Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  Both actors, from their young and wise days, to older and foolish with it (if we take foolery to mean serious play, and in keeping with Bob Dylan’s “Oh but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”), enact a kind of throwing off of grand wisdom for a less showy assumption of humble not-knowingness, one that goes further and is of much better use given the lightness demanded by life.

  If more proof were needed, in addition to the Godot play, of an endless list of things that testify to life’s pointlessness, the respite on offer may be that there is an escape clause from a Beckett play.* It comes in Beckett’s stage direction to the script, written for television, titled Ghost Trio (1975), in which the door and window on the set are noted by Beckett to be “imperceptibly ajar.” There is a story that the director crouched at that door in Beckett’s presence and pushed the door against the jamb in an effort to show that the door was not closed, and was as near to imperceptibly open as was humanly demonstrable. The director must have been pleased with himself for paying such close attention to the playwright’s notes in the presence of the playwright. Beckett is said to have walked up to the set door, opened it wide and slammed it shut, and said, “There, imperceptibly ajar.”

  Imperceptibly ajar remains just that: a perception that is at the same time acknowledged and denied as awareness. Knowing that life is absurd does not rob life of its joy. In fact, any joy gleaned under such duress is bound to be worth a whole lot more than joy derived from contentment. Wordsworth rubbed against it as a sensory fact in “Tintern Abbey,” a poem that Geoff Hardy read aloud to us and acted out with great fervor, in my high school years. The crux of the poem, titled as written at the ruins of the abbey and with a date as well, centers on the sensuous memory of a poet whose university is the physical world but whose gift is an ability to extrapolate from that world into metaphysical territory, Wordsworth’s fabled “emotions recollected in tranquility.”

  My postoperative confusion coupled with a sense of being tied to my body’s register of a gradual increase in pain sends me into digressions, escape mechanisms, that help me to cope with time dragging its feet and my time weighed down by the surgeon’s assault on my body, and my fragile body’s struggle to recover from it. That necessary escape takes me from one prized memory to the next to bypass pain and this drag of time (and the fear that goes with it). I make ready to launch my tie-in of Wordsworth and Beckett with my cancer operation and pause only because I am forced to do so by last night’s earthquake, which happened just after midnight. Lucky for me I was out of the hospital and back at home. Debbie and I woke to the house quivering in its fifty-six earthquake restraints, plates and bolts added to the foundation to keep the building on its moorings and steady it for just such an occasion as besets it now. And the shake passed in a couple of seconds. The cat bolted off the bed and disappeared in the dark. The pocket door to the bathroom appeared to be the culprit that made all the noise. It sits and is held in place by sliders of ball bearings at the top and bottom, and it disappears into the bathroom wall with the touch of a finger. As noisy as a vuvuzela, tonight the door acted like a Geiger counter.

  I grabbed my glasses, my phone, my dressing gown, and my catheter bag and with Debbie we headed for the bedroom door, where our eldest greeted us with wide eyes and a loud expletive. Liliana emerged on that upstairs landing, dressed and with her contacts left in as she slept. I asked her to grab her phone. Christopher made the descent of the fifteen steps that connect the second and first floors in three bounds. I followed Debbie and Liliana, my six stomach punctures and catheter dictating my pace. We met the dog and Nicholas at the bottom of the stairs and we headed into the kitchen. We looked out and saw other house lights coming on. We waited for another shake. The plan was to run outside if another one began. We waited for the aftershock and as we stood in the kitchen near the door to the backyard, we told each other many times over about the first short burst of shaking as if repetition helped us account for the many layers of comprehension that are necessary around a dramatic event. Also, repetition settles the nerves.

  Thinking that another rumble might follow soon and force us outdoors, I excused myself for a moment and ran to the bathroom a couple of steps away from the kitchen, where I emptied my catheter bag with a horrible singular focus. It took about eight seconds to drain a healthy straw-colored liquid followed by a low degree of pink in the tube that signaled the bleeding that the doctor warned me about. I sighed, flushed, skipped washing my hands, and rejoined the family in the kitchen. The cats were nowhere to be seen. Usually they hide under the dining room table or on a chair under the table in the open space that adjoins the kitchen. Debbie called, Clementine. We knew that Moonlight, the older and more skittish of the two, would never respond.

