Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  I conjure the Caliban of my imagination rather than the creature from Shakespeare’s Tempest. A Caliban of the mind, part invention, part resurrection, to drive back the bogies of my mind. A creature modeled, in part, after Aimé Césaire’s rendition of the colonized being. Césaire’s image is of beast of nature vested in ecology. His monster’s persona operates as a necessary corrective to our mechanized ways. So I greet it, rather than shun it, or act as if I’m afraid. I say, Come here, wild thing. Come to me. I need you on my side to feel I am doing my best to resist cancer. An untamed beast like you inside me registers my condition of rugged resistance.

  Where are you now, ghouls? I am close to being prepared to engage in combat with you. Cancer’s troops: You flew in the air around my head and climbed in my spinal column. If I live long enough you will lose interest in me or you will all be dead. If I do not grant you room in my heart and head, you might wither away like the capitalist state as decreed by Marx (Karl). How long must I wait? I am not that patient. Able to remain focused and grow a beard as I wait for an outcome that I know must arrive at some point. All I have to do is wait and learn how to practice waiting as a craft and an art. That place where the sensibility is stationed for a long time and is vigilant. To wait with interest, with waiting as an activity in itself.

  Hot flash again. Unheralded, unwelcomed, and out of my control. I cringe as it opens my pores and holds this flamethrower close to my skin. I grit my teeth and wait. This too will pass. There is no pattern to how it claims my body. Just the claim launched at irregular intervals of no algorithm except the fact that it recurs and wakes me when it happens at least three times in the night and hourly in the day. As my cancer proliferates and sends me yet another iteration of itself as a mean ghost and shape-shifter, I summon the creatures of my culture and education.

  In addition to Caliban, I call on the being who birthed him, his mother, Sycorax. Her spells bring that coveted nothingness waiting for us at death, that no-place where we send our thoughts when those thoughts grow tired of their ties to history and biography. We send them in spells of our own, songs we identify with and dances we see our bodies performing even if we have two left feet. It’s a place not found on any map, where poetry pools its moments from history and myth and politics and sex and gender. Where each spirit bides its time, having walked away from the skin, and parted company with the sex of history and politics. To dance and parade in this communal and no-gravity carnival space of nothingness. Of being disembodied, a spiritual reliquary.

  * * *

  The second time my daughter cried over my pitiable cancer condition I remember thinking that this should not be happening again because of me. I was supposed to be in control of all this. Yet it did. We were driving back from the end of her school day, just before the imposition of citywide COVID-19 restrictions. I met her and she was in a funk. She said she had a terrible day. That she heard such and such a friend say something about such and such a person and that she laughed and word got back to the person about whom the remark was made and that person was pissed and others were pissed on her behalf and she, my daughter, was in big doo-doo (her word).

