My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online Page A

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 telephone; 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