My Brother (4 page)

I did not know how my brother had contracted the HIV virus. I would have liked to know because it would have told me something about him. I was almost sure it was not through the use of intravenous drugs, because there was no evidence of that on his body as far as I could see; also, such a thing as piercing himself with a needle, causing himself pain, did not seem to be in keeping with his personality; the use of intravenous drugs involves hypodermic needles and hypodermic needles would be associated with illness and death. In a place like Antigua, I suspect, the use of drugs is not about the dulling of pain in a useless life but about providing and extending pleasure. I do not know this with certainty, I only suspect so. I suspected he got the virus through sex and I supposed it to be heterosexual sex. I only supposed this, I did not know it with any certainty. If he had had homosexual sex, he would not have advertised it. Antiguans are not particularly homophobic so much as they are quick to disparage anyone or anything that is different from whom or what they think of as normal. And they think of themselves and the things they do as normal: this includes a man and a woman having sex with each other. I only wanted to know these things about my brother because they would tell me something about him, but also, on the whole I like to know whom people have sex with, and a description of it I find especially interesting. My own life, from a sexual standpoint, can be described as a monument to boring conventionality. And so perhaps because of this I have a great interest in other people's personal lives. I wanted him to tell me what his personal life had been like. He would not do that. Antiguans are at once prudish and licentious. A young woman will be loudly praised for being a very nice girl, by which it is meant she does not have sex; yet no young woman would ever be ostracized because she had ten children by ten different men.

He used to have many friends, they were at his house visiting him all the time before he got sick, when he was well, with no thought of sickness at all. They were young men like him, Rastafarians like him. They would come to his house and sit on his bed and smoke fat marijuana cigarettes. My mother would complain about these young men visiting her son, but her words of complaint did not stop them and she did not go further than words. These boys had Rastafarian names, names they had given themselves, names very different from the ones their parents had given them. My brother's Rastafarian name was the name of a Hebrew prophet, one whose prophecies were about pestilence and doom. But when he lay in the hospital, none of his friends came into his room to visit him. They came to see him. They would stand in the doorway of his room and they would say something to him. They never came in. After they had seen him they left and they never returned again. My mother said that they came to see if it was true that he was HIV-positive, that he had AIDS. Had he been in their shoes, he might have done the same thing. We are not an instinctively empathetic people; a circle of friends who love and support each other is not something I can recall from my childhood. A girl he used to know saw him in the hospital while I was there with him. I could not tell if she had been one of his lovers. He and I were sitting outside in the sun at the time. He spoke in a very friendly way to her; she was friendly but not too much so, she never came too near him. She went inside to visit someone else. When she came outside to leave, she did not come over to say goodbye to him. He called after her. She waved her hand at him without looking back. He asked her if she would come back to see him. She raised her shoulders high, in an I-don't-know gesture. She never looked back at him. But not long after, while we were still sitting in the sun, he saw a woman wearing a pair of tight-fitting pants that outlined the curves around her pubic area, and while staring pointedly at her crotch, he said some words to her, letting her know that he would like to have sex with her (“That would fit me very nicely, you know.” He said it exactly like that). She, too, would not look at him. This made me wonder at the confidence of men. There he was, diseased and dying, looking as unattractive as a long-dead corpse would look, and he could still try to convince a woman to sleep with him.

