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 only 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.

I was walking up and down the floor of my kitchen, the floor was pine, a type of wood that reminded me of my father, who was a carpenter. This man was my brother’s real father and not really my own, my father was someone else I did not know, I knew only this man and to me he was my father. He was a man I loved and had known very well, better than his own children knew him (my brother who was dead, my brother who was a merchant in the market on Saturdays, my brother who had almost killed our mother when he threw her to the ground while trying to prevent her from throwing stones at him). My brother’s coffin was made of that kind of wood, pine; my other brother, the one who is a merchant in the market on Saturdays, had picked it out. It cost the least of all the kinds of coffins that were on sale at the undertaker’s, I paid for it with traveler’s checks. As a child I was afraid of the undertaker, Mr. Straffee; as a child, all the furniture I came in contact with was made of this wood, pine: the chair that I sat on at home, the floor that I walked on at home, the bed I slept in, the table on which my mother would place the meal I ate in the middle of a schoolday, my desk at school, the chair I sat on behind the desk at school—all of it was made from this wood, pine. The floor on which I stood that morning that my brother had died was cold and the planks had pulled away a little from each other.

I called all the doctors who had prescribed medicines for my brother to tell them he had died. Their names were Scattergood, Hart, and Pillemer. Only when I had called them, standing by the telephone, did their names stand out to me, as if their names had drawn me to them all along. They said how sorry they were to hear of it. I called the pharmacist to tell him that my brother had died. His name was Ed. He had been very kind and sympathetic, often trusting that I would pay him the hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars’ worth of medicine that I had charged; no matter how much I owed him, he always gave me the medicines that had been prescribed to ease my brother’s suffering and prolong his life. I went to the grocery store in the little village to buy something, and when I told Pete, the grocer, that my brother had died, he told me how sorry he was and he said that he was sure that his wife, Debby, would be sorry to hear it, too. Everyone I told that my brother had just died said how sorry they were, they would say this, “I’m sorry,” and those two words became so interesting to hear: everyone tried to say them with an emphasis that they hoped would convey the sincerity of their feelings; they really were sorry that this person they did not know was dead, that this person they would not have liked at all (I knew this, for they would have found him charming, he was so good-looking, he could remember to have good manners when it suited him, when he wanted to get something, but really in the end he would have found their devotion to the routine, the ordinariness of pure, hard work, devoid of satisfaction, yet he would not have quarreled with them, he would only have done everything he knew how to accentuate to them the futility, the emptiness of the thing called life, the thing called living—they would not have liked him). But these words, “I’m sorry,” which sometimes are said with a real depth of feeling, with true sincerity, sometimes just out of politeness, are such a good thing to hear if you are in need of hearing them, and just then I was in need of hearing those words, “I’m sorry,” “I am so sorry.” I did not love my brother, I did not like my brother, I was only so sorry that he had died, I was comforted to hear other people say that they were sorry that he had died. And I was full of admiration for the people who could say this: “I’m sorry,” for they said it with such ease, they said it as if they were only breathing.

When I saw him for the last time still alive, though he looked like someone who had been dead for a long time and whose body had been neglected, left to rot—when I had last seen him and he was still alive, I had quarreled with him. I had gone to see him one weekend, leaving my family to spend the Thanksgiving holiday by themselves. My brother, the one who is a merchant on Saturdays in the market, had called to say Devon was not doing very well, Devon was sinking, Devon was going down. That was just the way he said it: not doing very well, sinking, going down. For the sickeningly floriferous thrush growing in his throat, a doctor had prescribed something; the pharmacist placed thirty tablets of it into a bottle so small I could hide it in the palm of my hand and the bottle could not be detected; the bottle of that medicine cost so much that I could not pay for it then; nor could I pay for the other medicines I needed, medicines for pain, not medicines to ease pain but medicines to make you not feel anything at all. I could not pay for any of it with cash, I could pay for it only with credit; and in that way, though not solely in that way, his illness and death reminded me again and again of my childhood: this living with credit, this living with the hope that money will come reminded me of going to a grocer whose name was Richards, not the one who was a devout Christian whom later we went to, for the grocers named Richards, whether they had religious conviction or not, charged us too much anyway and then forced us to pay our debts no matter how unable my parents were to do so; my parents had more children than they could afford to feed, but how were they to know how much food or disease, or anything in general, would cost, the future never being now; only it actually comes, the future, later.

And when I saw my brother for the last time, alive, in that way he was being alive (dead really, but still breathing, his chest moving up and down, his heart beating like something, beating like something, but what, but what, there was no metaphor, his heart was beating like his own heart, only it was beating barely), I was so tired of him being in this state, not alive, not dead, but constantly with his demands, in want, constantly with his necessities, weighing on my sympathy, at times preying on my sympathy, whichever way it fell, I was sick of him and wanted him to go away, and I didn’t care if he got better and I didn’t care if he died. That was just the way I felt, that was the only thing I felt just at that moment when he would not die and when he would not live; I only wanted him to do one or the other and then leave me alone.

I did not kiss him goodbye when I was returning home to my family, I did not give him a goodbye hug. I said to him at the end of my visit (four days), Goodbye, and he said, So this is it, no hug no nothing? (and he said it in that way, in conventional English, not in the English that instantly reveals the humiliation of history, the humiliations of the past not remade into art); and I said, Yes, this is it, goodbye, and perhaps I will see you again, and I was aware that when I said it—perhaps I will see you again—I was assuming something that was not true at all: seeing him again was left to me, seeing him again was something that I could decide. I did not feel strong, I felt anger, my anger was everything to me, and in my anger lay many things, mostly made up of feelings I could not understand, feelings I might not ever understand, feelings that everyone who knows me understands with an understanding that I will never know, or that someone who has never met me at all would understand as if they had made up my feelings themselves.

Two months before I saw him alive for the last time, there had been a big hurricane, and then weeks later a smaller one. The first one raged over the island for thirty-six hours and caused the usual destruction that goes with a hurricane, but what people talked about afterward was the sound of the wind and the rain; it sounded as if someone were being killed and the someone being killed was screaming “Murder! Murder!” My brother could only lie in his bed. He heard that sound that seemed to be someone saying “Murder! Murder!” He must have heard the sound of large trees crashing into houses, water flooding the streets, the poles holding up the wires that carried electricity splitting, then hitting the ground. When the poles that held the wires carrying electricity hit the ground, the house in which my brother lay, his mother’s house, our mother’s house, became dark and then filled with a light that had been absent for many years; for my mother got out the old kerosene lamps and lighted them. The light of the kerosene lamp was the only light I knew at night when I was a child.

Everyone inside the house was frightened; they could hear the disaster of the hurricane affecting other people in a dramatic way: dwellings being ripped apart, children crying, people calling in panic, in fear, certainly not in joy, certainly not in welcome. In that room, inside that house, my brother lay still, while outside it was not still at all, and what did he say, what did he think, what did he feel? He felt nothing, he said, he heard the noise of the wind and the rain, he did not hear the people; the light from the kerosene lamp only made him wonder (“De noise bad, man, but me no pay it no mind; dem people, dem people, me a warn you, deh no good, deh no good; de light you know, ’e like dem old-time days”). And in that moment (and by moment I mean a length of time that does not correspond to a scientific definition, and by moment again, I do not mean just a figure of speech) I felt (and perhaps incorrectly, but all the same these are my thoughts on his dying and on his life—and that is one of the reasons to outlive all the people who can have anything to say about you, not letting them have the last word) that I understood him again—nothing new, an old insight, this one—that he was a dreamer, that he liked events best when he could be in them but not have them ask anything of him, that he could observe and have the sensation of something, but while doing so he must not be expected to save himself or anyone else. I remembered then being with him for the first time after twenty years, and lying on his bed in his old shack of a house, the little one-room house that was the house I had grown up in; it had seemed so big to me when I was a child, I lived in it with my mother (the woman who later also became his mother) and my father (the man who really was his father and really was not mine), and I was very happy in it when I was a small child, and then I was very unhappy in that house when I was growing out of my childhood, and my unhappiness in that house coincided with his birth and the birth of the two other boys (my brothers and his brothers) who were born just before him; and so that time (1986 in January) when I saw him again for the first time after twenty years, I was lying in his bed and he was sitting in the doorway speaking to a friend of his, they were planning a career, or something like a career in Dub music, and they were both smoking marijuana, which they did not call marijuana; they called it the Weed, as if that name, the Weed, made it something harmless, something not to be taken seriously. They laughed at me when I told them not to smoke so much marijuana, and then they started to smoke cocaine. And later, as my brother lay dying in his mother’s house, I ran into this boy, his friend, as I was visiting my other brother who sells things at the market, whom I was helping sell things in the market, and this boy, my dying brother’s old friend, came up to us to buy some soda, and he had with him a woman and a child, not his wife, just the mother of his child. The three of them were together and they were a family and they looked so very nice, like a picture of a family, healthy and prosperous and attractive, and also safe. This old friend of my brother’s did not recognize me, and so I reminded him of how I knew him, and even so, he didn’t ask after my brother, and even when I told him in a quite frank way about my brother’s condition, it didn’t seem to interest him at all, and I urged him to visit his old friend and he said he would, but he never did, he never did at all.

When I was lying on his bed that time in 1986, I was looking up at the ceiling; the little house was then old, or at least it looked old; the beams in the roof were rotting, but in a dry way, as if the substance of the wood was slowly being drawn out of it, and so the texture of the wood began to look like material for a sweater or a nightgown, not something as substantial as wood, not something that might offer shelter to many human beings. Looking up at the roof then, rotting in that drying-out way, did not suggest anything to me, certainly not that the present occupant of the house, my brother, might one day come to resemble the process of the decaying house, evaporating slowly, drying out slowly, dying and living, and in living looking as if he had died a very long time ago, a mummy preserved by some process lost in antiquity that can only be guessed at by archaeologists.

