18,23 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
A New Statesman Book of the Year 2021In this piercing and unforgettable memoir, the award-winning poet reflects on a year of turbulence, fear and hope.For acclaimed British-Guyanese writer Fred D'Aguiar, 2020 was a year of personal and global crisis. The world around him was shattered by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States, California burned, and D'Aguiar was diagnosed with stage-4 cancer.Year of Plagues is an intimate, multifaceted exploration of these seismic events, which trouble and alienate D'Aguiar from community, place and body. Combining personal reminiscence and philosophy, drawing on music and on poetry, D'Aguiar confronts profound questions about the purpose of pursuing a life of writing and teaching in the face of overwhelming upheavals; the imaginative and artistic strategies a writer can bring to bear as his sense of self and community are severely tested; and the quest for strength and solace necessary to help forge a better future. Drawn from distinct cultural perspectives - his Caribbean upbringing, London youth and American lifestyle - D'Aguiar's beautiful and challenging memoir is a paean of resistance to despotic authority and life-threatening disease.In his first work of non-fiction, D'Aguiar subverts the traditional memoir with highly charged language that shifts from the quotidian to the lyrical, from the personal to the metaphysical. Both tender and ferocious, Year of Plagues is a harrowing yet uplifting genre-bending memoir of existence, protest, and survival.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
iii
YEAR OF PLAGUES
A MEMOIR OF 2020
FRED D’AGUIAR
v
For Debbie Dalton and our Christopher, Nicholas, and Liliana, lockdown strong, no matter how long
vi
I cannot, for the present, express my meanings more clearly.
—Spinoza
Beware the terror of not producing
Beware the urge to justify your decision.
Watch out for the kitchen sink and the plumbing and that painting that always needed being done. But remember the body needs to create too.
Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it
Beware feeling you’re too good to need it
Beware all the hatred you’ve stored up inside you, and the locks on your tender places.
—Audre Lorde, from Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, 1974–1989
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My heartfelt thanks go to Jonathan Burnham for his editorial “Edward Scissorhands” genius and the team at Harper, Jackie, Gabe, Kim, and copyeditor Douglas Johnson. Also, to André Naffis-Sahely who read like a critic with a poet’s eye and grace. And to Geoff Hardy and his husband, Peter Roscoe, for confirming aspects of my past, as did my brother, Gregory D’Aguiar and his partner, Maria, and Patrick D’Aguiar living his dream with Tanawan. For Andrew D’Aguiar who found love in Milton Keynes with two-t’s Nattasha. In memory of Grace Theriault, who honored her first name in the way she lived her life. In admiration of Matthew Kay: son, your wise words and films gave me strength. To Cameron, your struggles brought much needed perspective in my fight, while your children, Dylan and Aniyah, turned me into a granddad. To Elliot and Antonia for their little miracle, Cruz, who brought me joy. And for my mother, Kathleen Cadogan, whose spirit presides over all. Last and most crucial, to the doctors, nurses, and staff in oncology at the UCLA medical center. x
YEAR OF PLAGUES
1.
OUT OF THIS TIME
Good morning, cancer. How are you? You must have been there that balmy night in Atlanta in the early nineties. At that sports bar. A group of us poets decompressing with quick rounds of drinks and propelled into a state of collective foolhardy bravery, decided, while we faced the long trough of the urinal and watched the small TV screens mounted directly in front of us at eye level, to aim our various streams up at those screens.
We had rushed to the bar after a day of all things to do with poetry, from readings and performances to panels on poetics and the future of poetry books in light of the digital revolution. We wanted nothing more to do with poetry that day though everything about us reeked of our poetry personas, our berets, fedoras, long scarves, pebble spectacles, handlebar moustaches, excessive beards, tweeds, corduroy, you get the picture.
There was no Ghostbusters crossing of streams as we stood shoulder to shoulder at the urinal. This was strictly parallel play. We blurred the images flickering at us and cheered. We were a testament to the power of the body over technology. For as long as we peed and in our state of blissful inebriation there would not be any diminishing of this strength. Posers. We were young. We toasted afterward to our experience already consecrated to mythic memory.
In the three decades that followed my night at the bar I took my excretions for granted. If I went out for any length of time, 2I never wondered about the location of the next public convenience. I could hold it. In fact, if someone polite and considerate asked me if I needed to go, I invariably said no, without having to think if I needed to relieve myself right then, because I would have to empty at some point soon. All of the above was true for me until the fall of 2019.
Around October I began to notice that I had to concentrate to pee. I seemed to be in possession of a shy bladder even though I stood there in response to an urge that I had to attend to immediately. No more texting with one hand as I directed my stream with the other, no more playing the partial absentee from the job at hand. I strained a little and the result was a desultory trickle that barely registered against the porcelain. What happened to the comforting noise of my piss forcibly trained at porcelain or into toilet water, that sound of mounting relief that is the liquid waste equivalent of exhaling?
There was synergy that night in Atlanta for all of us at that time in that place. If synergy teaches anything, it is this: that it holds a plurality of things together for a moment and one moment only before those things disperse into their chaotic patterning of our reality. I heard this anecdote from a drunken poet: he said with glazed eyes and through splattering, beery saliva, that in a certain martial arts movie, the hero runs from a group of ninjas chasing him toward a river. The camera shows the audience that the river, with its traffic of junks, presents the final roadblock for our hero on the run. As the ninjas draw near we see they are dripping with nunchucks and other deadly implements. They close in on our hero and the real estate runs out for him as he looks at the river and again clocks the surface teeming with junks. Just as we think the chap has to stand his ground and perish against overwhelming odds, the camera pans to the river once more, and that chaotic scene of junks on the water switches to elegance and order with the junks all lined up in a row as they pass each other. The star spots his escape route and he hops from one junk to the next until he reaches the far shore of the river. Just as he leaps 3ashore we see the ninjas arrive at the opposite bank and prepare to follow the same route across the river. But the junks immediately fall apart and resume their chaotic commerce of navigating the river, and the ninjas tumble into the water.
