For years I used to enjoy a good, loud fart and a belch. I relished it. The buildup was innocuous and mild, the expulsion as a deliberate act by me loud and long, and disgusting if truth be told, since the kids and Debbie expressed mock and genuine outrage at my bad manners. It was not funny if on occasion when the kids were young I gripped the hand of one of my sons or daughter and thrust it to my backside and farted on it. They complained loudly and called their mother and called me a bad name or two.
I still belch though with a resigned capitulation to an inevitability rather than any relish of my pneumatic power. I dread farts. They are the cause of my consternation and pain. I think of cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli and brussels sprouts, with some opprobrium. I love how Debbie prepares them with a touch of garlic and butter or olive oil and baked for a while. As I eat them I think of what they will unleash in my hapless body, and the thought tempers my enjoyment.
And why do I have to go three times a day? It feels overly efficient, as if I have lost my storage capacity and must move my products as soon as I make them regardless of what the market wants or needs. It is a new inner mechanism and it feels alien and I cannot alter it and so I put it down to my cancer working its ministry in me. This switches my mood from sunny to overcast. And it drives a wedge between my body and my spirit. I begin to see daylight between the two and I start to entertain the possibility of an independent spirit that, like a rocket segment, can jettison the body and soar away from the pull of gravity or the grave.
In my depressed mood I eat too much, I’m disinclined to exercise, I wake early and sleepwalk through the middle of the day, I crave sugar and chewing, I feel bloated, sluggish, the simplest tasks appear insurmountable. I’m easily irked by the most innocuous remarks from my daughter, such as, Dad I can’t respect you if you say stuff to me that sounds trivial and if you don’t take what I say seriously. And my sons’ behavior of walking into spaces where I’m sitting and not saying a word of greeting to me though it is the first time that I have seen either of them that day. Or Debbie’s habit of leaving things on the kitchen island’s marble counter and my obsession with keeping it clear and clean, as if the clutter on the counter clutters my mind. Some of this has to do with COVID-19 isolation throwing us into close proximity for too long. Some of it rests squarely on my altered mood.
To calm myself I retreat into my office and read and breathe and try to write another installment in my calendar of accruing misery as I see this countdown diary. I did not expect to feel that the fight is lost so far away from the date of the PSA test. I wonder if I am weak. To so readily separate my body from my spirit when it is the two, as a unified entity, that presents me with my best chance of beating cancer.
* * *
I wake so early my eldest, living with me, Christopher, is still awake. I lie in bed and hear him bang about in the kitchen through no fault of his own since the cabinet doors do not have handles and the hinges are stiff. I see his glowworm lighting in his room seep out under his door on my way from the kitchen to the bathroom, what we call Nicholas’s bathroom since it is just outside his bedroom, whereas Christopher has his own en suite (cramped, it must be said) bathroom.
The dog sighs in his bed and turns his face to watch me as I place water from the fridge into the kettle and peel a banana and help myself to a palmful of walnuts without slamming the door, a feat that takes extra care when closing the cupboard door. I warm almond milk in the microwave to drown my tea. I like it half and half: half water and half milk, which means I steep the tea bag in half a cup of hot water and add the hot milk a minute or so afterward.
I say all this to let my cancer know that I have not given it a single thought since it made me wake up abnormally early by playing on my dreaming mind. I decide to use the time to write, on the basis that my fresh brain cells are best for the task of invention even if my body needs more rest. This agitation feeds my cancer, of course. I am deprived of sleep and so the cancer ages me just a little bit, wears me down just a smidgen, as a result. It is clear to me that things could get worse: I could be awake and replete with worry about cancer, instead of awake and using the time to get work done.
It seems to me that I beat the cancer at its own game if I put the time to good use rather than ruminate over cancer’s disruption of my sleep. There is no better use of my time than to write, second only to reading. As I write, sequential time alters. The usual clock face of seconds marching into minutes, and those minutes adding up to hours, fails to operate in that way for me. Time takes on elasticity and springiness. It seems to stretch so much that I lose track of those passing seconds. It seems to jump from its linear march so high and so far that one moment it is such and such a time, and the next an entire hour has elapsed.
