My mother loved him to the end of his days, as she will to the end of hers. He left her for another woman. She loved him and he walked away from her and from us and started anew, with a new wife and children. He left me his wobbly genes probably rigged with cancer DNA so I need to reach him the only way I know how—by memory and invention—see him at his best, early in his adult life, in order to lay his ghost to rest.
12.
The City Is Dying
I see his smile and bright eyes and hear him over and again, “The operation went really well. It was hard. I hope I got everything. Stop all five drugs right away and come back and see me in three months for a test to check your PSA.” I start at ninety and hope that when I count down to day one I will see the doctor again and hear that the cancer is cleared from my body, that the PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test registers way below 0.5 and so frees me of the need for more tests and possible radiation and chemotherapy. That is my wish. For three months I hope that wish comes true. I count each day and take them one at a time and see what each brings and what I make of each of them, no two the same.
I conduct this countdown under the added duress of COVID-19. I hope each day lessens the pressure on my mind, loosens the knot of my shoulders, and helps me breathe with a little more ease. That is a lot to hope for. I place my faith in what exactly? What kind of charity do I practice during this ninety-day period? How do I tack a meaningful course between the cliché of cautious optimism and that of an abundance of caution?
My body continues to heal. The drugs diminish in my system. I am winning my fight over control of my bladder. Where is the specter of the cancer? Evicted from my body, has the cancer morphed into a state of nonbeing? To continue its fight with me at the level of the subconscious, working on the margins of my waking life, and the moment I fall asleep greeting me in full armor in my dreams?
I worry. I doubt. I second-guess the doctor—what if he is wrong?—and myself—what if this starts a life-shortening affair with cancer?—and everybody—they tell me I will prevail, what if I don’t?—and everything—drugs, along with surgery, cannot stop cancer, only slow its progress. I cannot believe that the cancer succumbs to a six-and-a-half-hour surgical operation. Nor how zapping it with radiation or drowning it in chemicals can succeed where the first wave against it of a scalpel-and-meds combo failed (assuming in my gloomy outlook that the PSA test in ninety days will say as much and confirm that the beast within me lives on).
* * *
COVID-19 sails in the city air in search of naked faces and bare hands that touch things plastered with COVID-19 that then touch faces. COVID-19 smells of disinfectant and of decay. The two vie for dominance in the city.
The city sits on a crate in the entrance of a shuttered church and shouts gospel all day until hoarse. The city tries to keep to itself in a tent on the sidewalk. Shrink-wrapped food stacked untouched beside that tent.
Our masks resemble theater or a wrestling persona. Masks muffle speech and hide our smiles, and collect what we exhale. Our noses stream into them. Our glasses fog. We move slower and feel short of breath. We begin to fear the city air and the openness of the city. And each other.
The city is dying. Asking for distance and anonymity and vacating its soul in the process. COVID-19 moves in to conquer not us—for we run and hide from it—but the brick, cement, glass, and steel of the city that cannot get away. Once the city falls we all fall with it. COVID-19 dies with the death of the city. Those of us who survive occupy a ghost town and crave the countryside, and never seeing another soul six feet away in a mask with fear and rage in their eyes.
COVID-19 is the jumbo jet equivalent of the paper airplane of my cancer. Except that I do not fly it, it flies me: from early morning waking before the city cockerel crows to reading with my eyes picking up the words that bounce off my mind uncomprehended.
* * *
We are in the makeshift gazebo in the choked backyard in Mid-City eating dinner at sunny six o’clock and listing our various aches and pains—it starts with Liliana’s crooked neck from sleeping awkwardly, it seems, and moves to Christopher’s many joints inflamed from sitting too long at his computer, to Nicholas, who dug a hole for us to plant and peeled off the skin on his palms, to Debbie’s dodgy lower back that aches from standing for hours while she concocts our delicious meals from scratch, when the conundrum of a friend from my high school days springs to mind.
He danced for a while and hurt his spine. He wore a body cast that encased him from his armpits to his crotch. He moved like a robot, turning his entire body in any direction he wished to direct his attention. He had to sleep on his back, and to pick up something off the floor involved bending his legs to the point of folding them under him in order to reach that thing.
One morning he woke with an erection that had worked its way up and under his body cast and was stuck there. The discomfort woke him. He could not free himself from that cast—he tried, it hurt—without inflicting some injury on his member. He had to speed to the fridge, as much as his robot incarnation allowed him to move quickly and find ice, which he applied to the engorged area to drive away the warm blood. His erection gradually disappeared and he freed himself.
For a moment we laughed so hard and long that our bodies were perfect again and my errant bladder was prelapsarian (with my surgery as D-Day) in its efficiency. I peed myself a little, laughing. I report it to Debbie and she tells me that peeing thing happened to her a lot and for some months after the birth of each child. There is so much secrecy and shame around the complications of the body as it recovers from trauma. The challenges feel private and unutterable. The small failings of the body in a fight to recover control seem outside decorum. I wore a catheter for a week after robotic surgery hauled away my diseased prostate and my seminal vesicles and nearly three dozen lymph nodes.