That moment when the junks aligned for the hero may be the moment of synergy that we captured fleetingly that evening in that sports bar. We knew from instinct that our young bodies had reached their zenith. Our flesh-and-blood awareness was primed for decline from that night onward. We acted in a ritual that marked that threshold with gratitude for the unaccountable privilege of having reached that moment in our episodic lives. For we deemed life to be fragile and ruled by chance, full of accidents, if not plain disaster, and liable to be taken from us without notice or, if with notice, then with added pain and dread.
I owed this awareness of a temporary harmony with forces beyond my control to my emergence as a poet. Poetry primed me for insecurity and chance. Poetry’s knack for forging relationships among unconnected things chimed with my penchant for sound, rhythm, and image of words as tantamount, a way to make sense of the world. My nervous system seemed predisposed to insecurity as bedrock for belonging to the world of disparate elements and chance occurrences. That night in the sports bar crowned my belief that knowledge would be mediated by the body’s unquestioning sensory reception of the world.
All this expansive sense switched its focal point from the world at large to my bladder. A weight and pressure in my loins cancels my heart and pulse as twin guards of my hours. Those twins are replaced by the liquid hourglass of my bladder. An announcement of some imminent threat to my life calendar surges in me. Without knowing what could be wrong, I feel this burgeoning fear that something most definitely is not right. I take several days to focus any language to formulate what I am feeling, since the heightened emotions generated by the new sensations result in confusion, in incapacitating alarm.
From fall 2019 I began to think about input and output. Not 4just in terms of the age-specific need to be aware that if I drank X amount of beer I would have to urinate Y number of times but of how everything I took into my body would be registered by the Geiger counter of my bladder. Whereas before my gut told me when I was hungry, or my sluggishness or dry mouth said that I should drink some water, this new time device behaved like supersensitive radar for all my consumption, and sprang up in my crotch.
I planned my socializing as a meticulous robber might a heist. Where was the nearest gents in this building or that mall, or park? I began to think like an off-duty fire marshal who enters every structure with a mindset that clocks all the hazards and exits. I could not relax. I invariably devoted a portion of my awareness to the demands of my bladder. Every time I embarked on a task—it could be anything, a meeting or car journey or shopping expedition—I wondered when my bladder would announce its presence. And what an announcement: a twisting of my innards located in the area behind my pubic bone, a sharp sense of a wild flame from a naked torch deliberately glanced against my body but improbably from inside my body, a burst of this sharp feeling that radiated down my legs and up my back and spread to the ends of my fingers that made me clench my teeth and narrow my eyes.
When did I think something was definitely wrong and I needed to do something about it rather than accommodate it? I wish I had a precise date. I have only this Southern California season, late autumn into winter. There never was for me a where-were-you-when moment of realization. Instead it dawned on me, imperceptibly. The kind of thing people said about a stoic toad in a pot of water gradually brought to the boil. I sensed the need to act one day and put it into words the next and made inquiries on yet another day.
I felt my scrotum for any sign of change. Nothing. I looked long and hard at my crotch to see if the area at my pubic bone showed any alteration. Nothing. I went so far as to crouch over 5my plate-size concave shaving mirror to see if the place under my scrotum and around my rectum had changed in some way. Nothing.
I turned to Google and YouTube. The two search engines supplied a cornucopia of alarming statistics and graphics all pointing to cancer of the prostate. On the one hand, people testified to my symptoms as indicative of “the good cancer” as a thing to live with, rather than die of. On the other, at fifty-nine, as I was at the time of the discovery, I learned that I could die from the probable cause of this obstruction to my free flow. If the web were true, I would suffer a rapid demise of the body and matching depletion of the spirit, and no shortage of pain along the way. The beast of the thing would take over my body from the inside and shut down each function of it like the flight of businesses from a dying mall.
I was born in 1960, which the Chinese zodiac tells me is the year of the metal rat: a good year for London’s Notting Hill Carnival, for which the radical thinker Claudia Jones* (expelled from the United States) serves on the carnival’s steering and planning committee; Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” begins the dance craze; JFK wins the US presidential election; Hitchcock’s Psycho premieres in New York; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is published; in South Africa the Sharpeville Massacre of schoolchildren launches the armed resistance of the African National Congress (ANC) to apartheid symbolized by the leadership of Nelson Mandela; Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) wins his first professional fight; the soap Coronation Street premieres on the UK’s Independent Television (ITV) network; Wilson Harris publishes his seminal first novel (his third in terms of composition) titled Palace of the Peacock, with its ecological dismantling of the idea of the colony; and many colonies continue breaking free of 6their European masters—Benin, Chad, Nigeria, Senegal, Cameroon, Mali, Niger, Somalia.
Conjecture is everything. February 2, a Tuesday, early evening, I am born. Redheaded and anemic, dropped off with a nanny during the week, while my parents slaved away on the buses as driver and conductress (as my mother was called back then) with her nifty ticket machine whose noise I clocked as Mum’s freeze-dried heart (for her ability to leave my older brother and me in care all week). As for Dad, his ticker was destined to stop, aged fifty-three, the same number as his bus that he aimed down Blackheath Hill into the sprawling capital. 1960 was not as cold as feared. The London Carnival was only two and the 1950s gave up its signs, no blacks, no irish. My parents bought a two-up, two-down redbrick terrace.
