Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  Time is not the only outside partner with whom my body has questionable affiliations. Time is perhaps the least culpable of them. Time, after all, happens to all of us, and time shows its ravages on us all. My body goes one step further by inviting time to party with it. Doing time is one thing, biding one’s time is another thing, but inviting time to do what it will with you and to show you the worst excesses of its pastimes, well, that is quite uncharted territory.

  My body returns to me altered by the encounter with time at this reckless level of engagement and abandonment. Whatever the two were doing away from me amounted to a year or two of wild living squeezed into a night and day. I shake my head and throw myself into the task of getting my body back on track with me in terms of a good night’s rest, healthy diet, and wholesome exercise.

  I cannot wear a wristwatch anymore because of what time has done to my body. I look at wall clocks and see them as portals that open pathways into our minds and hearts, not with a routine to be obeyed and ordered by time, but as a chance to let all that go for this other way of living, as if on a short fuse that you can see burning out as it approaches you with its invitation to extinction.

  Imagine a large jug of wine, decanted for the interaction of the grapes with the air; now pour that wine into six glasses and raise them in a toast. The time it took for those grapes to grow in the vineyard and mature and get pressed and bottled and left to stand again in a slow march toward maturity to end up in that jug is time not seen, whose surface is barely scraped in the brief duration of that toast. In similar fashion, the time that takes my body from me for an all-night party, one where everything goes, squanders all the time put into keeping my body healthy, all that preparation seemingly to prime my body for that night of adventure.

  I work with a routine that invests in the time that is available to my body, the time that turns up and walks off with my body, goes on a spending spree with that investment. My body, built for living and marking time, even as time chips away at it, believes in abandonment to time and abhors my investment of a portion of that time in my bid to buy more of it for the body and me. My body and I tussle over this conflicting view of what the time given to us is for.

  The second betrayal by my body is with cancer. I never saw that one coming. There was no bar in which I saw time saunter over and entice my body away from me. There was no jug of wine to measure out into glasses for a toast to our bacchanalian existences. Just this arrival one day of cancer rooted in my body and reading its dictate to me that this body no longer belongs to me but to cancer. The shock of the announcement stalls me. The willingness of my body to go along with it and give that cancer room and board until that cancer grows big and bold and launches its coup, that shocks me into stillness as well.

  I cannot believe that my body hid this from me for so long. I marvel at the fact that it all unfolded as a plot right under my nose and before my eyes (in front of my inward gaze and awareness as insight) while I remained unaware of it. I ask my body why. Why do this final thing to both of us? What do you stand to gain from our mutual destruction? Do you hate me so much that you are willing to die to take me down? And so the questions pour out of me. Or they pour inside of me from my mind to my body. And they register as tears that I shed involuntarily away from others and alone in my office or the bathroom.

  I try to let my body know that this latest betrayal cannot be slept off and showered away. That cancer is another matter altogether. That while we have a limited amount of time at our disposal to interpret it in different ways, and differ in how to put the amount of time that we are allotted to some good use (or not), cancer, by contrast, cannot be divided and parceled out in this way. Cancer is life’s all-in poker game of boom or bust.

  * * *

  Boom, if you can gamble with cancer and win by securing a cure. Bust, if cancer takes over and cuts off the rest of time and takes your life. Boom, if the lesson that you learn from having cancer and being cured of it puts you on a richer and more meaningful path of spending the rest of your time on earth. Bust, if after all the taxing treatments to cure you of your cancer you end up dead from cancer anyway. Boom, if the love in your life multiplies and intensifies as a result of the threat of cancer in your life. Bust, if all that love just ends up as a witness, forced to watch you perish from cancer.

  Boom-bust. That is what cancer brings, no in between. No flirtation with time for a chance at repair from the encounter. And perhaps another binge with time in some other future encounter. Not so with cancer. Once you strike the deal (cancer will promise anything to make a deal with you), cancer moves in and takes over. You might like the look of what you see initially, a blast of color, and lots of frenzied activity by your athletic cells to rein in cancer, since those cells view cancer as an invading army. You might feel the buzz of this turn in your body’s chemistry.

