Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  Actually, it may be the anesthesiologist who kills me accidentally, whose drugs and gas send me into a coma and I descend so far away from myself that I become lost and my heart takes it that I have left its harbor for good and so my heart stops beating for me, switches off its lighthouse-rhythm sweep of my consciousness, leaves me bereft. I know that the science of my surgically induced sleep mitigates against an accident of this kind. Outside the science, where Anansi and Brer Rabbit rule as supreme trickster beings, in their nether world, I wonder if I am at their disposal, and being put to sleep delivers me on a platter to them for them to divide between them the bounty of my mind and body. The anesthesiologist ferries me across the river to meet my fate, unknowingly delivers me to my infinite rehearsal conducted by Anansi and Brer Rabbit.

  If not the surgeon or the anesthesiologist then the nurse who patches me and introduces a pernicious infection in my wounds that sends my body into sepsis shock. If not the nurse then COVID-19 running around the hospital looking for a new body to claim for its pandemic growth. COVID-19 waits in the hospital for each new arrival and for me. I see novel coronavirus as my cancer in one of its many guises in a game in which my cancer plays Anansi or Brer Rabbit or both interchangeably or simultaneously depending on the challenge posed by me. I delight in the city slowed and quieted by the threat of COVID-19. How the city air smells clean robbed of exhaust fumes. I hear so many birds in Mid-City, mockingbirds, hummingbirds, wrens, finches, crows, seagulls (eight miles from the sea), their various calls made louder by the lessened traffic and imagined thinness of the freshened pelt of city air. New leaves push through limbs, buds open regardless, and my allergies flair no matter the pandemic’s devastation of all routine.

  A friend says that this pandemic is a ripe time to dismantle all of capitalism as it grinds to a halt, take the evil bits of it apart and put it back together again with a green and communal eye. The list of things to be discarded by the reorganization of the current system, largely halted by COVID-19, becomes long and unwieldy once the many parts are laid bare by their enforced slowness and partial stoppage. Some parts just cannot work anymore as is. The experience of this time should soften up the public for a new system to be put in place rather than a restarting of the old one. Could this be true as well for my cancer and me? Am I on the brink of living out the last chapter of my life in a revolutionary new way? COVID-19 is capitalism’s cancer, here to make capitalism stop and take notice and start again with heightened wisdom and hopefully a changed character. For example, we have two cars in the house and with social distancing in place we use just one car to make runs to the supermarket for supplies. What if, once the virus disappears, we keep the ethos of one car for all of our needs and even trade in both petrol guzzlers for an electric vehicle? Is there an equivalent trade that I can make to emerge safely out of this cancer?

  What could I trade to secure my health? To know my valued holdings I need to identify the places and people and ideas that I have returned to in my consistent bid to make sense of the world and of my life. First, C. L. R. James’s 1938 study of the Haitian revolution, titled The Black Jacobins. James shows how the first successful slave rebellion became the world’s first antislavery and first postcolonial republic. The heroes of James’s world plan war and economics along the lines of race as the demarcating factor. James’s penchant for narrative makes a confusing episode from history read as if it were a linear story in a fictional enterprise. His personalities are imbued with astonishing leadership qualities such as Toussaint Louverture’s wily dealings with the French and British. He appeared to enact Anansi. He knew that he had to employ military tactics and negotiation trickery to win his country’s freedom. For C. L. R. James the first postcolony is a shining example of the way forward for the longue durée of the anticolonial and postcolonial struggles.

  How does history help me in my epidemiology? James’s 1938 study demonstrates how slavery as a profiteering enterprise cost more in human terms to keep it viable for a few beneficiaries. He certifies slavery’s moral turpitude and inherent mortality as a system, how slavery’s repression breeds rebellion and why slavery under those strains is destined to fail. C. L. R. James’s biography of slavery has a hero, Toussaint Louverture, whose heroics, though costly in human terms (more than two hundred thousand deaths), result in the reward of unquantifiable freedom. In addition, the history of a successful rebellion would shine for other oppressed people to see and benefit from by knowing about it.