Worse than my advanced middle age was the statistical liability credited to my race. As a Black man, the degree of equity in the dire stock of the disease multiplied. Black skin, whose penalty was not only a history of enslavement and its epidemiology of distress, but biology as well, gifted me certain predispositions. Of course, I put it down to statistical social design rather than any objective ability of science to examine Black people. Science cannot help itself when it comes to Black bodies. Science exercises a shamefully high degree of subjectivity. Blacks always look worse than everyone else under the outright hostility or, at best, indifferent profit rubrics of the White gaze. To escape that incapacitating gaze that literally drains the color out of a Black body (a seemingly desirable condition, non-Black, though, in fact, a state of living death that robs the person of any memory of Black vitality and Black being), the Black person must be twice as healthy, virile, fashionable, inventive, funny, and tragic.
Do I feel pain more acutely than Whites on account of a history of hurt? Is a White prostate any less invasive of bladder function than a Black one? Of course not, fool. The thought that this bias might be the case is a cause of some concern to me and my psyche, a suspicion that I am inclined to think neurotically as 7if primed by a history of oppression to react in this way. I don’t know enough about what it is like to feel a serious pain emanating from inside me. (You never gave birth, my wife, Debbie, says to me.) Apart from stomach and muscle soreness from exercise, the feeling of pressure around my bladder area feels different. It is pain and not painful. It is a history of pain that I should recognize, and nothing like it at all, something altogether new. I do not suffer as a Black individual. I suffer as a person afflicted by a condition that is a new experience. I do not worry as a Black man. I worry as a man not accustomed to worrying about his body.
I am not lonely as an artist because I am Black. My loneliness may be a precondition of my art and has no bearing on my sense of being Black. If anything, I feel alone with my symptoms, private even, thanks to a predilection of mine to keep things to myself. I do not wish to bother or burden people, so I live with things alone in my heart and head and work them out until they lessen in urgency. My bladder would not allow me to be lonely. Information about it brought me up against the fact of how alone I felt and how singular the experience would be for me. Even though men everywhere suffered from it (one out of every four), this experience would be mine, a solo rendition of my sense of limited time in my life. I had to share my problem with Debbie.
My mortality concerned me not because I am a Black man prone to neurosis, but thanks to my predisposition toward conjecture (speculation is not neurotic). I read that my prostate cancer may have spread to other parts of my body, which made me worry along a curve extrapolated from that point of information as a part of the function of my imagination. I do not think this is Black or White. It is just human. It may be overthink and undue worry. It may just be me. I am I (not wishing to channel Popeye!) if I concede a unitary being bearing my name launched into the flux of this world (an artistic loner), rather than a brief span of history with a specific heredity (a communal loner).
Nevertheless I made the appointment. I combed my workplace web pages for names and reviews, videos and articles about 8oncology. I found other experts near and far to compare with my university. I made the call based on excellent appraisals for the oncology group at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I asked the phone attendant for someone experienced, or someone who had masses of experience operating on this very thing. The last thing my crotch area needed was a novice.
The fact that it was a teaching hospital bypassed me. I was not in the frame of mind to be anyone’s guinea pig or dummy practice patient. I wanted the expert with the most experience. It seemed to me that there was no room for error. To further medical knowledge was one thing, but not on my vanishing body. I wished them luck without any personal commitment to their need for experimentation. I said as much in several conversations that ran in my head in advance of my taking the leap into action. All of which may be testament to my anxiety about the whole enterprise, one in which all roads of thinking led back to my prostate dilemma.
I began to worry, in advance, about things going wrong. I figured that my block and tackle (a teen term), my waterworks (from my prepubescent years), my pleasure principle nerve center (those satirical twenties and thirties), required expert attention with a minimum of risk. I imagined a posttreatment reality of improved function: a return to a powerful, noisy stream, to forgetfulness when it came to all things urinary, to feeling more than ten years younger again, a pictograph of my body in which the ink dried somewhere in my early to midforties.
Ah, to forget about my bladder, to consign its forefront status in my mind to the back burner of inattention. Memory and attention have powered me to this point in my life. I lived up to this point in the solid conviction that I was against forgetting, that to forget was to be negligent of a writer’s responsibility to history and to the art of remembering by imaginative design. I never dreamed that forgetting could be a psychological condition of peace in waking life, of contentment with the frailties of an aging body. It would be a case of one part of my body acting in 9the interest of the whole by selectively removing itself from the arena of my attention.
I had to fix what was wrong with my body if I wanted it to work judiciously for and with me. At the moment it behaved like the enemy who had slipped past the ramparts to wage a guerrilla campaign from inside. I felt pressured onto my back foot, always reacting to some new action by my bladder and never able to catch up or anticipate what it would do next to keep me off balance. Now at the front of my mind, now dictating the geography of my diary with regular bathroom pit stops, now waking me up twice a night, now pushing me to the edge of almost afraid to drink. What a song and dance (my mum said this about any aspect of life that gave her the runaround) my bladder led me in.