  All too soon all of that dissipates. What you are left with is the worry planted by the knowledge that you have cancer and all the side effects as it impedes bodily functions as a result of its intrusive and growing presence in you. By then it is too late to change your mind about cancer. Nothing can be done about that contract with it. The body becomes alarmed at what it has gotten into, and panics, and does what only the body can after a revolt against the mind: the body turns to the mind for help.

  * * *

  Our twoness is a oneness. Our division into distinct entities rests on the false assumption that one of us can live without the other. In fact, we are interdependent moment by moment: body on mind and mind on body. Mind made the move to separate from the body and rule over it. Mind seemed to think that regulating the body’s hungers amounted to dominating the body, superior to it by virtue of acting the part of manager of the body’s needs. Somewhere along the line the mind forgot that what the body consumes is also consumed by the mind, and that both body and mind need those nutrients.

  Cancer thrives on this division. Cancer wants nothing more than to invade a body that operates as if it were independent of the mind. Independent-thinking bodies make for easy prey. Cancer chases that body that runs from cancer until exhausted and collapses and cancer lassoes it or sinks teeth into its neck. Or the body sees cancer as something enticing, as if cancer wore a disguise, and voluntarily goes with cancer, without asking the opinion of the mind. Cancer feeds the body to make the body lose its bearings and ability to resist what cancer does next.

  What does cancer do next? As the body lays transfixed by disease, cancer opens a vein (not an obvious one, think between the fingers or toes) and secretes itself there, plants itself in the body. The body comes to its senses alone and wonders what happened to all the company that it started the night with, before the psychotropic drugs broke out and scrambled everyone’s sense of time, turned time elastic like a clock painted by Dalí (time warps, time bends) that drips off the wrist as time runs out of my life.

  Nevertheless, tomorrow is Mother’s Day so I google what local florist might be open, locate one a mile away, and take off in the car solo and with a mask. How odd to drive on empty streets and see hardly a soul. I am the florist’s first customer of the day. The place is chock-full of arrangements from moderate to extravagantly priced. They offer me a free balloon and when I pick the arrangement that I like, balloon the price in keeping with my enthusiasm. I rush back to the house and ask Debbie to go upstairs for a moment while I bring something from the car that she is not allowed to see. I place it in the small front room beside the living room and close the sliding door with instructions to the children to keep out.

  I take Liliana on a separate shopping run to the local CVS for cards. Liliana wraps her order of earrings and a necklace for Debbie in a number of outsize boxes. (I mean those huge Amazon boxes, one for each earring and the necklace.)

  * * *

  Mother’s Day

  In the first Superman movie, Superman arrives too late at the site of an accident to save his beloved Lois Lane. She perishes. Superman operates among us ordinary mortals with on
e golden rule: never intervene in time as experienced by humanity. His grief at his failure to save Lois Lane soon turns to resolve: he decides to break this condition of his cohabitation with people. He zips into the space outside earth’s atmosphere and starts these rapid revolutions around the planet to reverse time and recoup the time that he lost that made him late in Lois Lane’s moment of need.

  In true Superman fashion he arrives in time to save Lois Lane, who is none the wiser: that she died and that her hero steals time to reverse her fate and rescue her. What happens to the entire planet gifted those precious minutes to relive? I see what I can do to avert disaster with my body and cancer. In the bonus time I tell my body the following: “Dear flesh and blood of my night and days, you who drive my ability to see feelingly and feel with sight; most bountiful bundle of nerves and bones and with a gorgeous one-piece skin suit; hear, oh hear! Much has passed between us. Much has been shared. We have tried to go our separate ways, though conjoined twins, and never managed for long or to get far. This is our one and only opportunity to do something together for our mutual benefit and to underwrite our shared time left for us to enjoy a life that may be our one shot at living (assuming religion to be Marx’s ‘opiate of the people,’ and a contrivance).

