Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  I refuse to give up my morning coffee. I need one vice to add to the enrichment of my life. So I compensate with cups of green tea in the afternoon—one every hour from two to five p.m. I brew it as instructed, with a little warm water added to the teabag in a cup, topped by water that boiled, or nearly boiled, and left to stand for a couple of minutes before I pour it. It takes about five long minutes before I can sip from that cup. Since I associate all my body’s excretions as contaminated by my cancer, all infusions that I consume should mitigate against disease. I hope that caffeine carries some uncharted medicinal effect that fights cancer. If all my medicines that I took came in this form of a morning cup of coffee, from that aroma that fills the kitchen when the machine brews, to that bittersweet taste of a roasted nut, I would have been a happy gladiator against cancer, instead of a neurotic mess, frightened of my shadow.

  Do not tell me that coffee feeds my cancer. Do not go there. I can face the news in eighty-two days that it has returned, anything other than implicating coffee with cancer. Pl-ease.

  * * *

  According to the nursery rhyme, Thursday’s child has far to go. So it feels today, two weeks after surgery: that I have far to go before I can feel anything like I felt before this trial began with cancer. I am an old man in a child’s frame of mind.

  The old man who has to cope with his postoperative condition quantum-leaps to a time free of any worries about the body as an escape from having to face too much reality. The old man cannot believe what is happening to him—that he has to wear diapers again to catch the production of a bladder out of his control.

  One thing happened that made the diapers indispensable. I woke early in a pool of urine. Worse, I held Debbie in a gibbon-like spoon embrace, and she too was soaked, along with the bedding. I felt the warmth in my sleep as a dull register and instead of experiencing alarm I felt a deep comfort and so allowed the undisciplined spigot to flow at will. She felt it too and took it for sweat since we both sweat a lot at night these days. The pee soon turned uncomfortably cold and I woke with a start, which woke Debbie. I pushed back the bedding to see this darkened map. I apologized profusely to Debbie, who did her best not to laugh and was very understanding with her tales of leakages after childbirth as we pulled off our wet things and found dry ones and stripped the bed and remade it with fresh linen.

  The child in me was mortally embarrassed, the adult bemused. Neither one wanted another second of communion with the other. Both had nowhere else to go if the two were going to pool their resources, so to speak, and take on cancer. The old man in the present needed that child from the distant past, given cancer’s long history of engagement with the body. The two had to accept upsets and setbacks, and recover quickly from them, if they were going to stop cancer from regrouping.

  Those stories from childhood carried, in embryonic form, the fortitude of the adult. A remembrance of an early episode of the child’s, in theory, should assist the adult mired in difficult present circumstances, since this present is in part indebted to that distant past. We shall see how that turns out. We know that cancer is older than both of us. As the child in me eats dirt unwittingly so the adult must crave it too and embrace it with the sensibility of the child. With this twinning comes the formation of a resistance to cancer staged through time, performed as a continuous present to bring those healing powers of adventure and laughter from that past into the present.

  * * *

  If I laugh too hard, I spill a little bit of pee. If I cough, if I sneeze, more pee. If I move too fast, too sudden, I pee a little bit. If I walk too long, pee. My body in action is permission granted to my urine for it to spill. It’s like I’m walking around all day with an egg in a spoon. Or I’ve filled too much water in a balloon and that water needs no excuse to head somewhere other than where it should be. I have my mind on my bladder and my bladder on my mind. If my attention strays from it for a moment, my bladder, balanced on a high wire, loses its footing and falters, and spills, and I wet myself.

  My bladder is one of those mischievous spirits that need constant supervision. If you take your eyes off it for more than a second, it gets up to no good. Spillage. It reminds me of the cup that I have in one hand while I try to twist a bottle cap with the other, and the hand with the cup automatically mimics what the other hand is doing and turns as well and spills my cup. Which doth not runneth over. Which makes me feel inadequate and dotty. Or I try to look at the time on my wristwatch and forget that I hold a cup of tea and that twist of my wrist to see the face of my watch spills the rest of my tea all over.

