I returned to my own home in Vermont with my children. I spoke to my brother, the one who was sick with HIV; I spoke to my brother, the middle one; I spoke to my mother. I never spoke to my oldest brother; there is no clear explanation for this, his story is another big chapter and he, too, can neither speak it nor write it down. My youngest brother, the sick one, had moved into the little room that had been built for him; my mother was very pleased that she had built it. He got stronger and stronger. Over the telephone my mother told me that he was very well, so well he might go to work; he found a job, but the person who had employed him ran out of money. He was better beyond anyone’s expectation, he had gained quite a bit of weight, he was staying out all night, he was drinking beer, and when I asked if there was a certainty that there was only beer in the bottle, my mother was actually surprised that a beer bottle might have anything but beer in it; but immediately I heard he was drinking beer, I thought he would not stop at beer. He was seeing a lot of girls and presumably having sex with them; there was the Guianese girl and there were other girls, but no one ever said where those others came from. He and my mother had huge quarrels and unforgivable things were said, but after the quarrels were over, they would both feel that everything said had not really been meant.
One day a woman who, when we were little girls together, was my best friend called me on the telephone to tell me that some books I had given her had been stolen and could I replace them. She was in tears. I was very touched by this, because they were books I had written and when I had given them to her she did not seem particularly pleased to have them. We speculated about who might have taken them and why. Just as she was about to hang up, I asked her about my brother and she said he was quite well, he saw his friends, he was not working, he stayed out all night sometimes; he was drinking, he was never without a bottle of beer in his hand, there was always a girl waiting for him. She said his hair had gotten very thin. She said his lips had gotten red again. When I first saw him in the hospital, lying there almost dead, his lips were scarlet red, as if layers and layers of skin had been removed and only one last layer remained, holding in place the dangerous fluid that was his blood. His face was sharp like a carving, like an image embossed on an emblem, a face full of deep suffering, beyond regrets or pleadings for a second chance. It was the face of someone who had lived in extremes, sometimes a saint, sometimes a sinner.
MY BROTHER DIED. I had expected him to, sometimes it seemed as if it would be a good thing if he were to just die. And then he did die. When he was still alive I used to try to imagine what it would be like when he was no longer alive, what the world would seem like the moment I knew he was no longer alive. But when that moment came, the moment I knew he was no longer alive, I didn’t know what to think, I didn’t know what to feel.
He had been dead for a long time. I saw him two months before he was actually dead. He was lying in his bed; his head was big, bigger than it used to be before he got sick, but that was because his body had become so small. The bed in which he lay dying I had bought for him. It was a small bed, a bed for a child. The sheets on the bed I had bought at Ames, a store in the small town in which I now live, a place he would never see. He would never see me in the place I now live, but I could see him in the place in which he was then living. He lived in death. Perhaps everyone is living in death, I actually do believe that, but usually it can’t be seen; in his case it was a death I could see. He was alive, he could speak, he still breathed in and out, he still sometimes would demand a particular kind of food and then decide that he liked it or did not like it, but he wasn’t alive in a way that I had ever seen anyone before. He was lying in his bed with the thin sheets on top of him, his eyes open, wide-open, as if they had been forced to be that way, his mouth open, as if it had been forced to be that way; he was lying in his bed, and yet he was somewhere else. When I saw him that time, the last time before he died, and he was lying in bed, his hands were invisible; they were beneath the sheets, the sheets were not moving up and down; his eyes were open and his mouth was open and his hands were not visible. And that was exactly the way he looked when the undertaker unzipped the plastic bag in which he lay when I went to see him at the undertaker’s. When I saw him, though, lying in bed, two months before I saw him at the undertaker’s, he was in his mother’s house. She is my mother, too, but I wasn’t talking to her then, and when I am not talking to her, she is someone else’s mother, not mine. I could see him through the louvered windows while I was standing on the gallery. It was at the end of one of those days, like so many I used to know when I was a child, and that I wanted to run away from: in the east the darkness was already falling down from the sky; in the west, the sun, having exhausted itself from shining with such relentlessness, was hurrying to drop below the horizon. Not a bird sings then; chickens fly into trees to roost for the night, the trees become still; no one quarrels, people’s voices are muted. It is not the usual time of day to be born or to die, it is the usual time of day to prepare to be born or to prepare to die; that was the time of day when I first saw him two months before he died. He did not die in the middle of that night.
