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.
My mother lives with her male children, who by now are in their thirties, or rather, my mother’s male children, by now in their thirties, live with her. It is an important distinction. My mother would not subordinate herself in any way to anyone, especially not her children. She would not live with anyone; they would live with her; if she were to live with anyone, they might ask her to leave, they might throw her out after she had given them one of her famous tongue-lashings. She protects and reserves her right to verbally humiliate her children. What can be so wrong with that? She and the grown-up men children who live with her quarrel all the time. At any given moment there is a small war of words going on between her and one of them. The middle grown-up male child no longer speaks to her; it has been years since he has spoken to her in even so much as the tone of voice he would use for giving directions to someone he just met on the street, someone he has never seen before. If he is forced to speak to her, his voice is full of hatred and despair. He has told me he does not recognize the sound of his own voice when he speaks to her. He calls me up to tell me he is sorry he never sympathized with me when I told him how awful she had been to me. He says to me, Mom is evil, you know, as if he had never said it to me before, but he says it to me every time we speak, as if it is a new discovery to him.
After he was dismissed from the hospital my brother went back to my mother’s house and slept in her bed with her. He had no place to go, not even a bed of his own, and so he went to his mother’s house and slept in her bed with her. There was nothing wrong with that. It was decided that the son coming home from the hospital should move into her bed because his old house, which was behind hers, was too drafty. I could not understand this, because what kind of draft exists in a place that is hot all the time? There was another reason for him going to live with her. The oldest of her three sons had been living in the other shack behind her house, and his living quarters were really just pieces of galvanize all nailed together with one opening, which was the door. The structure that my sick brother had lived in resembled an actual house; it had three windows and the windows had working shutters, it had a door that could be bolted. When my brother went to the hospital because he was so sick, the one living in the galvanized house immediately moved into the sick boy’s place and my mother could not and would not tell him to move back to his old structure. These two brothers did not get along; I was told this, they did not get along, as if it were an exception, as if usually the people in this family got along except for those two. It was my mother who told me that they did not get along, and she gave me an example of their disagreement. The brother living in the room made of old galvanize is an electrician and he has many valuable tools, which he kept in his room; at the height of my sick brother’s drug addiction, he would go into his brother’s room and remove tools, which he would then sell. My brother the electrician, after warning his brother not to steal from them. The middle grown-up male child no longer speaks to her; it has been years since he has spoken to her in even so much as the tone of voice he would use for giving directions to someone he just met on the street, someone he has never seen before. If he is forced to speak to her, his voice is full of hatred and despair. He has told me he does not recognize the sound of his own voice when he speaks to her. He calls me up to tell me he is sorry he never sympathized with me when I told him how awful she had been to me. He says to me, Mom is evil, you know, as if he had never said it to me before, but he says it to me every time we speak, as if it is a new discovery to him.
After he was dismissed from the hospital my brother went back to my mother’s house and slept in her bed with her. He had no place to go, not even a bed of his own, and so he went to his mother’s house and slept in her bed with her. There was nothing wrong with that. It was decided that the son coming home from the hospital should move into her bed because his old house, which was behind hers, was too drafty. I could not understand this, because what kind of draft exists in a place that is hot all the time? There was another reason for him going to live with her. The oldest of her three sons had been living in the other shack behind her house, and his living quarters were really just pieces of galvanize all nailed together with one opening, which was the door. The structure that my sick brother had lived in resembled an actual house; it had three windows and the windows had working shutters, it had a door that could be bolted. When my brother went to the hospital because he was so sick, the one living in the galvanized house immediately moved into the sick boy’s place and my mother could not and would not tell him to move back to his old structure. These two brothers did not get along; I was told this, they did not get along, as if it were an exception, as if usually the people in this family got along except for those two. It was my mother who told me that they did not get along, and she gave me an example of their disagreement. The brother living in the room made of old galvanize is an electrician and he has many valuable tools, which he kept in his room; at the height of my sick brother’s drug addiction, he would go into his brother’s room and remove tools, which he would then sell. My brother the electrician, after warning his brother not to steal from him, ran a live wire around the perimeter of his room and did not tell anyone. A puppy that had been a parting present to my friend who was moving to St. Vincent ran into the live wire and was electrocuted. My mother said she was sure that one brother had not meant to kill the other, that he would not have used wires that carried current strong enough to do so.
