Read My Brother for Free Online

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