As I lay there I could hear our mother busy outside. In a climate like ours we live outside. When I was a child and my mother was trying to teach me European table manners, this was done inside, with the three of us—my mother, my father, and me—sitting at a table that he, my father (that man I knew so well, better than his own children—and that was how I came to know him so well, I was not really his child) had made, they both approving of the way I managed knife and fork and food, and my mouth all properly arranged. All things foreign were done inside, all things familiar and important were done outside; and this was true even of sleep, for though we fell asleep inside the house, as soon as the eyes were closed and sleep came on, no one stayed inside, all dreams, or so it seemed to me, took place outside; and in any case, as soon as we woke up, the first thing was to observe the outside of our house to make sure it had stayed the same as when we last saw it the night before. But at that moment, again in 1986, when I was lying inside the house in which my brother was living, my mother was outside talking to herself, or to a chicken that got in her way, or to the cats she had adopted which were just recovering from fish poisoning, as was my mother, but the cats were lagging in their recovery. Our mother—and sometimes I think of her as my mother only, and then sometimes she is the mother of my brothers also, and when she’s our mother, she’s another entity altogether—had recovered almost at the same moment she became sick from eating some fish, grouper, that must have fed on something poisonous in the sea and had sickened everyone and everything that had eaten it. A dog got in her way and she cursed him; my brother’s friend got in her way, she cursed him and he laughed; she cursed my brother and he laughed. I did not get in her way, I was inside on the bed lying down, but in any case, I no longer got in her way, I had removed myself from getting in her way, I was in a position in my own life that did not allow for getting in my mother’s way, she could not curse me, I no longer needed her. Even so, I still ate the food she cooked, and that was what she was busy outside doing then: cooking some food for me. She was a very good cook; I did not like her cooking when I was a child, but when I was lying in my brother’s bed I loved all the food she cooked, all the food I would not eat as a child: fungi, saltfish with antroba (eggplant), breadfruit, doukona. I longed for these foods and was so glad to have them cooked for me, and not just cooked for me but cooked for me by her. It was while my brother was ill and I began to visit him (I did not take care of him, I only visited him and took him medicines, his mother took care of him) that I decided not to eat any food she cooked for me, or accept any food she offered me at all. It was not a deliberate decision, it was not done in anger. My brother, the one who sells food in the market, the one who had stopped speaking to my mother even though he lived in the same house as she, cooked his own food and would not let her cook anything for him and would not eat anything she cooked no matter how hungry he was. He did not like his mother anymore, he did not love his mother anymore. He called her Mrs. Drew, the name that ordinary people called her, just that, Mrs. Drew; he called her only, used her name only when he could not avoid it, when to address her without speaking her name would cause attention to be drawn to himself (someone might wonder, Why does he not speak to his mother directly?). My brother who was dying (and he was dying; there were times when he seemed sick, just sick, but mostly he was just dying), he too before he got sick called her only Mrs. Drew, but as the life of his death overwhelmed him, he came to call her Mother, and then only Muds. “Muds,” he would say, “Muds.” At that point in his life, that moment in 1986 when I was lying on his bed, looking up at the beams of his ceiling that would eventually remind me of his dry, rotting, shriveling body, he too no longer ate the food she cooked; this was part of a separation he wished to make between himself and his family. It was at this time that he proclaimed himself a Rastafarian and spoke constantly of Jah. The impulse was a good one, if only he could have seen his way to simply moving away from her to another planet, though perhaps even that might not have been far enough away.

And so I stopped eating my mother’s food, inspired by the acts of two of my three brothers, who were much younger than I (by eleven and thirteen years). In my case, my case of not eating the food my mother provided for me, this act was full of something, I do not know what, but this occurred to me long after I was in the midst of doing it: that just as I was deciding not to eat my mother’s food anymore, and thinking (and feeling) that this decision was really a decision to rid myself of a profoundly childish attachment to her, I was only reliving a memory, for when I was a child I would not eat the food my mother cooked. When I was a very small child, I would eat food only if she chewed it first; then I must have outgrown that, because I remember the difficulty I had with eating was in eating anything she cooked at all. And so not eating food my mother cooked for me as a sign of distancing myself from her was a form of behavior I had used a long time ago, when I felt most close to and dependent on her.

When my father died (this man who was not my real father; my real father eventually died also, but I did not know him and his life and death do not at all concern me, except when I am visiting the doctor and my medical history becomes of interest), I had been living away from my family for ten years. I learned of his death three months after he had died and been buried. My mother and I were in one of our periods of not speaking to each other, not on the telephone, not in letters. In the world I lived in then, my old family was dead to me. I did not speak of them, I spoke of my mother, but only to describe the terrible feelings I had toward her, the terrible feelings she had toward me, in tones of awe, as if they were exciting, all our feelings, as if ours had been a great love affair, something that was partly imaginary, something that was partly a fact; but the parts that were imaginary and the parts that were only facts were all true. She did not like me, I did not like her; I believe she wanted me dead, though not actually; I believe I wanted her dead, though not really. When my father died and she wrote to tell me three months later, I could not have known that such a thing, the death of this man, would make me feel as if I could not be moved from the place I was in when I read of his death. I had received the letter just before the onset of the Christmas season, and it made a time when I was always unhappy even more so. I had many friends, but they were not my family, they were only my friends; they had their own families, I was not their family. I wept. I did not think I should die, too, not consciously, not unconsciously.

In the letter telling me that my father (that is, the man who was not really my father but whom I thought of as my father, and the man who had filled that role in my life) had died, my mother said that his death had left them impoverished, that she had been unable to pay for his burial, and only the charitable gifts of others had allowed him to have an ordinary burial, not the extraordinary burial of a pauper, with its anonymous grave and which no proper mourners attend. The letter was not designed to make me feel guilty. My mother did not know of such a concept, guilt outside a court of law, feelings of guilt resulting from accusations made among ordinary people in their lives as lived day to day; she only knew of guilt as it existed in a court of law, with its formality of accusation and deliberation and then judgment. To her, she had simply described the reality of her situation, but I felt condemned because I had so removed myself from my family that their suffering had gone unnoticed by me, and even as I wept over my father’s death, I would not have done much to prevent it, and even as I wept over my father’s death and my mother’s description of emotional pain and financial deprivation, I would not do a thing to alleviate it. It was ten years after I left my home that he died, it was ten years after he died before I saw my home again, and among the first things I wanted to do was to see the place in the graveyard where he was buried. But no one wanted to take me there; my mother said that since they had not bought the plot, most likely by then someone else was buried in it, for a plot was reused if it had not been bought by the family of the dead within seven years’ time. The grave had never had a tombstone; no one in his family had visited his grave since the day of his funeral.

And so one day during the time when my brother was dying, I insisted that my mother and I pay a visit to the cemetery in which my father had been buried; I had the sentimental notion that perhaps my brother could be buried nearby, as near as possible to his own father. We passed through the door of that Dead House, she and I together, and as we did so, my own complicated and contradictory feelings about the dead came up and lay on the ground before my feet, and each step I took forward they moved forward, too, like a form of shadowing; all my feelings about the dead, determinedly unresolved and beyond me to resolve, lay at my feet, moving forward when I moved forward, again like a form of shadowing. The dead never die, and I now say this—the dead never die—as if it were new, as if no one had ever noticed this before: but death is like that (I can see); it happens every day, but when you see mourners, they behave as if it were so new, this event, dying—someone you love dies—it has never happened before; it is so unexpected, so unfair, unique to you. The dead never die, let me just say it again.

She and I, I and my mother, walked through the graveyard looking for my father’s, her husband’s, grave, the place he had been buried, the plot, but she could not remember where it might have been. It was not in the place where Anglicans are buried, or the place where Catholics are buried, or the place where Moravians are buried; it might have been in the place where Methodists are buried, for when he was born he had been christened a Methodist, but when he died he was no longer a practicing Methodist (he was no longer a practicing anything, really, by the time he died), and because my mother had no money to pay for a burial, the Methodist minister would not bury him for free. My mother and I walked up and down in the graveyard looking for his grave; she thought it might be near a tree, she remembered a tree, but there were many trees in the graveyard; she stood at many angles trying to remember where it might be, what she could see the moment his coffin was being lowered into the ground, but she could not remember. She did know that he was buried in the part of the cemetery reserved for people who were not Anglicans, not Methodists, not Moravians, not Catholics, just people who belonged to the other Christian sects, only she did not know where. She was wearing a blue skirt, a blue that is the color of seawater, Caribbean seawater when it is seen from far away; I cannot remember the color of her blouse, and this must be why: as we were walking about, going to and fro, looking down at the ground, we could hear lizards scurrying around in the dry brush that surrounded us; the graveyard looked like everything else in a place like that, as soon as you turn your back, everything will collapse into a state of dry decay; she and I stopped walking and we were just standing still when suddenly a lizard came over to my mother and leaped up the front of her skirt and started climbing as if it were bent on scaling all the way up her front. She did not shriek and run away, as I would have done if this had happened to me; instead, she stood there and shook the lizard off her, not in a calm way, not in a frenzy, not with fear, just in her way, she shook the lizard off. As she shook the lizard off, she said that she hoped it wasn’t one of those people, meaning the dead, come to tell her something that would make her want to join them (“Eh-eh, me ah wahrn you, dem people no get me, you know”), and she said this with a laugh. It all happened so quickly that I did not have time to shriek and run away, which is what I feel I want to do each time I remember this; I was not full of calm, I was not full of frenzy or full of fear; I am only all of these things at once each time I remember this.