  James’s text begs the question, what if the encounter between Europe and Africa happened along lines of fair trade? History as we know it would be a work of fiction. There would have been mutual growth and development. Not the plunder and hurt of history in need of contemporary modes of redress. It is this James who walks with succession through the emergence of the James as literary storyteller invested in history as personality, and the James who sees history as a set of economic and cultural practices.

  These changes embody the Anansi biography of multiplicity. They exceed revisionism or augmented ideals through time. That way a single body has of handling time requires shifts of persona. As his body shape-shifts, so James imagines a free space over a lifetime with his focus on Africa as his palimpsest. He dreams his way off his island nation of Trinidad and Tobago to connect with Africa. He becomes the young researcher who makes Africa a living place. In his book Beyond a Boundary, he brings into being a postcolonial geography and independent spirit. He seems to say that not all places continue from colonialism into a condition of the postcolonial, that some things may come about outside of that continuum. For instance, the sound of the cricket ball on the willow bat swung in the mind of the adult echoes as that ball sails beyond the boundary. If that struck ball ever lands it is for another generation to find it. What we have as James’s legacy is the trajectory of that ball that he batted with his best swing for that sweetest of sounds that tells him right away “looks like this one gone for good.”

  With my cancer, I throw my arm up and that cricket ball sent sailing by James’s scholarship lands in my open palm. I grip that ball. My reflex triggered by a sound. That sound traveled over time and across seas to reach me. It takes me back to the yard at the front of the house in Airy Hall. As kids we used the path from the front gate to the front porch as our cricket pitch. I do not remember what we used for a bat but I can still feel the pain of the ball that banged on my leg as I stroked at it and missed and it slammed into my shin and left a bruised bone. The better batters among us sent the ball sailing over the fence around the yard and the nearest fielder had to retrieve it and sometimes all of us had to look in the tall grass of the field to find that ball. The sound of the bat as it connected with the ball twinned with the smell of a bakery. Some note on a tuned instrument, one plucked string left to echo, one struck key left to brew in the air. The cries of us children at such a clean hit multiplied in the air and made us jump on the spot and slap our thighs and flick our index fingers against our clasped thumbs and middle fingers. If the ball sailed toward the sun you had to shade your eyes to trace it.

  The bat-and-ball sound and children hollering are an instant stretched to become a constant maintained out of time. Always that stroke and crisp contact, crying out for joy. Thwack, drawn-out loud and long, that pulled on nerve strings, opened corners of lungs and mind. Made us believe back then as I do now in this extended replay that the highest obstacle merely presented the biggest challenge, rather than seeming insurmountable. Even if I grant my cancer a place on the team playing cricket in the yard all those years ago, and a seat next to me on the floor near my grandmother in her rocking chair on the front porch telling her Anansi story, even if the cancer soaked up, same as me, the sound of that bat driving that ball out of sight, and fielded patiently for a turn to wield that bat or bowl that ball, I would maintain an edge over the cancer.

  Whereas the cancer witnessed everything alongside me, I played an active part in each of those emblems from my past. Whereas the cancer b
ided its time, I lived mine. All that I needed I heard in my grandmother’s story. All I could ever be seemed delimited by the whack of that ball beyond the boundary of the yard’s paling wood fence. Both story and game made me feel full of the goodness of life.

  Bowl that ball, James. I have the bat in my hand and I am ready to swing for the boundary. Tell that story and fill my ears inclined your way. Even with cancer I am prepared to play, to listen, primed for this life.

  My cancer says that it does not play cricket. Which is to say that it refuses to play by any rules outlined by me. Which is cancer’s way of tearing up the rulebook of our relationship, as if rules were anathema to our relations. I reply that all of me up to this moment made the cancer possible and therefore everything about my past counts in my present, our (the cancer and me) present. In a roll call of my disease and me to see exactly who is on whose side—as if a line could be drawn in the sand between us when a circle is drawn around us and we move with it from one location to the next—things in our world answer to their names.