  We ventured outside and Bengal the stray cat appeared, ready to eat. I petted him, two quick strokes along his back, and scooped out a handful of hard cat food kept stored on the deck in an airtight plastic container, and dropped the portion into his bowl, which he settled in front of right away and started to devour. Bengal was blissfully unfazed, so it seemed. Or else he associated our appearance in the backyard after midnight and a shake-up of the earth as something he could not influence except to eat. Debbie remarked on his calm. I think back to the rigmarole of borrowing a cage from a pet center and following the instructions to capture Bengal for him to be neutered. He mewed all the way across the city as I delivered him for his overnight stay. I picked him up the next day and he greeted me like a long-lost friend. I opened his cage in the yard and enticed him out of it with a can of sardines in oil. He licked the bowl and refused to leave the backyard. That was eighteen months ago. Now here he was, teaching us how to behave in an earthquake.

  That COVID-19 had swept all our gods away, and not for a day, week, or month, but for the foreseeable future. That the earthquake followed to make sure our gods could never be reassembled. Taken together, they make me wonder about the power of my cancer. To come for me and for the city, in which I live, and the state and the world, just to be sure it does not fail in its bid to capture me. To tell me that the San Andreas Fault runs through my heart. To shake that belief into my single body by shaking the entire city to ensure I number among the twenty million. I do not believe I am exempt from any suffering beset on the city. I believe I must fight what I can see and what I know to be numinously present.

  The ruins of a life, like the ruins of the past, were it an abbey, say, once glorious, now defunct, might be a good place to begin a quest to find out how feelings prompted by vestiges of a place help recall and shape our life practices. The poem is about the impossibility of return, among other things. Wordsworth’s “five long years have passed” and return to the abbey finds him no less predisposed to the sensory alarms and charms of the place. Away from the place and it offers the poet solace, quickens the poet’s mind and blood, stirs feeling even in the absence of its stimulus. The memory of the place stirs philosophical inquiry in the poet, who is able to “see into the life of things” as a result of exposure to nature.

  It is less the abbey and more its surrounding nature—the river, meadow, fields, trees—that carry the magic that Wordsworth celebrates. The poet’s above the abbey, working out a poetics of the spirit that’s embedded in nature, and there’s a secular vision. Nature as a force we can benefit from by knowing about guides my recovery from cancer. What if cancer presents its ruins to me to see if I can benefit from them? Do I capitulate or is my survival contingent on my bringing all that I know to bear on my attempts at finding a cure?

  As long as I keep the poem “Tintern Abbey” in my arsenal, my cancer weighs less on my mind. As the cancer pulls me, the poem helps me tug against that pull. In a way that only a poem works, by recall, insinuation, and out of contemplation, I learn from it how to approach cancer.

  Driving to my post-op appointment—being driven, actually; I am not allowed to drive so Debbie is at the wheel—we comment on the gradual return of traffic, more cars, the odd mad
driver as usual on an entirely private road of high jinx, high-anxiety maneuvers, and on our sense of feeling unhurried, almost unshakable in a new calm of COVID-19.

  Debbie pulls into the hospital. We park. We don our masks as if to hide some supercelebrity status. We pass the door nurses with their thermometers and questions. We sit in the waiting room, where other people sit spaced out in alternate chairs as directed, though at eight thirty a.m. the place is mostly empty. The hospital is so close to my office on campus that it makes me wonder how I’ve managed to avoid it for the five years that I’ve lived and worked in Los Angeles. I could answer by saying that I’ve stayed healthy and I’ve cultivated an aversion to sick places. I’ve been running several times a week, at dawn, between the piers of Santa Monica and Venice. The beach has been closed for weeks due to COVID-19. I’ve changed to riding a stationary bike while I conjure my run on the beach:

  Lavender hills light—high seas that harvest the last of the night—waves apparently broadcasting more news—yesterday’s Twitter by this president that reads like an invitation to whites to murder Black people—yesterday’s new levels of homelessness—police brutality—gulls in a mass on quiet sands—space trembles, star-heavy—sky fruit falls from branches for me to wish by—wish for peace, as dead mount faster than we can dig graves for them—where not even one star lands—where waves sound like grief and no two mourners the same.