How can that swift passing of time be good for my cancer? Time for cancer is treacle, stodgy toffee pudding, a thick onion soup, a frog march under the Florida midday sun, a wading into a strong sea, a stringy, chewy steak, old tuna in sushi, or tuna cooked into cardboard, a tight shoe on a long hike, an unquenchable thirst, a hole in the pit of the gut that food cannot fill, a nagging filling, executed poorly, that worries the tongue, a baby stingray flapping uselessly on the beach, crossing a muddy trench, crossing, on a windy day, a rope bridge strung ninety feet off the ground.
My writing time is marked by sips of tea from the giant teacup that I keep covered with a saucer to keep it warm, interrupted by bathroom breaks to pee. Between sip and pee, the two measure this exclusive time that is free of the tug of cancer. If I could stay in it I would live forever, with cancer at a standstill in me, frozen, waiting for linear time to resume, but it never does, because I leave my desk only to pee or refill my teacup.
Dream on, Fred.
* * *
Fireworks wake me. They’ve been sounding for weeks now in the lead-up to July 4. Behind the house on the isolated street that runs next to the school. And sometimes, all the surrounding streets seem to explode. How can people afford it? I chatted with Debbie and the kids about it and we came to the conclusion that someone sets an alarm especially for the task of exploding the ordinance at 1:30 a.m. to wake the entire neighborhood.
There is a door by the lazy Susan that keeps falling off its hinges. How is it hanging? I find it holding on by one hinge when I step over the cats, meowing for food, as I try to reach the kettle. As the kettle warms up I find a few tidbits for the little furry beggars and they purr appreciatively and squat and settle before the treats. Dexter stays put in his basket and watches. I pet his massive head and tell him he is a good doggie. I eat a banana and a palmful of walnuts. The usual Earl Grey teabag in a half cup of boiling water topped up with almond milk warmed in the microwave and I’m set for a spell in my office to moan about my cancer rising, or so I think as I head nearer to the date of that decisive blood test for PSA.
Debbie mentions some painting that we could do this summer and the deck that needs to be restained and a few odd repairs to our Mid-City dwelling, and I stop her in midflow to let her know that I cannot think about a single thing or undertake any projects, however menial, until I know what the upcoming test portends for my future. Good or bad, I can proceed with the knowledge either way. While I wait to find out—nothing doing. I float. I gestate, as if in a hellish version of that Floaters track from the dance-crazed and maudlin seventies, “Float On.” (The extended twelve-inch version went on for a staggering twelve minutes!) It was all echoes and birth signs and ethereal, as a foundation for sentiment and its logic of hope, and magic of faith. Puke. Or, eew, as my daughter would say.
That feels certifiably diagnosable. That I have depression wrapped in rage. (This sounds like a fish and chips order, wrapped in newspaper, from the local takeaway.) That the cancer has splintered or diversified its portfolio of doom, and introduced its surrogate, depression (wrapped in rage), dawns on me. The rage part of it comes with the recognition of a virulent opponent in me. Still, the rage puzzles me. I do not understand it. I feel a surge of negative energy, say, impatien
ce, or a gloomy outlook about the publishing potential of a book about my experience with cancer. I think what else is there if I cannot talk in public about cancer and show the beast to others who might benefit from hearing about my grapple with it.
Moreover, I view writing as my resistance to cancer. My understanding that comes from writing is nothing short of my troops sent in the field to meet cancer’s army. I have a past that I access through writing, to deploy against my cancerous present. As I conjure imagined cancer-free worlds, I stem the flow of cancer’s plunder of my body.
Dream on.