This was the home my brother was discharged to. He went home with his mother. He had gained more weight. His temperature was normal. He had an enormous appetite. The infections in the throat, the lungs, the thrush, all of them had cleared up. He only took his daily doses of AZT and a tonic, a high-powered multivitamin, that Dr. Ramsey had prescribed for him. We spoke to each other on the telep
hone; sometimes he called me, mostly I called him, almost every day. He did not sound like his old self. His voice sounded like that of someone who has just inhaled an amount of helium, out of its normal register. He would speak to me with a pretend English accent, making fun of the way I have come to speak, I suppose, but meaning no malice, I believe, and even if he did, I don’t believe I would care; that, after all, is not serious malice. He would say, How are you, maiy deahre, and how is the home front? In his own voice he would tell me that he felt as if he could take on the world, he felt better than he had ever felt, that life looked wonderful, that he was going to change everything, how sorry he was that he had let things go like that, he had wasted his life, he was going to look for a job as soon as he was able, the doctor had said that just now he should rest and gain some more weight, but as soon as he could get a job, he wanted to settle down and start a family. He would say that again and again, he wanted his own family and as soon as he could, he would get to it. He told me of a plot of land that was bare, available, for sale; he was going to buy it and build a house there and raise a family there. Perhaps it was a flag of some kind, he was trying to tell me something, I don’t know; anyway, why should I tell him just now when he sounded so full of promise, so full of happiness, that a family of the kind he wanted, a woman bearing his own children, was not ever going to be possible? I missed him. I missed seeing him suffer. I missed feeling sorry that I could see him in his suffering, I missed seeing him in the midst of something large and hoping he would emerge from it changed for the better. I did not love him. What I felt might have been love, but I still, even now, would not call it so.
His doctor, Dr. Ramsey, called to ask if I thought he was all right, if I knew anything about the life he was leading now, if he was seeing his old friends again; and this was because on one of his visits for a checkup, he had asked one of Dr. Ramsey’s nurses to go out on a date with him, and when she mentioned his illness he denied he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS, and then when he knew that Dr. Ramsey knew of his behavior he demanded to be tested again for the HIV virus because he said he did not believe he was in a positive condition. Dr. Ramsey thought from the sound of his voice perhaps he was on drugs again. I told the doctor that I believed the sound of his voice was from being so glad to be alive. I believed that then, I believe it now. I said, He is so glad to be alive, his voice has the sound natural to someone glad to be alive. But how did I know that? It was not from personal experience. It was only from conjecture on my part. If I had been almost dead, expected to be dead and then found I was alive, I believe my voice would be suffused with the sound of happy disbelief. I imagined him sitting on my mother’s little front porch, watching the sun’s heat lose its grip on land and people, the paper-thin white clouds drift by, going one way, seldom returning thick and black with rain; the unnatural-to-a-small-island sound of car horns signaling a traffic jam, the impatience of people in a hurry to get to destinations that are never much more than a stone’s throw away. Whenever anyone passed by, he would have to call out to them a greeting regardless of whether they were familiar to him or not. He would not be able to bear the emptiness of silence, someone passing by with no knowledge of his existence, someone passing by who wants no knowledge of his existence. He was not meant to be silent. He was a brilliant boy, he was a brilliant man. Locked up inside him was someone who would have spoken to the world in an important way. I believe this. Locked up inside him was someone who would have found satisfaction speaking to the world in an important way, and that someone would not have needed to greet every passerby, that someone would not have time for every passerby, that someone would have felt there isn’t enough silence in the world. But he was not even remotely aware of such a person inside him. It is I who told him this and he agreed with me at the moment I told him this, and he said yes, and I saw that he wished what I said were really true, would just become true, wished he could, wished he knew how to make the effort and make it true. He could not. In his daydreams he became a famous singer, and women removed their clothes when they heard him sing.
* * *
He and my mother both called me to say that he had no more AZT. I panicked because I believed even one day of missing his treatment might cause a setback. If only they had told me that he would be needing more before he needed more. Why hadn’t I thought of it? I called the doctor in this country who had given me the prescription in the first place; the doctor called the pharmacy. It was a Friday afternoon, the pharmacy had no more AZT left and would not be getting any more until the following Monday morning. It suddenly dawned on me that there might be quite a few people in my little community who needed this drug. I did not know who they were. If I wanted to know it was only because I now in some way felt related to them. That Monday I got the AZT, I sent it to my brother through a private mail service, he received it, he resumed taking it; a few days without it in his system did not seem to make any difference to his physical well-being. He continued to gain strength, he continued to get well.
* * *
It had been six weeks since I had seen my brother, six weeks since the morning I left him in the hospital, shortly after he had been weighed and registered a gain of one pound from the week before. I had returned home to my family, to winter that, as it must, turns to spring. I wanted to go and see him again and I was preparing to do so when in a conversation I was having with my son I mentioned my mother. I said, My mother … but before I could get any further, my son said, Your mother, I didn’t even know you had a mother. He knew very well I had a mother, he had even met her. The time when she had come to visit me and I had a nervous breakdown after she left, he was two years old. Perhaps he was too young to remember that he did not like her, only for the reason that he did not like anyone for whom I had powerful feelings; he might have felt that any powerful feelings I had for anyone else meant less powerful feelings left for him. The way he said it, though, alerted me to something. He had not known or imagined that I, his own mother, could have in her life a someone about whom I felt the same way he felt about me. When he looks at me he does not see a person, he sees the sky blotted out, the horizon, too; there is no B.C.E. or C.E., there is no present or future, there is no time at all; he sees his needs fulfilled, his needs unfilled, he sees satisfaction and disappointments, I am for him a source of pleasure and pain, he shall wish me dead many times, and when I finally do die, a large emptiness that can never be filled up will be with him for the rest of his own life; he loves me now and hates me now, too, though this last he does not yet fully understand. This state of profound contradiction, loving me and hating me, is what will be for the rest of his life, if I am a good mother to him. This is the best that it can be. If I should fail him—and I very well might, the prime example I have is not a good one—he will experience something everlastingly bitter and awful; I know this, the taste of this awfulness, this bitterness, is in my mouth every day.