I prefer that body cast. Something everyone can see and link to my robotic state. Something to collect signatures on that one day will be cut off to restore all of me, nothing given away. None of this trade-off with my cancer, my pound-of-flesh scenario that leaves me feeling incapacitated. As if in ninety days I should be ready for a new conflagration with cancer and from here on in I should not waste a minute of preparation.
This voice from my distant past is not the only one that wants to be heard in my cancer wars (plural because no sooner one is over than another presents itself as a distinct possibility). Another voice that belongs to cancer, that I shut out of my story as a defensive strategy, may have to be allowed to have its say if I am to present a full picture of the many dimensions to my battles. That voice should not be taken as a ventriloquist trick performed by me. That voice is my cancer.
* * *
I do not feel far from my cancer, post-op for ten days. That thing still rules my life. I repair from my fight with it. And I fear that it lurks just around the next corner not far ahead of me. I wonder about the form taken by a guerrilla action by cancer conducted in me. How long before medicine catches up with it? How long before I detect its sabotage of my biology and chemistry and physiology?
“Don’t worry, be happy,” as Bobby McFerrin’s maxim goes, although replete with wisdom about the need to simply chill, it just does not cut it for me at this time. I worry. I am not happy about it. Cancer has my attention. It’s this nagging doubt about the success of the operation that occupies me as a thing that I must understand and live with or else suffer from. Understanding (over-stand, my brethren) comes with a price. I have to embrace the thing I fear if I am to come to terms with it. My impulse is to run in the opposite direction and not look back.
Instead, I must stop, turn, and confront cancer, what is left of it, or the ghost of it, if I am to live without anxiety riding me and dictating my days and nights. Ghost cancer is cancer that has lost its footing in me, its body coordinates in me, to become an absence that maintains a presence in me. This is Toni Morrison’s “absent presence” that she applied to Blacks in a White world: we’re present but W
hites don’t see us and use us only as relative bodies to help pin down their White coordinates, and refine their White being.
Who will blink first? My cancer or me? Fuck you, cancer, you blink first. My eyes are staying wide open even if they weep and then dry up. You won that first round that hospitalized me for two days and pummeled me with a cocktail of drugs and left me scarred and humiliated and stupidly grateful to have escaped your stranglehold. This next round is mine. Now that I know what I am up against—I call it many things, a fight, or dance, or a couple rowing a boat—I am ready (or as ready as I can be under the circumstances).
Doubt leads to worry, and worry is my enemy and cancer’s friend. Doubt feeds my art, sure, and outside art takes on the personality of cancer. Worry is one of the shadows of doubt. Worry powers that ghost incarnation of cancer. Worry powers the disease around my mind until a sickness takes over my flesh and blood, and hijacks my spirit. How do I fight a ghost? The thing I cannot see that asks me to keep it locked in my sight? Its dimensions are worry. If I worry, cancer takes flight in my body. If I control worry, I keep that ghost trapped in a closet or jar or chest.
I might even have that ghost under a microscope for my inspection. Ghost experiment. I search for ways to examine an invisible and malignant force so that I can rid it of its influence on me, or worse, its recapture of my life to end my days. The lab is my mind. I have a ghost machine that operates inside me. My heart is its engine, my thoughts its velocity. I have to match that ghost stride for stride, lock eyes with it and pivot as it pivots in and around me.
* * *
It’s one of those stay-at-home and keep-close days. Seeing the world beyond the front door as the deep drop off a continental shelf if we step over that threshold. We surround ourselves with familiars—each other, home furnishings, favorite finger foods, television, books, and online campouts. The most that we do is let the dog out the back door for his yard exercise and bathroom break around the side of the house.
Disease rages outside. The air carries the threat of contagion. We watch the news and feel panic seep from the screen and fill the room. We read our phones and that same urgency creeps up our arms and changes the light in our eyes. COVID-19 invaded the city. Reports of it circle in the air. To breathe, we must wear masks and avoid contact with others.
I read slowly, as if everything were poetry in need of my singular attention. Really it is because I cannot think outside ruminations about the pandemic. No room left for anything else. I retain even less. My eyes land on words and bounce off of them rather than picking up each, as if they were little shells on a beach, for closer scrutiny. The rhythm of the words stays with me, so I fool myself into thinking, even if their meanings slip from me. They chime in me like the sound of the sea.
* * *
As a child in Airy Hall, I fetched water with two buckets, one in each hand. We worried that just one bucketful of water carried with all the body weight pivoted to one side to keep the arm straight and preserve every drop of that water along the walk home would make that arm longer than the other arm. We thought that we would end up with our bucket-bearing arm inches closer to the floor than the arm thrown out for balance as we walked in that peculiar way of keeping the knees bent a little and no bobbing about in a movement as if in a short run.
Oddly, twice the weight did not translate to twice the work. The body could be straight with two buckets instead of tilted sideways as it was when you carried one bucket. That tilt kept the knee clear of the bucket as you walked home as fast as you could without spilling any of the gold.