  Don’t even talk to me about running. I may as well just be facing a urinal. My bladder runs things, not me. I feel like a pupil in school who needs a permission slip to leave the classroom and walk the corridors on an errand. No note, no guarantee of a dry spell, and the expectation that I will be detained by an accident. I need to be a ninja with my bladder. I have to find a way to laugh without laughing. And stifle a sneeze and a cough. No sudden movements anymore, every move calculated to please my bladder and no movement outside of this bladder economy.

  It’s as if the surgery has left this opening in me and my life is spilling from me, little by little around all my attempts at living. It is the calling card of my operation; the signature of the doctors who operated on me; my urine as ink for their illegible scrawl on my clothing. As if they are pop stars and their biggest fan, me, I meet them and let them sign the most intimate part of my clothing.

  My Kegel exercise is my only friend, otherwise I’m at the mercy of my bladder, going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Or I’ve walked behind the cannon of a waterfall, but to get there I’ve stepped through the waterfall, and I’m too soaked to enjoy the storeroom of quiet behind those falls. It’s water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink.

  Do I imagine a cloud of urine about me as I navigate among others? A smell that makes people twist their noses and look me up and down, and take a step back from me? My clothes ablaze with urine, pungent as a primary color is vibrant, so that I consider washing and changing on the hour every hour to avoid that dilemma. I need to commemorate my bladder and designate today as national urine day. I can wear a badge that looks a bit like spilled ink on blotting paper. I can search the night sky for a new star to name after it. Or devise a meditation practice specifically to preserve my urine by maintaining composure. I would be as light-footed as a ninja and walk on rice paper and not tear it, and not spill a drop of my precious cargo.

  Pandemic

  A version of dear

  Sylvia’s Bell Jar covers

  All of sweet LA,

  All that LA sweats,

  All the mayor’s shame exposed:

  Too many homeless,

  Too much casual

  Police brutality caught

  On camera, left

  Unsolved to fester;

  Empty streets,

  Shuttered shops,

  Crowded supermarkets,

  Pharmacies,

  Traders of Guns;

  Vendors at intersections

  Stop selling flowers,

  Traffic homemade masks;

  Homeless numbers dwindle;

  Smog peels from city air;

  Our dog, Dexter, waits

  By the door for us,

  As we don protective gear,

  His olfactory city map

  Weighs on our mind.

  The horror of Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting—a modern-day lynching by three racists—overshadows my bladder, COVID-19, and cancer worries. I feel sick. The young man simply jogged through a neighborhood in coastal Georgia where he lived with his mother. He was shot on February 23 and were it not for the video recorded by one of Arbery’s assailants, this lynching would have passed us by. It happened two and a half months ago. Ahmaud was twenty-five years old and Black.

  Just as I start to think that my consciousness is full of cancer and its ramifications with no room for much else, this happens and it grips my heart and stops my breat
h and fills me with unquantifiable rage and hurt. Just as I wonder if the personal always disrupts the bigger picture I see that I am attuned to big events whose arc returns our world to the dark days of slavery and Jim Crow.

  My cancer is not only my worry. My cancer runs this society as well.

  13.

  I Listen and Hear More

  My cancer tells me that my secret (that I have cancer) is safe with it. I need not divulge this fact to anyone. I can keep it just between the two of us. I get suspicious right away, that cancer is up to something if cancer is telling me that something or other that I am doing is supported fully by it. I decide to talk selectively to people who matter most to me.

  I decide that it’s time for me to call Geoff on WhatsApp. My early morning; his midafternoon. I have to wait for a few minutes as he settles back home after a thirty-mile bike ride with Peter. He says they are having a cup of tea and homemade Eccles cakes bought from a house in a village near Uffington outside Shrewsbury.

