Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  A couple of grown-ups were crouched beside him as we gathered around. He kept screaming. The adults held his hands away from his leg and one of them tore off his own shirt and in one move of pulling his arms apart divided that shirt into two strips for a bandage. I crouched down and peered though several legs and caught a glimpse of my cousin’s injury. A long piece of greenheart wood stuck out the side of his calf and it appeared to have penetrated his heel. There was some blood but not as much as I expected. Another uncle scooped up my cousin and positioned him sideways on a bicycle and rode off to the nearest town where there was a hospital. My cousin was still bawling as the bicycle disappeared around the bend.

  My grandmother walked back into the house. We followed. We stared at her from a safe distance. We did not say anything about our kites. Our cousin returned bandaged and with a crutch some hours later. He offered a weak smile. My grandmother took him into her room, a special vanity and bed and rug on the floor, that we entered only if told by her to fetch her something that she needed from it, or else to polish the wood floor. She closed the door and uncles and aunts shooed us from the hallway.

  My cousin came back to us with a look of peace about him and so very tired that he kept yawning and before we could get anything out of him an adult steered him away from us and straight to bed to get some rest and to heal. That is what the adult said to us. Stay out of the room and let the boy get some shut-eye. The grown-ups said that my cousin’s accident was sufficient punishment for daring to fly his kite on Good Friday. My grandmother did not say anything. She didn’t have to. We all knew not to disobey her no matter how strong the temptation. We believed the wait for Easter Sunday was worth more than the risk of breaking our grandmother’s rules and ending up in a terrible accident. And when we ran out on Easter Sunday with our kites and filled the sky over Airy Hall with them, we forgot all the reasons why someone would want to rebel in the first place.

  All these years later I carry that incident from my childhood in Airy Hall as if to prepare me for what could be my last Easter before I die, though I am not ready for Liliana’s slow-motion way of going about her hunt for the eggs hidden in the living and dining rooms and bedroom that serves as a music room. Liliana takes some time to dress. Debbie and I are seated in the living room, feet up on the coffee table, twiddling our thumbs. I shout up the stairs that it is Monday already. Nothing. Debbie adds that the eggs will hatch. Again nothing. We make small talk. Nicholas walks in with his favorite poncho, the one he wears with his friends from high school, all of whom bought one. He takes his basket and smiles at the contents. Liliana appears at the bottom of the stairs. I expected full makeup and a ballroom gown. She is in her best fatigues, no makeup, none needed. She looks beautiful. Hers is the kind of effortless beauty of form and appearance that other people have to spend hours to orchestrate.

  I tell people that Liliana was sent to us by the gods. That after our two boys and a gap of five years it was a shock for the sonogram to confirm her sex and we questioned the radiologist in disbelief, and she laughed and showed us the indisputable evidence and we cried.

  Liliana walks from mantel to side dresser to sofa and picks up chocolates and other candy and adds them to her basket. We call her back to sweep a place where she missed something and she obliges and expresses surprise at what she finds that was always there staring her in the face, more chocolate. Soon her basket fills. Soon Sunday settles into its COVID-19-altered name in a week of Sundays thanks to the virus. A lone jet, sounding like a vacuum cleaner, passes overhead. One car, then two, drag rubber along tarmacadam with a sound of sandpaper on wood.

  * * *

  My pre-op orders me to take a COVID-19 test. It is the last hurdle to the physical ejection from my body of the major site of my cancer. The pre-op test before COVID-19 amounted to a stress test of the body’s ability to withstand anesthetic, the heart’s electrical efficiency, and a cardio assessment. I met those criteria. Now COVID-19 presents itself as if to bar my entry to the café where the healthy sup. I protest even as I see how I am a small piece among millions who are at the mercy of the contagion. I see COVID-19 for all its pandemic claims, as no more than an incarnation of my cancer—in this case society at large grieves with me, as we are both under “heavy manners” (as we referred to despotic authority in those bygone days of my London youth) from one thing or another, that is none other than the same thing, which is cancer.