It was on this visit that I began to speak of my mother in the old way, the way I did before I had written of my life with her, in a voice of awe, as if I, even I, could not believe the things I was saying, could not believe I really knew such a person. When I told my husband about the lizard, he said, “Really?” and he smiled as he said it, and I wondered if I seemed to be telling a tale, like a child in books I used to read when I was a child, or like a child in some of the books I now read to my own children. To “Really?” I would reply, “Yes, yes, really!” This, too, did happen: inside the house, my brother was slowly evaporating; outside, everything was itself, not orderly, not disorderly, just itself. I was watching my mother do something ordinary, scale some fish under a tree, but then I noticed that the tree, which used to be a soursop tree, was no longer itself; all that remained of it was its charred trunk. In my now privileged North American way (my voice full of pity at the thought of any kind of destruction, as long as my great desires do not go unmet in any way), I asked my mother what had happened to the tree, and she, without paying any real attention to me, told me that the tree had become a nuisance to her and so she had set fire to it and burned it down. And it is in this way that the tree became a nuisance to her: My mother had gone to visit some of her remaining relatives in Dominica, the ones who were not dead and were still speaking to her. While there, she ate a passion fruit and its flavor so pleased her that she pocketed its seeds, and when she returned to Antigua, she planted them and they grew with such vigor that they outgrew their first support, a trellis made of a bedstead and corrugated galvanize, and then leaped up into the soursop tree, which grew weak from this burden. The weakened soursop tree then became attractive to a colony of parasitic insects, and while living in the soursop tree the parasitic insects prospered and multiplied; this was not surprising at all, it was predictable. The parasitic insects, in their comfort and prosperity, expanded and began to infest the house. My mother tried to contain them with insecticides (imported from North America), insecticides with ingredients so toxic they are unavailable to consumers in North America. The parasitic insects could not be contained, they could not be eradicated, and that was what my mother wanted, that the parasitic insects should be eradicated. Her impulse is not unheard-of, the desire to eradicate all the things that are an annoyance, all the things that interfere with the smooth running of your day, a day which should produce for you a feeling of complete satisfaction, a kind of happiness even; such a desire appears quite normal, it even has historical precedence. The parasitic insects would not go away, and so one day she doused their source, the soursop tree, with kerosene and set it alight. The soursop tree burned; its parasitic partner, the passion-fruit vine, burned also. I was not there to witness this inferno, the burning of tree and vine and parasitic insects. But I was plunged into despair, for I recognized again that the powerful sense my mother has of herself is not something I had imagined and I was grateful that only a soursop tree, a passion-fruit vine, and some insects had gotten in its path. It’s possible that in another kind of circumstance the shape of the world might have been altered by her presence. But this woman, my mother, had only four people to make into human beings.

I did not see the soursop tree and its parasites (passion fruit, insects) perish in the blaze my mother caused; I could only imagine it. Much time after it had occurred, a lone seedling of a passion fruit sprang up just outside the gate that separated my mother’s house from the street. It grew to about eighteen inches tall, it lasted at just that height for a long time; after the hurricane occurred and when I saw my brother for the last time, I noticed that the passion fruit no longer existed. So much was occurring at the time I noticed this, the absence of the passion fruit’s existence, that I could only notice it, not attach any significance to it, but there is significance to it all the same. And from the place I could look down at the stunted passion fruit—for it was that, stunted, unable to go on, unable to go back, it could not yet die—I could no longer see the soursop tree, I could no longer see the remains of its charred trunk, only the blue sky above it. I could only imagine it below that blue sky, an innocent sky, a sky that looked as if nothing important had ever taken place beneath it. But a glance away from the charred soursop trunk is where my mother’s old stone heap used to be, and it was in this place that once my brother’s and my life intersected, and this now has a meaning only because my own life can make it have one. At that moment in my mother’s life, when her youngest child, my brother who was dying, was born, my mother’s life (a life she might have had in mind, or a life that had become a nightmare; how could I, how can I know) collapsed (I could feel that then, I can see it now). Her husband (the man who was not really my own father, my brother’s real father) was old and sickly and they could not properly support the family they had made. I was always being asked to forgo something or other that had previously occupied my leisure time, and then something or other that was essential (my schooling), to take care of these small children who were not mine. At thirteen, at fourteen, at fifteen, I did not like this, I did not like my mother’s other children, I did not even like my mother then; I liked books, I liked reading books, I did not like anything else as much as I liked reading a book, a book of any kind. My youngest brother was two years old when one day he was left in my charge, my mother placed him in my care while she ran errands; perhaps I knew what these errands were, but I no longer do, I cannot remember what it was she had to do and so left me alone to care for him. Mr. Drew, our father (though his father, not really mine), was not at home. But I liked reading a book much more than I liked looking after him (and even now I like reading a book more than I like looking after my own children, but looking after my own children is something I cannot, describe in terms of liking or anything else), and even then I would have said that I loved books but did not love him at all, only that I loved him because I was supposed to and what else could I do. All day I was left to look after him, and all day, instead of doing so, I read a book, a book whose title and plot or anything else about it I cannot remember just now. The day must have passed in the same rhythm as the pace with which I turned the pages (and I recognize this way of phrasing this event as romantic, even literary, for the day must have passed with its own usualness and did not care about me in particular or in general), and so when I finished reading the book I realized the day was ending and my mother would soon return home. Between my coming to the end of the book and the time my mother should return home there were not many minutes remaining, only minutes were left for the chores that should have taken me an entire day to complete. I did the things I thought my mother would notice immediately; changing my brother’s diaper was not among them. This was the first thing my mother noticed, and only now I can say (because I can see) “Of course.” My brother, the one who was dying, who has died, who while dying could not take himself to the bathroom and freely control his bowel movements, then as a little boy, two years old, wore diapers and needed to have someone change them from time to time when they grew soiled. That day (and I cannot remember if it was a Monday, a Tuesday, or a Wednesday, but I do know with certainty that it was not a Saturday or a Sunday) when I had been reading instead of taking care of him, I did not notice that in his diaper was a deposit of my brother’s stool, and by the time my mother returned from her errands—and she did notice it—the deposit of stool had hardened and taken the shape of a measure of weight, something used in a grocery store or in the fish market or the meat market or the market where only ground provisions are sold; it was the size of that measure signifying a pound. And in it, this picture of my brother’s hardened stool, a memory, a moment of my own life is frozen; for his diaper sagged with a weight that was not gold but its opposite, a weight whose value would not bring us good fortune, a weight that only emphasized our family’s despair: our fortunes, our prospects were not more than the contents of my brother’s diaper, and the contents were only shit. When my mother saw his unchanged diaper, it was the realization of this that released in her a fury toward me, a fury so fierce that I believed (and this was then, but even now many years later I am not convinced otherwise) that she wanted me dead, though not in a way that would lead to the complications of taking in my actual existence and then its erasure, for she was my mother, my own real mother, and my erasure at her own hands would have cost her something then; my erasure now, my absence now, my permanent absence now, my death now, before her own, would make her feel regal, triumphant that she had outlived all her inferiors: her inferiors are her offspring. She mourns beautifully, she is admirable in mourning; if I were ever to be in mourning, this is the model, the example, I would imitate. At that stage of my life I was fifteen, my brother was two years old—I was unable to help her make sense of her life. The man she had married was sick and could not really build houses anymore, he could not really make furniture anymore; she might have loved him for a moment, she might have loved him for many moments, I never knew, but there was a child almost two years old, there was a child almost four years old, there was a child almost six years old. These were all his children. I was not his child, I was not a part of the real debacle of her life, and then again, worst of all, I could not help her out of it. I insisted on reading books. In a fit of anger that I can remember so well, as if it had been a natural disaster, as if it had been a hurricane or an erupting volcano, or just simply the end of the world, my mother found my books, all the books that I had read, some of them books I had bought, though with money I had stolen, some of them books I had simply stolen, for once I read a book, no matter its literary quality I could not part with it. (I then had no sense of literary quality, literary quality being a luxury, luxury being absent from my existence unless I saw an illustration of what this might be on a tin of cheap powder imported from England, and this picture of luxury only demonstrated what it might look like if one did not have to work at all, and so luxury was presented as contempt for working and any association with the dullness of the everyday.) A cauldron of words, even a world perhaps, may have passed, but not between us, though by then it would have been only one way, for I could make no response. But there was a moment when in a fury at me for not taking care of her mistakes (my brother with the lump of shit in his diapers, his father who was sick and could not properly support his family, who even when well had made a family that he could not properly support, her mistake in marrying a man so lacking, so lacking) she looked in every crevice of our yard, under our house, under my bed (for I did have such a thing and this was unusual, that in our family, poor, lacking a tradition of individual privacy and whether that is a good thing, whether all human beings should aspire to such a thing, privacy, their thoughts known only to them, to be debated and mulled over only by them, I do not know), and in all those places she found my books, the things that had come between me and the smooth flow of her life, her many children that she could not support, that she and her husband (the man not my own father) could not support, and in this fury, which she was conscious of then but cannot now remember, but which to her regret I can, she gathered all the books of mine she could find, and placing them on her stone heap (the one on which she bleached out the stains and smudges that had, in the ordinariness of life, appeared on our white clothes), she doused them with kerosene (oil from the kerosene lamp by the light of which I used to strain my eyes reading some of the books that I was about to lose) and then set fire to them, What I felt when this happened, the exact moment of the burning of my books, what I felt after this happened, the burning of my books, immediately after it happened, shortly after it happened, long after it happened, I do not know, I cannot now remember. In fact, I did not even remember that it happened at all, it had no place in the many horrible events that I could recite to friends, or the many horrible events that shaped and gave life to the thing I was to become, a writer. This event, my mother burning my books, the only thing I owned in my then-emerging life, fell into that commonplace of a cliché, the repressed memory, and there it would have remained forever if one day, while paying me a visit, while staying with me in my home, a place whose existence seemed especially miraculous—her presence only served to underline this—she had not said to a friend that if it were not for her vigilance, I would have ended up not in the home and situation that I now occupied but instead with ten children by ten different men. And she had a story to illustrate this fact: apparently, when I was about the age at which my brothers’ existence—all of them—became also my responsibility (even though they were not my children, I had nothing to do with them being in the world), a boy named Lindsay used to come to our house and ask if he could borrow some of my books. This boy only pretended to love books (my mother knew this instinctively then, and she knew of this with certainty at the time she came to visit me); what she believed he wanted was to seduce me and eventually become one of the ten fathers of the ten children I would have had. One day, she said, when she grew tired of his ruse, she said to him that I had no books, that I was not a library, didn’t he know. The person to whom my mother had told this story only repeated it to me when she thought my judgment of my mother had grown too harsh, had only repeated it to me to demonstrate that my mother had done the best she could and was only acting in this way to prevent me from experiencing a harsh life, to make it possible for me to have the life I had when my mother was then visiting me. I had forgotten the burning of my books, I remembered it when my friend told me the things my mother had said. And then this detail: the boy’s name, Lindsay, just this boy, his name, his authentic interest in books, an interest I shared with him, and then his absence, though at the time of his sudden absence I did not note it, I did not miss it, anyway I do not remember doing so. And then so many years later, after the burning of my books and the events that led up to it, and my mother’s visit in which the powerful revelation occurred, long after all this, when my brother, the one I had neglected when he was left in my charge, the one who was dying of AIDS, was hospitalized because he was almost dying before he really died, lying in the hospital room where my brother first lay when he was diagnosed with this disease, was a man named Lindsay, and when I went to visit him, this Lindsay, for I had to, no one else did, he was being treated with the same neglect and slight and fear as my brother had been by the staff of the hospital. He looked familiar, he looked like that same boy who used to come and ask me for my books, but I could not really tell if it was he or if I just wanted it to be he, so that all these events in my life would come together: my brother dying, the memory of my books being burned because I had neglected my brother who was dying when he was a small child, a boy named Lindsay who might have been one of the fathers of my numerous children, the what really happened, the what might have really happened, and how it led to what was actually happening. And then again, and then again.

