My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
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    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.
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    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