Year of Plagues
Page 30
You see where this is going, don’t you? Everything that you do to thwart me results in your giving me a helping hand in my conquest of you. I put out a part of me for you to focus on, and you focus on it while I work undetected and unobstructed in other parts of you.
You know those lizards that you trap and they relinquish a part of themselves, say the end of their long tail, and leave the trapper holding that part while those lizards wriggle away to safety? That’s the two of us; that’s me with you. You wriggle away from me and leave a part of yourself behind, thinking you have me fooled and that you are free, when in fact I am inside you and you have taken me with you.
* * *
Midsummer solstice and Father’s Day. I delayed the former by one day to stack up the two to see what they might do for me with their unified strength. First things first: Will I live to see another of either or both of them? Honestly, I do not know. Everyone says that. My claim to a special relationship with temporality rests with the outcome of my cancer. Am I cured or has it recurred? I’ll find out.
Until that day comes, let me live as that crab that Debbie and I saw this morning on our six a.m. beach walk with Dexter pulling me along. I handed the lead to Debbie and switched my phone’s camera to video and stooped to catch that crab up close. It opened its pincers and raised them and walked toward me. Feisty. I thought of that crab in Walcott’s Omeros, brandishing a pen, with the maestro imagining literacy as a trope for describing the unscripted tropics. (The Walcott of “We were blessed with Adam’s gift of giving things their names.”)
The tide was farther away than ever. We could walk around the outside of the promontory. I carried my flip-flops and loved the cool of the compacted wet sand, which widened a ring of pressure around my feet with every step. To look back is to see that print erased by the wet that rushes to cover where my foot lifts away. Soon the crab-like creep of a wave finalizes that erasure.
Enveloped by that sea sound, the walk is a float in a sea bath made of sound waves. I bank this goodness. It makes me feel rich. The reserves of this kind of rich help me in my fight with cancer. For cancer wants nothing to do with the sea or this crab. Both nouns verb their names and create this vibe of well-being. The crab, crabs along in life as life. The sea, seas. With the help of these two, and at my best, I, Fred, Freds.
To walk around the wrong side of the promontory on the springy bed of the sea left to air by the retreat of the tide on this longest day of the year.
I get hugs from Nicholas and Christopher, and open funny cards that I read aloud that make us laugh out loud, and a block-shaped balloon with an outlandish message about my greatness in the universe as a father, and two gift bags of summer clothes. If I could pray, I would say in a whisper to myself so that I can hear it for myself as I think it through, “Dear God, let this day last for as long as I draw air.”
* * *
Father’s Day Roots Rock Reggae
DJ Cancer
My digital self surfaces in a web sea
With my digital wife by the name of Debbie
We Bluetooth from phone to your inner ear
We come with a message plucked from thin air
If you see love on a flat screen
If you see it dressed to draw you in
Do not be tempted by that fast food
It lacks substance and brings you no good
My code is a function of your download
As you read me I want you to feel me
Allow yourself to be captured
By my lyrical digital mastery
I hope you have the bandwidth
To accommodate my message
Peace and love electricity
Free to you no tricks from me
My digital self surfaces in a web sea
With my digital wife by the name of Debbie
We Bluetooth from phone to your inner ear
We come with a message plucked from thin air
Peel your eye from the screen
Look all around you
What you see is not pixels
You see black killed by blue
You cannot believe your screen
Shows the same grueling scene
You grab your phone and run
To your first demonstration
Where you meet truncheon
Rubber bullets and teargas
Where you learn to chant slogans
March long and run fast
My digital self surfaces in a web sea
With my digital wife by the name of Debbie
We Bluetooth from phone to your inner ear
We come with a message plucked from thin air
* * *
Take my hand and trust me, for I come to lead you to the promised land of your extinction and to get there you must understand all things presented to you by me, for all things that roll off my tongue can be only sick and tiresome and fake guided as I am by the spirit of mighty pestilence and the spirit of all-powerful hate and understanding flowing in an everlasting fountain through me to you so listen and watch me now:
I’m going to say this once and once only
To those faint of heart and feeling lonely
I bring salvation from the treadmill of time
Stop putting up with life’s dings and grime
Join forces with me I am the operator
Who can switch off that water torturer
Grant me permission I’ll do all the work
I stick my spanner in the wheel of time’s spokes
You don’t have to do a thing just relax
Go with my swing and let me be your Ajax
Against time against boredom against longevity
For the short fuse of the little that’s a lot of levity
For the promise of existence outside time’s walls
For the quiet behind the cannon of time’s waterfalls
* * *
Whereas love not hate is the compass needle that inclines my spirit away from despair, I reject you; whereas I cannot concur that time is a drag upon the soul and must be bided through terminal decline, I reject you; whereas the ails and travails of my body and mind in no way cancel the gifts of consciousness but work in affirmation of the good that follows the bad and the worse to come that gives way to relief and hope, so I reject you.