One day years ago—I was thirty-six and he was twenty-three—I was visiting my family, I was lying on my brother's bed in his little house with my feet resting on the windowsill and in the sun. I used to do exactly this when I was a child: lie in bed with my feet resting on the windowsill and in the sun, because my feet then were always cold. I would read books then, and this whole scene of me lying in bed and reading books would drive my mother to fits of anger, for she was sure it meant I was doomed to a life of slothfulness, but as it turned out, I was only doomed to write books other people might read. At the time I was lying on my brother's bed, he was sitting in his doorway. Usually he was lying on his bed. He would lie on his bed in a drug-induced daze. His mother would not have allowed him to do this if he were female; I know this. The walls of his house were plastered with magazine pictures of Americans who have been extremely successful in the world of sports or entertainment. All these people are of my and his complexion. My daughter likes to sing. It is perhaps the pictures on my brother's wall that make me discourage her from singing in a way that might bring her public attention. I have said to her father, “Does the world really need one more somewhat brown person singing?” My daughter loves math and is very good at it. Maybe she can find satisfaction singing to herself while poring over numbers that will explain some small mystery in the universe. There may be someone of my brother's hue, or my daughter's hue, or my own hue who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics or chemistry, but if such a person exists, my brother does not know of it, my daughter may know of it, I do not know of it. In his room that time were some books on a table and a radio cassette-deck player. The books were his old school textbooks. One of them was a history of the West Indies, though it was mostly a history of the British West Indies, and it was exactly like the textbook from which I had been taught when I was in school. I was reading it, lying on his bed, and when I got up to go, he gave it to me as a gift. I still have this book, it's sitting on a shelf with some other books that I like very much.

He must have wanted to be a singer. He had a stage name, it was Sugarman. He had on cassette tape a recording of him and a friend of his singing a song called “Mr. Telephone Man.” It was a song that was popular not too long ago, sung by a group called “The Silvers”; these people, “The Silvers,” were all related to each other, they were not just friends. He and his friend sang this song in the reggae style. He gave me a copy of this tape of him and his friend singing this song. I lost it when moving from one house to another. I am only sorry about this now.

On the morning I was leaving my brother, after spending a week with him, we learned he had gained one pound. It was a Monday morning; I had arrived a week ago on the Sunday night and he had looked then as if he would soon die: he was losing weight, he could not eat, his temperature would go from high to dangerously high, his throat had large ulcers growing on the surface and they went all the way down his esophagus. Everyone thought it was a matter of days, weeks, but all the same he would soon be dead. I had brought him the medicine AZT, he took it and did begin to look better. His temperature had dropped down, not to normal, but to below normal; Dr. Ramsey said that was better than being too high. And then just as I was leaving to return home to my own family on an early-morning flight, he, along with the other patients on his ward (all men suffering from various ailments, none of them related to HIV, as far as I could tell, since they were not treated with the aloofness, at-arm's-lengthness, that was extended to my brother), were lined up in the hall to be weighed on an ancient but accurate-seeming scale. The scale registered a one-pound gain in my brother's weight from the week before. I felt happy, I felt pleased with myself, I even felt proud of myself. I had been instrumental in this, his gaining one pound, and I knew what it meant; it meant that he was getting better, or at least that he was better than he had been before I got there, when every time he had stepped on the scale it had registered a loss. The nurse who recorded this on his chart, a Sister, a rank of nursing that continues to exist only in places where the British influence, with its love of status, remains, turned the corners of her mouth down as she did so. This must be a universal expression of disappointment and irritation and sourness, but I have seen it only in the disappointed and the irritated and the sour among women in Antigua. He had been expected to die; no one infected with HIV and as sick as he was at that time had ever come out of the Holberton Hospital alive. I said goodbye to him, he thought I would not come to see him again. I said I would come again, and it crossed my mind and he said it out loud, yes, perhaps to his funeral (“Yu cum back fo' bury me”).