  It is this conflation that I insist on that needs some explanation. The death and suffering across the world from COVID-19 dwarfs my calamity with cancer. A sense of grace tells me that I should accept the fact that I am one person among a multitude of people in great distress at this time. Of course, I count, but for much less. I need to demonstrate a sense of proportion even with my affliction taking its toll on my ability to think in an even-tempered way. I should see how the millions of infected souls outweigh my struggle to extend my life against the petition of cancer to shorten it. But a part of me believes that my cancer would dearly love that too. My cancer wants me to put my fight with it second and focus on the bigger fight of COVID-19. The less time I devote to the fight with my cancer, the more it thrives in me. The more I attend to the pandemic of COVID-19, the better for my cancer to progress without my surveillance. COVID-19 is an agent of my cancer. It is one among many curveballs pitched my way by my cancer.

  If today’s test result comes back positive, it means the operation cannot happen in seventy-two hours. And in a climate of physical isolation, who knows when the medical team could reconvene on my behalf. I am just one person. Thousands have died from COVID-19 and the routine at every level of society has been upended. People will suffer the consequences of this enforced and necessary isolation for years to come. It is the plague of the digital age, I have read and heard. My cancer should shrink into perspective under that magnified gaze. I should even be courteous enough to put off my surgery myself, without bothering with any tests, to allow the experts to assist in the struggle to treat the COVID-19 afflicted.

  For me to bow to the excesses of COVID-19 would be for me to surrender to my cancer. It is that plain and simple. I have to fight it because this is a fight for my life. If I have COVID-19 dormant in me—I do not exhibit any symptoms—that means I cannot take the next best step to halt the progress of my cancer. That leaves me a walking dead. I may recover from the novel coronavirus, if I have it, and, in effect, I will have signed my death warrant with my cancer. The urgency to remove the prostate and the surrounding lymph nodes feels the same with or without COVID-19. Of course I try to do both—attend to my cancer and COVID-19, as twin demands made on my family and me, on society and its future. I see a version of me inclined to die for the bigger cause of a stand against the novel coronavirus. I mean, not fight my cancer in this willful fashion by insisting on treatment in the midst of a pandemic, and devote myself to richer days with my immediate family. Someone else might decide not to fight the advance of cancer in their body on the grounds that the wider war that is being waged against the novel coronavirus takes precedence. Not me. The binary is a false one. My family members do not benefit from my early demise from cancer if I devote myself to fighting COVID-19 with them. We are a unit doing our best to stop the spread of the disease. We are isolated at home. We shop when we absolutely have to. Our online lives have grown exponentially as we keep up with family and friends.

  I want to put the test behind me and continue my preparation to face the first surgery of my life and the biggest challenge to my longevity. COVID-19 is only as big a threat to me if the test returns positive and cancels my surgery. In this sense COVID-19 shows another face of my cancer.

  I wish there were a song for this. It would be great right now to muster the ability to laugh (by the calypso satire of Trinidadian picong) at both COVID-19 and my cancer. I can’t at the moment, though I look ahead to the distance and perspective that will bring me the added imaginative arsenal of wit and laughter and a quatrain or two of excoriating calypso.


  I get prostate cancer

  It wreck my calendar

  COVID-19 join the gang

  The two make big bang

  * * *

  At this stage of the run-up to my operation when I will lose a part of my body to my cancer, I have a routine. Stuck in the house, I find any occasion to go out an opportunity to dress up. For the COVID-19 test I wear my best jeans (the brand of which shall remain nameless, since it is the fit more than anything that enthralls me) and a shop-pressed shirt and good shoes. I shave as well. It’s a drive-thru test. Debbie accompanies me. The university hospital is nineteen miles away at Redondo Beach. As we drive we talk about one of my early experiences soon after my arrival in the US with the notion of drive-thru. In Maine, I saw a sign that said drive-thru redemption. I asked Debbie if it was religious. If those who have sinned could drive up to a window and be absolved. Through her belly laughter she said it was for the return of cans and bottles. Two empty highways later we arrive at the hospital. I have a long paragraph of special instructions that I printed from an email about where to drive on the hospital grounds to receive the COVID-19 test.