  The cancer that occupies my body wants me to believe that it is indivisible from me. Each spell of cold sweat or hot flashes, of the several every hour, belongs to me. I cannot put it down to the side effects of the drugs, though that works as a partial explanation since I was free of these spells before I embarked on the drug regimen. I cannot blame the cancer for launching an independent campaign of terror on my flesh and blood and consciousness. Instead, each outbreak of hot flash as it surges through me and makes me tear off my cardigan if awake, and if in bed kick off the sheet and blanket, both cardigan and blanket that seemed necessary to keep me warm, as I felt inordinately cold all the time (again, the drugs, or the cancer or just me and my fear or a combination of all three), has to be embraced as my newly cancerous body in an altered history of my life. Life before cancer and life with cancer represent two life histories that I hope to enrich with a third expeditionary force in my biography known as my life postcancer.

  If all works out with COVID-19 and me, that is, if the hospital accepts my operation as an urgent one and allows the doctor and his team to work on me. I can see all the medical professionals chipping in to help out with this emergency, each specialist diversifying to cover the demands on the system made by this novel coronavirus outbreak. April 1 came and went and I lost that date to COVID-19. Cancer won. Cancer wins each time I lose something or other. The next mid-April date might be canceled since the social or physical distancing and the spread of infections have together made all routine life in the city impossible to carry out. My operation is routine for my doctor and his team. They carry out several each workweek. COVID-19 puts all of that on hold for those of us who nurse life-threatening disasters and rely on medical interventions to save us. COVID-19, society’s cancer, is mine too. The pandemic teams up with the cancer in my body to launch a pincer attack against me, killing masses of citizens along the way.

  As if in answer to my worry about the long tentacles of cancer that seem to reach into every facet of my body and so every aspect of my life, the hospital emails me to confirm the mid-April date for my operation, and further to set a date four days before it for the expensive PSMA. That is the test that paints a detailed picture of the course set by my cancer cells that emerged from the membrane around my prostate, as opposed to the antigens that generally indicate the presence of prostate cancer. If the membrane-specific cells have migrated to those suction tubes of my lymphatic system, then a clear path will show from my prostate outward. It is to this picture that the surgeon refers when he says to operate without it would be to travel blind, to cut into me and see what he finds rather than have a map of what is there before he makes his cuts.

  I pay toward my monthly insurance premium and have a copayment. Yet I have to foot the bill for a procedure that the surgeon deems necessary for him to do his work. This is broken medicine. That the richest capitalist nation in the world works by bleeding its citizens at every turn and every juncture of medicine and in their civic life makes that nation impoverished on many fronts; the ethical, first and foremost. I fear for the life of the citizen who is poor in this richest of nations. It makes sense that the poor and Black in the nation die earliest of all groups and the rich live long and healthy lives. Even death is sociological.

  Of course I will pay for it (mine is not a case of Fo’s Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!) and I’ll take home my free CD that I get after the procedure—a detailed picture of my lower interior. I am glad that the surgeon will have eyes so that he knows where to go when he cuts into me. I wish the whole enterprise free for everyone. I hate this monetary society. Though I reserve the bulk of my passion for my cure, there is always a modicum of it for targets that deserve my venom. My doctor is a magician and a mechanic. He works his magic of my possible cure and he fixes my broken body invaded with cancer by removing the invader, as far as that is possible. He may be a part of my Anansi and Brer Rabbit arsenal. Someone I bring on board to help me banish the cancer from my territory.