I needed to break the partnership with my conundrum and become in effect a solo dancer in charge of all the choreography. I needed someone like the legendary Mr. Bojangles, someone able to move and invent the next move and the next in fluid motion (he tried to patent his dance up and down stairs, and failed, though succeeded in inventing the word copacetic) and make it look not just easy, but good. Or else a Billy Cobham figure with drums, a one-man orchestra, many-limbed like a spider, playing his Total Eclipse extravaganza. Or the anarchic inventions of a cut-to-pieces and scrambled then reassembled modern mind like Jean-Michel Basquiat. You cannot look for long, and you cannot look away for too long either without feeling impoverished.
Debbie, my wife, had noticed my symptoms some time ago and mentioned it to me, but I was casual in my response to her (not ready to hear her) until now. I told her my suspicions and she grew alarmed. Her response heightened my own sense of doom nursed quietly by me as I sought to protect the children from anxiety over me. Debbie always presented as someone in touch with her feelings in a way that left me in awe and in horror: awe at her facility with difficult emotion, horror that it might be contagious and leave me at the mercy of something out of my control. In contradiction to this taciturn approach of mine on the emotional 10front, I championed methods like meditation and yoga, and writings about mind and body unity—all disciplines invested in a life of emotional intelligence.
My ideal for coping with the materialist treadmill turned out to be a pinch of the anarchist with chunks of socialism and utopianism. Blake’s Jerusalem meets Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturism. I really wanted everyone to know themselves and to get along with one another and hug trees too, all in a garden where it was cool to eat the fruit and be naked without compromising the right to be there. As if the garden were an invitation to experiment in community that could never be revoked. No pre-, no post-, just perpetual current good standing.
And for poise under bladder pressure I conjure Emma Goldman on Ellis Island in December 1919, on the eve of her deportation to Russia for her “un-American” anarchistic activities. She makes sure everyone around her is settled and calm and able to write last messages of hope to loved ones whom they are about to leave behind with no inkling of when they might return and be reunited, messages that she hides in her dress. Her enormous sacrifice for her beliefs turned into a life practice as she tends selflessly to the needs of others in true enactment of her equitable ideals. As with everyone else whom she helps, she too faces the fate of being cast out of her adopted country because of her politics.
I made the call to see an oncologist. The receptionist asked me a few pertinent questions and I answered as tersely as I could, not knowing to whom I was talking, and not wanting my business out there. At last she said that she needed to ask these things to be sure she matched me with the right person. How long had I been experiencing difficulty urinating? How many times at night did I go to the bathroom? Was it painful to urinate? Did it alter my bowel movement? Could I refrain from sex two days before seeing the doctor? No problem on that last count, I joked. My sexual appetite had waned considerably. She asked me where I worked, and when I said at the university, she piped up, sounded more animated, and wanted to know what I did, and when I said that I was 11a professor she became positively gleeful, personable, much more accommodating and even said that she would do everything she could for me since I belonged to the UCLA “family.”
I attended that first appointment alone. Debbie had to be somewhere else and the time was in the middle of my teaching day. I put her off coming with me in the belief that this first meeting was preliminary and I would need her further down the road of the progress of the doctor investigating what was going on with me. How odd to turn up to a waiting room full of people with the same malady. All men. The only difference was that everyone seemed so much older and when someone younger-looking turned up everyone gawked at him with a mix of pity and alarm that so young a body might be facing such an affliction reserved for senior bodies. No one spoke. We sat and waited for our names to be called. And when that happened the person answered quickly but took quite a while to lever the ailing body out of the comfortable chair and catch up with his name.
The doctor, a retired oncologist who worked part time, put me at ease immediately by acting as if he were a plumber who needed to examine my faulty fixtures and offer his diagnosis. He asked me to drop my trousers and underpants. He stared for a long moment at the distribution and arrangement of my genitalia. He focused the way I do when I visit a gallery and stare for ages at a painting that I close my eyes to see in my mind’s eye, and look at again to augment my memory of it, and again close my eyes to add to what I remember and so on before I build a story about how it works on me, and what I think and feel about those influences. I had showered longer than usual that morning for this very reason—his face was close to my crotch—and picked my newest pair of underpants. He pulled on a pair of gloves. There was an immediate pungent smell of rubber as if I had woken on the inside of an inner tube, like the gigantic one for the rear wheels of the tractor that cruised the farm of my paternal grandparents in Guyana.
Next he slapped on copious amounts of what looked like jelly 12onto his fingers. He asked me to lean over by resting my elbows on the chair and he unceremoniously stuck his index and middle finger into my anus and up my rectum, and swiped along the tube as if to wipe my interior clean. That was a new feeling, of some blind, double-proboscis creature released in my rectum and bumping into its architecture to forge deep into me. To cope with my shock of his prodding around inside me I visualized my arm wiping the steamed-up inside of the car windscreen on a winter morning in South London, or on the East Coast, say, Massachusetts or Virginia, a crucial act to see where I was driving, just as he needed to know what was happening to my body.
I felt shock at the intrusion and a modicum of discomfort, it must be said, not pain exactly but the start of a painful procedure if it continued unchecked. He worked swiftly, deeply, knowledgeably. Mercifully, he extracted his fingers in a deft move and wiped them and dispensed with his glove, rolled it off his hand by pulling it inside out. He informed me as I wiped myself and pulled up my underpants and trousers that my prostate was more than twice as large as it should be. Instead of roughly walnut size, it was two and a half walnuts.