  “You see that shiny thing that catches your eye? It is the hypnotic glint in the eye of a boa constrictor. Walk away from it. You sip that condiment with sweet and sour, salt and pepper, cardamom and coriander inducements? Spit it out and toss that drink. You smell that rose that wants you to stuff your nose into it for more of its honeyed aroma? Pull away and run away from it, and do not look back at it until you are out of breath. You feel that silk against your skin that makes the hairs on your arms wave in its direction and incline toward it for more of that touch of delight? Free yourself from that touch and remove yourself from its vicinity, as far away from it as you can get and as fast as you can do it. You hear that music that makes you drop everything that you are doing to get closer to it so that you can hear more of it in unmediated and unadulterated ways? Cork your ears against it. Chant something nonsensical (om-na-mah-sheva-ya) or something principled (no justice, no peace, prosecute the police) at the top of your voice to drown out that magnetic music. As you chant move away urgently from its realm of sound to a safe, silent distance.

  “Hear, oh hear. All those temptations are forms of cancer that if we can outwit in this borrowed time, granted to us by the luck of the marvelous, then we can be safe and free of cancer’s untimely murder of us. Are you with me, brother, sister, comrade body?” It is a no-brainer for the body. There is no hesitant weighing of possibilities. The body knows what it must do before it finds the words to declare its intent. In the same way Superman sweeps Lois off her feet and to safety, the happy ending is that body and mind walk into the sunset in unity and at peace. Yeah, right. Wake up, Fred.

  For Mother’s Day I begin by serving Debbie. First, her cup of coffee, in bed. We wait for the children to wake and she opens her cards and I fetch the bouquet in a peacock fantail stuck in foam to keep that fan shape, mostly roses and some colorful brush and a few hydrangeas and lilacs as fillers. Debbie loves it. She enjoys opening those boxes and reminds everyone that it is a trick that I introduced one Christmas back in the early 2000s to disguise my gifts to her and the children, since she tended to guess pretty accurately what slippers or dressing gown or pajamas or underwear I would buy for her (perfumes only on Valentine’s).

  For supper I grill salmon decorated with olive oil and lemon and garlic, and a pinch of salt for the salt eaters in the family (the kids) and a couple of twists from the black-pepper shaker for the pepper people (me). I grill squash, onion, mushrooms, and tomatoes from the garden (the latter do not turn out so good). We eat in the gazebo. We watch a movie, a romantic number that makes us wistful for days long gone when the kids were wee and all three ran in different directions for us to catch them.

  * * *

  This is where I sit in a half lotus with my wrists flopped on my knees and breathe and retreat deep inside and as far away from the clamor of the present as I can bear to be at the moment. Is there such a place? Of stillness and quiet, so quiet I can hear the wings of a butterfly fluttering by (yak!), so still I see specks of dust afloat in a slant beam of light. Ah, to be one of those specks floating without a care. Take me there and leave me. Lose me. Confuse my cancer like fuck.

  No balls, no ass, no brain, no heart, just this speck afloat in defiance of gravity, history. A complete escape and no prospect of a return, no passport to pass through the usual ports, no escape clause from the cause that captures this landscape, or cord to pull to show saturation, once I slip this time I do so for all time, for good. Watch me float off the ground in that half lotus on a flurry of breathing and lost to myself. History thief. Antiblack paint, spiked to thwart white supremacy’s climb.

  Bodiless like this I retain nothing of history’s hurts; contain nothing other than this essence of sunlight that keeps me buoyant. Nyabinghi for me as I possess and am possessed by this flotation of all things good outside history, in defiance of linear time. Stay with me now. I dictate to you what is dictated to me in my condition of being nameless, bodiless. Do not take notes as much as soak up these notations by osmosis of your skin, eyes, nose, mouth. Drumbeat. Wavelength. Elastic. Porous.

