Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  Reprised by, “Wait right there, I have to fetch my weapon. You bring rhythm, I bring your downfall. Let’s swing until only one of us is left standing or both of us fall.”

  This is how it goes between my cancer and me. By turns rhythm and blues, soul and funk, and jazz number. A trumpet or saxophone or trombone solo, all three take turns in me, with that guiding snare and bass drum. Cancer, we dance until one or the other falls or both. Let me be the one to see you off, even if I follow almost immediately after you. This is my body, not yours, you are an unwanted guest in it. You have overstayed your welcome. Now you wish to stage a takeover, which is really a takedown in which both of us fall and never rise again. For that outcome, never an option, I muster every fiber in me and within reach of my memory and imagination to fight against you, Mr. C., though we lean on each other in a club that carries on way after closing time with the band reduced to long solos in slow, slow time. A time out of sorts with the stopwatch of daily routine. A time not on any pulse. That slows the heart and settles the trembling Jell-O of the mind. And for this we dance on into the small hours in that slowly emptying wineglass of the club.

  The hands of the clock in my body have stalled at midnight. That hour when the dark releases all its jewels of sport and joy. You see the night as thick. It presses your eyes. We walk through it, my cancer and me, as if wading into a sea. We inhale the riches of the night and our glasses refill automatically and we dance and never tire until we reach that point of no return. We lean against each other to stay upright. The wood floor accepts that our feet polish it to a shine of the lights of the house, wood polished smooth, sweat twisted into the grain and the grain worn. You know how certain tasks will wipe the fingers clean of their prints, well, that is how we dance through the night.

  I tend to dismiss my cancer when I talk to people about it. I put Mr. C. in his place as a temporary distraction and a test I am destined to pass. I refuse to grant C. the kind of space and prominence that I have assigned to him in my head. I mean I do not talk about my cancer in those terms to my wife, and certainly not to my daughter. I think that if I deny cancer this recognition then I gain something, have some advantage over the cancer that it cannot do anything about to alter in its favor or fix on its terms. This psychological realm signals my unending and relentless dualism with my cancer. That I make no concession to it, having already conceded real estate to it in my body, been compromised by it and now its overt threat of my premature death.

  I have not told Geoff, my best friend (other than my wife, that is), about my cancer diagnosis. He lives with his partner, Peter, in Shrewsbury in the UK, an ocean away, and an excuse for me to say to myself that I do not wish to burden him with my problems in an already problematic time with COVID-19 nesting all over the globe. Feeling overwhelmed, I feel he wouldn’t be able to help me. Also, I don’t want him to worry about me and add to my talk about cancer with what would be his regular queries and offers of advice. I struggle privately with thinking that says I can put cancer behind me as a single and private undertaking and save my friends the worry of the need for blow-by-blow accounts of my fight with it. I don’t want to add to gossip about me, to hear people hear from my friend in an unspooling thread of talk about me that wouldn’t happen otherwise. I feel bad every day about not telling my friend, and with each day that passes the feeling worsens and the hurdle grows taller and appears insurmountable. We are in touch almost daily, since he sends me pictures of his cycling trips with his husband, Peter. I always reply with a comment about his mobility despite restrictions, and the beauty of his location, and with some quip about my LA isolation with my family.

  I have not told my mother. She is twenty years older than me and has congestive heart failure, some weight issues, shortness of breath, and arthritis of several joints. She is a miracle of life in that she has been at death’s door for a decade now. Her plate is full. She has more than her share of worries to cope with without me adding to it with my bad news. Again, I believe I will clear this hurdle and so it does not merit my passing on the worry to my mother. That is the reasoning.

  I feel I will not get any satisfaction from telling my mother my troubles. That it will only add to my problems since she is bound to alert my brothers, who will confer and resent me for not telling them earlier. She is parsimonious with her love and praise and so with her sympathy. I don’t feel I’ll hear anything useful from her to help me with my fight. I worry about my ability to deal with her sorrow at the news. So I continue with my WhatsApp messages every other day to her to find out how she is and she replies a couple of times a week, and our relationship of a respectful emotional distance full of pleasantries continues unfazed.