I could visualize that. Most mornings since around 2005 I’d been eating a little helping of walnuts—enough to cover the palm of my hand—in the sound belief that their high quotient of antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids (good guys) strengthened my aging heart. I hardly ever ran out of them, because I bought the walnut halves in bulk and filled a tall jar with them. I wondered if that two and a half was with or without the pesky shells, whose pieces sometimes stole into the shelled batch and shocked teeth that clamped down and experienced a shard. Two and a half times bigger than the usual outcrop of prostate growing inside me. Conjoined twins fused to another single; sick little triplets; a ballooning time bomb; a crab growing in a shell it cannot jettison and so destined to meet some impasse with; something I never gave a second thought to before, now center stage in my life as if to tax me for my neglect of it. 13
The doctor ordered a blood sample—two ampoules of the bright-red stuff—and a nurse drew it from me. She told me I had good veins. People say that a lot. I hardly felt the needle’s plunge into the folded space just above the crook of my inner right arm. I complimented the nurse, told her she was an excellent phlebotomist. She smiled and weighed me. We joked that my clothes and boots amounted to about 4 pounds to be taken off 160. The nurse took my blood pressure. I asked her if it mattered that I was left-handed. She said no. I sacrificed my right arm. She wrapped a sleeve around it, held in place by Velcro. She inflated the sleeve to a point that bordered the uncomfortable and just at that point, held it, and began the slow deflation back to comfort and relief: 115 over 90. I wondered if the caffeine heightened the diastolic first reading. She said it was fine. In the form about my history I said my father had died at fifty-three from a bad heart—so I was told.
I say “so I was told” due to the notorious unreliability of information by word of mouth about my immediate family. Acrimonious divorces, migration, and early deaths might be to blame for the unknowable family epidemiology. My parents married young, emigrated from Guyana to England, and divorced early while in England as their five young children lived with grandparents in Guyana. I should write that twice for clarity. The whole experiment of bettering themselves by striking out into the unknown together ended in hostility. They quibbled over photographs and my dad got most of them as memorials because she got us, the real thing. The result of my past is a lot of hearsay, conjecture, and plain, willful ignorance—no longer in a position to care for the other party given the bad history between them. My genealogy resembled a time bomb. Not the flowering of unknown gifts into creative biography but the detonation of a grenade. The possibility that I might have cancer and that it would become the measure of my life.
My maternal grandmother died of bone cancer. Another mine buried in my field of genes. The cancer started in her hand. She 14resisted surgery partly out of vanity and partly practicality. My grandfather was long dead. A new handsome gentleman courted my grandmother. Apparently, he was so well groomed that you could smell his cologne before you spotted him, and not one starched stitch on him was out of place in the most casual of settings. He had Mister, always Mister, before his name. The house full of grandchildren always reconfigured into a child-free zone when he appeared and my grandmother in her starched and perfumed fineries met him at the door. We piled on the covered back stairs and played with matchsticks for people (chewing gum on the tops of the matches for women with big hair) and bottle tops for vehicles, and we partied with those matchsticks and took them to drive-in film shows and street drag races without saying so much as a syllable or bumping into each other’s cars and people, or scraping against the stairs and railings.
My grandmother worked with her hands all day. Mostly housework, and she talked with her hands, gestured a lot, and she had a lot to say, so her hands were occupied all day. This made her hands indispensable. (Not that we should think of our hands as dispensable, say like the smallest outer toe or the smallest finger.) Not indispensable as tools, though she proved that, more as expressions of her. She could not do without even one little finger. Meanwhile the cancer marched on and up her arm. She held out against surgery for as long as she could. And when she accepted losing the hand, too late, after the amputation she continued to decline from the metastasized disease, with further surgeries to remove more of her arm. She was dead at forty-six. Her handsome suitor migrated to Canada a while before the cancer took hold of her and knocked her for six (as local parlance phrased it, a term lifted from cricket, the national sport of most former British colonies).
The doctor says my enlarged prostate concerns him. Concern in another setting might be casually deployed to mean that a thing is on one’s mind though not central to one’s thinking. As used by the doctor I know it packs much more power. In fact, 15concern takes on the air of a lab setting, something scrubbed of emotional resonance as a deliberate qualification for its use in a patient-and-doctor exchange. He has my full attention. He says only further tests can really tell him what is going on. He adds that I should not worry ahead of the results of those tests and that when they come back and he has a chance to look at them we will speak again. As a precaution, he schedules me to see a surgeon. He says I should not be alarmed, he has to make the appointment early because openings are hard to come by, and my date can just as easily be canceled if it proves unnecessary. The date with the surgeon is in two weeks. The doctor shakes my hand goodbye. I wonder if his light touch—soft and glancing—has anything to do with my compromised longevity. His heavier grip reserved for persons with more time on their hands. 16
* Carole Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
2.
I DO NOT WANT TO ALARM YOU
Debbie and I are in the kitchen and abutting breakfast room with our three children when I broach the subject of my cancer. Christopher, aged twenty-two, our eldest, is searching Debbie’s partially completed puzzle, spread on the breakfast table, for a corner piece that only he seems able to find, every time, hidden among the mass. Nicholas, aged nineteen, the second, as I like to think of him to avoid the middle-child stigma, is at the stove concocting his famous three-egg omelet into which he sprinkles an array of powders, onion, garlic, salt, black pepper. Debbie is seated on the sofa that is next to the breakfast table. I am microwaving a cup of coffee that I reheat periodically throughout the morning and top up with almond milk and fresh coffee. Liliana, aged thirteen (the baby girl of the household, mollycoddled by us as a result of our shock at the ultrasound that revealed she was a she and not the expected dominant family requisite male), is seated at the center island eating her bowl of ramen noodles.
Guys, I do not want to alarm you but I do have a health issue.
They turn from their respective tasks, Nicholas pushes the pan off the flame, Christopher looks at me and keeps a puzzle piece in his hand, Liliana places her spoon in the bowl and clasps her hands and glances at her mother, who looks up at me and rests her phone in her lap.