  Soon her phone rang. And it was the very person against whom the cruel thing had been said by someone else in the presence of my daughter. My daughter had the call on speakerphone, as befits her generation for whom the most private exchanges transpire in public places. The girl’s tone was that of a headmistress. My daughter was conciliatory, apologetic, and confessed to all manner of sins against others going back to kindergarten. The girl intensified her tone of upset, anger, and superiority against my daughter, and said that my daughter had done a bad thing and a cruel thing and that my daughter should think before she laughed at anyone in the future and that there would be consequences for my daughter’s laughter. I made repeated slashing-of-my-throat gestures to my daughter to get her off the phone and away from a conversation that sounded like false piety at my daughter’s expense. My daughter ignored me and when she did hang up after more exculpatory remonstrance, she burst into tears. She said that it was all her fault. I said it was the fault of the person who made the cruel remark in the first place and where was she in the whole conversation, why was she not the one under the microscope (more like turning on a spit)? And why apologize so much for something that might be a natural reaction? And why volunteer new information about yourself that has nothing to do with the current controversy? My daughter renewed her tears. She said my sickness, my cancer, had made her edgy and vulnerable and unable to think. That my being ill was the most worrying thing to her and that she could not function properly. I said to her that her reaction was perfectly normal if the remark was funny and that the person who made the remark was the one who should be catching umbrage, not her, my daughter. I said that the person who told the girl about the incident, about what was said and by whom and who laughed at it, that person was not a kind person for making that report to the girl. Why was the girl not mad with the person who told her about it or the person who said it in the first place? My daughter cried harder and repeated that my illness had made her react uncharacteristically (her word). It was back to my cancer and me. We were the real stars in this middle school drama. Well, hello, cancer, another fine mess . . . But wait, I said to my daughter, as she cried. My cancer has nothing to do with it. My cancer is not the one who made the remark or the one who, in a normal reaction, laughed. My cancer did not run to the girl and tell her chapter and verse about the incident. Keep my cancer out of it. That is my business. Our family business, no less. I was mad. Did not see red, exactly, but definitely heated up at the prospect that my cancer could be the fall guy in my daughter’s school melodrama. I had to defend my cancer. I could not sit idly by and watch my cancer’s good name being maligned. I said that what made my daughter say too much and give too much airtime to that manipulative bitch (my word) was my daughter’s guilt that she was wrong to laugh at the remark rather than have the wherewithal to say to the cruel tongue of the utterer that to say such a thing was unkind (the remark concerned the girl’s overweight). My daughter said through her tears that I didn’t know how hard it was for her to live with her father dying of cancer. That I was too wrapped up in it to see her pain over it. That she was a child who had to process my bad news and I should remember that. I relented right away. I apologized for being hard with her. I said, of course the cancer is a beast to contend with for all of us in the house, not just for me and doubly so for a young mind, a daughter afraid that she might lose her father. I said that I was mad for her, not at her. Mad that the girl could call and extract such a confession from my daughter for doing nothing except react to something that was probably funny (though admittedly unkind). I added that the remark was made away from the girl, and the person who reported it to her was not a good person but mischievous. I told my daughter to put the whole thing behind her—it was a ruse. I apologized for causing her so much worry. I assured her that the cancer would not win, not if I had anything to do with it. I offered her my handkerchief from the top pocket of my jacket. She snorted into it and by the time we reached home she had regained her composure. She offered my hanky back. It was not as soiled as the last one from the previous incident. I told her to keep it for next time. We exchanged I-love-yous and went into the house, where the whole thing was recapped for her mother.

  My wife said, It is fine to worry about your father’s cancer. It is a worry. But do not use it to cover what you do if you feel embarrassed about your actions. That is not cool. What you did by laughing at a remark may have been unthinking but it is not a capital offense. You may have been embarrassed and so laughed when you really wanted to stop the speaker in her tracks and tell her what she was saying was not kind. That is a matter of reflection miles after the event. The point is, while your father’s cancer is upsetting it’s not the reason why you are so upset by that girl’s blaming of you for laughing. The girl was attacking the wrong person. The speaker of the remark and the person who reported it
to her are the ones at fault. Not you. I listened and nodded emphatically as my wife hit those salient points. All the while my daughter shook her head. Her conviction was clear. We hugged. It was over. I said I was not going to die from cancer. My daughter said she believed that too. I told her I loved her. She said the same. My wife chipped in with her declaration of love and with hugs. We had a group hug. It was love, love, love, and no room for anything malicious. Mr. C. had not won the day, this time. Had failed to wriggle his way into the middle of our family affairs. Though present in my family, he was not a prime mover in it, though a prime mover in me. Cancer, you should know that I have a drawer full of handkerchiefs and I can drive, listen to my daughter crying, and hear her complaints, all at the same time, without getting into an accident.