Your song leads not to salvation but damnation. You take us on a timespan devoid of all the good things in store for a long life. You speak as if your illness as an accelerant of my end represents opportunity and represents an escape clause from the misery, as you dub it, of a long life, when in fact to be sick with you is to be sick of you, sick of your mental pains and physical discomfitures; no ride with you can ever be smooth for the sufferer and those loved ones nearby.
You bring a bitter end. You sour the little of the life that’s left in the body with your chemical infusions and poisons that cause confusion. You call that your way of ending things quickly when the time with you doing your work of sabotaging life slows time to a crawl of suffering. Your song deceives. You impel toward despair. You kill the spirit of the living, not just of those who must wait for their bodies to fail at your disposal but of the relatives who witness this suffering and must live with it. Sometimes I think our duel in words needs another response from me. What did the poet say about the response to an effrontery in his poem “The Schooner Flight”? “Some case is for fist, some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife—this one was for knife.” I wish I could invite my cancer to meet me in the parking lot after work or after dark for us to duke it out, rather than this civil discourse of winner takes all by virtue of staying power, which has nothing to do with right or wrong, good, bad, or indifferent.
* * *
I am in it up to my neck. I wake early and my first thought as I transition from sleep concerns my cancer. Good morning, my foe. Let’s get up and go at it. I do not need my first cup of coffee before I begin. It’s three a.m. and by virtue of the fact that I am awake and thinking of you, that
means things have started between us. What starts, exactly, apart from my worry about the spread of the disease in my body? I have no hard evidence that this is the case, just a hunch and a conclusion that my run of tough luck will continue with another piece of bad news that relates to the first piece about cancer.
I figured my fight back would have hardened into a regimen by now and not be as tentative and circumspect. I saw myself as equipped with chants, slogans, physical exercises (apart from Kegel), a robust diet, and a host of other intangibles to set up an army in my response to cancer and its possible return. And I’d be there at a battle site of my choosing ready to engage with it when it shows up. The mood in my camp tantamount to carnival as we arm-wrestle, wrestle, race, fence, target-practice, sing around campfires, dance, and ready ourselves to meet our foe and meet our fate.
By this time my fear would be tempered to suit my resistance to cancer and not the fear of a scrambled thought process and a body immobilized with it. The kind of fear that powers a sharp offense; fear kept under strict control and apportioned out to feed my strategic thinking made sharp by its controlled presence. Not the fear that makes you worried that you might pee yourself, or worse, shit in your pants. That’s the fear sent ahead by cancer to do its nasty sabotage. That’s fear beyond my control that floods my body like a heat flash I can do nothing about except breathe down the neck of my shirt, which I flap to cool myself, dry my forehead, and wait for it to pass.
There is no song and dance, or chant and prance, to rid me of this one. It could be that today I wake with vulnerability amped up in me, leaving me unable to stomach the smallest challenges. Taken one day at a time, my cancer is spread out like rice on a table for me to pick out the rotten grains. This is not something that I have done in the West. It was daily practice in Guyana and the rice was in a bowl and picked clean, washed, and then boiled. By casting my cancer as a bowl of rice whose grains are sorted for cooking, I make cancer one task in my day that ends up with me consuming cancer instead of being consumed by it.
This cannibal figure that I cast myself in allows me to eat a morsel of my enemy in order to learn what strategy my enemy intends to deploy against me. I am not really a cannibal who eats to his fill, more a symbol of conquest and ingestion as contemplation for insight. This sounds like an excuse for debauchery—tasting the flesh of the enemy—but I take it from certain indigenous practices to be instructive about overcoming subjugation by a powerful opponent. Cannibal is Caliban is me: three easy steps to form a triumvirate against cancer’s unitary assault.
* * *
I feed all the animals in and out of the house: two cats in, two cats out, and a dog in the kitchen content with a biscuit treat. Now I qualify for my coffee after a banana and a palmful of walnuts. For my coffee I decide to add honey to the pot, as it were, which is a copy of the almond milk that I usually buy that I am out of, with its “hint of honey” as the label says. As soon as I sip the cup I think of feeding my cancer with a sugar treat.
The coffee turns sour.
You should see me peel that banana. It is curved to perfection and yellow and the soft flesh bears no resemblance to something I can eat without teeth. I bite into it and chew and both bite and chewing happen without my having to think about it, since there is not much resistance to the pulpy flesh and the taste is of a sugar distributed almost in concealed fashion, throughout the body of the banana. The moment I admit to the sugar as a register in the fruit I think of feeding my cancer with a favored candy.
The banana turns bitter like gall.
Walnuts are a sure bet. I chew with focused gusto to break up those compressed bodies broken into walnut halves for the most part, and some of the halves in accidental quarters. I bite and chew with some relish—the sort of enthusiasm brewed by overnight hunger and the prospect of the first engagement with sustenance. Those walnuts provide the right amount of resistance to my gums to make me bite into them and chew and feel how the pieces work into the crevices between my teeth. I catch the savory nuts and oils and begin to taste sugar, only a hint of it when I think of how this feeds my cancer (my cancer has a sweet tooth).