  I have kept it a secret from my brothers too. I have six brothers, four from my father and two more from my stepfather. I am somewhat close to three of them. We talk when I have news or a birthday rolls around. We chat in a couple of exchanges periodically, on WhatsApp. Why would I divulge the challenge of my life to them given the flimsy footing of our relationships? I mean, it is courteous, but it is all walking on eggshells with us, no risk, no vulnerability, and so, no trust. It does not have the steady platform that a relationship needs to cope with the introduction of the heavy weight that my cancer brings with it. I do not want to be hurt by their response, which I can predict will be disappointing. I do not wish to fuel their talk around my disease without their need to talk to me.

  In the past my brothers and I have talked among ourselves about the worst one among us at the exclusion of that pariah of the moment. We seemed obsessed with another brother’s struggle. Or found it salutary. There but for the grace, et cetera. I know from our talk that we do not want that brother to fail, we just express amazement at his failing. It is this infatuation with someone’s bad news that scares me off from breaking my news to my brothers. I do not want to be their topic of the day. Also, I can hear the advice from each of them, the platitudes, the inquisitiveness, the mounting feeling of “I wish I had kept my mouth shut” the more I go through this with them. The energy on my part needed to curate the responses of my brothers and mother would subtract from my days. I am better off hoarding my doubt at having withheld the news than my umbrage at having shared it. Gladys Knight has a couplet in her song “Midnight Train to Georgia,” in which she says, “I’d rather be in his world, than live without him in mine.” Well, my sentiments are the exact opposite in relation to my family. Knowing what it costs to live in their world, I opt for solitude.

  I am preoccupied with a riot of my emotions stirred by my cancer. Leave my family and best friend out of it. Preserve my strength for the battle ahead, the operation and recovery and then a protracted fight with continuing radiation and chemo. I’ll need to harness every particle of resistance for my long road with cancer. Enough of those whom I did not tell about my cancer and how about why I even have to entertain that kind of talk in the first place. Who designated blood relations as privy to confidences? Who said that friends are true friends only if to them I can unburden my worse fears? My wife is my best friend. My kids around me are sharing in my news. We are under the same roof and in the same cadre of resistance to COVID-19. There is my confidence and they are my confidants, and those are my troops for my fight with cancer and COVID-19. My troops for anything else on the horizon.

  The fact is that I am too much inclined toward privacy, too standoffish with others, too doubtful of the efficacy of the medicine of sharing. “Lean on Me” has not been my philosophy, though as sung by Bill Withers I feel more than hear the offer of support, the added strength conferred on the open and receptive listener, that help is already on hand just by feeling the truth of that song. Bill Withers died two days ago. I played his music all day as I did my chores, which consisted mostly of exercise bike, tidy of my home office, laundry, cleaning the boys’ bathrooms, and some stretching on my yoga mat. I see from “Lean on Me” that COVID-19 is the time for that song, and according to the news it has seen a rebirth among people sharing it a
nd drawing sustenance from it. I know the song has one condition before the listener is able to access the largesse of its loving world: the imperative to ask, to lodge the request for help. And how do I do that if I cannot bring myself to utter the words, not wanting to seem so vulnerable, and not wishing to bother others who appear busy with their lives?

  I thought I knew why Maya Angelou’s caged bird must sing. For freedom. For access to the world denied it that the song insists is the right of the singer. For Wallace Stevens’s singer “beyond the genius of the sea.” For the ability to tell “the dancer from the dance,” that exquisitely indistinguishable pairing in Yeats’s “Among School Children,” though vulnerable to demarcation along the lines of the separation of art from life. I aspire to the quality of being in Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses,” of flowing and flown in keeping with the demands of our experience of historical time, with the two as constants (and formal constraints) sharing a point in time as if outside the demands of linear time. I sing outside the cage about other things to do with the love of song for the sake of singing. I sing to spread some good vibe worldwide to outstrip the bad, the unhelpful, and the downright evil. I want my life to be akin to a song with the plaintive note of Bill Withers. As if the simple at its simplest matches the profound at its most complex.

