which works in this part of the basement by some miracle of design that admits phone signals. One of the many operations in my life that I will need another lifetime to understand how it works, but for now I accept its friendly fire of magnetic rays into my eyes and ears.
The technician appears sooner than anticipated and delivers the CD to me. I thank him and he wishes me well. His parting gaze is a look I have come to recognize in nurses and doctors who deal with me. Knowing the details of my file, they look at me as if seeing an astonishingly limited numbered of days of life emblazoned on my forehead. It is a look of pity and warmth and it stops just short of commiseration. It is a look that I fear the moment I catch it, and immediately following my fear, this rage surges in me, rage mixed with defiance, that declares I will live a long life and prove them wrong.
It is early for my ride to arrive but another second in that basement will be the death of me. I hurry away with a quick parting greeting to the receptionist, who waves while still on the phone and whose eyes I avoid just in case his smile is a knowing one about me. I summon the lift with my ballpoint (nib retracted) and exit with big strides and step from the automatic doors into the broad day. My energy returns a spring to my steps. I must be glowing right now. If a machine could pick up the radiation in me it would buzz loud and long. If I clasp something like an egg I might boil it hard in its shell with my gamma ray touch. If I stare at a brick wall perhaps I can see through it to the other side.
I phone Debbie as she drives past me on the other side of the road with a divide full of plants that hide me from her. She pulls over and I cross at the lights and hot-step it to her. I tell her I am nuclear. She scoots around the car to the passenger side and I fold into the driver’s seat. She has a banana, an energy bar, and a whopping slice of her walnut-and-caramel cake for me. I thank her profusely and drive one-handed as I gorge.
Debbie mentions that Liliana has an online debate competition beginning in thirty minutes. Ordinarily this would have been impossible for us eight miles from the house at this time. We reach home in just under twenty minutes. Liliana is delighted to have us at home. It is her first online debate, brought on by the enforced isolation of COVID-19, and no one is sure how it will work out. I tell her everything for me went according to plan and that I have a CD of the result though no way to understand what’s on the disc. Between one debate and the next as the judge adds up the scores of the student entrants, we get Nicholas to load the disc on his computer, since my Mac cannot read it. What comes up is a shape of my body with a line below my crotch area and another at my neck to demarcate the lines of inquiry of the scan. The second image is a series of sections of my body looking at it as if I were cut in half and a machine had traveled up my body shining a light on everything. The image is mostly shades of gray (less than fifty), and apart from the clear shape of kidneys and pelvis, we are not sure what we are looking at on the screen. I tell them in our confusion over what we are staring at that a dark gray pinpoint at the bottom of the body shape surely has to be my rectum. They laugh. We give up. I tell them that I’ll report back after my talk to the doctor on Monday about the results. Now that my doc has eyes to find his way around the inside of me, I can ask him what the radiation reveals about the spread of my cancer.
10.
Hello, Miss Corona. Meet Mister Cancer
I did not in a month of Sundays ever consider this Sunday to be my last Easter. Yet here I am forced to mull over that fact as a distinct possibility. I face a major surgery. I have a deadly condition. In this mindset I return to Easter in Airy Hall, the best rendition of the occasion in my life. We sang the hymns at Sunday school.
Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
The Bible tells me so.
We also sang,
Someday, someday, I’ll go where Jesus is,
Someday, someday, I’ll go where Jesus is,
Someday, someday, I’ll go where Jesus is,
For I’ll be brought up to meet him,
Brought up to meet him,
Brought up to meet him in the air.
We listened to the scripture and th
e Psalms. My favorite remains Psalm 23. I left Sunday school with my dozen-and-more cousins with winged feet that made us skip along the side of the dirt road all the way home, some of us still singing one or other hymn.
We skipped home looking forward to the day. All during the previous week (except for Good Friday) uncles would call each of us in turn and measure us for a homemade kite. We watched as one of us was called up to stand still in front of two uncles. They looked the child up and down and glanced at each other and nodded and they waved the child away and picked up pieces of wood and marked those pieces. It seemed an age went by as others came under the searching eyes of my uncles. Then came my turn to be measured for my kite. I stepped close to them and they held up my arm, since I was very skinny as a child, to gauge what if any muscles clung to my skin and bones. They shot each other their knowing glances and picked up a small piece of wood and marked it up and waved me away.