When I was looking at him through the louvered windows, I was not thinking of myself in the sense of how it came to be that he was lying there dying and I was standing there looking at him. I was thinking of my past and how it frightened me to think that I might have continued to live in a certain way, though, I am convinced, not for very long. I would have died at about his age, thirty-three years, or I would have gone insane. And when I was looking at him through the louvered windows, I began to distance myself from him, I began to feel angry at him, I began to feel I didn’t like being so tied up with his life, the waning of it, the suffering in it. I began to feel that it would be so nice if he would just decide to die right away and get buried right away and the whole thing would be done with right away and that would be that. I entered the house and stood in the doorway of the room in which he was lying. The house had a funny smell, as if my mother no longer had time to be the immaculate housekeeper she had always been and so some terrible dirty thing had gone unnoticed and was rotting away quietly. It was only after he was dead and no longer in the house and the smell was no longer there that I knew what the smell really was, and now as I write this, I cannot find a simile for this smell, it was not a smell like any I am familiar with. I stood looking at him for a long time before he realized I was there. And then when he did, he suddenly threw the sheets away from himself, tore his pajama bottoms away from his waist, revealing his penis, and then he grabbed his penis in his hand and held it up, and his penis looked like a bruised flower that had been cut short on the stem; it was covered with sores and on the sores was a white substance, almost creamy, almost floury, a fungus. When he grabbed his penis in his hand, he suddenly pointed it at me, a sort of thrusting gesture, and he said in a voice that was full of deep panic and deep fear, “Jamaica, look at this, just look at this.” Everything about this one gesture was disorienting; what to do, what to say; to see my brother’s grown-up-man penis, and to see his penis looking like that, to see him no longer able to understand that perhaps he shouldn’t just show me—his sister—his penis, without preparing me to see his penis. I did not want to see his penis; at that moment I did not want to see any penis at all.
What I am writing now is not a journal; a journal is a daily account, an immediate account of what occurs during a certain time. For a long time after my brother died I could not write about him, I could not think about him in a purposeful way. It was really a short time between the time that he became sick and the time he died, but that time became a world. To make a world takes an eternity, and eternity is the refuge of the lost, the refuge for all things that will never be or things that have been but have lost their course and hope to recede with some grace, and even I believe this to be true, though I also know that I have no real way of measuring it.
His death was imminent and we were all anticipating it, including him, but we never
gave any thought to the fact that this was true for all of us, too: our death was imminent, only we were not anticipating it … yet. Death was the thing that was going to happen to him, and yet every time I got on an airplane to go and pay him a visit, I was quite afraid that I would never come back: the plane would crash, or in some way not at all explainable, I would never come back.
There is a photograph of my brother in a book (an album) full of photographs collected by my husband. They are family photographs and they are in this book because my husband wanted to give our daughter a snapshot view of the first five years of her life. The photograph of my brother that is in this album shows a young man, beautiful and perfect in the way of young people, for young people are always perfect and beautiful until they are not, until the moment they just are not. In this photograph his skin is smooth; his skin looks as if it were a piece of precious fabric covering a soft surface (the structure that was his face), and if this fabric were to be forcefully pressed with the ball of a finger, it would eventually return to its smooth and shiny surface, looking untouched by experience of any kind, internal or external. He was beautiful then. He did unspeakable things then; at least he could not speak of them and I could not really speak of them to him. I could name to him the things he did, but he could not name to me the things he did. He stole from his mother (our mother, she was my own mother, too, but I was only in the process of placing another distance between us, I was not in the process of saying I know nothing of her, as I am doing now), he stole from his brothers; he would have stolen from me, too, but the things he could steal from me were not available to him: my possessions were stored on a continent far away from where he lived. He lied. He stole, he lied, and when I say he did unspeakable things, just what do I mean, for surely I know I have lied and once I stole stationery from an office in which I worked. His unspeakable things were things he was unable to speak openly about. He could never say that anything in front of him was his own, or that anything in front of him came to him in a way that he did not find humiliating. He was a thief, he was not proud to say that most of what he had had come to him through stealing. In the place in which he lived when his skin was smooth and unblemished—he