Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  I thank Debbie for her stellar advocacy. I tell her I love her. I tell her so, many times over, as if each telling is a new manifestation of that love, a new way for love to grow between us. Over the last five months she kept all my details at her fingertips and asked all the right questions of me before I met with the doctor so that together we formed a unified front of judiciously informed people, hungry for cure but cognizant of the routes open to us as we speed toward the end of a bad journey. Whatever years I have left to live I want to spend them with her. And be there for her when she needs me as she was there for me. Cancer turns me into a sixty-year-old, not forty-five or fifty, or fifty-five as I kept saying I felt, always the younger man in defiance of time’s euclidean geometry of reckoning with my body, but all of sixty years.

  The scars across my lower stomach change from raw to crusty to bright new outcrops on my skin, blemishes rather than avenues cut through my flesh. One cut is just one inch above my navel, another about three inches above that first one. To the left of the first cut there is a three-inch space before another incision and another three-inch gap for the outermost cut on the left side. To the right side of the first cut just above the navel, there is a three-inch gap before a fifth incision and three inches away, on the far right side of my lower stomach area, the biggest of all incisions, this one about two inches wide, out of which my cancerous prostate and other matter sullied with disease made their bloody exit. A camera occupied the highest incision, that second one above my navel. It provided the internal picture projected on a monitor to guide the scalpels inserted into the other openings. The robotic element addressed the mechanized prongs in my body guided by the surgeon, who worked with the picture provided by the camera and headed for the places earmarked by the radioactive chemical tracers from the self-financed PSMA test.

  I could sit forward after two nights in the hospital and two more days at home without pulling on something to spare my stomach muscles and aggravate those incisions. Another couple of days and even the swelling around my midriff deflated. After a week, the surface glue started to peel off in the shower and really flake like glue on a finger or any surface. I have to shake my head to clear a picture of this sealant applied all the way along a cut that opened a lane into my body, six lanes. With the restrictions of COVID-19, I have ample time for the slowness of healing. No matter how fast I rush ahead mentally, my body crawls along mending at a pace independent of my mind. I hope my daily walks help. I nurse a picture of those cuts closing and my midriff’s return to its former middle-aged glory—slightly puffy, under the slight inflationary grip of midline fat, and something to pull in with a breath whenever I think about it (which is several times a day.)

  Where does the feeling come from that I have lost something and returned from a funeral with the air of a burial still fresh in my body? It surfaced, this bad feeling, of impending doom as if I am about to have a heart attack, on my first night in the hospital. As my head cleared from the anesthetic I felt famished. The nurse told me to order something before the kitchen closed. He gave me a four-page menu—very five-star! I picked fish and mashed potatoes with corn on the side and rice pudding for dessert, with fruit juice. An orderly brought in the tray and did not linger and tried to keep far from me as she positioned the food tray on the adjustable table across the middle of my bed. I tasted the food and expected the flavor of hunger, which is no flavor at all, just a contented ravenous impulse. Instead, I chewed on sawdust and had the distinct mechanical experience of shoveling carbon into a pit of a machine. I chewed and shoveled the food but I was not there in that experience. I was absent from my body, still finding my way back to myself and filled with horror at the prospect of what I was in the middle of discovering and how the whole thing might grind to a halt and leave me stranded outside myself and so lost to my body.

  The feeling of emptiness stayed with me for days: empty and exhausted, and ready to sleep for weeks in a new hibernation of the depleted spirit. At home I could see roses galore on the bushes in the front yard and remark on their rich display of red, pink, yellow and orange and white as if looking at the experience from some distance away. The ebullient display of life on the nettled branches just an arm’s length from my face nevertheless seemed miles from me in my flat mood. My tiredness suffused my skin and bones. If lethargy was in the blood, then my body operated on a transfusion of it. With tiredness came this sadness. Not tears. The feeling of being on the verge of a flood of them, that I could burst at any moment, keel over and pound the ground and pull at my hair and dribble in hysteria. Somehow I kept myself away from that precipice.