  I wait for my name. Debbie reads her phone. At some point in my recall I run backward, skirting foam signing the names of the dead in sand that the waves wipe clean. More of us ready to fall. More of us dead than living, slowed by cut tendons. For all the rose stems plunged into the vases of rifles, rifles aimed at thinking hearts. The nurse butchers my name, which raises a smile in Debbie and me. Sounds like she issued an order for us to evacuate the reception area. Only Debbie and I respond by following her. She takes me straight to a waiting room and asks me to take off everything below my waist and cover myself with a paper sheet and wait for another nurse. I ask if I can keep my socks on—the air conditioning is ramped up in these septic spaces—she says yes.

  Catheter-removal time—yippee. A handsome male nurse walks in. He is brown, perhaps from the South Seas, I say his color due to my SoCal location, where a tan comes with a premium as the thing sought after and showcased, and he is buff, not as novel in a gym-driven culture of bodacious bodies, but something of a rarity in a nurse, our culture’s emblem of selfless care. His thick black hair and a warm, toothy smile crown the picture of a perfect specimen of my gender, of where I need to be and may never again attain, less because of my cancer and more to do with my location on the chart of time, with me on its downward curve.

  He asks me to stand. He remains seated, his head just above my crotch, his stool on wheels that he pushes to the sink and back to my waistline as he twists his body to attend to a giant syringe and fill a kidney dish with water. He spreads a few absorbent sheets on the floor and asks me to step onto the covering. He says he will introduce some water into my bladder to see how things are working with the connected catheter. He asks me to let him know when I feel an urgent need to pull over to the side of the road. He empties about four of these big syringes through the catheter tubing into my bladder. I can feel my bladder ballooning. Debbie asks what the record is for such fillings. I get asked that a lot, he says, the record is thirteen and the man who set it, to look at him you would not think he could hold that much water, a skinny guy.

  The nurse (I wish I had the wherewithal to retain his name, said just once when he walked into the room and hidden from sight on his ID, which hangs on a chain turned the wrong way), whose face I shall never forget, looks serious, and says, Now comes the tricky part, that I need to be quick with the one-liter plastic jug that he hands to me. The moment he pulls out the catheter I should slip the holder in place to catch my urine. Will it hurt? I ask. No. Ready. I nod and I swear my head has not completed that gesture and the nurse pulls on the catheter and it erupts from the end of my penis and a flood of urine follows as I shove the jug in place. He is right about the lack of pain and about my need to be swift to catch the flow. Clear water, that I cannot control, escapes me at top speed. He asks me to contract my sphincter. I concentrate and the involuntary spigot closes off slowly as if reluctant to obey me. We do this count-and-hold routine until all the fluid that he pumped into me is gone.

  He asks if I have padded protection for my clothes. I say yes. He hands me a chart and says that I need to practice the flow-and-hold regimen for the next three weeks if I am to regain control of my bladder function. I thank him many times over. His broad smile, quick nod, and You are most welcome are hardly issued by him before the bulk of him is halfway out of the door, where he stalls for a moment to add that the doctor will be in to see me.

  I dress, with the pad adding a comical protuberance to my crotch. The doctor walks in with another doctor and the stenographer, who boots up the computer and logs in and starts typing even as the surgeon introduces his companion as a senior resident doctor. I thank him for everything. For his magician’s touch with my prostate. For his calm during my storm. For his deep knowledge of a road that was new to me at the end of 2019 and is in 2020 still news. He smiles. Debbie thanks him as well.