*   *   *

This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don’t like at all and would like to avoid. It’s not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it’s not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can’t go on and on, and if they can’t go on and on, then they must go, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you can survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don’t want to go with them, you only don’t want them to go.

On that last visit that I made to see my brother, the visit where I quarreled with him (not him with me) and I did not kiss or hug him goodbye, and even told him that I did not want to kiss or hug him and did not tell him that I loved him (and he did not say that he loved me, something he had said many times before), I spent one day trying to find Dr. Prince Ramsey. My brother was in great pain. A stream of yellow pus flowed out of his anus constantly; the inside of his mouth and all around his lips were covered with a white glistening substance, thrush. Dr. Ramsey’s old office, which had been just a stone’s throw from my mother’s house, the house in which my brother lay dying, had been destroyed in the hurricanes (Luis, then Marilyn) and his temporary office was far away, on the All Saints Road (the road which leads to a village called All Saints) and in a building that had not been destroyed by the hurricanes, perhaps because it did not need to be, it was so dilapidated already, a building called the Hotel Bougainvillea. He was not at his office but he was expected back quite soon and I joined a group of people sitting in chairs waiting and waiting for the doctor, and we waited not in joy, not in anger, but more as if we were in a state of contemplation, as if we were seeing the whole panorama of life, from its ancient beginnings in the past to its inevitable end in some future, and we accepted it with indifference, for what else could we do? And this is the way people wait, people all over the world wait in this way, when they are powerless or poor, or both at the same time. And after I had waited for a while, his nurse, a woman who had always been so nice to me and kind to my brother, always putting me through immediately to Dr. Ramsey whenever I called, always asking after my brother and showing him sympathy, but a woman whose name I could not ever remember, told me that I most likely would find him at a funeral at two o’clock that afternoon, a funeral for a boy who was four years old.

The funeral—that is, the church part of the funeral—was being held at the Methodist church; I knew this church well, I had been baptized in it, though this would have taken place on a weekday, not on a Sunday, because my mother and father were not married at the time I was conceived, my mother and father were never married at all; from about the time my mother was seven months pregnant with me, she and my father quarreled and they never spoke again, except in court, except when I was a grown-up woman and he complained to her about something I had written, which he had not read because he could not read, and she said some words to him, she cursed him, and so I had no parents, I had only a mother and a father, and they were not ever married, and so I could not have been baptized at the Methodist church on a Sunday, only on a weekday, though a service for my burial could have been held any day of the week. And it was in this church that I was received; that is, I became eligible to partake of Holy Communion, and I remember this passage of my life as being filled with fear, and I remember feeling already disappointed and already defeated, already hopeless, thinking and feeling that I was standing on a fragile edge and at any moment I might fall off into a narrow black hole that would amount to my entire earthly existence: I felt I hated my mother, and even worse, I felt she hated me, too; my brother Devon, the one dying just then at that moment, was one year old and I did not wish him dead; I only wished that he had never been born, because it was his birth that plunged our family into financial despair, his birth and his father’s illness; and then, just around that time, his father and his and my mother, who were married, no longer liked each other (“in love” is not something I can imagine about my mother and so, too, “out of love”) but did not do anything about it, for he (the father) was too old and she (my mother) is at her most intelligent when she is in a fret. Her life is a long fret.

And in that church then, the Methodist church of St. John’s, Antigua (where I had been baptized and received, and where my brother who was then dying was baptized as a child, though not received, for by the time he was fourteen years of age our father, Mr. Drew—his real father, a father not really mine—was sick and took up most of our mother’s attention and so he was beyond our mother’s influence), there was a funeral for a four-year-old boy I did not know, and I was looking for the doctor who might keep the funeral for a man I did know at bay. Dr. Ramsey was not in that church full of people; his wife was there, a beautiful woman I thought her so, but he, Dr. Ramsey, was not there, he was at the hospital, or visiting someone at home, or just anywhere, but he was not at the church. The church was full; in the front pews were the dead boy’s immediate family and their relatives, and also his little schoolmates. The little schoolmates looked nervous and miserable (though I might have only imagined this, perhaps if I had asked them they would have said they were not miserable to be at a classmate’s funeral, they were feeling something else, not miserable) and for a good reason, for they would eventually sing a hymn about the love Jesus had for little children in particular. This little boy had been dead for two weeks, but the funeral was postponed until the many relatives could come from all the corners of the earth where they had purposely and gratefully scattered themselves, for the island on which they were born could not sustain them; it could sustain other people, people born of Europe especially, but it could not sustain them, this boy’s relatives; the irony of all this is that the little boy was not of Antigua, he was of the United States; his parents had adopted him, they had the means to do so, to adopt someone from far away; someone from nearby would have only confirmed their ordinariness. But this little boy from far away, now dead and only going the way of people from near or far, the way of eternity, was in a coffin that was standing just inside the door of the church. This coffin was meant to look like a box in which precious jewels were placed: it was covered with white velvet, but instead it looked cheap, like the living-room furniture of poor people in rich countries. His immediate female relatives were all dressed in clothes made from the same cloth—a white silk with some image from the vegetable kingdom woven into it, not the animal kingdom—though not all in the same style; the men were in suits, the kinds of suits that men everywhere wear when it is said of them that they are in a suit. And this scene in my old church, the schoolchildren standing only a few feet away from their former little friend now mysteriously (for so it would have seemed to me if I had been one of them) vanished, though also surely only inside that beautiful (if you were a child) velvet box; the parents and their relatives mourning, sad, even though they were dressed so elegantly, so carefully, beautifully really, the surface of their clothing so at odds with the actual event, a funeral; the church with its big open windows, its big open doors, built many years ago by the ancestors of the people inside it, or certainly built by the ancestors of people who looked like the people now inside it; Dr. Ramsey’s wife, whose son had been a classmate of the dead boy; the people just outside the church who were only passing by and who had no real interest in the events inside the church but only perhaps wanting to witness immediately, not through some remote medium, someone less fortunate (the dead boy, his parents, the people related to them), someone suffering right now: the dead, or those related to someone unfortunate enough to have died—all this made me not sad then, only now when I think of it am I sad, at the time when I was taking in the whole spectacle, at some moments I felt disdain, at some moments I felt triumphant, at some moments I felt awe, at some moments I felt bewilderment, at some moments I had a revelation; but never did I feel sad then. At the cemetery where the little boy was buried I felt curious, I wanted to get a good look at the face of the boy’s mother, for at the sight of her son in his coffin being lowered into the ground, she threw up a thick colorless liquid and the other relatives and mourners did not look at her, for though there was nothing at all unusual about a mother collapsing at the sight of her own son vanishing forever from her sight, this mother’s behavior did not go with her dress. Her dress was so white and pristine and proper and clean, not the thing to wear if you are going to have the dry heaves—her stomach had been emptied of even the thick, colorless liquid. And the mourners did not look at her, not only because it would have been impolite to do so, but also because the people in the place I am from do not like a vivid expression of feeling, they like only the gesture of a vivid expression of feeling, and then after the gesture they like to go home and speak of something else in which truups, that placing of the lips together and forcing air out through them, is heard quite frequently. And now to make that sound, the truups, makes my stomach feel strange, as if I am in a vessel sailing on waters I have never sailed on before, and the current is unfamiliar, and I will throw up, only I will throw up nothing solid, just a thin colorless liquid.

*   *   *

My friend Bud (of Bud and Connie, Bud and Connie Rabinowitz) said to me he found it strange the way people in Antigua regard illness, that when a person is ill no one mentions it, no one pays a visit; but if the person should die, there is a big outpouring of people at the funeral, there are bouquets, people sing hymns for the dead with much feeling. There was a man named Freeston (and he really was but is not anymore), and he was and is, as far as I know, the only person to publicly admit he was afflicted with the HIV virus; in making his situation public, he hoped to perform a public service. He spoke on the radio, he appeared on television, he gave talks before groups of schoolchildren. It is perhaps because of the reaction to his publicly identifying himself as a person with AIDS that no one in Antigua will do this again. The doctor who had been his permanent physician refused to see him after Freeston told him of his condition; ordinary people thought him foolish (“’E mek pappy-show of ’eself”); one day when I was visiting him and we were sitting on the gallery was the exact opposite of all those things, and that was the thing: my brother’s mother (my mother) only judged, never was accepting, had many thoughts; she was (is, for she still is) intelligent, her intelligence is like a weapon, and it has destroyed her, it destroyed some of her children: her son, my brother, was then dying. Freeston died. He went to Miami to be treated, he went to London to be treated, from London he came off the airplane in a wheelchair, and then he went to his mother’s house, where he died. I do not know any details of his death; his death was not notorious, only his way to his death was so.

*   *   *

And my brother died, for he kept dying; each time I remembered that he had died it was as if he had just at that moment died, and the whole experience of it would begin again; my brother had died, and I didn’t love him; or, at any rate, I didn’t love him in the way that I had come to understand love, something so immediate it was always in front of me even when my back was turned away from it, something so immediate it was like breath itself. My children were like that, breath itself; their father was like that, breath itself; but my brother was not like that, I could breathe easily (and did breathe easily) without him in front of me, he grew up without my seeing him do so (I saw him when he was three years old and didn’t see him again until he was twenty-one). I love the people I am from and I do not love the people I am from, and I do not really know what it means to say so, only that such a thing as no love now and much love now, these feelings are not permanent, or possibly not permanent. One day something may happen and I will understand that all the things I now feel, which do not at all seem like love (the word I would use to describe my feelings about my family, the people I have made my own: my husband, my children, my friends, though that word “friend” is so thin to explain that thickness), are in fact love; that I loved my brother and the other people I am from, my mother, my other brothers, and Mr. Drew (the father of my brothers, who was a father to me, though at the same time not my father at all).