  I turn into a lane that is not the main entrance but one of the side entrances that takes employees to the parking garage. I remember to pull on my mask. Instead of entering the garage, I am asked by the man and woman at the guardhouse positioned on the property two steps from the sidewalk if I am there for the COVID-19 test. I say yes. What is my name? I have to say it twice for them to understand me through my mask. “Welcome, Fred,” the guy says, in a chipper way, as if I am there to collect lottery winnings. The woman tells me to stay right and follow the road all the way to the back. The man adds that I will know to stop when I see another guardhouse.

  Debbie and I comment to each other on how long a drive albeit at a crawl pace that road turns out to be as it snakes around the back of the building, as if taking us to an isolated spot, the kind of removal that a bomb squad performs before they blow up a suspicious package. The guard there sports a broad smile and welcomes us. He wears a mask as well. That is how big he smiles, the kind of smile that spills out of the corners of a mask. He speaks to me at a couple of feet away from the passenger window, where Debbie sits. I say my name. He repeats it with an entirely different pronunciation and confirms it on his clipboard. He props a walkie-talkie toward his chin and says into it that I am there. A nasal reply sounding as if the person held her nose to speak blasts out of the walkie-talkie. The guard takes the number one printed on plastic-covered letter-size white paper and pins it under my passenger-side windshield wiper. He tells me to proceed along the cones that lead out of sight until I come to a tent. I thank him and look ahead and drive at a crawl. The blind left turn reveals a white tent the size of a single-space garage with open sides. I drive in and a man in a security uniform and mask signals for me to stop beside him at a white line with a large stop sign. He tells me to put the car in park and switch off the engine. A nurse at a table about six feet away asks me in a shout what my date of birth is and to state my full name. Another nurse with a mask and visor too (it looks a little like a welder’s but made of clear plexiglass) has a small vial in his hand and long prod modeled on a Q-tip but longer and with material on just one end and rather more of it than one sees on a cotton bud and with a firmer, more compact look.

  He says to look straight ahead and hold my chin up a little and not to move my head. I lean back on the headrest and offer my nostrils to him. He reaches into the car with his gloved hand and sterile gown-covered arm and sticks the probe up my nose, so far up that his fingers almost touch my face and I feel this tremendous shooting pain behind and between my eyes, so much of a shock that I involuntarily shout, Ouch! He retracts his arm and dips the stick into the glass capsule labeled with my details. A fat drop of water bounces out of my left eye above the nostril that the nurse drilled into, and my right eye blurs with water. My nose waters as well. I become many spigots, many fountains of responses, none of them under my control. I inhale deeply a few times and Debbie and I laugh as I pull off my specs, dry my eyes, put them back on, and drive away and search out decent words for “What the fuck?” It takes me a mile of road before I remember that I have the mask on in the car. I take it off and stuff it into the storage side panel of the driver’s door, knowing that I will need it for the hospital stay.

  I had better not have that virus after the unpleasantness of the test. Did the male nurse stick the probe in too far? Why did it hurt worse than the Lupron Depot injection into my butt? Maybe I have more nerves in my nose than I think. The two highways are a dream drive that flirts with my ability to see just how little of my attention I can sink into the task of driving home. There is no time for speculation before I exit the highway and make the couple of turns home. The area behind the upper bridge of my nose throbs like a stop sign at a pedestrian crossing. I imagine the beat matches the rhythm of my heart.

  Back at home an email pops up that says in the heading that it contains my PSMA test results. For security reasons I have to log into my UCLA health portal to access the two PDFs. I call Debbie to be by my side as I open the mail. One is the confidentiality agreement that I signed, which gives them permission to use their findings as a teaching tool, the other details what the gamma highlighted. I speed-read to the story about the lymph nodes. They have taken up the gamma rays throughout my body, which means the pathogens that specifically identify the cancer in my prostate membrane have migrated throughout my body, principally in the lymph nodes, which regulate infection and cleanse the body of impurities.