  The next day I run with my daughter around the block in her practice to reduce her school track time. She runs for about one hundred yards, stops, walks for the next hundred and runs again. We do this for several laps of the block, heading counterclockwise around the houses so that we pass our house about four times. This adds up to a mile. During the walk phase I ask her how she feels about my illness. I say that I understand the strain that she’s under thinking about me, whether I’ll be around for her high school graduation, as well as worrying about her school grades. She is a straight-A student who worries about every project and test. She says that she thinks a lot about my having cancer. I tell her to remember that I’m in good hands with UCLA’s treatment plan for me, and that I want to beat this thing and believe that I can and the best thing she can do to help me in my fight is continue to thrive in her schoolwork. I tell her she’s doing so much that makes me proud—her excellent grades and her healthy handling of her peers, to name two. I don’t say that I mean by that that she’s open to exploitation of her feelings by the more Machiavellian of her peers. I just tell her to watch out for those types. I have to explain Machiavelli to her. I say he was a bastard manipulator who didn’t have a good bone in his body and who did everything to fuck up others and shore up his position. We move on. To fears that can blow things up out of all proportion to the situation; to cancer as that fearful thing for being unknown. I boast a bit when I say that cancer couldn’t have happened to a stronger person in our house. I exercise, don’t smoke, hardly drink, write in ways that promote imaginative strategies for problem solving and have more to lose as a father and husband, and more to defend. I tell her that her mother and brothers and her provide a huge boost to me in my fight with cancer. She is sweaty so we hold hands for a few steps and she resumes her run with me keeping pace beside her and watching out for the death trap of the sloped and cracked sidewalks.

  A week later my surgeon calls to say that the tests all point to a need for him to operate on me and remove the cancer, as a matter of some urgency. I want to press him on how urgent a matter. Instead I ask him how this will work with COVID-19 restrictions. He tells me that he will make the case for my surgery as an emergency rather than routine or elective. I take him to mean that my cancer is virulent and not decorative in me. A heat flash takes over my body. I break into a cold sweat and do all I can to say goodbye and I look forward to his next call about a date for the surgery. I hang up and the phone shakes in my hands.

  Where is Anansi when I need him? In one story that fits my situation, Anansi plays a trick on his family even as he feeds them and shows he cares about them. I heard the story from my grandmother in the countryside of Guyana, where I spent my childhood. I could not have been more than six or seven years old. It stayed with me through the years because I pitched my absent father in the role of Anansi. As I grew up in London and in my adult years there and in the States, there were many instances when I felt I needed Anansi’s guile in order to survive a situation. It was hardly a matter of life or death. It turned out on reflection to be more a matter of pride and to deflect a degree of shame. I exhume the Anansi story with my father tagged to it for the simple reason that the story served with each telling, one piece at a time, nudge by nudge, to wake up the cancer biding its time in the waiting room of my body.

  The Anansi story went something like this. On a day full of birdsong and brash orchestration of morning light, Anansi left home in search of breakfast for his family of five. He could see the bunk beds in two rooms where his oldest boy and youngest boy slept and where his second-born daughter and third born dreamed the flavored dreams of the young with no inclination to ever grow old. In the third room he left his wife, an act of scooting away from the spoon of his embrace of her, more a folding of his many limbs around her already folded many limbs to form a relaxed coxcomb or the crown of a peacock at rest. He scrambled toward the heavily fortified banana plantation.

  He wiped the cobwebs from his eyes, real cobwebs since he really was a spider. The next minutes needed his full concentration and all hands of his spider sense on deck. There were dogs and barbed wire and an electric fence to negotiate before he reached the heavily ripe banana trees, and to renegotiate on his way out of there. There was the temptation of bearing so much fruit and not sampling any of it—against his better nature of selfishness, of always serving himself first and leaving crumbs for others who depended on him—so that the fight against that urge took up the lion’s share of his spider sixth sense while he battled the plantation’s defenses with the remainder. His fight never amounted to a battle in the strict sense of that term. It was much more a game of wits. His limbs though numerous were flimsy. His body though wily lacked any ability to absorb a direct blow from an assailant. But his wits, well, had there been in existence a device to measure them, that reading would have been off the charts.