  First, I run through my story—not the facts of it but the why of it. Why wait so long before I decide to confide in him? I did not wish to bother him with a thing that needed my full attention and of which I felt too preoccupied to spare anyone an ounce of extra effort to take care of their shock and concern for me. I did not want to involve others until I had definitive news about my struggle with the disease. I did not feel good. In fact, I was too depressed to talk to anyone. I felt too much anger at the world that I was dealt cancer’s cards. I wanted to conserve my energy for the fight of my life.

  I dial. He picks up. The grainy footage (analog, digital) of his front room notwithstanding, he looks fresh and animated. Sun funnels into the front room and fills the space with charm. After the preliminaries of how each of us is doing, I tell him that I have some personal news. I relay the story of my diseased body.

  I conclude by saying that I have these wounds that are healing and I’m battling with bladder control after the removal of a catheter, and how I go back in three months for a blood test that will give me the all clear, or else confirm more cancer, and put me on a course of radiation or chemotherapy to resolve it. Geoff nods and looks surprised. He plunges right away into a relay of his experience with my symptoms among his patients when he worked at the Shrewsbury Natural Health Centre as a massage therapist. He is mercifully restrained in his offers of advice of what I should be doing next. I have little patience for advice. Not just from Geoff, but everyone. Perhaps the illness has curtailed my patience. I think of Oscar Wilde’s adage (that advice is an excellent thing not to follow, but to disregard) as a sufferer’s dismissal of more things to think about on top of everything to do with the disease. Though the advice may be good, it figures as a distraction for the mind and body already locked in combat or tango with the disease.

  Geoff nods a lot, and I take his active listening as genuine empathy and love. He reminds me of his breakdown in the nineties— he refers to it as when he cracked up—when he said he felt the same things that I am telling him about, and that I wrote him, from America, and called him too, though he could barely speak, and it proved most helpful to him. WhatsApp freezes up a couple of times while one or other of us talk on without realizing we cannot be heard. We have to repeat ourselves quite a bit, which wears me down. Nevertheless I feel elated that Geoff knows about my disease. I feel that the disease might wish me to remain locked up with it as a way to wear away at my resistance. Talking with Geoff adds energy to my sense of a life that needs to be lived with or without the cancer.

  We soon stray to other topics. I say I’ve switched to online teaching and lots of walks in the neighborhood. He mentions his bike rides with Peter, who says a bonny hello (without knowing what Geoff and I are discussing) and he reports that a man is on a boat on the Severn, which runs past the back of their house, and the man’s shouting at the houses through a megaphone that it’s time to end social isolation. Peter then leaves and a moment later I see him on all fours crawling across the screen, around Geoff, to avoid being seen by me.

  I tell Geoff how much listening to classical music and jazz helps. He is thrilled about that as an avid classical concertgoer. Classical, he says, enables the listener to work through complex emotional scenarios by providing a safe structure in which or by which you can explore quite challenging things. I agree. I find it quiets my mind and takes me away from my worry about cancer, and into these fields of emotion where I wander, or sends these huge waves through me that sweep me along with them so that I am lost to myself.

  * * *

  Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, on a loop. A blank page with one line that starts in a corner at the top and wriggles, and writhes, and jives its way down that playground of white space to fill the place with joy. I chase after it and I seem to catch up and run along with it for a stretch before it zooms ahead of me and leaves me reaching for its coattails. Exhilaration pulls and pushes me to keep up with where Coltrane leads me, for even Coltrane appears not to know at times, as he forges ahead trusting in discovery as an impetus for breathing more notes.

  Cancer, I wish to lose you now as I follow Trane. I hope my cancer cannot keep up with this flood of positive energy. Cancer finds that it is too much (like trying to drink from a fire hose), and I suppose that it burns cancer to touch it (like a red-hot brand), so cancer shies away from it. Me, I head right for that burn, that blaze that lights a path not seen before and one that beckons me onward to go, follow where Trane leads, trust what Trane trusts. So it is that we (Trane and I) leave cancer far behind us, fallen on its face in the dust.