*   *   *

His mouth so white, abloom with thrush; his lips so red, glowing, shiny from fever; his skin blackened as if his normal quotient of pigment (normal in a way unique to him, he was descended from Africans mostly) had increased from some frightening source: his face was like a mask, and this was while he was still alive, or still amounted to something called being alive; I mean he breathed and he spoke and he took in nourishment, and fluids of different textures would pass out of his anus, and these fluids did not have a fragrance, they had a smell, and only someone trained to ignore it (a nurse, a doctor) or someone who knew him deeply (his mother) could tolerate it, or not mind it, or say “But what to do” (his mother again) in that way of total resignation and acceptance that always defeats any attempt to make something of it, to interpret it, to give it a meaning embossed, or embellished, or spare, or even neutral. His smells only made his mother (my mother) say, “But what to do.” And saying that, she changed his bed, his diapers, his clothing, but could not help keeping the same tone of annoyance at the trouble he put her through and the trouble he had put her through from the beginning, when she had hoped he would not be born, and then he was, and our family could not support his added presence, and our father got sick, and I was sent away to help a family disaster that I did not create, and I did not love him because I did not know him, and then I knew him again, but then he was dying and so “What to do?” which by that time perhaps everyone in my family (that family I could not help having) said as almost a constant refrain, “What to do,” and we did some things, but none of them prevented him from dying, and the moment when he realized that “What to do” would not prevent that (his dying) is a moment so universal, so common; how I wish he could have just told me: “What to do, what to do?”

And after he had died, the whiteness of his mouth, the redness of his lips, the unusual blackness of his skin, his very suffering itself began to seem sometimes as if I had made them up, though not his death itself, for everyone could remember it readily and would refer to it readily (“I’m so sorry about your brother”), and my mother was sorry about his absence (“Me miss he, you know, me miss he”).

*   *   *

Not really more than a week after he was buried in the warm and yellow clay of the graveyard in Antigua, I resumed the life that his death had interrupted, the life with my own family, and the life of having written a book and persuading people to simply go out and buy it. I was in Chicago, a place for which I have only random memories: when I was nineteen, four girls were in my charge (I was a servant in this family) and I spent a summer looking after them in a place not far from Chicago, and I had a boyfriend whose name was Ed and he and I went to see someone famous play a guitar and sing a song in Chicago; my daughter and I once went by train to visit her father’s relatives in Chicago, and while there we went to the planetarium and saw an extraordinary film about the forming of the universe, and after that we could not find a taxi to take us to the train station (the reason being no taxis appeared; the patrons of the planetarium seemed to have arrived in their own cars) and I became so afraid that we would miss our overnight train to Albany, New York, that I burst into tears, and my daughter, seeing me cry, started to cry, too, but then all of a sudden a taxi appeared and we got to the train on time and had dinner on the train and slept all through the night and then had breakfast in the morning on the train and got off and came home safely, and I want to go to Chicago on a train again but only when I am young; it is far too late for that now; and in Chicago again, I change airplanes as I go from the Eastern part of the United States to the West. This is how Chicago used to appear in my mind when I would think of it, but that changed after my brother died.

I was in Chicago and it was so cold I should have been complaining, but I was so cheerful and agreeable that even when a man, just before he sat me down in front of him to ask me questions about the book I had written, hugged me and pressed my chest into his and ran his hands down my spine to my bottom and then up again, I did not object, I only noted it and wondered about the ups and downs of his life and what he had been like as a boy and what he had been like as a man, before he became this old man running his hands up and down my spine and bottom in a room with a few people and many bright lights; and I sat and talked to him, and then I went off and sat and talked to other people, men and women, some of them to their face, some of them through telephones, and I never told them that my brother had just died, that I was in a state of pain, a state of pain I had no real words for, a state of pain I did not know how to explain; such a thing had never happened to me before, this loss happens to other people all the time, their hair turns gray from it, loses all its natural, beautiful pigmentation: brown, black, yellow, or some combination of these, and they become gray, the color of things dying, or certainly the color of things that will know dying. But I had never been like that until my brother died; in spite of all the people I had been close to who had died, I never believed in it, the very fact that they had died; I now know that I thought of them as being somewhere else, someplace that I now no longer visited, or had never visited and would never visit, for they were there and I was here and had chosen to be here and not to join them at all; they had not died, they were only someplace else. And this made sense, for much of my life had been spent away from people who meant much to me and who were among the first people to make sense to me; I once did not see my mother for twenty years, even though I thought of her first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and almost all my thoughts of her were full of intense hatred, but she was alive and not in my sight and I could so well remember her hatred toward me—I will not add a qualifier to that, her hatred toward me, or modify it, this was just so: my mother hates her children. But that my mother might become dead, I had never imagined this.

Chicago again: how cold it was that time, so cold that I could see the lake, Lake Michigan, from my bed in the room of my extremely nice hotel, my bed so comfortable and made up twice a day, once in the morning and then again in the early evening when I was out having my dinner or talking to some of all those people in person or by telephone, and the lake was frozen, all the water in it tightly squeezed together, all bound up into ice, and the ice was blue, not an inviting blue, like the sky sometimes, or the sea sometimes, but a blue that is the color of a dress that might cost so much only two or three people in the world can afford to buy it, or like a blue of something that is far away in another part of the universe, such a blue was the frozen water in the lake that time; and it was so cold everybody talked about it. It’s so cold, they said, at first as if it were a surprise and then as if it were a punishment: “It’s so cold!” It was cold, just the opposite of the earth and the atmosphere where my brother had just been buried, and this cold allowed me to think of him without mentioning him to anyone or telling them of my predicament, that at the moment I seemed to be having such a triumph, a book I had written interested people who knew nothing at all about me (for is that not a desire of people who on writing books allow them to be published and exposed to a public: that people who do not know them, absolute strangers, will buy the book and read it and then like it). They did not know that I had suffered a great loss: someone I did not know I loved had died, someone I did not want to love had died, and that dying had a closed-door quality to it, a falling-off-the-horizon quality to it, the end, an end, nothing … and yet, what to do? For it is the end and yet so many things linger.

But. I was reading from the book I had written to an audience in a bookstore (and my reading was not complicated by my feelings of sympathy for the owner of this small bookstore, who had her own worries about the ruthlessness of capitalism and the ruthlessness of the marketplace—the two things synonymous and making her ability to earn a living in the way she chose difficult—and the ruthlessness of life itself, and though she never did say this, I gathered, I felt, she meant her own worthiness made her exempt from all this, marketplace, capitalism, life itself; I was sympathetic, since I feel exactly that way about my own self), and the audience was very kind and I was grateful that there were so many people, for it was so cold, and I saw some of my husband’s relatives in the audience and that made me happy, for it is so easy to love people you do not really know and only have the strong feeling that you should love them because they perhaps remind you of the people you love best in the world, the people you have chosen, and so I was happy, in a way, or almost happy, in a way. And then, just as the room was emptying out, I saw a face that I recognized from somewhere else. I didn’t know where, except I knew it wasn’t a dream I had had, or someone who was a part of my intimate life in the past (my intimate past being my youth, which was full of curiosity and conviction and courage, and since I have survived it, my intimate past, I simply shall never repeat it); it was just the face of a woman with thin skin (it was empty of pigment and so thin in color) and short hair, like a boy who has been bad and a part of his punishment is to have his head shorn of hair: a humiliation. And to this face I said, “Hello,” tentatively, unsure, for so many times I have greeted a familiar face with enthusiasm only to have the person say they don’t know me at all and have never seen me before, and I never get the impression that they want to know me more or see me again. And so I said, “Hello,” and this person said, “Hello,” and when I said that she looked familiar, she told me that yes, we had been in an AIDS support group in Antigua three years before. I said, Oh yes, and I remembered that whole afternoon of the AIDS support group listening to Dr. Ramsey and viewing his display of slides depicting all sorts of stages of sexually transmitted diseases with the sexual organs looking so decayed the viewer could almost smell the decay just by looking at them. And I remembered this woman, superior and slightly contemptuous of her general surroundings (but I did not fault her for that, I had felt the same way, only more so) and casting blame and making denunciations (and I did not fault her for that, I had futilely gone so far as to write a small book in which I did nothing but cast blame and make denunciations), and just in general making everyone present at the meeting wish a little that she was not there, not at the meeting but somewhere in the world where she would do good beyond imagining, but at this meeting, who was she? She was far more disturbing than the woman with thick skin who had opinions about the evil of white people and the goodness of black people—her words—and though I shall never be surprised by the aversion human beings can feel toward each other, for even I found her ways of arriving at her opinions offensive (but that is only a polite way of my now saying that at the time she said these things, if there had been an acceptable rubbish heap for human beings who said rubbishy things, I would have placed her on it. But how would I have achieved such an ability?). All these thoughts overwhelmed me, though they did not cripple me, but I was overwhelmed all the same, trying to place her in those new moments when I had just discovered that my brother was dying, would die, and that I did not love him, or did not recognize my feelings for him as being love, but felt such a responsibility, an obligation, to help him in some way. And just seeing her face made me say the thing I had not been saying at all, only thinking as a separate person, not the person in the room reading; I had been thinking, My brother has just died, my brother has died, but to her I said, as simply as this, “My brother died,” and she said as simply as this, “I know.”

When she said this, “I know,” a whole world rolled out in front of me, not falling off a desk and crashing like the miniature water-filled glass domes which my children collect and always ask me to be on the lookout for when I go somewhere new, and these water-filled domes, with a little make-believe scene stuck to their bottom, a scene with a symbol of some city or figure associated with the pleasures of childhood, are always falling off my children’s desks or dressers, just falling from a high place and crashing, and water and scene of city or scene associated with childhood pleasures scatter all over the floor, and then all of it soon becomes invisible to the naked eye, but the bare sole of a foot feels its invisible remains and the shattered dome then registers as something dangerous and sinister because it can be felt but never seen. And so it was not like a shattered miniature water-filled dome with a scene of any kind that this woman whose face I had seen before, whose voice I had heard before but now in Chicago was saying “I know,” seemed to me; it was not like that at all; it was like something unrolling, a carpet, a sheet of paper, and I knew it would hold a surprise, but this did not frighten me, I was indifferent to fear right then, but only right then; ordinarily I am not indifferent to fear at all; ordinarily I am quite afraid of the consequences of the thing I am about to do, but I do it anyway. But that “I know.” Her voice surely would have been sympathetic, she must have lowered her head, I always lower my head when I feel sympathy or something tender for people who need sympathy. She only said, “I know.” And I said, “How did you know?” and I said, “Did you know my brother?” And she said yes. And then she said that she had been a lesbian woman living in Antigua and how deeply sad it made her to see the scorn and derision heaped on the homosexual man; homosexual men had no place to go in Antigua, she said, no place to simply meet and be with each other and not be afraid; and so she had opened up her home and made it known that every Sunday men who loved other men could come to her house in the afternoon and enjoy each other’s company. My brother, she said, was a frequent visitor to her house. She only said all that. On Sundays men who were homosexuals came to her house, a safe place to be with each other, and my brother who had just died was often at her house, not as a spectator of homosexual life but as a participant in homosexual life.