  Anansi sniffed the fruit and held the bunch close to his face with his head inclined toward it as he scrambled out of reach of the leap and snapping jaws of the three Dobermans. He treated the barbed wire as if it were a multidimensional and multidirectional limbo dance, an almost dislocation of his limbs to stretch and sidle, crouch and tiptoe through a maze of wire, the escape route discernible only by his spider sense. As for the electric fence, he heard the hum and closed his eyes to vault it. Anansi leapt with the stolen fruit cradled against his chin for that exhilarating smell. His technique matched the Fosbury flop of an Olympic high jumper. He curled his back over the barrier at such close proximity to the live wire that the fine hairs on his bottom sprung upright as they almost grazed that electric field.

  I pause here to illustrate one instance in which Anansi saved my life. Back in my teens I rode an open-backed bus that allowed passengers to board and alight from the bus without having to wait on a door to open or close. In the winters of London this resulted in people sitting as far away from that rear entry as possible by heading to the front of the bus or climbing the stairs to the top deck. On warm nights it was common to hold on to the bar on the landing of that exit and bask in the breeze as the bus sailed from one stop to the next. I would arrive at the exit early and hold on and close my eyes and measure by the force of the wind how the bus slowed as it approached the bus stop halfway down Blackheath Hill in South London.

  On one such evening I made ready to disembark. I opened my eyes in time to hop off the platform just as the bus lined up for the bus stop, about ten yards from it, at a speed of about ten miles an hour. The drop to the road required a slight lean back on the heels and a slight bend to my legs, as rapid steps were needed to halt the forward momentum of landing on the move. All I had to do was glance down and hop off and complete the short run and brake to a casual walk away. That night my vibrations were not aligned with the city’s waves of movement and stasis, red light and green with a flash of amber in between, horns and engines and the odd shout of a greeting, call, or curse. I moved out of sync.

  I landed on Blackheath Hill’s steep gradient with too much of my weight on the front of my leading left foot and I stumbled and toppled forward. This fall at ten miles an hour would mean landing flat on the face. Such a fall can be nasty even for an agile teenager. Something in me felt the jolt of
my foot on the road and the pitch forward of my torso. And something in me kicked into action at that very moment. It happened in slow motion outside the time governing the moment. I heard my grandmother talking to a group of us children about Anansi’s switch in times of crisis from his human form to his spider incarnation, that he transformed faster than the blink of an eye. I heard her talk not as a strung-out sentence ruled by her breathing but outside linear time as an instantaneous, complete comprehension that flooded my reaction to the sensation of falling. I became Anansi. I altered, from a teenager falling after disembarking too early from a moving bus, to a fully fledged spider with eight legs that kept it stable no matter what the momentum or angle of the drop from one surface to the next. I landed as a person and rolled like a spider and bounced back onto my feet and walked away with barely a shake of my head.

  Anansi scrambled away from the dogs barking on the other side of the electric fence and away from the plantation. He sniffed the hand of bananas and glanced at it. The yellow and green skin, the curved shapes joined at the head to form a bunch, the way those bodies tapered off to pointed loose ends of individual fruit. Anansi’s mouth watered. Which leg or two or three to steady the banana and which to tug at the top of the fruit to loosen first one strand of skin then another and another until the fruit stood bare chested or lower still, naked to the navel, a bit more than half of it exposed, the torn strips craned backward and elastic in their patterned fall. More saliva flooded his mouth. He had to swallow. He laughed out loud and picked up the pace of his scamper and swung back to his home and his family.

  Anansify my life. Unleash those shape-shifting gifts. If wit, trickery, mind and body morphing are called for, so be it. I am that spider from my childhood. The spider whose story survived the Middle Passage and three hundred years of plantation slavery in the New World to a second-floor verandah in Guyana where a grandmother tells a gaggle of her grandchildren about an Anansi that befits her countryside life.