  If there’s a shape for the spirit housed in the body, Coltrane’s exhalations embody it. That spirit emerges out of history. Pain shines in the architecture of that spirit. Coltrane works through his pain. He shakes off the shackles of his hurt and surges toward joy. He falls back into the pool of his punishment and treads there for a time before he jettisons out of that element into joy once more. His spirit is soaked in pain and joy. He douses us with the same mix of history as an instant enactment of the breath of the body in collusion with his saxophone.

  Coltrane helps me in my fight with cancer. As long as he plays, cancer stays hidden and may even shrink, bombarded with the sound of Coltrane. He casts a spell with his sound. He picks me up and I fly with him in swirls and confident ziggurats. We veer toward objects and swerve from them at the last second so close we brush them with a sleeve. The flight begins in air with Coltrane. Air is only the beginning with him.

  Once he wins my confidence and trust, Coltrane heads for the open sea. He takes me up to a cloud and dives in notes that add speed to gravity’s pull on my body. I see the sheet metal of the sea racing to meet me as I zoom toward it. I brace myself and something in Coltrane tells me to breathe like him and work my body with those breaths and relax. Just as I obey Coltrane the two of us meet the metal skin of seawater and rather than obliterate us, it parts for us to enter its caves. I feel this closeness of moving underwater. I see the painted canvas of the inside of the sea being made with swirls and dabs. Some of it is my doing. The vast majority is Coltrane’s breathing in twists and turns of meaning.

  That is not all, though that may suffice. I listen and hear more and feel more and see farther. Coltrane dives deep with me in tow and makes a ninety-degree turn and heads for the shore. I think that Coltrane must know that he has to surface to make landfall. I think he must begin to head for the surface at any moment. I wait for the tug and prod of a change of direction and nothing like that happens. Instead he accelerates. He means for us to crash underwater into the wall of the shoreline. I brace for impact.

  Two things happened to me during my treatment for cancer, which I’ll relay because they remind me of two other things. The first is a twang and puncture of skin that the doctor warned me about in a test that broke through the wall of skin of one of my organs, traveled across interior space and broke though another wall of another organ to collect a specimen. The twang and puncture made me contract my body for a pain
ful reaction that never arrived. The second is a sensation that overtook me the moment before I lost consciousness in the hands of the anesthesiologist, that my tongue had filled my mouth and flesh had replaced everything in my head, my eyes, nose, ears, brain, and mouth, and all the flesh, of me being turned inside out, nudged against bone as if about to spill from my body.

  Listening to Coltrane, that first crossover, from speeding underwater to tunneling underground, is the twang and puncture I feel as one element, water, gives way to another, earth. The flood of flesh in me that replaces everything inside and pushes gently against bone and skin is what it feels like to move at high velocity underground. The two things do not terrify me. I trust Coltrane, my captain. I am a passenger on his craft built out of sound. I expect us to turn at any moment to break free of earth and splash into air and an expanse of light.

  Which is where Coltrane trails off and cuts me loose, high up, level with the top of a mountain. Which is when I free-fall. I do not flail as expected. I stay calm and wait for what Coltrane has in store for me. I breathe. Which is how I turn into what children call a helicopter seed, one of those maple seeds with the prongs that twirl as they sail from a tree seeking to become another tree. I turn in slow motion and my descent follows suit—it too slows to let me see that Coltrane brings me back to earth in one piece though irreparably altered by my journey with him.

  * * *

  My body betrays me over and over. First, with time, my body leaves me stranded at a bar nursing our two drinks and walks out arm in arm with time. My body tells me I have to put up with it or leave. I shut up and put up. My body returns with bruises and scrapes and exhausted, the kind of exhaustion that results from masses of exhilaration. And my body sleeps for days. Or walks around with me, in a daze or like an automaton doing my bidding out of duty and absent from our shared routine.