A great sadness overcame me, and the source of the sadness was the deep feeling I had always had about him: that he had died without ever understanding or knowing, or being able to let the world in which he lived know, who he was; that who he really was—not a single sense of identity but all the complexities of who he was—he could not express fully: his fear of being laughed at, his fear of meeting with the scorn of the people he knew best were overwhelming and he could not live with all of it openly. His homosexuality is one thing, and my becoming a writer is another altogether, but this truth is not lost to me: I could not have become a writer while living among the people I knew best, I could not have become myself while living among the people I knew best—and I only knew them best because I was from them, of them, and so often felt I was them—and they were—are—the people who ought to have loved me best in the whole world, the people who should have made me feel that the love of people other than them was suspect. And his life unfolded before me not like a map just found, or a piece of old paper just found, his life unfolded and there was everything to see and there was nothing to see; in his life there had been no flowering, his life was the opposite of that, a flowering, his life was like the bud that sets but, instead of opening into a flower, turns brown and falls off at your feet.

And in the unfolding were many things, all contained in memory (but without memory what would be left? Nothing? I do not know): the girl from Guiana with whom he had been having unprotected sex after he knew he was infected with the HIV virus; the girl (another one altogether) who saw him sunning himself on the veranda of the hospital that first time when he had been seriously ill and the doctors thought he would be dead in three days—she had known him very well, she had been used to being seduced by him in one way or another, but when she saw him so thin in the hospital, so weak, my brother could tell that she had heard the rumors about him (they were true, but he could not admit it to himself then, and she was not really sure), and the way she distanced herself from him caused him great pain (he was dying and should have been beyond that, but dying was very new to him then); and the flirting with the nurses in Dr. Ramsey’s office who knew of his situation, and he knew that they knew of his situation, and so their scorn (they did not hide it) must have been especially painful, but I did not know, he could not (I now see) let me know; and then again their scorn was painful to him because in it his secret of not really wanting to seduce them, really wanting to seduce someone who was not at all like them, a man, became clear to him, was made plain to him, and so the doubleness of his life, which was something he could manage ordinarily, in a day-in, day-out situation, must have been erased in those moments, and perhaps he despaired that the walls separating the parts of his life had broken down, and that might have caused him much anxiety, and such a thing, the anxiety when it appeared on his face, would have seemed to me, who knew nothing about his internal reality, as another kind of suffering, a suffering I might be able to relieve with medicine I had brought from the prosperous North; but I did not know then, I only know now. And in this Now, I can understand why a man, a teacher, though not an old teacher, would want to take him on a journey to Trinidad, just the two of them together, and my brother not being able to pay his own way was no hindrance to this plan; but this whole incident of the teacher—a man—who wanted to take him on a trip, a holiday, the why of it, is clear to me now, the why part of it; I only asked this question at the time he was dying, and again after he was dead.

And then again, when thinking of that woman in the bookstore in Chicago, her white hair cropped short and lying close to her scalp (though not in a forced way, it lay on her head quite naturally), the way she emerged from the damp and blue cold and the dark night, with her tale of regular secret meetings on Sunday afternoons in a climate the direct opposite of the one we were in, I, even I, with all my New World sophistication (this New World in which I now live began in 1492 and for very convenient reasons it insists on this status, “New World,” people from everywhere else, for myriad reasons, need it to be a “New World”), wondered, and then doubted, and went back and forth, whether she was telling me something true or just something she wished to say: Your brother came to my house because my house offered him a setting to be himself, his real self, a self which loved the deep intimacy and companionship of other men, a self of which he was ashamed and afraid to show to anyone other than the people who were sympathetic to and shared his secret. And I returned to my room in the hotel, a room from which I could see the water of Lake Michigan stilled, frozen, blue in color, but the frozen waters of Lake Michigan were a blue not like a blue my brother had ever seen, it was not like the blue of the Atlantic Ocean in the West Indies (the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia or Martha’s Vineyard is not blue at all, it is a gray, a gray that signals the beginning of the end of things); nor was it like the blue of the Caribbean Sea, another body of water my brother might have been familiar with; oh, but he was familiar with it, I have seen him swimming in it, and later when he was dying he gave me his school textbook, A History of the West Indies. No, it was a captive blue, this blue of Lake Michigan, a blue that held in it restraint and at the same time destruction; it was not permanent, this frozen water and color of the lake which I could see from my hotel, and each room of this hotel cost a great deal of money, money that my brother might have wanted and even imagined, but by that time he was dead, I had buried him a week or so ago, and I could only go back to that room that cost so much and imagine my brother, his life, and my own, which was in direct contrast to his. I was alive, I was in danger of not being so only in the usual way, the airplane on which I flew from place to place might fall out of the sky, a vessel in my brain might suddenly burst, my heart might be stilled as if someone had reached in and stopped it, like a clock on a wall, like the mechanical toy my son winds up and makes go and then, for a reason that pleases solely him, places in the palm of his hand, squeezing all its mechanism until it just stops; my life could end in the manner of all those things. Just then it had not, just yet, just now, at this moment that I am sitting and contemplating (though I am not sure that I am capable of contemplation), I am remembering the life of my brother, I am remembering my own life, or at least a part of my own life, for my own life is still ongoing, I hope, and each moment of its present shapes its past and each moment of its present will shape its future and even so influence the way I see its future; and the knowledge of all this leaves me with the feeling: And what now, and so, yes, what now. What now!

But the feeling that his life with its metaphor of the bud of a flower firmly set, blooming, and then the blossom fading, the flower setting a seed which bore inside another set of buds, leading to flowers, and so on and so on into eternity—this feeling that his life actually should have provided such a metaphor, so ordinary an image, so common and so welcoming had it been just so, could not leave me; and I was haunted by everything that had happened since he died and everything that had happened before he died, and everything that was happening as I went from the city of Chicago and its view of the frozen lake of blue, a blue that was not permanent, a blue that would change with the season (a thing my brother would never know, a change of season, for he never left the place in which he was born).

Once, when I was looking for a new dress to wear to a ceremony during which my husband would receive an award, I bought a white dress with blue stripes, a dress I liked (though it was not the dress I finally wore to the ceremony, I later bought a plain white dress and wore that to the ceremony) because it reminded me of a dress worn by children (though it was a dress my own daughter, ten at the time, would never wear, too childish, she would say), and perhaps I bought it because I was just becoming old enough (I was forty-six) to want innocence again and old enough to convince any observer that the appearance of innocence at my age was meant to be my actual innocence at the age when I was actually innocent. I bought this dress; it had an Empire waistline, it had gathers under the breast, the length of the skirt came to just above my ankles. It was this dress I wore to my brother’s funeral. I bought it at the moment I was thinking of celebrating the honor my husband had been given, but it was that dress I wore to my brother’s funeral; and at the time I wore it to his funeral I thought to myself, I will never wear this dress again, I can never wear this dress again, and as I write this, it is true: I have never worn that dress again. I tried to give it away, but the person to whom I tried to give the dress was too old for it, she was sixty-one years old and was too short for it, the skirt dragged on the floor, and she was too stout for it, the zipper in the back would not go above the point that was her waist. And the airplane I flew on to his burial was blue, and the sky in which the airplane flew was blue, and there was the white of the clouds; and the water surrounding the land, the ground in which he was buried, that water was blue, and that water, the water surrounding the land in which he was buried, was sometimes flecked with white, the foam caused by the rush of the waves as they dashed against the shore. But the color blue did not run through all my memories, or all my experiences; on the whole, every scene, every memory remained itself, just itself, and sometimes a certain color might make memory more vivid and sometimes again, not so at all, just not so at all; sometimes a memory is without color, a dream is often like that, without color, but the absence of color does not mean an absence of truth, or truth in a way that one could understand as not a falsehood. Oh, how I wished never to think about him again, never to see blue and say, “What did Devon think of that, such a color,” or think, Here is the sound of something that reminded me of Devon, or something that if Devon had heard of, he would have been propelled into a world in which he could delay his death, or just simply taunt its inevitability, for his death was inevitable, as was mine (as is mine, but at that time in his life my own death would have been an accident or a surprise, not something anyone expected).

And then he died, not in the middle of the night, which was the hour he was born, but in the very early morning, at about five o’clock, the hour I was born; and I know the hour he was born because I was there, and I know the hour I was born and the hour he died because our mother has told me. And all that night as he was dying, he called out over and over again the names of his brothers, and he called out for his mother. He called her “Muds” then, short for Mother, but when he was well and when he was young, he called her Mrs. Drew, which is her married name; when he was well and when he was young he did not like to show any dependence on her and so he called her what any ordinary person would call her, but perhaps it was only to disguise how much he needed her, for he never ever made a home for himself apart from his mother. He called out for his brothers; he called out, “Dalma”: Dalma was the brother he was closest to and they had played cricket together when they were small boys, and they were together when Mr. Drew, their father, our mother’s husband, died in the hospital all alone one night after he had suffered a stroke; they were in the house together at the very moment Mr. Drew had suffered the stroke.