Feeling, then, that my son—my children—needed to see me as vulnerable to someone as they are to me, I took them with me on the next visit I made to see my brother, which meant being in the company of my mother. They loved her; my children loved my mother, especially my daughter. My daughter asked her to come and eat with us, to come swimming with us, to come and sleep with us. She wanted to see her grandmother all the time. My son felt the same way, except he complained that he didn’t like the way my mother pinched his cheek when she asked him if he was really her little grandson. They ate whatever she cooked for them. I would say to her, They have no appetite, they never eat anything, and she would say they ate everything she had put on their plate. This was true. It amazed me the amount of food they ate when my mother cooked for them. My mother, looking at my children, told me that they loved her (“Dem lub me. Dem lub me a lot, you know”), and there was something strange in this, as if in time they would come to love her more than they loved me, and there was something boastful in it, as if to say that everyone eventually loves her, as if to say that anyone who
loves me will love her, only more so. I told her only that this was true, that they did love her; I did not tell her that loving your grandmother a lot was to be expected, that it was something common, like standing in the open anywhere in the world and looking up and seeing the sky. My brother when he saw my children asked if I had brought them to see him before he died (“Yu bring dem fo’ see me before me dead”). He said it sharply, he said it directly, he actually looked me in the face. I thought he might laugh, I thought he might cry. I did not answer. I did not say that had not crossed my mind.
My brother looked well, very very well. He said he felt well, very very well. I thought, He may be dying, but he’s not dying as rapidly as he was before; I may be dying much more quickly than he; I could cross the street and a car could run over me; he may outlive us all; anything could happen. I wanted then to call some of the people who had been kind to him and helped him when he was sick. I called a man who would come to the house and give my mother a ride to the hospital for her second visit of the day every day. This was extremely kind, the sun would be at its hottest then. I thanked some other people. I called a woman, a social worker, who counseled families in which a member was HIV-positive. When my brother first took sick, someone had told me to get in touch with her. When my brother first met her, he denied to her that he was HIV-positive. It was after many visits with her that he began to say of himself that he was infected with the HIV virus, or that he had AIDS, though he still called it “the chupidness.” For him to face honestly and straightforwardly his affliction was thought to be a good thing, because it meant then that he might somehow begin to understand what was happening to him and try to cope with this stage of his life and so live as long as possible. When my brother asked me if I had brought my children to see him before he died, that to me was evidence that the work she had done with him was a success. And so I called and thanked her. I asked her how she thought he was doing. She said he looked well, but she did not like the tonic he took because the main ingredient in it was alcohol, she had asked him not to take it, he did not need it, Dr. Ramsey had given him vitamins in tablet form that were more than adequate; he took this tonic not in the measured, prescribed amount but from the bottle itself. She was annoyed, I could tell. I said I was sorry. She said there was more. She was gloomy now, I could tell. She had come to visit my brother one day, and a girl from Guiana was there (“a Guianese girl”: she was expressing prejudice here, life in Antigua is better than life in Guiana; people will come from Guiana to do the work that Antiguan people like my brother will no longer do). After the girl left, she got answers to questions she had not really meant to ask; she had not come prepared to ask these questions, it occurred to her to mention them only because she saw the girl. My brother had been having unprotected sex with this woman and he had not told her that he was infected with the HIV virus. He did not tell her, because if he told her he thought she might not want to have sex with him at all. The social worker then went home immediately and brought him back a box of one hundred condoms. But my brother told her that he could not live without sex, that if he went without sex for too long he began to feel funny. He was unmoved when she asked him if he would like to have that done to him, someone infected with the HIV virus and knowing it having sex with him without telling him; perhaps he thought that is exactly what had happened to him. He was unmoved when she asked him if he would like someone to treat his sister (me) the way he had just treated that woman (“What if that had been your sister?”). He agreed to use the condoms in the future when she told him that HIV infection was dose-related, that is, the more of the virus you get, the more virus you have received, the quicker it kills you; if he wasn’t telling people he was HIV-infected, perhaps they were not telling him if they were infected also; using a condom was not only to protect other people from him, it was also to protect himself from other people.
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