Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  Dedication

  For Debbie Dalton and our Christopher, Nicholas, and Liliana, lockdown strong, no matter how long

  Epigraphs

  I cannot, for the present, express my meanings more clearly.

  —Spinoza

  Beware the terror of not producing

  Beware the urge to justify your decision.

  Watch out for the kitchen sink and the plumbing and that painting that always needed being done. But remember the body needs to create too.

  Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it

  Beware feeling you’re too good to need it

  Beware all the hatred you’ve stored up inside you, and the locks on your tender places.

  —Audre Lorde, from Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, 1974–1989

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Acknowledgments

  1: Out of This Time

  2: I Do Not Want to Alarm You

  3: Is This What Dying Looks Like?

  4: Fred, Do Not Be Afraid

  5: You Are My Mortal Enemy

  6: To Fall, Falling, and Never Land

  7: Help Me, Anansi

  8: What Brer Rabbit Did

  9: Surely I’m to Be Saved

  10: Hello, Miss Corona. Meet Mister Cancer

  11: The Maddening Pain

  12: The City Is Dying

  13: I Listen and Hear More

  14: I Wake with His Name on My Tongue

  15: As Long As I Draw Breath

  16: Juneteenth

  17: My Father’s Body

  About the Author

  Also by Fred D’Aguiar

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt thanks go to Jonathan Burnham for his editorial “Edward Scissorhands” genius and the team at Harper, Jackie, Gabe, Kim, and copyeditor Douglas Johnson. Also, to André Naffis-Sahely who read like a critic with a poet’s eye and grace. And to Geoff Hardy and his husband, Peter Roscoe, for confirming aspects of my past, as did my brother, Gregory D’Aguiar and his partner, Maria, and Patrick D’Aguiar living his dream with Tanawan. For Andrew D’Aguiar who found love in Milton Keynes with two-t’s Nattasha. In memory of Grace Theriault, who honored her first name in the way she lived her life. In admiration of Matthew Kay: son, your wise words and films gave me strength. To Cameron, your struggles brought much needed perspective in my fight, while your children, Dylan and Aniyah, turned me into a granddad. To Elliot and Antonia for their little miracle, Cruz, who brought me joy. And for my mother, Kathleen Cadogan, whose spirit presides over all. Last and most crucial, to the doctors, nurses, and staff in oncology at the UCLA medical center.

  1.

  Out of This Time

  Good morning, cancer. How are you? You must have been there that balmy night in Atlanta in the early nineties. At that sports bar. A group of us poets decompressing with quick rounds of drinks and propelled into a state of collective foolhardy bravery, decided, while we faced the long trough of the urinal and watched the small TV screens mounted directly in front of us at eye level, to aim our various streams up at those screens.

  We had rushed to the bar after a day of all things to do with poetry, from readings and performances to panels on poetics and the future of poetry books in light of the digital revolution. We wanted nothing more to do with poetry that day though everything about us reeked of our poetry personas, our berets, fedoras, long scarves, pebble spectacles, handlebar moustaches, excessive beards, tweeds, corduroy, you get the picture.

  There was no Ghostbusters crossing of streams as we stood shoulder to shoulder at the urinal. This was strictly parallel play. We blurred the images flickering at us and cheered. We were a testament to the power of the body over technology. For as long as we peed and in our state of blissful inebriation there would not be any diminishing of this strength. Posers. We were young. We toasted afterward to our experience already consecrated to mythic memory.

  In the three decades that followed my night at the bar I took my excretions for granted. If I went out for any length of time, I never wondered about the location of the next public convenience. I could hold it. In fact, if someone polite and considerate asked me if I needed to go, I invariably said no, without having to think if I needed to relieve myself right then, because I would have to empty at some point soon. All of the above was true for me until the fall of 2019.

  Around October I began to notice that I had to concentrate to pee. I seemed to be in possession of a shy bladder even though I stood there in response to an urge that I had to attend to immediately. No more texting with one hand as I directed my stream with the other, no more playing the partial absentee from the job at hand. I strained a little and the result was a desultory trickle that barely registered against the porcelain. What happened to the comforting noise of my piss forcibly trained at porcelain or into toilet water, that sound of mounting relief that is the liquid waste equivalent of exhaling?

  There was synergy that night in Atlanta for all of us at that time in that place. If synergy teaches anything, it is this: that it holds a plurality of things together for a moment and one moment only before those things disperse into their chaotic patterning of our reality. I heard this anecdote from a drunken poet: he said with glazed eyes and through splattering, beery saliva, that in a certain martial arts movie, the hero runs from a group of ninjas chasing him toward a river. The camera shows the audience that the river, with its traffic of junks, presents the final roadblock for our hero on the run. As the ninjas draw near we see they are dripping with nunchucks and other deadly implements. They close in on our hero and the real estate runs out for him as he looks at the river and again clocks the surface teeming with junks. Just as we think the chap has to stand his ground and perish against overwhelming odds, the camera pans to the river once more, and that chaotic scene of junks on the water switches to elegance and order with the junks all lined up in a row as they pass each other. The star spots his escape route and he hops from one junk to the next until he reaches the far shore of the river. Just as he leaps ashore we see the ninjas arrive at the opposite bank and prepare to follow the same route across the river. But the junks immediately fall apart and resume their chaotic commerce of navigating the river, and the ninjas tumble into the water.