It was Dalma who gave him, Devon, the name “Patches,” because he liked to place patches of different-colored cloth all over his clothes regardless of their needing such a thing as a patch. And Dalma would call him by that name when he—Dalma—came home from one of his three jobs (“Hey, Patches, how you doing, mahn, how you doing?”), and people who knew him from when he was a boy, a student at Boys School, would call him that, “Patches.” And when he was dying he called Dalma, he said, “Dalma,” the only name he had ever called that brother. His other brother’s name was Joseph, and he was generally called Joe, only Devon called him “Styles,” because when they were boys Devon had noticed that Joe was very particular about the way he looked and would always dress in a way that might be called stylish, and so Joe was known to him as “Styles,” and I do not know if Joe ever liked being called that, for those two brothers did not get along, and when Devon first learned that he was dying it vexed him so to see Joe in good health, it vexed him so to think that Joe would continue to live after he had died and inherit his little house, the coffinlike structure their mother had built for him, or any other thing that was his (“Me bex, you know, me bex, me no want he get me tings”). And yet “Styles” is the last thing he said, only that, “Styles,” and then there was silence, a silence so ordinary that my mother thought he had fallen asleep at last, exhausted from calling out the names of his mother and his brother that he was close to (“loved” must be the word) and the brother that he did not like so much, the brother he could not bear to have inherit the little house he used to live in. When the silence fell, how relieved my mother was then, she told me so later, and when telling me so, she was full of sorrow, and I had sympathy for her then, but still no love, only sympathy, and some revulsion, as if I felt what had just happened to her—her child had died, she would be burying one of her children—was a contagious disease and just to be around her, just to be so near her meant I might catch it, this thing of burying your children when they are still so young, when they have not really lived at all.

And that night he was dying in the dark of that small room, thirty-three years of age, with none of the traditional attachments ordinary to a man his age—thirty-three—a wife, a companion of some kind, children, his own house, even a house he rented, his own bed (I had gone to a furniture store one day and purchased the one which he lay dying on, and even as I did that, I could remember his father, Mr. Drew, repairing the crib that he lay in when he was a baby just born, but that crib was first made for Joe and then refurbished for Dalma and then refurbished again for his birth; I don’t remember that too much attention was lavished on the crib by the time he arrived, because his arrival pushed the family to a brink over which we all fell, our family was never the same after his birth).

He had read in a novel written by me about a mother who had tried and tried and failed and failed to abort the third and last of her three male children. And when he was dying he asked me if that mother was his mother and if that child was himself (“Ah me de trow’way pickney”); in reply, I laughed a great big Ha! Ha! and then said no, the book he read is a novel, a novel is a work of fiction; he did not tell me that he did not believe my reply and I did not tell him that he should not believe my reply.

That night as he lay dying and calling the names of his brothers and his mother, he did not call my name, and I was neither glad nor sad about this. For why should he call my name? I knew him for the first three years of his life, I came to know him again in the last three years of his life, and in the time between I had changed my name, I did not have the name our mother had given to me, and though he always called me by the new name I had given myself, he did not know the self I had become (which isn’t to say that I know this, the self I have become), he did not know who I was, and I can see that in the effort of dying, to make sense of me and all that had happened to me between the years he was three and thirty was not only beyond him but also of no particular interest to him. And that feeling of his lack of interest in me, his sister, not being included in the roll call of his family, seemingly forgotten by him in the long hours before he left the world, seems so natural, so perfect; he was so right! I had never been a part of the tapestry, so to speak, of Patches, Styles, and Muds; I had only heard about the time he was involved in murdering a gas-station attendant and our mother used her substantial political connections to get him out of jail, his sentence reduced because he became a witness against the others, his friends, who along with him were involved in this murder, and then his emerging to live a life made up of strong feelings (positive feelings) for a man who was king of a small country in a landlocked part of Africa (Haile Selassie of Ethiopia), smoking the leaves of a plant which would cause him to have hallucinations. I shall never forget him, my brother, but this was not because of his smile, or the way he crossed a swelling river and saved a dog, or his sense of humor, or his love of John Milton (he loved not so much John Milton as all the people who came after and were influenced by John Milton; but all the people he met who came after John Milton and were influenced by John Milton were servants in the British colonial enterprise); I shall never forget him because his life is the one I did not have, the life that, for reasons I hope shall never be too clear to me, I avoided or escaped. Not his fate, for I, too, shall die, only his life, with its shadows dominating the brightness, its shadows eventually overtaking its brightness, so that in the end anyone wanting to know him would have to rely on that, shadows; and in the shadows of his life is a woman emerging from an audience in a bookstore in Chicago and telling me of secrets in his life, his life as he lived it in the shadows.

And at the time he was dying, all through that night, all through the night I was a continent away, seated in an airplane as it flew through the dark atmosphere, then sitting in the falsely lighted rooms in the airport, waiting for planes to transport me home to my family, traveling through these spaces in a natural dark and then a false light, carrying plants (those rhododendrons, native to a part of the world, New Guinea, that was foreign to me but has shaped my memory all the same: plants that would make prosper a population of annoying small flies in my house and then die, and nothing I could do, no remedy in any of many plant encyclopedias I have, could save them. They bloomed beautifully and then died, dying, as always, being so irreversible).

My mother’s house after he was dead was empty of his smell, but I did not know that his dying had a smell until he was dead and no longer in the house, he was at the undertaker’s, and I never asked my mother about the smells in the house. I wanted to see what he looked like when he was dead and so I had asked the undertaker not to do anything to his body before I arrived. Only now, a little more than a year later, I wonder how I knew to say such a thing, for I am grateful (only because I would have wondered, been haunted about it, and so now my interest is satisfied, even as it raises another kind of interest, another haunting) that I did, but at the time it happened—he was dead, I had been told so—I felt removed from events, I wished something else was happening, I wished I was complaining about some luxury that was momentarily causing me disappointment: the lawn mower wouldn’t work, my delicious meal in a restaurant was not at an ideal temperature, a meadow I loved to walk past never achieved a certain beauty that I wanted it to achieve.

He was in a plastic bag with a zipper running the length of its front and middle, a plastic bag of good quality, a plastic bag like the ones given to customers when they buy an expensive suit at a store that carries expensive clothing. The zipper coming undone sounded just like a zipper coming undone, like a dangerous reptile warning you of its presence; oh, but then again, it was so much like the sound of a zipper, just any zipper, or this particular zipper, the zipper of the bag which held my brother’s body (for he was that, my brother’s body). He looked as if he had been deliberately drained of all fluids, as if his flesh had been liquefied and that, too, drained out. He did not look like my brother, he did not look like the body of my brother, but that was what he was all the same, my brother who had died, and all that remained of him was lying in a plastic bag of good quality. His hair was uncombed, his face was unshaven, his eyes were wide-open, and his mouth was wide-open, too, and the open eyes and the open mouth made it seem as if he was looking at something in the far distance, something horrifying coming toward him, and that he was screaming, the sound of the scream silent now (but it had never been heard, I would have been told so, it had never been heard, this scream), and this scream seemed to have no break in it, no pause for an intake of breath; this scream only came out in one exhalation, trailing off into eternity, or just trailing off to somewhere I do not know, or just trailing off into nothing.

My husband’s father had died four years before, and when I had seen him dead, I had a strong desire to tell him what it was like when he died, all the things that happened, what people said, what they did, how they behaved, how his death made them feel; he would not have liked hearing about it at all, I knew that, but I also knew how curious he was about experiences he did not like or want to have, and that one of the ways I became a writer was by telling my husband’s father things he didn’t want me to tell him but was so curious about that he would listen to them anyway.

My brother would not have wanted to hear how he looked when he died, he would not have wanted to know how everyone behaved, what they said and what they did. He would not have wanted to know anything about it, except if someone had a mishap; an embarrassing mishap would have made him laugh, he loved to laugh at other people’s mishaps, I cannot remember him showing sympathy, and yet I do not remember him being cruel, his own mother was cruel. He would have found his death—his lying in the plastic bag of good quality, his mouth open, his eyes staring into something, a void that might hold all of meaning, or staring into nothing in particular—funny, but only if it was happening to someone else. I do not know, I do not know. And when next I saw him again, lying in the coffin made of pitch pine, the wood which Mr. Drew, his father, my mother’s husband, a carpenter, used mainly to make all sorts of furniture, his hair was nicely combed and dyed black—for how else could it have gotten to such a color—his lips were clamped tightly together and they made a shape that did not amount to his mouth as I had known it; and his eyes had been sewn shut, sewn shut, and I have to say it again, sewn shut. And so he looked like an advertisement for the dead, not like the dead at all; for to be dead young cannot be so still, so calm, only the still alive know death to be still and calm; I only say this after having seen my brother just dead, before the people still in life arranged him. My mother said that the body in the coffin did not look like her son at all (“’E no look like ’e, ’e no look like Devon”), and that was true, but it was only that he did not look like the Devon we had gotten used to looking at as he got sick and then declined amazingly into death, living while being dead. She forgot that for a long time he did not look like Devon, the Rastafarian, the reggae singer, the seducer of women (we did not and cannot now know what he looked like as the seducer of men), that the body in the coffin was of someone we did not know, the body lying there would never become familiar to us, it would have no likes and dislikes, it would never say anything memorable, we would never quarrel with it, he was dead. The undertaker went among the mourners asking if we wanted one last look before the coffin lid was put in place, and after that all views of him on this earth would be no more.

Such a moment, a final goodbye, must be complicated. I put it this way, “must be,” because this was something happening in my life, a real thing, something so important that I wanted my own children to witness it. I had taken them with me to visit him, I had taken them with me when he died, and they, too, viewed his body before the undertaker had transformed him from someone just dead to someone ready to be seen just before his burial. And so, goodbye. My mother looked at him for the last time, his brothers looked at him for the last time, I looked at him for the last time, my children looked at him for the last time, my mother’s friends from her church looked at him for the last time, some men his age who knew him from school, who had not seen him when he was sick but now attended his funeral, looked at him for the last time. Oh, the indignity to be found in death; just as well that the dead seem unable to notice it.

It was in that funeral home in which he lay that I first encountered the dead. The dead then was a girl with a hunchback and I did not know her, I only saw her on the street in her school uniform, but her deformity had made her well known to other schoolchildren who were not deformed at all, and so when she died I wanted to see what she looked like. Seeing her lying in her coffin created a sense of wonder in me; seeing my brother did not, but that might have been because by the time my brother died I was so old that the idea of death seemed possible, but still only possible, something other people might decide to do. When I had seen the girl with the hunchback lying dead in her coffin, my brother was not yet born, and even my own life, the life that I now live, was not yet born, and so I could not imagine, would not have been capable of wondering, if this place, Straffee’s funeral parlor (the funeral parlor where the girl lay, the funeral parlor where my brother lay), would resonate in me, would come up in any way in my life again. My brother’s body lay not in the same room as hers, he lay in the room next to the one in which her body had been; the funeral parlor had expanded, and in any case, the room in which she had lain held another body, another funeral, a man thirty-five years old who also had died of AIDS, or the virus that causes AIDS, or something like that; whatever is the right way to say it, he had died of the same thing as my brother. Mr. Straffee, the owner of the funeral parlor, died in the same year as my brother; Mr. Straffee was very old then, and I cannot tell if he got involved in such, the business of burying people, to accustom himself to the idea of his own death, or if he hoped such an intimacy with death would protect him from its actual occurrence, or lessen his fear of its actual occurrence.