was really young then but beyond adolescence—he had some books on a shelf; they were school textbooks and one was a history of the West Indies, though really it was a history of the British West Indies. This book was a book he took from his school. I understood that, taking a book from school; when I was a little girl, living on that small island, I used to steal books from the library, not my school, but the library; the school that I attended had no books that I wanted to steal. I would not have wanted to steal a book about history; I stole only novels, and all the novels I stole were novels I had read, they were all written in the nineteenth century. I was not interested in history then, only so now; my brother had history books on his shelf. He was obsessed with the great thieves who had inhabited his part of the world, the great hero-thieves of English maritime history: Horatio Nelson, John Hawkins, Francis Drake. He thought that the thing called history was an account of significant triumphs over significant defeats recorded by significant people who had benefited from the significant triumphs; he thought (as do I) that this history of ours was primarily an account of theft and murder (“Dem tief, dem a dam tief”), but presented in such a way as to make the account seem inevitable and even fun: he liked the costumes of it, he liked the endings, the outcomes; he liked the people who won, even though he was among the things that had been won. But his life was real, not yet a part of history; his reality was that he was dead but still alive; his reality was that he had a disease called AIDS. And no matter what anyone says, or for that matter what anyone has discovered so far, it seems to me that to be so intimately acquainted with the organism that is the HIV virus is to be acquainted with death. We are all acquainted with death; each moment, each gesture, holds in it a set of events that can easily slide into realities that are unknown, unexpected, to the point of shock; we do not really expect these moments; they arrive and are resisted, denied, and then finally, inexorably, accepted; to have the HIV virus is to have crossed the line between life and death. On one side, there is life, and the thin shadow of death hovers over it; and on the other, there is death with a small patch of life attached to it. This latter is the life of AIDS; this was how I saw my brother as he lay in his bed dying.
* * *
I was in Miami, a city at the far southern end of North America, and ordinarily the word “Miami,” representing this city, is familiar enough so that I can say it and know what I mean, and I can say it and believe that the person hearing it knows what I mean, but when I am writing all this about my brother, suddenly this place and the thing I am about to say seem foreign, strange. I was in Miami, and if someone asked me a question in regard to my family, I would make frank replies about my family and about my mother. It must have been wonderful in Miami then, but I will never really know, I can only repeat what other people said; they said that it was wonderful in Miami and they were glad to be there, or they wanted to be there. But I myself was in Miami, and I found Miami not to be in the tropical zone that I was from, and yet not in the temperate zone where I now live; Miami was in between, but its in-betweenness did not make me long for it. I missed the place I now live in, I missed snow, I missed my own house that was surrounded by snow, I missed my children, who were asleep or just walking about in the house surrounded by snow, I missed my husband, the father of my children, and they were all in the house surrounded by snow. I wanted to go home. One midday I left Miami, and when I left, it was warm and clear and the trip from Miami to Vermont should not have taken more than eight hours, but Miami is south and the farther north I got, the more temperate the weather turned and there were snowstorms which made air travel difficult and I arrived at my home in Vermont fourteen and one-half hours after I left Miami. In Miami I had taken a walk through the Fairchild Botanical Gardens, and while there I had bought two rhododendrons from New Guinea at the gift shop. The rhododendrons were in five-gallon pots and they were very awkward to carry on airplanes and through airport terminals. Perhaps I looked like a very sensible woman carrying two large plants covered with trumpet-shaped brilliant orange blooms in the middle of an airport and in the middle of January, because everyone I met was very kind and helped me with my plants and my various other traveling paraphernalia. I was so happy to reach my home, that is, the home I have now made for myself, the home of my adult life.
My two children were asleep in my son’s bed. When I am away from home they like sleeping together. When I saw them asleep, breathing normally, their features still, they looked so beautiful, not doing anything that I felt was a danger to them or annoying to me, so that I did not have to call their name out loud, as if their name itself were a warning (“HAROLD,” “ANNIE”), or as if their name itself held regret. I stood over them, looking down at them and thinking how much I loved them and how glad I was that I had them, and I bent over and kissed them and they woke up and were glad to see me and begged me to get into bed with them and snuggle with them until they fell asleep again. I got into bed with them, meaning to stay there only until they fell asleep, but I fell asleep also; I awoke because my husband woke me up.