Two buckets meant an even walk with a focus on as little up or down or sideways movement as possible. The key thing was not to spill any of that precious cargo on the walk back from the village standpipe. If water spilled over the side of the rim of the aluminum, the sand road gobbled it up. There was almost a sizzle to that spill. The watermark lowered a fraction and served as a reprimand until it dried. The walk kept your eyes just in front of you to avoid potholes or stones and to keep an eye on the buckets and make small adjustments to the limbs, so small that the water hardly registered them with a wrinkle.
My bladder is that single bucket that I fetch with me. The slightest move without proper forethought results in this little spill of urine. I have to keep my mind on the sphincter muscles that close the opening of my bladder. No sudden moves, no sneezing or outburst of any kind, not even laughter. Otherwise, that spill.
When we reached the house a grown-up helped us hoist the bucket with care up to the water barrels stored in shade under the steps that led from the kitchen. Pouring made this music of water tumbling onto water in a drum.
Then it was back on the road for the walk to the standpipe for another load, talking all the way about the glory or misfortune of the last journey, who spilled what, when, where, and why. How next time no such bad luck would happen.
I walk with my bladder halfway full and delicate in as normal a movement as possible to avoid drawing attention—no slightly bent knees, no wooden gait to advertise, there goes Fred with his dodgy bladder. Thinking about it all the time, the attention flicks from one thing to the next and I have to bring it back to focus on stopping any spill.
* * *
Year crushed by COVID-19. Make room for more blather about my rebellious and cancer-afflicted bladder. Underwear padded as though I have just graduated from diapers and although potty trained, still prone to the odd accident or two. Adds protuberance to my crotch area. Feels stuffed between my legs. If I sit with my legs folded and my equipment sidles to left or right, any leakage misses the pad and soaks through my pants to implicate my trousers as well.
I am so conscious that this might happen that I have taken to wearing black trousers to disguise the wet patch. I have become Pissy, the kid I knew in Georgetown, Guyana, who earned his nickname for the telltale wet stain at his crotch and an ammonia cloud about him. Pissy should have been a loner and teased to death but he was a gorgeous storyteller and unlike the rest of us ten-year-olds able to see adult movies, mostly westerns, since his dad worked at the local cinema and always let him in to see the matinees. Pissy relayed each plot complete with dialogue and shoot-out sounds. He drew two imaginary pistols from imaginary holsters at his hips and with index and middle fingers straight and the small and little fingers curled, and his thumbs tucked at the first joint of his index fingers he wielded those two six-shooters. He fired by parting his lips with a sneer and spitting quite a bit to produce a sound that was a cross between a gargle and a cat’s hiss that tailed off in a tinny echo. He blew on the end of the barrels and thrust them back into his hips.
As Pissy relayed his story, complete with gunfights, a wet patch grew on his khaki school short-pants. The dark stain that began as an island in a sea of khaki by the end of his story had become a dark sea enveloping an island of khaki. Pissy made an excuse to leave school before lunchtime and rarely returned until the next day with another episode from a film to relay to us. And we were ready, even if we breathed through our mouths to avoid his ammonia and tried not to stare at his crotch.
Not to be Pissy, I change my black short pants and briefs (boxers do not work with pads) two or three times a day, shower once, add talcum powder to my crotch for that baby-sweet smell, and think Kegel and practice Kegel throughout my waking hours. My struggle with Kegel exercises centers on sneezing, or coughing, or a raucous laugh, each of which elicits leakage, as if my bladder in a festive mood has to mark those occasions with a splash. If my bladder fills up while I sit through a movie (sitting appears to reduce my bladder’s capacity), that leakage just happens as though a bucket, left under a running faucet too long, simply overspills. I feel the warm fluid spreading in my crotch and must pause the film and rush to the bathroom.
How do women power through that conundrum? They bear children and must work at recovery of their bodies and with the memory maybe repeat the experience. It’s a sobering thought for my one-off wrestling match with my bladder. I ask Debbie about it
. She puts it down to benefit analysis, that she weighs the risks with the benefits and the latter far outshine the former.
* * *
I find out in a casual chat with Debbie that caffeine irritates the bladder and intensifies that sensation of needing to go to the bathroom. I love my morning coffee. I add a lot of almond milk to the two large mugs that I consume over a couple of hours from the moment I wake. I eat a banana and a palm of walnuts before I zero in on my coffee consumption. I warm the almond milk, about one third of a cup, in the microwave. If I add the almond milk to the coffee without heating it, the coffee becomes lukewarm from so much milk. I hate lukewarm coffee. I prefer that my coffee is too hot and I have to wait for it to cool a little before I can drink it than to drink it lukewarm.
I increase the quantity of milk from a third to half a cup to reduce the amount of caffeine that I consume while preserving my habit of three big cups before eleven a.m. It helps. I pee less often and a lesser amount. I practice Kegel each time; that is, hold for ten to twenty seconds, two or three times during each visit to the bathroom.
A listener outside the bathroom, who did not know about my condition, might be forgiven for being puzzled at the burst of urine, then silence, and another burst followed by a longer silence, and again that burst and an even longer pause before that final emptying. They might think that I was conducting a battle to urinate: that the silences between short bursts of peeing were my buildup of musculature, or will, or pressure of some kind.
Year of Plagues Page 23
