Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  Each time I hear Paul Robeson sing “Ol’ Man River,” I think of a fight that cannot be won that offers an enriching though murdering experience. That as long as he sings I am fine and the moment he ends his song that unstoppable river resumes its flood of my knowledgeable body. The river is older than my body, and the mind of that river exists as a fragment in my consciousness. I feel that symbiosis as Robeson trills that song, more a boom than a trill and with a deeper resonance to it, as if I were submerged in the singing and the song was way below the surface of the Mississippi. Start over from the top, Mr. Robeson. With each singing I gain something new and take a little more from that wise old river. Bring me those currents to cleanse my body and rid me of that cancer, that sunken treasure that I do not care for that lies deep in my soul. That is where Robeson’s voice delves. And for those innumerable benefits of his voice I give blood and a pound of my flesh. Cut carefully, one pound, not an ounce more.

  I am neither shy of, nor locked in combat with, cancer. I embrace it like I would any partner who keeps me upright, balanced, and moving. At some point of my choosing I plan to part company with my cancer partner, that we may fall away from each other’s embrace and take separate routes forward rather than stay shy and locked in what looks like a dance and really feels more like combat. Though my partner hides in me and hardly registers as present in me, now that the drugs have taken over, I feel things associated with the drugs that I view as surrogates for the cancer. Cancer Anansi who tricks me into thinking what I am feeling is all for the sake of the cure of my cancer. Anansi of the viral and venal. For your troubles, I offer one section of my body. Eat it as sacrament and drink the blood that I will lose in the process of your extraction of a part of me.

  I have Guyana, the UK, and the US to draw from in my address of my cancer. I should draw from all three to launch my counter to the forces of the cancer. I have the globe as encapsulated by literature and history and politics. As I sleep I dream of cancer dreaming of me. From my vantage point I think that I cannot take a second away from my vigilance of my cancer, that any distraction on my part adds to the life expectancy of the cancer, which depletes my life expectancy. There is no dream life–waking life dichotomy, there is no seam between the two (though the two present as distinct entities), not as far as my cancer is concerned. My cancer never sleeps. My cancer has eyes in the back of its head. It sees with the compound eyes of a fly. And it looks backward and forward in time. I know from the string of my heredity that my cancer is a living history. I guess from the treatment program ahead of me, and the operation that looms on the horizon, that the cancer directs aspects of my future. Between past and future—in a present that announces its life and death moment by moment—the cancer shadows me.

  I grant my cancer a consciousness that operates independently of its physical growth in my body. I struggle to separate my mind from the mind of the cancer in me. The two work in tandem. The two wear any number of disguises and they shape-shift too. One is the hare that races ahead in the fable, the other is the tortoise that keeps its eye on the long road ahead, rather than the rabbit-run of the moment. For my purposes, at some point in the race the two creatures swap places and roles switch between them, and the end of the race loops back to its beginning as I try to outwit the cancer and the cancer returns the favor with interest.

  I see my body on the starting line of the race against my cancer. I move away from the starting line to buy some time. The cancer is not impatient. It has all the time in the world. The more time I take to begin to race against it, the greater its reward. My move to buy more time is something Anansi wants me to do, since for Anansi time is of the essence. Anansi cooks up all his plots in those moments when he is poised on a precipice or between two places or balanced on a fulcrum. The longer the race takes to start, the better his chance of coming up with an evasive strategy. I wish I knew what he was up to in my body. I think that I am Anansi until I reach these moments of indecision, when I know I need something to happen that I cannot predict or conjure, some surprise and lightning insight that makes a difference to the outcome. I am poised at that unknown. I have to trust in Anansi as both a character and a process.

  At some juncture I realize that Anansi can’t do this work alone. In the same way that I can’t fight cancer on my own, so Anansi needs help in his spirit world if he is to defeat cancer. For cancer wages war in me on all planes (physical and mental), and Anansi fights for me in a place where he could use some company. I hardly have to ponder who to summon when up pops another fabled creature from my past.

  8.

  What Brer Rabbit Did

  Brer Rabbit wants something or other and someone or other blocks him. Brer Rabbit’s whole reason for being is to find a way to overcome the obstacle in his path to getting what he wants. Knowing what a character wants and putting up roadblocks along the path pursued by the character to realize that goal summarizes my task in the face of my cancer. The dictum captures Brer Rabbit’s many adventures and my need to have him on my side. Quite often Brer Rabbit wants nothing more than to witness the confusion he causes to others. His goals are small compared with his sense of fun that he gets from the game that he plays with others. If I take Brer Rabbit’s cue I might approach my cancer with a sense of humor and temper my earnest approach to the threat against my life.

  What Brer Rabbit did—he was hopping along innocently minding his own business and he toppled into a nest of vipers—might be useful to me with my calamity. Brer Rabbit remained in a crouching position and hissed like his assailants. He was surrounded. He spoke with a lisp and hiss to disguise his rabbit accent. He said, “Do not strike me, my brothers and sisters, I am one of you though you do not see it. I have news for you to make you big and fat with fur just like me.” They had not eaten in days. They said he looked like a rabbit and he certainly smelled like one and they were sure he would prove delicious to eat. He said he may look like a rabbit but that was just because he resembled the best meal he’d just eaten. He said he had news that would bring the same big meal to each of them. Listen. (As he spoke he kept turning this way and that to keep an eye on the ring of vipers.)