  My first surgery rehearsed my death. I have come back from the dead. I tasted what it was like to be present and have my grip on that present relinquished by some force outside my grasp. I simply let go of my life. That was the anesthetic. To come back from that helpless condition of death thrust on my body and mind leaves me scalded by an encounter with fire that blazed all around me and made it abundantly clear that there was no escape, just surrender. I am back in my life after a baptism in this fire. It leaves me sad, another place that I find myself in without wanting to be there, as if dropped into its coordinates by a shepherding clock, a time I must obey at a pace I cannot resist.

  I miss this thing that is my life and all the people in my life. I left it without much notice. Had I not returned to my life, I would have left behind exactly what I find waiting for me upon my return to my conscious life. Now that I am back, I feel sad for this absence and for the return to the same place and with the knowledge that I have another departure waiting for me at some point in the unknowable future. I should benefit from my rehearsed departure and return. Something in me should be ready for the next time. Perhaps my sadness derives from seeing how little I can do to bring about any reasonable effect that softens the fact of my death. The readiness that Lear declares for something that’s in media res and that involves not just preparation for but acceptance of the inevitable. No raging against the dying of the light, since that too is a waste of effort and an investment of energy that detracts from some more worthwhile undertaking.

  Which is what? At sixty, I could have stopped living. And what a stoppage! Projects half done, scripts in need of my attention, money matters, security matters for my children and Debbie, who depend on me. Sixty feels too early. I feel sad coming back from that realization and knowing that if I devoted every waking hour to a readiness for death that I may need another ten years to reach that point of saying yes, I am ready. And maybe continual deferral of being prepared is a condition of being alive, that my mind works with deferral as a permanent condition rather than a thing to be resolved. I feel like that character in Pinter’s The Caretaker, who has to go to Sidcup (a suburb of southeast London) to get his papers so that he knows who he is and perhaps settle the question as well of what his life means for him.

  In the productions that I saw, first in my midteens and then again in my late twenties in London, the way the character gazes into the future and declares the intent to go to Sidcup to procure those all-important papers means he never will make the journey and at any rate, the journey is not one to be made by him but by us, the audience, those of us lucky enough to be left with his bequest to ask a better question of life, or to realize the pointlessness of posing the same question that he poses. Even in a space that declares a lack of something, it seems enrichment comes from just knowing about the absence of any meaning, and is preferable as a state of mind to outright ignorance of it (though ignorance of it is often an excuse from responsibility for certain actions).

  I wonder if it hurts to know this for a fact? That my sadness arises out of a working knowledge of life’s journey as an interrupted activity and not a goal or task that we can complete to any degree of satisfaction. In place of Dylan Thomas’s rage—fight, not surrender; active demise rather than passive compliance—there is a quiet sadness that fits the conclusion of a thing worth the undertaking. Not for any point or meaning but for the joy and
excess of phenomena that bombard the senses and invite fabulous abstraction to do what it can with such a state of being.

  My body shows scars from a battle that carries on wounding my mind. I left surgery with a note of success in the battlefield against my cancer, routed from its base and chased out of sight, and with scraps of it left in place that in three months I can target with chemo and radiation; as such, it should signal a war that is all but over with me as the victor over my cancer. I have the scars on my body to show for it. There is this continuing fight with my mood. Cancer leaves its physical moorings and takes flight from my body as I sacrifice parts of me that held the cancer. On the psychological plane the cancer wages another battle of attrition to see how tough I can be with the memory of cancer in my body. I am to cherish the rest of my days as a cancer survivor. Cancer showed the error of my sixty years lived with ambition, idealism, righteous indignation, and not a small degree of selfish and damaging decisions.