The wood earmarked for my kite seemed so much smaller than the others. It might be because it shone brightly for me with my eyes on it as mine. One uncle used his cutlass to cut six strips of greenheart wood for the frame for the kite. Another uncle used his chisel to shave each piece of wood smooth and thin. That light scrape of the wood sent fragrant curls from it floating to the floor around my uncle’s bare feet, and made the wood so thin it could bend a long way without breaking. My aunts came into the picture with hammers and little nails, and rolls of colored paper. They drove nails, with little taps, careful not to split the wood, into the middle of the wood frame. If a piece of wood split accidentally down the middle or into two pieces, it made us suck on the air as if pricked by a needle, and our aunts stopped what they were doing to stare at the ruined wood and they sucked their teeth irritably and tossed the wood aside and had to ask one or another uncle for a new piece, which slowed the process. My aunts cut paper shapes, mostly diamonds, from colored paper, which was kept from creasing by rolling the sheets loosely like bolts of cloth. They angled thin paintbrushes dipped in glue onto the ends of each piece of paper and onto the wood frame. They used their fingers to press on the glue and stretch the paper on the frame. They rounded their lips and lowered their faces close to the wood and paper and glue and blew on it. I could smell the perfume of glue and of shaved wood, the fine dust from the paper that made me sneeze.
My aunts and uncles worked on our kites all week between their usual chores. By Thursday’s close the kites piled up, stacked in corners of the workroom. Each with our name on it, not written, but in skeletal form, made just for our frame to handle. Each linked to one of us changed us as never seen before, wood and colored paper, with a tongue and a tail and a ball of twine on the end of a stick, propped up against a wall. We went to sleep talking late into the night and had to be shushed several times by a grown-up, and slept fitfully and rose early.
The adults were up already. Plaited loaves of Grandmother’s baked bread were spread on the table to cool and taunt us. It was Good Friday and nothing could be done that was not already a thing to think about and refrain from doing. We had to ponder the ultimate sacrifice made on our behalf by Our Savior. We had to ignore those kites, newly minted for each of us as if the materials were withdrawn from each of our bodies. My grandmother could see everything because she never slept. So it seemed, awake, as I nodded off trying to stay up with her, and up and about the house before me even though I woke especially early just to catch her in her bed. She banned us from going near the kites and said we should not look at them since they were there to tempt us on Good Friday, a day of rest, when nothing should be done, not even fly a kite in anticipation of Sunday. No room for anything on Good Friday but grief and the lessons of that monumental hurt.
We believed in what happened to Christ, for we knew our kites would rise as emblems of his soul, ascending from the gravity of this world toward a more ethereal existence, paid for with his life, sacrificed on behalf of us lesser mortals. The string that we held on to presented to us the chance to join Christ in his heaven, as we’d sung in Sunday School, and as we held on to our kites, each seemed to be one of us up there, something that stood for us, small bits of our being, kites that encapsulated our bodies, our souls, no less, us flying on the end of as a long navel-string, sent up to meet His majestic ascendency. That was our Sunday. There was a great show of finding a clearing away from the next person and raising those kites in the breeze. We stood up and pulled on the strings and swung the kites’ tails from side to side, and their tongues sang in the breeze. We were airborne for the first time and for the rest of our lives. Our kites joined us to whatever forces dwelled out of reach.
And so this Sunday—if it is to be my last Easter—I want nothing more than to be with Debbie and the children and stay around the house. This version of Easter, cramped by COVID-19, and entirely secular, I wake early with Debbie, who hides chocolate eggs, positioned in partial view, for our thirteen-year-old daughter to collect when she wakes. Our two boys, young adults at twenty-two and nineteen, want the chocolates without the hunt around the house for them. I sit in the quiet of the living room and write this and hear the start of birds as the night thins and retreats and light begins in the east, as the things in the world that the night welded together begin to separate into their names. So that I can say tree, flower, car, house, grass, bird, fence, road, and each of them becomes, if not holy, infused with spirituality.