  That moment when the junks aligned for the hero may be the moment of synergy that we captured fleetingly that evening in that sports bar. We knew from instinct that our young bodies had reached their zenith. Our flesh-and-blood awareness was primed for decline from that night onward. We acted in a ritual that marked that threshold with gratitude for the unaccountable privilege of having reached that moment in our episodic lives. For we deemed life to be fragile and ruled by chance, full of accidents, if not plain disaster, and liable to be taken from us without notice or, if with notice, then with added pain and dread.

  I owed this awareness of a temporary harmony with forces beyond my control to my emergence as a poet. Poetry primed me for insecurity and chance. Poetry’s knack for forging relationships among unconnected things chimed with my penchant for sound, rhythm, and image of words as tantamount, a way to make sense of the world. My nervous system seemed predisposed to insecurity as bedrock for belonging to the world of disparate elements and chance occurrences. That night in the sports bar crowned my belief that knowledge would be mediated by the body’s unquestioning sensory reception of the world.

  All this expansive sense switched its focal point from the world at large to my bladder. A weight and pressure in my loins cancels my heart and pulse as twin guards of my hours. Those twins are replaced by the liquid hourglass
of my bladder. An announcement of some imminent threat to my life calendar surges in me. Without knowing what could be wrong, I feel this burgeoning fear that something most definitely is not right. I take several days to focus any language to formulate what I am feeling, since the heightened emotions generated by the new sensations result in confusion, in incapacitating alarm.

  From fall 2019 I began to think about input and output. Not just in terms of the age-specific need to be aware that if I drank X amount of beer I would have to urinate Y number of times but of how everything I took into my body would be registered by the Geiger counter of my bladder. Whereas before my gut told me when I was hungry, or my sluggishness or dry mouth said that I should drink some water, this new time device behaved like supersensitive radar for all my consumption, and sprang up in my crotch.

  I planned my socializing as a meticulous robber might a heist. Where was the nearest gents in this building or that mall, or park? I began to think like an off-duty fire marshal who enters every structure with a mindset that clocks all the hazards and exits. I could not relax. I invariably devoted a portion of my awareness to the demands of my bladder. Every time I embarked on a task—it could be anything, a meeting or car journey or shopping expedition—I wondered when my bladder would announce its presence. And what an announcement: a twisting of my innards located in the area behind my pubic bone, a sharp sense of a wild flame from a naked torch deliberately glanced against my body but improbably from inside my body, a burst of this sharp feeling that radiated down my legs and up my back and spread to the ends of my fingers that made me clench my teeth and narrow my eyes.

  When did I think something was definitely wrong and I needed to do something about it rather than accommodate it? I wish I had a precise date. I have only this Southern California season, late autumn into winter. There never was for me a where-were-you-when moment of realization. Instead it dawned on me, imperceptibly. The kind of thing people said about a stoic toad in a pot of water gradually brought to the boil. I sensed the need to act one day and put it into words the next and made inquiries on yet another day.

  I felt my scrotum for any sign of change. Nothing. I looked long and hard at my crotch to see if the area at my pubic bone showed any alteration. Nothing. I went so far as to crouch over my plate-size concave shaving mirror to see if the place under my scrotum and around my rectum had changed in some way. Nothing.

  I turned to Google and YouTube. The two search engines supplied a cornucopia of alarming statistics and graphics all pointing to cancer of the prostate. On the one hand, people testified to my symptoms as indicative of “the good cancer” as a thing to live with, rather than die of. On the other, at fifty-nine, as I was at the time of the discovery, I learned that I could die from the probable cause of this obstruction to my free flow. If the web were true, I would suffer a rapid demise of the body and matching depletion of the spirit, and no shortage of pain along the way. The beast of the thing would take over my body from the inside and shut down each function of it like the flight of businesses from a dying mall.

  I was born in 1960, which the Chinese zodiac tells me is the year of the metal rat: a good year for London’s Notting Hill Carnival, for which the radical thinker Claudia Jones* (expelled from the United States) serves on the carnival’s steering and planning committee; Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” begins the dance craze; JFK wins the US presidential election; Hitchcock’s Psycho premieres in New York; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is published; in South Africa the Sharpeville Massacre of schoolchildren launches the armed resistance of the African National Congress (ANC) to apartheid symbolized by the leadership of Nelson Mandela; Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) wins his first professional fight; the soap Coronation Street premieres on the UK’s Independent Television (ITV) network; Wilson Harris publishes his seminal first novel (his third in terms of composition) titled Palace of the Peacock, with its ecological dismantling of the idea of the colony; and many colonies continue breaking free of their European masters—Benin, Chad, Nigeria, Senegal, Cameroon, Mali, Niger, Somalia.