  Cancer says to me that I should remember it daily as I live out these last years. I am lucky to have learned from having cancer and lived to tell the tale. Has cancer poisoned the remainder of my life? Made my life the thing that I live thanks to the death of cancer. Added a sour taste to the flavor of my life, the afterglow when a candle flame dies, that bulb that shines for a moment in place of the light just switched off. My days singed by the blue flame of my brush with cancer. Cancer blues for the rest of my days. And the flip side, the B-side of the A-side, may well be a version of my life that is enriched by my cancer experience. The A-side for conventional living and the B for the walk on the wild side of things.

  Maybe cancer wants me to be the beneficiary of its postbattle charm, not lessons learned from my fight with it, but the remnants of it in me as a flavor added to the remainder of my life. Cancer is the extra- that is placed in front of ordinary. In this way nothing can be just what it appears to be when faced with me. I come to things having snuffed the candle’s flame for its afterglow, with the bonus light that follows the light just extinguished, with the boom and its adjoining endless echo.

  Not echo as in a weaker copy of the original, nor the sound that returns to you after it runs from you and hits a barrier that sends it careening back to its source. More something that starts from somewhere as a result of the seeds planted by the original sound that you made. More like an independent force derived from that sound though not indebted to it. Something with a life and rationale of its own. You live for this and cancer knows it and came disguised as that sound, some quality that you needed in order to be renewed, as if cancer can ever be about renewal. As if you were on a road and the only way to get you to take a necessary detour had to be this calamity of a wheel breaking off the axle, a tire blowout, some impassable block in the road. Some bang, and its diminishing echoes, that add up to more than simply copies to be viewed as lesser than the original.

  I move with leg irons, slow in the drag of a tide of bodily repair after surgery. No room in my head for any furniture other than my body’s cut and bruised parts caught in their rhythm and gripe of repair. Pain under the skin, deeper than flesh, pain between my bones. I feel a dull ache. I move to ease that mounting sense of pressure, move from my back to my left side (there is a big scar on my right side, the largest by far of the six incisions that does not countenance any degree of touch). The hours mock me. They pass as if running on the spot with all the pumping arm action and high kicks of legs to mimic rapid movement.

  One hour I think it is midmorning and the next I am in the middle of the afternoon and all that happened in between was my body barking my age and disrepair at me. How to heal when I feel stitched back together by the second hand of a clock? All my abstract art dispensed with in an instant by this body physics. The prescribed narcotics scoop up about three of those hours each time I take a dose and fling those hours away. And sometimes the gesture of disposal is into an oncoming breeze that pitches those hours back into my face. So I relive them with the same pain. Am I worthy? To think that this pain can be a university; that somehow Martin Carter’s poem “University of Hunger” could be a solitary venture with the same long march of despair as necessary for repair.

  The landscape of Carter’s poem, Guyana, is superimposed with the marks of British colonial history on that land. Is that what cancer has done to my body? Marked it for destruction? Those who march in Carter’s poem are on a desperate quest. They wake in this hunger and their only option is to let the rhetoric of the questions raised by their experience become self-answering. The hunger of the poem’s speaker turns out to be a teachable moment in a long history of such lessons of suffering. I take my lesson from the poem’s social and political example: to build a bridge between the personal and the political. As Carter teaches me to align with the poor as a standard for my art, so I wish my postoperative pain to forge a link with my artistic learning.

  My art is more than just fashion or a pose. It relates to how I move in my life. More than a gesture, my art is groove and a rhythm, syllabic slap and empathic rap of nerves and muscle and blood dancing my bones. Surely with this pain and limited body (harnessed to body by my mind filled with pain) I can co-opt the engine of my art to move me to less pain and a delimited sense of self as more than flesh and blood. So I breathe deep. That vase again, and a network of vines growing through breathing holes in that vase. Breathe in this rhythm and live by each breath. I am more body than mind. My thoughts relocate from my head into pure physical pain. A routing of my mind: from its station in the head to one devastated location below my navel and behind my bladder. Everything about my thinking now in that lower area across my stomach marked with six punctures, some untidy as if made in a hurry or torn at the edges under duress.