  They could use him as bait to attract the many rabbits hiding from them. All they had to do to have rabbits galore for their feast was follow his instructions to the letter. First they needed to get him out of the hole they were hiding in. One of them reminded him that they were snoozing and that he had fallen into their home. He apologized. Of course, he said, he was on his way to join them and tripped due to his meal-shaped appearance. They did not seem convinced that he was one of them but the idea of a delicious captive who might bring them more captives just as succulent appealed to their empty bellies and greed.

  Even in their doubt they wanted to be convinced. Even faced with a creature standing in the middle of them, covered in chewy fur, rather than prismatic scales, they still preferred the promise of a feast of plenty to the reality of a bite for each, if they shared. Though riddled with doubt, they were overpowered with greed, and so they told Brer Rabbit they agreed. He reassured them that going along with his plan was the wisest thing they would ever do.

  Brer Rabbit organized them into a rope ladder and he climbed out of the hole. They headed in the direction of a mongoose lair. They pointed out to Brer Rabbit that there must be some mistake. This path took them to the mongooses. If they continued on it, those creatures would surely cook their geese. Brer Rabbit said the mongooses had moved their colony and that this path was now the safe one to take. The snakes did not believe Brer Rabbit. They said he was trying to trick them but they were not stupid. He had better lead them the other way, away from the known gang of mongooses or they themselves would eat him then and there. Brer Rabbit dropped his ears and slumped his shoulders. He said fine and he took the other path, the one that the snakes knew as the safe path.

  The rest of the story is a meeting between a den of snakes and a troop of mongooses, and as everyone knows, when mongoose meets snake only mongoos
e walks away. This time Brer Rabbit as well. He hopped from the brawl as fast as his somewhat unsteady legs could without advertising his fear. He paid a price for each of his escapes from mortal danger and for each of his tricks that he played on others. The price of his experience increased the amount of risk that he needed to take the next time he found himself in a tight corner, or in a situation that had the makings of a juicy trickster event. His fall into the snake pit was deliberate. Brer Rabbit was bored at always winning. He put himself in a situation in which the odds were against him. He turned a blind eye to the hole and cast himself into it. He left the crisis feeling exhilarated though a little afraid as well, since exhilaration always kept company with fear.

  Anansi versus Brer Rabbit. At some point Brer Rabbit had to meet his match. He had to come face-to-face with a challenge that was not a gamble he thought he could win. Not a dangerous place he could dive into with the inkling that he possessed the wits to extricate himself from it. To wander far from his briar patch in search of a creature to outwit and make his day something more than a quest for another meal. To come up on the spot with a turn of phrase, a pop-up and fizz-buckle brain brew in answer to an opponent. Even so, it never crossed his mind that any of those sticky situations might result in his demise. The only surprising element was in the order of the details of his encounter. That unknowable outcome came in the form of Anansi.

  Anansi must have dreamed as well of such an encounter. To meet an adversary that justified his inordinate skill at trickery, his shape-shifting guile, his entry into contests he knew he would win always. He too relished the contest and never doubted the result, and reserved his surprise for how the feat would unfold for him. He secretly wanted to be stumped by a situation, to find himself in a corner and have no way out, just to see what that would be like even if it meant it was his last experience. The result of winning every time, no matter the odds or the opponent, meant that a part of Anansi’s mind remained reclined in a hammock with a fedora lowered over his eyes, snoozing through it all.

  Brer Rabbit and Anansi meet with the same mindset of unquantifiable skills and inevitable success. It can be construed as the meeting of two like poles, an immediate repel of force fields, a bilious feeling in the gut and a spin of the head with the heart skipping several beats and having to catch up with itself with a drumroll. I play the part of Anansi, my cancer plays the part of Brer Rabbit.

  I refer to the cancer as a person for the simple reason that it exhibits intention and will, and a consciousness and design, and awareness of time as a continuum, and of place and space to be explored or filled with its presence, and as a result of all of these may possess a dream life that operates independent of my consciousness and dreamscape. Cancer grows and feeds and breathes in me. Cancer splinters and multiplies, spreads and sprawls in modes of expansion akin to a human. I grant it personhood for these reasons and more. Cancer makes the most challenging foe that I will face in my life; everything else pales in comparison. If cancer wins in my duel to the death with it, I die, and in its victory over me the cancer dies as well. It is the only entity that wants victory for its own sake even if that means its own death. In this sense cancer is a person, in possession of blind conviction.

  The contest between Anansi and Brer Rabbit is a screen put up by me to hide from you, dear reader, to hide the truth of my changing condition. That room in my head for the disease, the one that I keep under lock and key to keep things locked in as much as to keep my curious self out appears to have grown in size; though still chained, the four walls and alcove have expanded and the ceiling raised its height. The door looks bigger too and the lock now looks like an ill fit. I feel the contents of the room. There is a burden around the area of my bladder, a dull ache, and pressure. If you ask me to give the discomfort a number, I would say a two or three, but if you ask how much time I spend in worry about that room, I would say eight out of ten. This gives the room centrality in that mansion of mine of my interior.