  Conjecture is everything. February 2, a Tuesday, early evening, I am born. Redheaded and anemic, dropped off with a nanny during the week, while my parents slaved away on the buses as driver and conductress (as my mother was called back then) with her nifty ticket machine whose noise I clocked as Mum’s freeze-dried heart (for her ability to leave my older brother and me in care all week). As for Dad, his ticker was destined to stop, aged fifty-three, the same number as his bus that he aimed down Blackheath Hill into the sprawling capital. 1960 was not as cold as feared. The London Carnival was only two and the 1950s gave up its signs, no blacks, no irish. My parents bought a two-up, two-down redbrick terrace.

  Worse than my advanced middle age was the statistical liability credited to my race. As a Black man, the degree of equity in the dire stock of the disease multiplied. Black skin, whose penalty was not only a history of enslavement and its epidemiology of distress, but biology as well, gifted me certain predispositions. Of course, I put it down to statistical social design rather than any objective ability of science to examine Black people. Science cannot help itself when it comes to Black bodies. Science exercises a shamefully high degree of subjectivity. Blacks always look worse than everyone else under the outright hostility or, at best, indifferent profit rubrics of the White gaze. To escape that incapacitating gaze that literally drains the color out of a Black body (a seemingly desirable condition, non-Black, though, in fact, a state of living death that robs the person of any memory of Black vitality and Black being), the Black person must be twice as healthy, virile, fashionable, inventive, funny, and tragic.

  Do I feel pain more acutely than Whites on account of a history of hurt? Is a White prostate any less invasive of bladder function than a Black one? Of course not, fool. The thought that this bias might be the case is a cause of some concern to me and my psyche, a suspicion that I am inclined to think neurotically as if primed by a history of oppression to react in this way. I don’t know enough about what it is like to feel a serious pain emanating from inside me. (You never gave birth, my wife, Debbie, says to me.) Apart from stomach and muscle soreness from exercise, the feeling of pressure around my bladder area feels different. It is pain and not painful. It is a history of pain that I should recognize, and nothing like it at all, something altogether new. I do not suffer as a Black individual. I suffer as a person afflicted by a condition that is a new experience. I do not worry as a Black man. I worry as a man not accustomed to worrying about his body.

  I am not lonely as an artist because I am Black. My loneliness may be a precondition of my art and has no bearing on my sense of being Black. If anything, I feel alone with my symptoms, private even, thanks to a predilection of mine to keep things to myself. I do not wish to bother or burden people, so I live with things alone in my heart and head and work them out until they lessen in urgency. My bladder would not allow me to be lonely. Information about it brought me up against the fact of how alone I felt and how singular the experience would be for me. Even though men everywhere suffered from it (one out of every four), this experience would be mine, a solo rendition of my sense of limited time in my life. I had to share my problem with Debbie.

  My mortality concerned me not because I am a Black man prone to neurosis, but thanks to my predisposition toward conjecture (speculation is not neurotic). I read that my prostate cancer may have spread to other parts of my body, which made me worry along a curve extrapolated from that point of information as a part of the function of my imagination. I do not think this is Black or White. It is just human. It may be overthink and undue worry. It may just be me. I am I (not wishing to channel Popeye!) if I concede a unitary being bearing my name launched into the flux of this world (an artistic loner), rather than a brief span of history with a specific heredity (a communal loner).

  Nevertheless I made the appointment. I combed my workplace web pages for names and reviews, videos and articles about oncology. I
found other experts near and far to compare with my university. I made the call based on excellent appraisals for the oncology group at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I asked the phone attendant for someone experienced, or someone who had masses of experience operating on this very thing. The last thing my crotch area needed was a novice.

  The fact that it was a teaching hospital bypassed me. I was not in the frame of mind to be anyone’s guinea pig or dummy practice patient. I wanted the expert with the most experience. It seemed to me that there was no room for error. To further medical knowledge was one thing, but not on my vanishing body. I wished them luck without any personal commitment to their need for experimentation. I said as much in several conversations that ran in my head in advance of my taking the leap into action. All of which may be testament to my anxiety about the whole enterprise, one in which all roads of thinking led back to my prostate dilemma.

  I began to worry, in advance, about things going wrong. I figured that my block and tackle (a teen term), my waterworks (from my prepubescent years), my pleasure principle nerve center (those satirical twenties and thirties), required expert attention with a minimum of risk. I imagined a posttreatment reality of improved function: a return to a powerful, noisy stream, to forgetfulness when it came to all things urinary, to feeling more than ten years younger again, a pictograph of my body in which the ink dried somewhere in my early to midforties.

  Ah, to forget about my bladder, to consign its forefront status in my mind to the back burner of inattention. Memory and attention have powered me to this point in my life. I lived up to this point in the solid conviction that I was against forgetting, that to forget was to be negligent of a writer’s responsibility to history and to the art of remembering by imaginative design. I never dreamed that forgetting could be a psychological condition of peace in waking life, of contentment with the frailties of an aging body. It would be a case of one part of my body acting in the interest of the whole by selectively removing itself from the arena of my attention.