I saw a doctor and I have an enlarged prostate and an elevated 18PSA from a blood sample. It is most likely cancer, though I have to take more tests to confirm that.
The three of them do a double take of wanting me to repeat what I just said even though I said it and they heard it and want to disbelieve their ears. I pause and busy my hands with setting the microwave to one minute.
Does it hurt? Nicholas wants to know. I shake my head, no pain, just a weird feeling of pressure.
Can you die from it? my daughter asks. Again, that dismissive headshake and I reassure her that what I have is treatable.
Just wanted to give you guys a heads-up, since the coming weeks will be busy for me.
Christopher half smiles and shoots me his thumbs-up of understanding, and goes back to his puzzle. Nicholas looks at me for a moment and I nod and he pulls his omelet over the flame. I smile at Debbie and she smiles back. Liliana forks curlicues of her ramen to her face. I retrieve my coffee from the microwave the moment it beeps.
The next week I have an MRI (I googled it), a.k.a. the magnetic resonance imaging machine. It resembles a capsule for sending me into the future, or for sealing me in a deep century-long sleep. The clinical all-white room, meant to reassure me, makes me feel like a huge germ in a germ-free zone. That the whole of me, not just my unruly prostate, is in question seems apposite as my dark skin tone pops out, spotlighted, in the contrasting white space. I want the machine to be accurate in the way it assesses me, to make transparent a covert disease in my body, a disease about to stage a coup.
Debbie insists on accompanying me. (I am not sure she should bother.) I do not want to trouble her and embarrass her and me by having a witness in the room. The fact of our marriage does not diminish this feeling of inadequacy at all. In secret I am glad to have her by my side. She waits outside for me. I undress and put my clothes into a locker and keep on my underpants but don 19a hospital gown (I am told to wear it with the opening at the front so that I can keep it closed and stay warmer).
The radiologist asks me to recline on the gurney. He hooks me up to a drip and feeds the dye into it. The dye enables the magnetic waves to highlight the bloodstream and the dye travels and draws this map of my blood system. He tightens a sheet around my body so that I feel as if I am encased in a condom with only my head peeping out. He plugs my ears with two sponge plugs. I’ve never had someone insert plugs into my ears before. What a trust exercise. How intimate. His touch is light and businesslike, gently probing as he settles the sponge pieces into place. He is a friendly guy. From Vietnam. We chat briefly about the legacy of America coming to a foreign land and the good fortune for those of us able to reap the benefits rather than the penalties of a colonial or imperial encounter. He feeds me on the gurney into the wide, round mouth of the MRI contraption.
As instructed by him, I hold my breath at the right time for a few seconds as the machine resonates—quite loudly, hence the earplugs. What exactly is the noise? Think of a jackhammer that the road workers lean into bodily to break up a road. Short bursts, as if discharging armor-piercing rounds. Is that just my impression, seeing red in every situation pertaining to my condition? I will myself to breathe deep past my sternum and visualize the tall neck of a vase into which I pour air rather than water to flower the stems of my ribs, or some such reasoning, just to defray the rising sense of panic and urgency about what must happen to me in the coming weeks to save me from my malady.
Given my prostate-specific antigen (PSA) reading—which is one hundred times higher than what it should be—I wonder if I will experience all my waking hours with increased concentration and razor-sharp clarity, if the ordinary, the quotidian, the routine of my day, will become supercharged by my awareness of the suddenly limited number of days on a measurable calendar. My research on prostate cancer highlights the possibility that 20time may not be on my side or time could be mine only if I act quickly.
* * *
Well, reality, supercharge me. Show me your bluest skies, make light cut into a room as if onto a stage in Vegas. The demonstration snaking past the quad below my office window ricochets off the surrounding buildings. The quad teems with so much life, its antagonism registered with me as vibrancy, necessity, a vital course charted by the pulse of the given. The bullhorn asks: What do we want? The marchers reply something indecipherable. The bullhorn asks: When do we want it? The marchers reply with a resounding Now. I want to find out more.
Ordinarily, I would have headed outside for a better view. Not today. I feel tired and flat. I care but not enough to change the course of my lethargy. I remain in my seat—not even bothering to stand, as is my usual practice, at my computer mounted on a platform, mounted in turn on my desk. The ergonomics of longevity seemingly out of my reach now. I languish in disease mode. My head, chock-full of morbid detail, needs additional room in my body, already rented out to my disease, to accommodate everything. I am in the middle of my life. This cannot be the sum of it. I have to fight this thing.
Flomax relaxes the sphincter muscles and eases the flow of urine. The weak trickle regains some of its backbone though in no measure anything resembling the fire hose of my ESPN days. I take one pill at night and go to sleep and it helps me make it through the night without having to fumble in the dark between the bed and bathroom. Flomax is my new best friend, an enabler in the truest sense of the term; that is, someone who helps a person to grow into a better human. The chemistry of it is of some interest to me. I am intrigued by the way the drug targets my contracted and depressed sphincter, surrounded and oppressed by my prostate, and induces the muscles to bow before the pressure of my urine. 21
I wish that Flomax had a similar force against the cancer that self-proliferates and enlarges my prostate, and hampers my urinary tract. Could there be a Flomax of the depressed spirit, able to open the spigots of optimism and induce in me a positive viewpoint that might banish those cells and shrink my prostate? I want to believe in the power of the mind over the matter of its house, the body. My body is in full rebellion against me. My mind cannot run fast enough to catch and curtail the body’s wild sprint toward the cliff of oblivion.