  In the last month and with the outbreak of COVID-19, my cancer becomes alert to the change in my surroundings and decides the time is ripe to strike against me. With all nonessential surgery suspended to make room for people who have caught the virus, my doctor promises to make the argument that my case qualifies as essential. Even so, my April 1 date is pushed back to the middle of the month, and a crucial test that the surgeon recommends strongly so that he can have eyes to see where to go when he operates on me is now unavailable (COVID-19 restrictions have caused the test to be postponed). The surgeon plans to go ahead using what imagery he has at his disposal from the tests that I took previously. Interestingly, he tells me that were he to operate now it would be in a semiblind state and that is why I really should have the PSMA in addition to the CT, MRI, and bone scans. I don’t want the additional test, because the university is conducting an experiment, a study, with its patented machine and procedure and seeks permission from the FDA to operate it. The only snag is that I will have to pay the $3K for the test. Being in no position to argue with the surgeon (after all, he is the expert), I agree to pay for the extra test after he illustrates the surgery as a blind undertaking for him without it.

  An additional worry is that I have to walk into a hospital environment virulent with novel coronavirus. Having spent the last three weeks splendidly socially distanced, I will be heading into the belly of the beast for an essential surgery, assuming my surgery passes the test for essential hospital procedures. There’s a chance that I will catch COVID-19 and bring it home to my wee darlings. With luck I might spend the two nights in the hospital and dodge the bullet of the virus bouncing off the walls of the place. The surgery is paramount for me. I want the operation’s promise that it can reduce or eliminate the cancer and increase exponentially my odds of beating it. My future looks dismal without the operation. As long as I draw breath let me fight this thing rather than roll over in life and surrender. I see my life as a song and dance, the humdrum and the routine, the repetitious and the fastidious all caught up on this web (and in the Web) of my days. I pictured it all taking me into decent old age.

  Can you tell that I am preparing myself for the chance of my surgery happening soon? Daily, I walk the dog with my wife. Every other day, I ride the stationary bike for forty-five minutes. And do I sweat and pant! Every day I undertake some version of yoga that lasts about thirty minutes, sometimes forty-five minutes. I think of my body and of my mental state. I see the operation as a hurdle that I can clear. I listen to plenty of music—classical, jazz, blues, funk, rap—to set up those positive vibrations beyond my conscious ability to manipulate them. What is that Irish comic saying? “In your life may the splinters on the banister face the right way as you slide down.” Maybe I should take the stairs, given my cancer blues. Or the elevator. Both Anansi and Brer Rabbit are on my side and consequently available to my cancer as well. The two live in me, so cancer has access to them. That means that they are not as powerful an aid to me, though it means I can match the cancer trick for shape-shifting trick. Also, I have an advantage as host and progenitor of the original tales. My life, with cancer as the squatter in me with squatter’s rights, probably means those splinters on the banister face downward for me. May they face upward for cancer.

  Some mornings I wake thinking I did not make it through the operation, that I died on the operating table and left my life in the middle of the muddle through my days (that should read daze). That part of my life that perishes in the operating room takes the cancer with it, and the two, my body and cancer, leave the studio-lit room of the operating theater for the dark room of the end of bodily consciousness. I rise, Maya Angelou fashion, from my fallen body and take on another form of being, so I fancy, rather than rush into a final darkness. I wake feeling sad that my sixty-year contract with this body has expired and that the cancer brought about my end and no means of extension to my life on earth could be found in time to save me. The operation turns out to be my funeral.

  It takes an age with me lim
bering up my body with yoga and meditation to shake that feeling of defeat. I view my lack of energy on waking from this dream of my death as the cancer at work by extension from my physical body seeping into my state of mind. I see the worry not as a thing to be dodged or set aside but as deserving of my attention. I move in stretches that seek to free up stored energy in me, energy that I keep in reserve and now need to shake off an attack staged in my sleep by my cancer. My dream of my death is my worry about the forthcoming operation and about its likely success against my cancer. I stare it down to watch it wither under my gaze since it grows in the dark spaces in me, the shaded and locked parts of me, those regions that seem to evade my focus.

  As the surgeon lays plans to wield his robotic scalpel to cut away at the cancer, so I deploy the light of my attention on that part of my cancerous body to shrink the disease, whether that disease is a mood, a sensation, or a vacuum pressure. As the surgeon works with massaging hospital rules and schedules to save me from the ravages of the cancer, so I am encouraged to work for myself to place me in the best position to benefit from surgery, to wake from it rather than capitulate to it. The surgeon’s work entails robotic arms and deep imaging of where to cut and slice inside me. The cancer sits up in the surgeon’s guiding light for those cuts. Some of me may be injured by those incisions made against the cancer. That is where my dream of my death waits for me to sleep and encounter it. That the best work of the surgeon may fail to save me from dying. That his intervention may bring about an earlier death than the one planned for me by the spread of my cancer.