I got on the airplane. As I was going through Customs in Puerto Rico, I wondered what he was doing. He might be sitting out in the sun, the way he and I had done in the few days when I had been there. He might be able to focus his eyes and concentrate now, he might be able to control the tremor in his hands and so be able to read the biography of Viv Richards, the great Antiguan cricketer, a copy of which I had bought for him. As I was going through Customs I remembered a British woman of African descent whom I had met at a workshop she was leading for people who wanted to volunteer to be AIDS counselors. When she found out that I lived in the United States and that my brother was lying in the hospital more dead than alive and because this was due to a lack of proper treatment, she said, as if it were the most natural, obvious suggestion in the world, that I should take him to the United States for treatment. I was stunned by this, because I was doing the best I could, I have a family, I'm not rich, everybody who comes in contact with this disease knows how costly it is to deal with properly; she in her position as leader of workshops would have known so, how could she just say things without asking about my circumstances, without wondering what taking my brother into my life would mean to me. I said, Oh, I am sure they wouldn't let him in, and I didn't know if what I was saying was true, I was not familiar really with immigration policies and HIV, but what I really meant was, no, I can't do what you are suggesting—take this strange, careless person into the hard-earned order of my life: my life of children and husband, and they love me and love me again, and I love them. And then she said, Oh yes, racism. And I thought then, with more bitterness than I would have otherwise, how unlucky people are who cannot blame the wrong, disastrous turns life can sometimes take on racism; because the hardness of living, the strange turns in it, the luck of it, the good chance missed of it, the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God part of it is so impossible to accept and it must be, in some way, very nice to have the all too real evil of racism to blame. But it was not racism that made my brother lie dying of an incurable disease in a hospital in the country in which he was born; it was the sheer accident of life, it was his own fault, his not caring about himself and his not being able to carefully weigh and adjust to and accept the to-and-fro of life, the feasting and the famine of life or the times in between, it was the fact that he lived in a place in which a government, made up of people with his own complexion, his own race, was corrupt and did not care whether he or other people like him lived or died.

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I returned to my home safely, and my family was glad to see me. I called my mother. It was the middle of winter and I missed the warm sun and I missed my brother, being with him, being in the presence of his suffering and the feeling that somewhere in it was the possibility of redemption of some kind, though what form it could take I did not know and did not care, only that redemption of some kind would be possible and that we would all emerge from it better in some way and would love each other more. Love always feels much better than not-love, and that is why everybody always talks about love and that is why everybody always wants to have love: because it feels much better, so much better. I missed him sometimes when I took my children to the school bus, sometimes when the snow fell; I talked about him, his life, to my husband, I talked about him to people I knew well and to people I did not know very well. But I did not think I loved him; then, when I was no longer in his presence, I did not think I loved him. Whatever made me talk about him, whatever made me think of him, was not love, just something else, but not love; love being the thing I felt for my family, the one I have now, but not for him, or the people I am from, not love, but a powerful feeling all the same, only not love. My talk was full of pain, it was full of misery, it was full of anger, there was no peace to it, there was much sorrow, but there was no peace to it. How did I feel? I did not know how I felt. I was a combustion of feelings.

My brother grew better and better; the AZT must have worked, he grew stronger, his clogged lungs cleared up, the sores in his throat began to disappear. One day, still in hospital, he rejected the food served to him and the food my mother brought to him, and asked for a serving of Kentucky Fried Chicken, that was the thing he most wanted to eat then. A franchise of this restaurant is in Antigua and it is a fashionable place to go, to be able to afford to buy and eat a meal purchased there. Dr. Ramsey was visiting him at the time he had this craving, and so he drove my mother to the restaurant, where she bought him a dinner of fried chicken, and she took a taxi back to the hospital and gave it to him. He ate it all and my mother was very happy because she had not seen him eat so heartily in months. She reported this to me with as much enthusiasm and satisfaction as if she had just seen him successfully complete a feat that no human had ever successfully completed before. In the days to come he grew more and more well, he ate more, his temperature was a little below normal, but it remained the same, it did not go up and it did not go way up. And then everyone began to wonder what to do with him, how long should he be in the hospital, should he still be in the hospital? No one had ever seen an HIV-infected person, who in fact had full-blown AIDS, leave the hospital in this condition—alive, even well; well if you did not know what his life was really, really like. He by then was sitting outside in the company of the other patients; they no longer shunned him, because he did not look like someone who had AIDS, he looked just like an ordinary sick person; an ordinary sick person was something they knew about, a person with AIDS was not. He looked like them, sick with no choice but to go to an ill-equipped hospital in Antigua. While he was in the hospital, another man came in, very sick with AIDS, as sick as my brother had been. The man died. His relatives did not come to see him. I do not know if my brother visited him and offered any words of comfort. My brother by then was well enough to go home. But what home? He did not really have a home. He would go home to live with my mother, and this was wonderful, that he would live with his mother and she would take care of him, but this became another example of the extraordinary ability of her love for her children to turn into a weapon for their destruction.