I wonder if art is up to the task of healing. If autosuggestion helps in any perceptible fashion, or if a positive outlook is tantamount to my mind fiddling while the Rome of my body burns. For I burn with cancer. Is my mind, with its penchant for recall in the middle of a crisis as a coping mechanism, simply whistling Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” while faced with the devastation of life? For my life is threatened with a summary end. I wonder if my speculation about the many things that could go wrong with me is a symptom of my propensity for camp exaggeration in the face of a fine-tuned assault on my being.
Since my late teens, when I lived in London, I had rejected the idea of the medical model, thinking that doctors and hospitals would not work for me. Back then I supplemented it with something that was all to do with me—my natural leanings toward positive thought as an antidote to dark despair—with my childhood in Guyana surrounded by homeopathic remedies for illnesses and then in the UK taking my lucky good health as a sanctuary from scientific medicine.
So that today, I believe intuitively in, well, yes, intuition; that is, in the capacity of the mind in coalition with the spirit to turn destiny or what purports to be inevitability topsy-turvy. There must be some help that I can muster on behalf of the medical model that I embraced in order to ride with this condition. I say ride after Parliament’s 1975 “Star Child” (A-side) and “Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication” (B-side) “let me ride,” injunction to the quarrelsome spirit to chill, to fall into harmony with an easier way 22of working with a bigger force, not by direct opposition to it but by flowing with it. There is not a shred in me of acceptance of my disease as somehow too far gone. I keep to the front of my mind that if I can maintain this positive thinking then I can slow down this thing and help the drugs and other medical methods perform their ministry. Together, my mind in partnership with medicine can overcome, chant down, Bob Marley fashion, the Babylon of my disease.
The ghostly ministrations of intangible forces such as positive thinking are things in the world, invisible but felt presences that can be co-opted on my side, if I dedicate my mental powers to them. At the cellular level, Flomax (tamsulosin), an alpha blocker, stops the hormone norepinephrine from reaching alpha receptors at the uptake point of cells, thereby robbing them of the necessary chemical messaging that tells muscles to contract. Flomax operates on my behalf by latching onto muscles in the bladder, neck, and prostate gland and lulling them to sleep. At the level of the idea, I see a force, or feel it, I should say. I think that my frame of mind might rein in the diagnosis and turn it around in ways difficult to measure, yet part and parcel of the changes brought about by medicine.
A second doctor conducts a biopsy of my prostate. It’s an outpatient procedure. Debbie accompanies me. She never leaves my side. We wait in a small room where I am told to undress and wear a hospital gown with the opening at the back. I ask if I can keep on my socks. The nurse looks at the green leaves on the pair, and by the way she nods and smiles I tell her the herb of those leaves does not figure recreationally or otherwise in my life these days. With my back to the nurse, I lie on my left side and face Debbie. The nurse shows me the probe, about a foot long and as fat as a truncheon, covered in a condom. She explains that the doctor will insert the probe into my anus and push it up my rectum and out of that probe needles will shoot through the walls of my rectum and into the afflicted areas of my prostate and extract cancer material for analysis. The perforations in the rectum wall, 23she tells me, are minuscule and they self-heal quickly, though I may see traces of blood in my stool for a day or so afterward.
Debbie laughs at the ghastly rocket of the probe. I nod in astonishment at the size of the thing. I can feel my sphincter shrink as if I have waded into the North Sea off the coast of Aberdeen. (That one time was my last time and my then lover made me do it.) The doctor comes in with a colleague. He introduces himself and points at the monitor that he says will guide the biopsy. There is a camera on the steel probe. He warns me that the process of going through the wall of the rectum, though painless, feels weird, as if someone snaps a rubber band against my skin. Debbie takes my hand and the nurse uses most of a tube of lubricating jelly to cover the probe. (That has grown with my alarm to resemble, now, a baseball bat.) I stop seeing what happens next. That probe is huge. I feel stuffed beyond capacity. The doctor asks me to breathe deeply and to keep breathing no matter what I feel and that I should remember it will be over fast. He says he needs up to twelve samples from my prostate. He speaks with a slow baritone. Great, Barry White is my torturer. He says that he has an image of my prostate from the previous test so he knows exactly where he needs to go to obtain the samples. I want to snap at him to get on with it. His slow delivery adds to my ballooning alarm about what is about to happen to the interior of my posterior.
Let the games begin. And they do. A silent movie runs. Moving images composed of touch. The probe fills up my rectum and the twang from a rubber band is more like a needle puncturing the roof of my mouth. One dozen of those pops. I count down. I raise my eyebrows. Guess my eyes must have looked as if they were about to pop out of their sockets. Debbie has turned pale with a look of being trapped at the uppermost point of a roller coaster on the verge of a precipitous descent. The doctor is accurate about the strange pain. Not of damage to the skin, more of an interior wreckage that is too deep to identity, that unfolds and most certainly stays central in my mind’s register of discomfort. Breathe. Try not to crush Debbie’s hand. Let cancer have its way 24with me—backward, forward, and upside down. I abandon my body and retreat mentally to my childhood memory of a game where I drive, in complete silence, two matchstick lovers to their drive-in movie date in their bottle top cars along the road of those wooden railings on the back stairs.