  I see the worst aspects of myself in the way others treat me. A part of me thinks I deserve to be sidelined, unrecognized, with not enough of anything in my life. That cancer is my reward. For the harm done to others. For the grave secrets that I harbor about my life. As though I need to level with myself by a reckoning with everyone around me; that is, unconditional disclosure at all times to cure myself of my reserved disease. Just as reserve feeds my art’s literary style, so it poisons my life. The cancer is my cure. What does not kill you, cures you, runs the mantra that I do not believe wholeheartedly, yet utter on a loop as I come to terms with possibly losing my fight to cancer, and as a consequence, in need of a belief in something if I am to survive that bleak prognosis.

  Down I go, pulled by the gravity I deplore, the one that drags me down and plants a heavy foot on my neck. Do I stay there and capitulate, vanquished? I see myself on skis that take off on a ski jump, and this life is meant for me to put as much distance between the landing and me as I can, by leaning into the drive of that jump off the slide. Keep me in that lean forward to the last millimeter of my stretch as I fly and experience being flown, floating down to earth. Who would want to land with a bang or whimper? Keep me airborne. Open as much real estate between my takeoff and my landing as possible. Keep me outside distance measured by time. Give me that, and I beat the cancer.

  For as long as I hear Linton Kwesi Johnson’s beat down bubble down bass music character poetics filling my head cave and shaking my crowns. It is a beat, as LKJ says. Of the heart. He continues. And he takes the measure of that rhythm, the metrics of a tailor for the suit of a body that is for the ages. A suit that does not have a season. For I parade in it and with it along the catwalk as long as I have hips to gyrate, and as long as hip, knee, and ankle joints last. I float and I move to a beat. I breathe and I picture my past as if loaded into the tongue of a slingshot and catapulted forward ahead of me, paving the way for my progress. I’m airborne and do not wish to curtail my flight for anyone or anything. Now bring out your tape measure and tell me how far I floated in the ski jump of my life; how big that suit must be to cover me.

  * * *

  The third time my daughter cried I took her tears—upon first hearing them—as confirmation of the effect of my dismal condition. I note her tears to show how life takes up where it left off when it got interrupted. I note how interruptions linger and do not go away, even if they have to wait in a queue of other things to do with living. My daughter is the most aware person alive about how she feels as she feels it, not miles after the event like me, but moment by moment. I heard her crying through her bedroom door. Either she cried without restraint or else she cried to draw my attention; that is, so loud she could not be ignored except out of spite or malice. I knocked. Waited. Nothing. Just her loud tears. I walked in and there she was, head in hand, bawling her eyes out. I asked her what was wrong. I expected to hear about another episode of worry induced by my cancer. Instead, it was an online test that she took and could not solve a problem and earned a B, though there is no shame in it, not her usual grade.

  I exhaled in relief that my cancer had nothing to do with her distress, and inhaled right away as the concerned parent ready to jump to her assistance. I belittled testing in a homeschool climate brought on suddenly by COVID-19 that left all the professionals scrambling to simulate the school day with a dispersed clientele. If the city could barely organize a few pickup spots for school meals, how can they hope to reproduce online the routine of populations that gathered under school roofs daily for instruction? I was about to add that I would write to her teacher to improve the grade on the grounds that the homeschool regimen was new to everyone, and bound to result in creases, that with time, would be ironed out.

  Her dear mother intervened just in time to save me making a promise that I could not keep. She said that these things happen. You win some and lose some. That high school geometry for a middle school student needed hard work and sometimes with partial success, though a B was not to be scoffed at, and grades can always be improved. She said that my daughter should take this one on the chin and plow on with her studies. She hugged our daughter and sure enough the tears subsided and a wonderful calm descended in my daughter’s room with me feeling quite useless and glad that Debbie was a part of the equation of this family.