  Alternatively, he may help the cancer by poking at it and waking it up to more virulent activity in me. He may find too much to cut into and so he may have to retreat and seal up my cut without doing anything about my cancer. My cancer may use the surgeon to legitimize its takeover of me by earning through surgery this medical and scientific blessing of its unimpeded progress in me. I will find out in mid-April how the rest of my days will be for me with this cancer in my life. More than a magician and a mechanic, my surgeon may well be a god, at least to my fortune with my dilemma. I am to walk into his cathedral a supplicant and with luck emerge from it the baptized convert. On a more secular note, he will cut me open, do what he can with the cancer that he encounters, and sew me up as cured of the disease or in need of further therapies to fight on against it.

  The surgery should not kill me. I should not die on the operating table. I should lose consciousness and surface into my life with no memory of what the surgeon did to me to save my life. With COVID-19 in the hospital I hope to dodge it. I hope the surgeon and his staff are well and the ward staff clean and clear of the virus, and the bed and all the implements that come into contact with me pristine and virus-free. That is my prayer. Hear, oh hear, as Shelley intones in “Ode to the West Wind,” his secular and black magic invocation of the winds of political change, so I pray to all the forces I store in me to come to my medical assistance. If I cannot have Anansi and Brer Rabbit on my side, let us say that the two in me are canceled out by the same two in my cancer, then lend me any trick of apotheosis that is available to me.

  COVID-19 assumes the role of an aid to my cancer. I must walk into spaces dominated by the pandemic in my quest to treat my cancer. I would be in my house were it not for my need to treat my disease. I run the risk of catching another deadly disease that’s rampant in the city. COVID-19 is another iteration of cancer in my body. As the pandemic riots in the body of the city, so my cancer rages in me.

  At my next appointment, I see a general practitioner who must verify my health for the operation. That means I walk into a hospital where the beds assigned for COVID-19 and the staff who care for them reside. Chances are that the virus is in the smile of that person who greets me at the door. There are too many ways for health professionals to pass the virus to me. The doctor who judges my health for the forthcoming surgery may have COVID-19. As he confers his approval on me he bequeaths COVID-19. The nurse who takes my pressure and pulse and tells me both are in good shape aspirates on me and her breath and her touch carry COVID-19. So the routine appointment appears to be my judge, jury, and executioner. I walk into the hospital with cancer that threatens to shorten my life and quite possibly leave with COVID-19 to speed up that shortened process.

  This does not stop me from my exercise regimen as I prepare for the middle of the month—assuming I get there free of COVID-19 symptoms. Between the doctor visit and my appointment with the surgeon I have that chemical resonance test, the PSMA. If COVID-19 misses me on the doctor’s
visit, it may get me on the second appointment. If not the second then on that third medical date, the one with the surgeon and overnight stay in the belly of the virus, many viruses, it must be said, since other post-op infections can catch me. What I mean to say is that my best ally, medicine, is about to take over; it remains my single biggest chance to stop the cancer in its tracks. I walk into its professional space that may be rife with disease knowing that this could be the blow against cancer that brings the cancer down.

  Cancer needs a song: tambourine and cymbals and a choir, not to raise it from the dead but lay it to rest finally. This will have to be arranged by a songster. All I have to do is write the lyrics, the songbook, for surely cancer and I are in a production that is the scale of an opera. “You rocked me to sleep when you slept. Now I choose to stay awake. I shake with your laughter through years. I want to stop time in you and take your life that is my life as well. Here is to all the times that you moved without thinking about me. Here is to all your lovers and children. I stake my claim of your life. For my life is not worth living if you live on. My goal is to see us both dead. I live for this death of ours. Do not make me live a moment longer. For all your laughter, I feel pain. All your life is my despair. I am cancer and no good comes from me.”

  And for counterpoint, “I do not want you for a guest. There is hardly enough room in me for all the things I have become and all the things left for me to be. I wish I could take you for a walk around the neighborhood. Instead you hide in me and chew your way out. My body jumps and skips and twists to songs of health and wealth. Just as light stirs the world to rise and shine, so I wake and dance to the tap of that light on my heels, forehead, shoulders, back, and belly. The sugar and spice in me for life does not include you, Mr. C.”