It was six o’clock in the morning, the winter daylight was still mostly silver, it had in it only a little bit of yellow, it had in it only a little bit of pink, I could see this as I left my son’s room, standing in the hallway and facing a window.
When my husband woke me up, he said, “Sweetie, come, come, I have to talk to you” (that is just the way he said it). In the dark of the room I could see his face; that isn’t really possible, to see something like a face in the dark of a room, but it is true all the same, I could see his face. It was an anxious face, a troubled face; on his face I could see that he was worried about something and I thought that something was himself. I said to him, “What’s the matter?” I asked him, “What’s wrong?” (and in just that way, using just those words). He would o
nly reply, “Come, come, I have to talk to you.” In the hall where I could see the silvery daylight with just a little pink and just a little yellow, he said, “Dalma just called, Devon died.” And when he said “Devon died” I thought, Oh, it’s Devon who died, not one of his relatives, not someone of his, this is not someone he has to grieve for. I was so glad about that, so glad at the thought, the feeling that this death, this look of sadness in his face, had to do with someone who was not related to him. He was not going to suffer a grief. My husband is someone I love; it is a love I had not expected or even really knew existed; I would rather bad things or unpleasant things happen to me. I can’t bear to see him suffer; in any case, he takes suffering too seriously, too hard; it is better when bad things are happening to me, then I don’t have to worry about him. And then again, I believe that I am better at handling bad things than he.
I got the children ready for school and gave them breakfast. I told them their uncle had died. They were not surprised, they had been expecting it; they would go to the funeral, they would go swimming with our friends Bud and Connie; Bud and Connie would take them to the Lobster Pot for dinner. I took the children to the bus stop, I had a nice chat with the other mothers while we waited for the bus to come, I did not tell them that my brother had died. I returned home, I called the travel agent and made travel arrangements; I sat and waited for a woman from a newspaper who wanted to ask me questions about a book I had written and had just published. This woman came and she asked me all sorts of questions about my past and my present, about the way in which I had become a writer, about the way in which my life, with its improbable beginning (at least from the way it looks to someone else now) of poverty and neglect, cruelty and humiliation, loss and deceit, had led to a sure footing in the prosperous and triumphant part of the world, leading to her, a newspaper reporter, being interested in my life. Whatever questions she asked me about anything, it was easy to be without mercy and to answer truthfully: about my mother, about the reasons for no longer wanting to associate my writing with the magazine where I had developed my skills as a writer. For the magazine I wrote for all of my writing life so far was like the place in which I had grown up; it was beautiful, an ideal of some kind, but it had been made vulgar and ugly by the incredibly stupid people who had become attracted to it. I said nothing about the death of my brother, which had actually occurred hours before (though really he had been dead for at least a year before the breath left his body), I had vowed to tell her nothing about my brother and his illness and now his death. If I had spoken to her while he was just sick and even almost dying (though he was in a state of almost dying for a long time), I would not have hesitated to tell her about my brother’s illness, to tell her of his impending death (and also to bring up the fact that all of us face impending death). I could not speak to her of his just dying. I could not make sense of it just then. His death was so surprising, even though I had been expecting it; it hung in front of me, not like a black cloud but like a block of something hard and cold and impenetrable. I spoke to her and I spoke to her, she asked me questions and she asked me questions. All the things I said to her were true, all the things I said to her were filled with meaning. The day was cold, it was the middle of January, the sun was shining. For me such a thing is a paradox: the sun is shining, yet the air is cold. And as I was talking to this woman from the newspaper who kept asking me questions and questions and whose questions I kept answering and answering, I looked out a window and I saw that an animal, a deer, had eaten up some especially unusual evergreens that my friend Dan Hinkley had sent to me from his nursery in Kingston, Washington. And the sight of the evergreens, all eaten up in a random way, not as if to satisfy a hunger but to satisfy a sense of play, suddenly made me sad, suddenly made me wish that this, my brother dying, had not happened, that I had never become involved with the people I am from again, and that I only wanted to be happy and happy and happy again, with all the emptiness and meaninglessness that such a state would entail.
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