Black Lives Matter
brings us to this day on a dead-end street, face-to-face
with a young rabbit, no bigger than a tangerine,
blue jays pick up with articulate claws, fly four floors and drop,
but lucky nine lives rabbit lands, thud, looks hurt,
stays still for seconds, as if lost in dream space,
staggers away, and another jay grabs it, until we intervene,
shoo those blue jays into treetops, and wrap
the pulse of fur, with two dimes for ears, in an old T-shirt.
Too young for us to feed it carrots or lettuce, we know
that we must release the bright bulb of a creature back
where we found it, but not before we chase
those lingering jays, place shirt gingerly on dirt, watch that
fur ball flick away into tall, abandoned, lot grass,
as if that bulb lost its element and left an afterglow.
We wait as jays circle, then tip wings for another zone.
We retrieve that tee, its smell of game, and tiptoe home.
17.
My Father’s Body
I know nothing about how my parents meet. She is a schoolgirl. He is at work, probably a government clerk in a building near her school. At the hour when school and office are out for lunch their lives intersect at sandwich counters, soft drink stands, traffic lights, market squares. Their eyes meet or their bodies collide at one of these food queues. He says something suggestive, complimentary. She suppresses a smile or traps one beneath her hands. He takes this as encouragement (as if any reaction of hers would have been read as anything else) and keeps on talking and following her and probably misses lunch that day. All the while she walks and eats and drinks and soaks up his praise, his sweet body talk, his erotic chatter and sexy pitter-patter, his idle boasts and ample toasts to his life, his dreams about their future, the world their oyster together.
Am I going too fast on my father’s behalf? Should there have been an immediate and cutting rebuttal from her and several days before another meeting? Does he leave work early to catch her at the end of the school day and follow her home just to see where she lives and to extend the boundaries of their courtship? Throwing it from day to night, from school to home, from childhood play to serious adult intent? Georgetown’s two-lane streets with trenches on either side mean a mostly single-file walk, she in front probably looking over her shoulder when he says something worthy of a glance, or a cut-eye look if his suggestions about her body or what he will do with it if given half a chance exceed the decorum of the day—which is what, in midfifties Guyana?
From my grandmother it’s, “Don’t talk to a man unless you think you’re a big woman. Man will bring you trouble. Man want just one thing from you. Don’t listen to he. Don’t get ruined for he. A young lady must cork her ears and keep her eye straight in front of she when these men start to flock around. The gentleman among them will find his way to her front door. The gentleman will make contact with the parents first. Woo them first before muttering one thing to the young lady. Man who go directly to young ladies only want to ruin them. Don’t want to make them into respectable young women—just whores. Mark my words.”
My grandfather simply thinks that his little girl is not ready for the attentions of any man, that none of them is good enough for his little girl, and so the man who comes to his front door had better have a good pretext for disturbing his reverie. He had better know something about merchant seamen and the character of the sea, and about silence—how to keep it so that it signifies authority and dignity, so when you speak you are heard and your words, every one of them, are rivets. That man would have to be a genius to get past my grandfather, a genius or a gentleman. And since my father is neither, it’s out of the question that he’ll ever use the front door of worship. His route will have to be the yard and the street of ruination.
So he stands in full view of her house at dusk. It takes a few nights before her parents realize he is there for their daughter. Then one day her father comes out and tells him to take his dog behavior to someone else’s front door, and the young man quickly turns on his heel and walks away. Another time her mother opens the upstairs window and curses him, and he laughs and saunters off as if her words were a broom gently ushering him out of her yard. But he returns the next night and the next, and the daughter can’t believe his determination. She is embarrassed that her body has been a magnet for trouble, that she is the cause of the uproar, then angry with him for his keen regard of her at the expense of her dignity, not to mention his.