  My body’s claim of me through its register of damage and pain and repair fills my head to capacity and underwrites cancer’s claim of victory by a show of these hours as its winnings over me. Cancer left my body through the biggest of these six portals. Cut away from my body and dragged out of me and into the open. A true extirpation if there was one. A solid eviction. And for the clearing away of cancer the remnants of this pain. My sixty years strapped to my back; no, more precisely, below my navel, where sixty years declare a weakness, a burden of time, and too little of the nonchalance of youth at my disposal. Sixty shots from a rifle salute, sixty bugle and trumpet calls for a body curled around pain and in the grip of pain and wanting nothing to do with life if it means more of this and all of it just for this cancer.

  The trumpet salute should be for cancer’s departure. A burial for cancer’s rose dug out of me. And for whom I grieve after months of fear of what cancer would do if left to its own devices in me. That I feared surgery would fail and leave the cancer to march on in me. That after surgery I may hear in three months’ time that there is more of it and just as rampant and in need of new medical strategies. So the hours in my body measure my mind, as one analysis and worry follow the next, generated by pain. Whose university is a longing for it to come to an end. Where the lessons that I extract from my immersion in pain take flight from me before I can grasp their meaning, catapulted from me by my pain. A university of perpetual loss.

  Perhaps a miniature violin plays for me. Other people live lives of pain, and here I am in a matter of days in pain’s arresting company and I am ready to declare defeat. My requiem is for the territory lost by my mind to the demands of pain. And in its realm with cancer absent and fighting by proxy, I’m distracted by it. I find I can’t think a thought that is not flavored by pain as a devotee of cancer. Though I know all about the finite body and its short span in that long march of time and history that Carter would have us attend to and benefit from even in our temporality.

  My father died aged fifty-three, supposedly of heart failure. He had a separate family life at that point after years of no contact with us. My brothers and I returned to England in 1972, from Guyana, having never known him as a father. I left London at two with not a single memory of him. While we were in Guy
ana with grandparents he separated from my mother while they were in London setting up the good life for us. It dawned on me that his heart failure might well have been prostate cancer. With no communication between the families, his news reached us secondhand and something was lost in translation. First, there was shame associated with prostate cancer. Second, if anyone asks, tell them heart disease, since he had a dodgy ticker from his youth and military service in the UK, where he took seriously ill with pneumonia and had to be discharged from the army.

  I wonder about the binary of either heart disease or prostate cancer, that one or the other must be false for a single truth to prevail. Maybe he had both heart disease and prostate cancer and they brought a premature end to his days. With just one of them on my plate and with seven years’ advantage over him, I take my cancer as his dubious gift to me, with heart disease as the less attractive of the two (in a beauty lineup of them). Or so I estimate from my pain, cuts, drugs, and prognosis. My father gave me nothing of use to me in my life except the fact of my life along with the baggage of his gene pool. I feel no hurt or rage toward him. He did his thing and he left early. Had he stayed in my life and lived to a cure or maintenance of one or both of his diseases, or if he had died and I knew what the cause of death was, I would have taken those preventive tests for diseases earmarked for those with family histories.

  I neglected my health checks and I am to blame for allowing my cancer to fasten its hooks into me, making it that much harder to cure it. My father casts his shadow on me. His influence on me from his grave is that of a stranger whose bloodline I happen to share. And with blood comes the penalty of genealogies of want, those small deficiencies that undermine the largesse of a continuity of life. Some of this is about me shadowboxing with him. I have no wish to inflict harm. I seek merely to dodge injury from him. He lies dead as a passive figure, long gone, whose agency wakes as cancer in me. I wake him to shake him from me, shake myself free of his genealogical stranglehold. That his ghost can battle me as cancer awakened in my body from his genes dormant all through my youth and into middle age makes this a mini epic. Some lifelong endeavor in which I kill once more the father who died long ago but refused to go in peace. I uproot my cancer and I kill him so that he dies twice, to stop his parade in my body in the shape of cancer.