  And the drugs, Doctor, and my next steps? He looks at me, and he smiles. I watch his masked mouth, to add sight to what I hear. To affirm my feelings. To double up on sight and sound that’s the equivalent of how a smell of cut grass triggers my childhood memories. For sight and sound to work like taste, say, a taste of copper. That brings me tongue-glued-to-winter-post up against the blemishes in my youth. I’m at the mercy of my senses. I’m lucky that they’re forces for good in my life. They steer me away from trouble. They shape my thoughts. They string thought on a clockface that cuts across my life and compresses years into a day.

  Stop it all, he says, the tamoxifen, the tamsulosin, the Lupron Depot injections, the bicalutamide, stop them right away, and come back and see me in three months.

  I feel giddy hearing this. Somersaults-on-the-spot giddy. My head undergoes this surge of light and electricity that sends my mood from even-keel good to laugh-out-loud stupid. I say it over and again to Debbie. Stop all the drugs. Three months. All I have to do now is regain control of my bladder. The surgery turns out to be that big battle that decimates cancer’s army and leaves it in tatters to regroup, perhaps with guerrilla activity in me to spread chaos and for me to mop up with more decisive medicine (chemo, radiation). I leave the doctor’s office, after profuse thanks with my face fixed in a Joker extreme smile, not feeling my steps along the hospital corridors and not feeling the six glued holes in my lower stomach.

  Happy, happy me, I sing Pharrell Williams’s megahit of mindless abandonment to serotonin and dopamine. Were it not for the glued wounds across my stomach, I would jump and click my heels to the best news from the greatest source. The doctor tells me to stop all the meds immediately. No more bicalutamide, no more tamsulosin, no more Flomax, that first Lupron Depot three-month slow-release injection is my last, no more occasional ciprofloxacin, and it’s hey ho the Jabberwock (Carroll) for I am drug-free, as in no longer taking them thar (Wild West gold prospector) poisons, me matey, aarrhh (though not free of drugs as they work themselves out of me, though no less buoyed by exhilaration, which brings out the Captain Hook in me). Instead I settle for a high five, fist dab, with Debbie, and a prolonged hug (though no kiss, not with our masks on). I run though the doctor’s words several times with Debbie on the drive home. At the house we seek out the kids in their rooms and in front of their computers, and tell them the good news, as unconditionally good, rather than happiness on a ninety-day lease that may be revoked and cancer reinstated, or happiness renewed indefinitely, depending on the PSA test.

  I want to go to a restaurant or the movies and celebrate with Debbie and the kids. COVID-19 has other ideas. With everything shuttered we settle for a special meal and dessert by Debbie and a home movie. Debbie cooks this ja
w-droppingly tasty roast festooned with garlic and cayenne and black pepper, with roasted potato pieces garnished with parsley, and she bakes my favorite carrot cake iced all over with cream and sugar and with the same filling between the two pans of stacked cake. I help myself to a large slice and spirit away another slice in a sealed Pyrex storage container knowing that the cake will be gone by morning. The wee famished ones (big and burly in reality though wee to me for all time) come out in the small hours to feast, you see. We watch a feel-good flick about a couple who face adversity and set aside their animosity to combat the threat only to find their old passion for each other, and realize, as a result of their joint struggle, that their objections to each other mean little given a whole lot of love that they share.

  A song looms, because I’m cancer-free, I walk on air, and with a bounce to my steps, taller by a couple of inches, chin up, shoulders back, head high, cause Doc says I’m cancer-free, if you catch me with a smile that I cannot help and cannot wipe away, whose beam I send to you to infect you too with a little bit of my happiness, that’s ’cause I’m cancer-free, and I can do anything that only yesterday I would not even try, at least that’s how I feel, giddy, silly, bursting with energy, seeing a shine in everything around me, and in the things that I cannot see, all because I’m happy, I want you to join my conga line and move like train wheels linked by looping arms—do the cancer-free.