A few days later I see a third doctor and he tells me in the company of my wife that another test is necessary to be certain that my bones and other areas near the prostate are not affected by the cancer cells. He says the biopsy results confirm cancer spread all over the prostate and perhaps elsewhere too, going by the MRI. He assures me that my enlarged prostate gland and hugely elevated PSA reading, though causes of concern, were not in themselves sufficient diagnostic tools to form the basis of a treatment plan. The cancer is present in large amounts but more of a sense of its locations (plural, his word) is needed before attacking it (his word, attack). He said I needed to have a few tests. A computerized tomography (CT) scan, a bone scan, and more than likely a final scan aimed specifically at a search in the body for antigens generated by cancer cells on the surface of the prostate; that’s at least three more tests, which qualifies as a battery of them.
In one test I react as if there is an awful texture and taste that I repeatedly swallow to try and rid my mouth of and it makes me feel that I am on the verge of throwing up. In one hour I consume the two pints of that emetic-like substance. In another test the doctor wants me to receive a nuclear injection that will glow around the areas of the bone trained to absorb the dye if those bones were damaged by disease. I brace myself for the unpleasant as a means to procure the resplendent: that medicine with a bad taste, this other medicine with a bad feel, both working in the only way they know how, by being medicine; that is, not nice in order to do some good.
I always shave for these appointments and dress my best as if about to face a classroom or my doom. For the next test I am not allowed to eat or drink. This time I savor a small coffee—not 25my usual two giant cups—and eat a light meal, a banana and a slice of brown bread topped with goat’s cheese and avocado, a tasty power food. The nuclear medicine, methylene diphosphonate (MDP) renews this avocado taste in my mouth. The hospital makes it (the MDP, not the avocado) to order with a shelf life of mere hours to do its work before it breaks down. I lie on my back. The radiopharmaceutical fluid is injected through a drip set up in my arm. A small dose, no more than a couple of tablespoons of liquid (26.4 millicuries, or mCi, to be exact) feels cold running into my right arm, a weird kind of cold not on the skin but worming its way under the skin and into my flesh. The cold feeling disappears as my warm blood floods the meds.
I tell myself to relax and breathe deeply and slowly. I summon two visual aids: the first is Blackheath Hill in South London at six a.m. with a light fog and a highlighted fox glancing back at me periodically as it trots across the hill, a stone’s throw from me on my paper route; the second, Marie Curie in her radioactive lab of perilous discovery. The radiation photography begins.
About halfway into it I feel a wave of nausea. I don’t just mean that I feel what is akin to an urge to vomit wash over me. I really mean a wave that sweeps me off my feet and bowls me around in deep sand and pebbles. (This tumble-in-a-washing-machine experience happened to me when I tried to bodysurf with my kids. Reader, it was horribly embarrassing.) And the nauseated sensation grows rather than lessens. I call out to the technician, Hello, I feel … and as he rushes in and pushes a tall bin next to my gurney, I turn my head just in time to expel coffee, toast, and grime from my guts. The effort of throwing the operation of my body into reverse makes me break out in a cold sweat. I apologize as I retch (try speaking and heaving at the same time) and he says not to worry, it happens to a lot of people. He hands me tissues. I wipe away slime and grimace at the awful feeling that flares and subsides almost immediately after I retch up avocado and stuff. I soon feel better. He says the nuclear cocktail fed into my veins sometimes causes the body to think that it has ingested 26a poison by mistake and the only thing to do is expel it. That the act of retching fools the body into believing that it has succeeded in saving itself from an attack via its gut. Yes, well, you could have fooled me, dear technician. That vomiting was for real.
By way of contrast the medicine lights up the lymphatic pathways around bone as though shining a light into a dark room to reveal the furnishings in it, monochromatic bone with a soft, fuzzy look, angular as bones are but almost porous in appearance and so, in my mind of associations, close to looking at a fine bone china teacup that is almost translucent, that is in the shape of a fragile body. On the monitor the dark patches swirl around. Apparently the medicine links to tissue that has traces of the prostate-specific antigen. The nuclear binding is chemically designed to seek out PSA exclusively. The medicine captured on the magnetic resonance imaging monitor resembles iron filings dancing to the push and pull of an invisible force. Somewhere in there, wrapped up with all that frenetic activity, is the disease, which is called out by the radiopharmaceutical to see if any of it has latched on to my bones. I cannot tell. The technician will not say. I ask him if when I get angry I’m going to burst out of my clothing and turn into a green, muscle-bound giant. He laughs and says there are no side effects except the nausea, which should clear up soon. He wishes me well and sends me on my not-so-mirthful way.
I think the nights are longer and the days shorter for me. I sleep and the last thought is of my body; specifically, my crotch. A weight registers around the area, a heavy feeling of trouble brewing. I beam a positive electron stream at the location below my bladder and in the space behind my penis and in front of my rectum. That beam contains an outdoor concert at Blackbushe in the Hampshire English countryside, in 1978, the summer before the tragedy at Jonestown, Guyana. I attended the concert with my friend Geoff Hardy. He turned me into a Dylan fan and Dylan was performing with Joan Armatrading (and, I want to add, Van Morrison—of Astral Weeks—Bob Marley, and, I believe, 27Tom Robinson, among others). I should ask Geoff, whose memory retains an encyclopedia of these things, but I will not ask him, because, in this instance, I do not want confirmation that might contradict my ideal.
I approached the portable toilets in the dark, and some way off from the actual portable cabins men formed a loose line as they urinated in the general direction of those toilets. As the night wore on, the line of men emptying bladders widened even farther away from those portable toilets until people just took a few steps toward the location of the bathrooms and unburdened themselves by aiming at the general vicinity of the portable potties. The women, more evolved, queued respectably for an age. The bolder ones wanted to use the men’s loos but found them too disgusting.