  My daughter crying is to me like having a root canal without suitable anesthetic. Her loud complaint and distress is a hand that dips into my spine and grabs a handful of nerves and pulls that spaghetti right out of me. When she cries I die. Just for today, my daughter’s misery is bigger to me than my cancer.

  I may tell my wife to stay home and let me do these upcoming visits alone. I can argue that by not accompanying me she reduces by half the chance of the virus getting into the house. I imagine stations of purification before I enter the house: peeling off my clothes in the backyard and hosing myself down before throwing everything into the washing machine and stepping into the house without touching anything and heading straight for the shower for another thorough wash.

  I know she’ll refuse to leave me alone for these appointments. We’ll have to come up with a regimen of care, of not touching anything, including our faces and of washing our hands as much as possible, of standing in hallways or rooms away from everyone else, of taking up as little space as possible, and getting out of there as fast as we can. Everyone we meet will be viewed as contaminated. Everyone administering to my care could transmit COVID-19 along with curative expertise. I make a mental note to ask the doctor for the medication that blocks the growth of breasts.

  I suspect they have begun to grow on me. I feel flabby around my midriff. Like I have a car tire strapped around my belly. I have put on a few pounds. I have not weighed myself. I can tell by the flesh that I grab in my hand when I reach around my middle and close my open hands there and it fills my hand with extra helpings of me. My chest looks different. I catch sight of it in the mirror as I shave my goatee and trim my hair. I have pecs but this is different, pecs with something extra added to them to give them both definition (which I want) and protuberance (which I definitely do not want). Debbie mentions a drug that helps fight cancer in women. It blocks estrogen, the production of my breast glands. It is yet another med (on what seems an exhaustive list) that I must request to add to the three that I take and the fourth one that is a three-monthly injection (due again soon, yikes, a long needle in the butt, or gluteus as preferred by my faint heart).

  Though I think of Derek Walcott’s take on exhaustion that pays dividends, I find the drugs regimen hard to stomach. In his book-length Omeros, there is a description of the sea in terms of literacy and history. The image of a tide that starts of
f Africa’s shore and ends up in the Caribbean replays the forced migration of enslaved Africans. Walcott’s image for it is “fountains exhaustion here.” Typically, he coins a contradiction to encapsulate a traumatic condition. The fountain is where I glean my delight. As a verb I associate it with energy and productivity. To link it with the geyser of slavery’s pain underscores Walcott’s genius with the telling and memorable phrase. The fountain of history’s hurts in the transatlantic slave trade repeats unendingly in that Walcott image, and in its repetition presents renewed opportunity for a treatment of injury. I say the lines and see the image and I am baptized by pain, and by the peeling away of those layers of pain for some relief offered by insight, and a coming to terms with the history that might otherwise prove indomitable.

  Of course, in my coalition of real and imagined, a wave is a sideways fountain that wind ushers ashore. Both wave and fountain make that noise of a kettle brought to the boil. History has a similar sound in the way it plays on the nerves and on the heart and hurts my head. I need that palliative fountain, vertical and horizontal, its sound of the sea that’s my cure. That settles my disturbed sense of myself, if cure could be a sound. As if the picture of that sea as painted by Walcott brought with it the sound of the sea and a smell of salt water. My daughter crying is in that sea of history. Her calm is that same scene without noise and movement.

  I have to ask, with three imminent medical appointments, what do I know before I go? My drugs regimen attacks the cancer on three fronts. First, it blocks the cells from dividing and multiplying; second, it blocks the food that cancer likes to feed on to grow; and third, it convinces the cancer cells to commit suicide, by turning their outward drive to increase their numbers into a cessation of production and action, which is the equivalent of self-harm. The drugs have a number of side effects, some of them working in ways that resemble the behavior of cancer, and others that promote appetites that can lead to the growth of cancer. From cravings for food, to a bloated feeling, to hot flashes, and feeling cold as well, I remain at their mercy, and vigilant that they are tied to the meds.