  Last thoughts cross my mind. Single words and images of people charged with a sad feeling. Fuck. Christ. Wow. Followed by my children, Debbie, my brothers, mother, grandchildren, and friends. All of it, and them, seen and felt at high speed. This is it, I think. My pulse speeds up and I start to breathe as if I’d sprinted to catch a bus. The lights around me increase in brightness—all the day and everything in it suddenly made big and bold and up close. I blink back what must be water brimming my eyes and turn my face away so that Debbie can’t see me. I summon my bits of classical music and jazz that I’ve been listening to a lot lately since it helps settle my mind and body.

  I wonder if the surgery can do more than remove the prostate and some nodes that are nearby, and whether I’ll end up having chemo and radiation anyway. It’s a worst-case scenario. The lymph nodes once they become replete with cancer succumb very quickly to the disease, and the prognosis gives the person about five years of life at best. Do I even have as much as those five years to live? It is sixty months, two hundred and sixty weeks. How to maximize 1,826 days, assuming I have that full calendar at my disposal? Write and read, meditate, and hang out with loved ones. And for hours, all 43,824 of them, I am a rich man. Let me go to seconds and be a multimillionaire of my mortality, 157,766,400—and if I write those words, they hold the promise of more time: one hundred fifty-seven million, seven hundred sixty-six thousand, four hundred seconds.

  I never thought I had inordinate helpings of time at my disposal. I saw it simply as a deferred condition of my mind, the least of my worries as I plowed on with my ambition and with paying the bills and enjoying family and friends and the city. I pushed away the idea of time as limited and finally about to run out as property held in common by humanity and therefore canceled as a specific thing for me to worry about. If everyone dies sometime, what is there to agonize over? It is only with the subtraction from it by my disease that I jump to my feet in protest and cry foul. I have come to terms with the idea of an inevitable death. I have not come to terms with death made into an earlier prospect by cancer.

  Hello, Miss Corona

  Meet Mister Cancer

  You two make a team

  Of nightmares from dreams

  Cancer, you are a thief of my time. You have broken into my body and headed straight for the vault where I store my years, and, cancer, you have helped yourself to a couple of decades. You see, cancer, without you in my life I
saw myself in my mideighties before I bowed out of this body. Not in my early sixties and threatened with not seeing sixty-five. For this reason I strip naked and stand ready in a gladiator’s arena of medicines and mantras to fight you to the end. I have a thirteen-year-old daughter. It is her face that I see when I think of my early death. I think of my sons and Debbie. I never wanted to leave any of them, not this preternaturally early. And so, my cancer, you are my only opponent in this arena. More than COVID-19 or the chance of a natural disaster, it is you, cancer, that I fear and for which I stop everything in my life, and prepare to battle.

  So tonight I stuff myself. As I work in the living room, I hear the Morse code of the chopping board extemporizing for an hour in the kitchen where Debbie dices and slices potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, onions, basil, and garlic. Coriander hangs in the air like pollen. Soon I help myself to two servings of Debbie’s curry, which perfumes the house from pillar to post. The omnipresence of curry in the air creates the illusion that I am eating through my nose, inhaling the benefits of Debbie’s delicious meal as much as chowing down on it. I round off stuffing myself with a hefty slice of her sponge cake frosted with a light blue frosting and sprinkled with chocolate shavings, which is the epitome of a speckled bird’s egg. I drink two eleven-ounce cartons of unadulterated coconut water. I belong to a brigade of gormandizers, bacchanalians devoted to sensory excess. Oh to induce vomiting just to start this overindulgence all over again!

  Stuck on the sofa with a rotund belly, I delight in a bloated feeling of my stomach’s skin distending in slow motion. It is as though I ate yeast that continues to work in my gut by swelling everything in its purview. What contentment truly earns its name without going to the brink and over the brink? My brain draws its blinds of discernment for nonchalance toward fate. My muscles forget what muscles forget when doused with salt, fat, and sugar. Tomorrow I fast.