Neighbors tease her about him. They take pity on the boy, offer him drinks, some ice-cold mauby, a bite to eat, a dhal-pouri, all of which he declines at first, then dutifully accepts. One neighbor even offers him a chair, and on one night of pestilential showers, an umbrella, since he does not budge from his spot while all around him people dash for shelter, abandoning a night of liming (loitering) and gaffing (talking) to the persistence and chatter of the rain. Not my father. He stands his ground with only the back of his right hand up to his brow to shelter his eyes zeroed in on her house. She steals a glance at him after days of seeming to ignore the idea of him, though his presence burns brightly inside her heart. She can’t believe his vigilance is for her. She stops to stare in the mirror and for the first time sees her full lips, long, straight nose, shoulder-length brunette hair, and dark green eyes with their slight oval shape. Her high cheekbones. Her ears close to her skull. She runs her fingers lightly over these places as if to touch is to believe. Her lips tingle. Her hair shines. Her eyes smile. And she knows from this young man’s perseverance that she is beautiful, desirable.
She abandons herself to chores, and suppresses a smile and a song. She walks past windows as much as possible to feed the young man’s hungry eyes with a morsel of that which he has venerated to the point of indignity. She rewards his eyes by doing unnecessary half turns at the upstairs window. A flash of clavicle, a hand slowly putting her hair off her face and setting it down behind her ears, and then a smile, a demure glance, her head inclined a little, her eyes raised, her eyelids batted a few times—she performs for him though she feels silly and self-conscious. What else is there for a girl to do? Things befitting a lady that she picked up from the cinema. Not the sauciness of a tramp.
Her mother pulls her by one of those beautiful close-skulled ears from the window and curses her as if she were a ten-cent whore, then throws open the window and hurtles a long list of insults at this tall, silent, rude, good-for-nothing streak of impertinence darkening her street. The father folds his paper and gets up, but by the time he gets to the window the young man is gone.
My mother cries into the basin of dishes. She rubs a saucer so hard that it comes apart in her hands. She is lucky not to cut herself. She will have to answer to her mother for that breakage. In the past it meant at least a few slaps and many minutes of curses for bringing only trouble into her mother’s house. Tonight her mother is even angrier. Her father has turned his fury against her for rearing a daughter who is a fool for men. Her mother finds her in the kitchen holding the two pieces of the saucer together and then apart—as if her dread and sheer desire for reparation would magically weld them whole. Her tears fall like drops of solder on that divided saucer. Her mother grabs her hands and strikes her and curses her into her face so that my mother may as well have been standing over a stea
ming, spluttering pot on the stove. She drops the two pieces of saucer and they become six pieces. Her mother looks down and strides over the mess with threats about what will happen if her feet find a splinter. She cries but finds every piece, and to be sure to get the splinters too she runs her palms along the floor, this way and that, and with her nails she pries out whatever her hand picks up. She cries herself to sleep.
The next night he is back at his station, and her mother and father, their voices, their words, their blows, sound a little farther off, fall a little lighter. His presence, the barefaced courage of it, becomes a suit of armor for her to don against her mother and father’s attacks. She manages under her mother’s watchful eye to show both sides of her clavicle, even a little of the definition down the middle of her chest—that small trench her inflated chest digs, which catches the light and takes the breath away, that line drawn from the throat to the uppermost rib exuding warmth and tension, drawing the eyes twenty-five yards away with its radiance in the half light of dusk, promising more than it can possibly contain, than the eye can hold, and triggering a normal heart into palpitations, a normal breath into shallowness and rapidity.
“Miss Isiah, howdy! How come you house so clean on the west side and not so clean on the east? It lopsided! Dirt have a preference in your house? Or is that saga boy hanging around the west side of your house a dirt repellent?” The gossip must have been rampant in the surrounding yards, yards seemingly designed deliberately so people could see into one another’s homes and catch anything spilling out of them—quarrels, courtships, cooking pots, music—and sometimes a clash of houses, a reaction against the claustrophobia of the yard, but not enough yards, not enough room to procure a necessary privacy in order to maintain a badly sought-after dignity—clean, well dressed, head high in the air on Sundays—impossible if the night before there is a fight and everyone hears you beg not to be hit anymore, or else such a stream of obscenities gushes from your mouth that the sealed red lips of Sunday morning just don’t cut it.
Year of Plagues Page 31