The walnuts turn iodine.
Why should I spit out my food each time I have the thought of aiding and abetting my illness? I finish what I am eating though only with a loss of my drive and enjoyment. How true is it that everything I enjoy adds to the body of my cancer? Not knowing for certain if it has returned to its nesting grounds in the area around where my prostate once resided means that I feed a ghost ailment. One that travels feet above ground with a flowing white sheet for corporeal sovereignty; a thing that haunts by virtue of its presumed absence and threat of imminent return. The terror, the terror. (My cancer is Mr. Kurtz from the dead-end conclusion to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.)
A part of me wants to refresh my morning and eat and drink those things all over again in defiance of my cancer orientation. Either that or I take up a water diet and host an online extravaganza, perhaps with a good playlist and thousands tuning in. A dance-off between my cancer and me. Would a raw diet hurt my cancer or just hurt me? Going raw means my poo will not smell. I will feel energized, fleet-footed, and giddy with the zealotry of the newly baptized.
* * *
Yeats said body built to pleasure soul as if the physical served merely to house and entertain the metaphysical. Now that cancer has me by the balls, I wonder if it helps me to embrace Yeats’s viewpoint. Perhaps the castle is afflicted and worthy of abandonment for the true house of my being. To walk away from what I know for what I can only speculate about. Let the body rot with cancer and fool cancer into thinking that it has beaten me by winning my body when in fact my true self flies away to safety and bliss.
As I count the days, so I conjure the various ways at cancer’s disposal of conquering me. The body of me. I view the two, body and spirit, as coterminous, in the fight against cancer. If that fight truly is lost, I figure that I can switch to a view of one aspect of my self as defeated and the other more enduring self as detachable from what is lost and able to fly to safety somewhere out of reach of cancer’s sticky little fingers.
Why the pessimism? Each day should take me one step closer to conclusive news of my cancer’s absence from my body. Instead, with each day that passes I feel a mounting sense of dread, that I will hear confirmation of what I fear, which is a return of my cancer. The negative thought has that much more traction in me than the positive one. My only evidence for this preferred mood of doom is my dread, some hunch that something is not quite right about my body.
I’m sorry to say that what comes next is not as ponderous in philosophical terms as what I have said about my body and its relation to my spirit. For this concerns my bladder and bowel functions. When they go low I am forced to go low with them. My bladder aches when I need to pee. The feeling is not as acute as what I felt before I registered my cancer in me. Precancer I felt a twisting of my nerves that was the equivalent of a high note on a guitar. Postcancer, or in its midst and postoperative, I feel the same nervous compulsion but stronger and with a lower note, if that same guitar is invoked as illustration. It is more like pain and less of the sense of a warning as before. If I do not pee right then or very soon after that first register, I face increased pain and immobilizing discomfort, as if the bladder were in the grip of a wave whose every surge means a heightening of its intensity.
Now I must go one step lower and deal with my bowels. (Let this serve as a trigger warning for those who need it.) I use the plural since I view my bowels as a cave with many twists and turns to it and a place where you might get lost spelunking. I know the route is singular even if contorted and I understand that matter includes pockets of air. My bowels were regular and attending to their demands once or twice a day at a fixed time or times of my choosing sufficed to placate them. I did not have to rush from a sudden urge. I felt that gentle and persistent notification of a task that needed my attention at some point in the near future. There was no emergency to the
process, unless I ate something awful.
My postoperative bowels are another matter altogether. Indulge me for a moment as I turn Swiftian with the integument of my body. First, I feel this mounting pressure in my rectum as if a dial is being turned up on a sound over a handful of seconds. It is a weight as well, low in my body near my anus, and the only thing keeping that weight in my body is my clenched anus, that if I did not hold on to those muscles with all my might that weight would fall out of me. It feels disproportionately heavy to its actual volume. The sensation is magnified so that my image of it magnifies from perhaps some body the size of a baseball to a five-pound dumbbell.
I’m sorry to go on about this but there is more. And I persist only to paint the picture of why my outlook for my cancer prognosis is gloomy. If air is mixed up (as it so often is) with the feces, the sensation travels higher up my bowels and moves about rather like a nail scraped along a chalkboard but with a more devastating result and eliciting a more extreme response than a cringe. I bend my back to ease the pain and have to be careful not to topple over as I rush to the bathroom. I contract my anus with all my might and hope it holds for another thirty seconds. The pain pounds up and down my bowels as if in search of a weak point in the wall out of which to burst.
On the toilet the result is copious and immediate relief. I feel so good so fast that I wonder about the kerfuffle and think that it cannot be normal. (My norm is built around how I behaved before the operation.) It feels driven by cancer, by a foreign body at the controls of my usual mechanisms for evacuating waste. I think of a learner driver who oversteers, overbrakes, overaccelerates, indicates too late or too early and turns too sharply so he clips the sidewalk, or at too wide an angle and drifts into the opposing lane. That driver is my cancer with my bowel movements.