  Yet I bounce as if bound in flesh and blood. Not sure I want the divorce between body and mind just because my body is afflicted. I work with elevation and transport to lift my body out of the clutches of cancer to some kind of safety. Not to be free of it, since I cannot see anything outside my body that is not indebted to it, rather to help it toward a cure of some kind, contentment of one sort or another.

  * * *

  You can catch me with a butterfly net. That’s me in a buttercup field, bobbing up and down and nodding into flowers. Heavily disguised and completely at home. Billy Cobham acts as a flotation device for my mood, making it lighter and keeping me airborne longer. His album Total Eclipse played in its entirety for his blast of drumsticks, liquid and multiplied into a dozen sticks and a dozen drums. There is this fountain that rises in the spigot and I am balanced on it, not sure how, but I stand on that rising tide as it lifts me higher and higher, powered by Billy Cobham and his drumming. And just as I think where can this go I find myself multiplied from one fountain to one dozen of me lifted and made airborne, balanced on water.

  That butterfly satisfied me. This show by water from a drummer turns those buttercup fields into suns, their shine turned down for my eyes, their heat cooled to perfection. Billy Cobham eases up on the drums for the horn and guitar to build something new. Water fountain and buttercup field conjure a third force. Where does the sense of a spin take over, that sends me on a tight spiral so that I descend into my body? Cobham takes me closer to my heart. He pushes my nerves against that beat so much so that blood courses through me with my eyes and feelings mixed with it, rather than outside it, and so no longer separate or able to see myself as separate from it.

  It is the same field and fountain in a vortex and plunged from outside to inside. There is this interior melee of disruption caused by a multitude of elements and emotions all conducted by Cobham. He does not allow the stirrings to settle and the spin to stop. He allows them to slow for a spell. He lulls the heart and mind into a slumber. Then he unleashes once more those sticks of tempestuousness. To send me on a head spin and tailspin, spiral and vortex at one and the same time in and through things as if to traverse a forest was to fly over and fly through it as well and under it if a tunnel could be made as fast as this flight.

  Cancer cannot live in Cobham country. Cancer is a drag on such velocity. Cobham shakes off that drag and flicks it from him and sound marshals at his behest and drives away to leave cancer stranded in the middle of nowhere. Cobham is a cure for cancer. A sound wave mode of cure for cancer, whose bellow and hum is in the shape of Cobham. A body thrown behind that groove, sweat and breath with movement of hands and feet and spinal colu
mn.

  Cancer shatters in the face of Cobham’s sound. Cancer turns to dust pounded by drumsticks. Cobham eclipses cancer. I need the sonic equivalent of dark glasses to listen to Cobham. He does things to the ears that the ears have not come across before as the body’s chief arbitrator of sound. He turns my pores into ears. I listen to Cobham with my entire skin. He gets under my skin to treat everything inside me as if all my internal organs were arranged on a stage for him to play on them. Heart batter, liver beat, kidney strafe, lungs echo, symbol-clash of stomach. They play Cobham and hear him too.

  As the last note dies on Total Eclipse and his drum majesty rests, I emerge from his world weaved from sound and silence feeling giddy and renewed.

  * * *

  Ways to forget about cancer. Take a deep breath and dive and swim underwater from one end of the pool to the other. Recite Kamau Brathwaite’s poem “Caliban” by heart; and Derek Walcott’s LIX. i, from his book-length poem Omeros, also from memory. And lots of Grace Nichols’s “I Is a Long Memoried Woman.” For as long as these readings last, cancer cannot breathe, unless cancer grows gills, and can breathe unaided on the summit of Everest.

  Memory as Invention

  DJ Cancer

  I remember things that happened before you were born

  I waited patiently looking in the distance to catch your arrival

  I was passed from your father and your mother to you and they

  Inherited me from their father and mother and that is why

  I have the patience of Job and I bide my time for the right moment

  To present itself to me when I know the time is ripe for me to strike

  For I’m the foe inside of you and the one you least expected.

  Guess what? You had me plucked out of you and now you wait

  To find out if I’m gone for good. Guess again. This is my comeback

  Song that I was gone but not for long and I return to wreak havoc