If only it could stay like this, a pristine memory of ritual, compliance, patience, and concomitant reward. Of seeing those kites being made all week, and watching them on Good Friday as we thought about the supreme sacrifice that was made on behalf of us all, and finally flying the little pieces of our lives on Easter Sunday to commemorate His rising.
One cousin had to disobey the golden rule about Good Friday. It was inevitable that someone in our midst would succumb to the temptation to fly a kite and break our grandmother’s ban that forbade us to touch it. That cousin remains a hero to me for his valiant effort and spectacular failure.
On Good Friday we rose early. At first this Good Friday seemed like all the ones before it. We ate fresh bread, buttered, with cups of sweetened tea for us to sip loudly and dip the bread into and chew long before swallowing it. We talked fast, as if talk would run out. We saw our kites. Adults reminded us several times to think about the significance of the day. His sacrifice. The requirement that we lie low in honor of that sacrifice loomed large. Everything was done in hushed tones and with penitence as the guiding force for everything. I felt like I had to tiptoe around the house.
My cousin behaved like the rest of us. There was nothing to telegraph his intention to disobey my grandmother. No one had ever rebelled against her orders about Good Friday. We completed our chores with a lot of talk about our kites and about the unbearable wait for Sunday. We said we would outfly each other by miles, that our kites would sing the loudest and that the color of the tails of our kites would stand out the best from all the rest. My cousin may have nodded his assent rather than contributed a boast of his own, as another cousin pointed out afterward, as if that reserve were some sign of his rebellious intentions, but I did not notice. It was hard to get a word into the mix with all of us brimful of words about what they and their kites would do come Sunday. A nod was as active as the younger cousins could get in those conversations.
We performed only essential chores on Good Friday. We had to fetch water from the standpipe positioned in the middle of the village at the bend in the one road into and out of it. We walked fast with our empty buckets and talked the most on that outward journey. On the way back we focused on the walk with the buckets full of water that we tried our hardest not to spill onto the parched red sand. We emptied the buckets sometimes with the help of an adult into the water barrels stored at the bottom of the steps that led from the kitchen.
I do not remember which one of us noticed my cousin. Someone called to the rest of us. We could not believe our ears. So-and-so was heading into the field with his kite. What? Did you just say
what I think you said? Am I hearing things? A commotion sprang up right away. How no adults caught on to us and intervened fails me to this day. Sure enough, I looked out the crowded window after elbowing a bit of room for myself, and there he was, unspooling some string and starting the pull of the kite to coax it into the breeze. Had he gone mad? He was acting in direct contradiction of our grandmother. She was known as the one adult who when she said a thing, that thing had to be done or else. She could not be disobeyed. There would be some unpleasant consequence if someone, big or small, disobeyed a direct order from her. Yet here he was, my cousin, in the field close to the road starting up the engine of his kite in a brazen disregard of our grandmother. What would happen to him? I wondered this even as I willed him to hurry up and get the kite off the ground. The long tail still dragged even as the kite dipped and climbed and dipped and climbed some more. He tugged at the string and released some more of it and stepped back and tugged. And so the kite climbed as if ascending the rungs of an invisible ladder.
We were on the verge of cheering for him. For there he was, flying a kite on Good Friday against my grandmother’s wishes and not a thing happened to prove that our grandmother should never be disobeyed. I was about to stick two fingers of each hand, the middle and index fingers, into my wide mouth and whistle with everything in my lungs, topped up for the action. Just at that moment my cousin screamed and released his kite, just let it go, the very kite that was made in his likeness, and he crouched down and grabbed his right leg. He kept screaming. Everyone ran to him. I was left behind by the better sprinters, who tore down the steps that led into the yard, taking those steps two or three at a time at great risk of tumbling onto their heads. I held the banister with a sliding grip and looked at each step as I raced down with hardly a touch of the balls of my feet.
Year of Plagues Page 18