My brother’s coffin was most plain, it was in the category of the ones that cost less, pitch pine stained with a very dark varnish. I had known how much it would cost, and so before I returned for his funeral I went to the bank in the small town in which I lived and purchased traveler’s checks. The undertaker took payment in traveler’s checks.

His funeral procession was not large, and there might have been many reasons for this. He had died of a disease that carried a powerful social stigma. People in the place that I am from are quite comfortable with the shame of sex, the inexplicable need for it, an enjoyment of it that seems beyond the ordinary, the actual peculiarity of it; only then when you die from it, sex, does the shame become, well, shame. Then he was not a well-known person, a famous person, and this would have disappointed him, he so longed to be well known and well thought of. Funerals in Antigua have always been social events, especially the funerals of young people, but he was not so young, he was not well known, he died of a disease that had a great shame attached to it.

His death, and so his funeral, was not like that of the little boy, only four years old, who died while taking a swimming lesson with his schoolmates in the seawater at Fort James, just died suddenly, fainting, losing consciousness and then dying, and that is what was said of his death: he just died suddenly, while learning to swim; he fainted and lost consciousness and then died. He lay in a refrigerator in a funeral home, the same funeral home that took care of my brother’s burial, while his mother’s and father’s relatives who were living in various parts of the world, all far away from Antigua, in climates different from the one in Antigua, returned to Antigua. His mother and some close female relatives of both his parents all wore brand-new dresses made from the same material, though not in the same style, and also, they did not show their feelings of sorrow at the same time. The church service part of this little boy’s funeral was held in the same church in which my brother (and I) had been christened and confirmed (the Methodist church, though in that tradition you are received not confirmed), and I had no real feelings when I saw that his coffin was in the same place, in front of the altar where I had taken my first communion and just plain communion many times after that. I was, at that moment I was seeing his coffin, trying to find my brother’s doctor, Dr. Prince Ramsey. The church was filled with the dead four-year-old boy’s relatives and their friends, people were standing on the steps of the church trying to see the little coffin and of course the family, because the sorrow expressed by the family, the sorrow shown by the family excites observers, evoking pity for the mourner and, ultimately, superiority, for to see someone suffer in a moment when you are not suffering can inspire such a feeling, superiority, in a place like Antigua, with its history of subjugation, leaving in its wake humiliation and inferiority; to see someone in straits worse than your own is to feel at first pity for them and soon better than them. And so it was that a large number of people who did not know this little boy or any member of his family but had heard of his death through hearsay had come to see his little coffin, something made out of cheap wood and then covered with white velvet, and had come to see his family suffer over their loss. His little classmates stood not far from the coffin, and later they sang a song about Jesus and his particular love for children. The children were not at the graveyard, and so they did not see his mother as she wept over his coffin being lowered into the ground and his mother weeping and throwing up nothing but mucus, the only thing left in her stomach. The children did not see this, but many onlookers did, they saw the mother vomiting nothing but mucus at the sight of her son’s coffin being lowered into the ground, and the father, her husband, holding her up after she had slumped to the ground, and then leading her away from the grave to sit on a grave nearby, a grave of someone I do not believe they knew, yet it was a good place to sit all the same. I was at the graveyard still looking for Dr. Ramsey, but he was not there, and when next I saw him in the graveyard, it was at my brother’s funeral, and between that boy’s burial and my brother’s death I saw and spoke to Dr. Ramsey many times, but on that day I did not see him.

And so my brother’s funeral; the undertaker (and it was not at that moment that I first made the observation that an undertaker often looks like a corpse in one way or another: bloated like a dead body that has been neglected, or thin and emaciated like a dead body properly preserved so that it decays slowly, dryly, or like a dead body that has been carefully manicured and tended to make the relatives doubt slightly the sight they are witnessing: I am looking at the dead)—the undertaker called us, his family, to take a last look at him, and this call for a last look only reminded me of scenes in other narrative forms in which there is a bartender and just before the bar closes there is a last call for drinks. We all looked at him, I and his and my mother, my brother who no longer speaks to my mother even though they continue to live in the same house, and my other brother, who broke my mother’s neck by throwing her onto the ground in the process of trying to stop her from throwing stones at him because she disapproved of him bringing a girlfriend, or any woman with whom he had a sexual relationship, into the structure where he—they all—lived; this structure was so near to my mother’s own house that she could hear all their conversations and all their sounds, and the conversations and sounds were an abomination to her (and that is the word for the feelings that roiled in her heart toward his actions, his wanting to live: abomination!), and when he would not cease this behavior of which she disapproved she first quarreled with him and then threw stones at him, and while trying to stop her from stoning him (and this was not exactly a defense of himself, for I say a defense of himself would have been to throw stones back at her), he threw her to the ground and broke her neck; it was a break so serious that she should have died or become a quadriplegic, yet she recovered so completely that she has buried one of her own children. When once she was complaining to me about her health, I jokingly said, “Oh, Mother, you will bury us all”; she said in reply, “You think so,” and she laughed, but I did not laugh, I could not laugh, I was—am—one of the “us.” There were her two sons still alive, and then there was me, her only daughter, but not Devon’s only sister in the world, for his father, Mr. Drew, had had other girl children with other mothers, but I was his only sister at his funeral, and I, too, went to take a last look at him, but it was unreal the way he looked: his hair styled in a way I had never seen it styled when I knew him alive; his eyes closed, shut, sealed, like an envelope, not a vault; his body was delicate, fragile-seeming, all bones, finally stilled, not ever so slightly moving up and down; his farawayness so complete, so final, he shall never speak again; he shall never speak again in the everyday way that I speak of speech.

The coffin lid was put in place and the sounds of the screws securing it did not cause us to cry or vomit or pass out. My mother said it did not look like Devon at all, and that was true, but I did not know which Devon she meant: Was it the baby a day old almost eaten alive by red ants, or was it the two-year-old boy who was left in my charge and whose diaper I neglected to change as it became filled with his still-baby feces because I had become absorbed in a book; or was it the Devon who was involved in the homicide of a gas-station attendant; or the one who played cricket so well and learned to swim at Country Pond; or the one who smoked the Weed, the way she referred to his marijuana addiction; or the one who changed from a vibrant young man who had come down with a very bad case of pneumonia and then was told in an open hospital ward by a doctor accompanied by two nurses that he had the HIV virus and that shortly he would be dead; or the one who was well enough shortly after that to begin having unprotected sex with women and sex with other people who were not women but who we—that is, his family—did not know about? Which Devon was he? All of them, I suppose; and which did he like best, and which one of his selves made him happiest? I cannot tell this, and perhaps neither could he.

And that day that he was buried was not at all unlike the day on which I first saw him lying almost dead in a bed in the Gweneth O’Reilly ward of the Holberton Hospital. All days in Antigua must be the same, people count on it, it is for this reason they go there, it is for this reason they leave there; the days are the same, the sun shines, no rain will fall, the sun rises at around six in the morning, the sun sets at around six in the evening; if this does not remain so, it is a catastrophe; a hurricane can change this, or the coming-awake of a volcano, but Antigua does not have such a thing as a volcano. He died on a sunny day, he was buried on a sunny day. At the funeral parlor there were people milling around outside and I did not know them, but that made sense when I realized that there was another young man being buried, a young man with a family and not many friends; he, too, had died of AIDS. His grave was not more than twenty yards away from my brother’s, and their graveside ceremonies coincided; the families and friends of the two dead men did not speak to one another; the two men were buried at the margins of the cemetery, far away from the entrance, and this was so not because of the thing that had caused their death but because of something that long ago perhaps had the same social stigma as AIDS: they or their families were not members of respectable churches. The other man was buried in the place reserved for Seventh-Day Adventists, my brother was buried in the place reserved for the Church of the Nazarene. Nothing about their death ceremonies made communication between their families occur; not sharing the same funeral parlor, not sharing the margin of the burial ground. The other dead man’s family did not say a sympathetic word to us and we did not say a sympathetic word to them. The Church of the Nazarene was our mother’s church, she attended services there regularly, her fellow church members came often to pray with my brother, though he did not believe in anything himself, except if he thought, just at the moment he needed to, that faith in the thing in front of him might serve him well. But he died, and on the way to the church part of the service, we passed some men who were in a yard, sitting under a tree making coffins, and they looked up as we passed by, perhaps to see their handiwork, for his coffin had been made by them, they worked for Mr. Straffee, and also out of curiosity, for it must be true for them, too, even as they make these houses for the dead that are in constant demand, the wondering if it is something real, will it happen to them; if it is so certain, death, why is it such a surprise, why is everybody who is left behind, who is not dead, in a state of such shock, as if this thing, death, this losing forever of someone who means something to you, has never happened before. Why is it so new, why is this worn-out thing, death, someone dying, so new, so new?

And yet when the minister preached a sermon about us all being reunited at some later date, I did not like that at all, I wanted to tell him that I did not want to see these people with whom I had shared so much—a womb in the case of my brother, blood and breath in the case of my mother—I did not want to be with any of these people again in another world. I had had enough of them in this one; they mean everything to me and they mean nothing, and even so, I do not really know what I mean when I say this. My brother, the one who lives in the same house as my mother but who does not speak to her and will not make a reply to her no matter what she says to him, and says he would not make a reply to her even if she asked him to save her life, especially if she asked him to save her life (and he is not the one who threw her down and broke her neck, a break that should have left her dead or crippled from the waist down and instead she made a complete recovery and has buried one of her children so far), this brother said a few words about his dead sibling, the one he had named “Patches,” but he did not mention that, the part about the name Patches, he only recalled that Devon loved to play cricket, how close they had been when they were schoolboys together; he did not say how afraid they were when their father (Mr. Drew) died and they did not want to attend his funeral and hid from our mother, who had to beat them (in one case) or threaten to beat them (in another case) to attend; he did not say how his dead brother’s carelessness with his own life might have led to such an early death and was a contrast to his own caution and industriousness (he held three jobs: an accountant, a peddler of imported foods in the market, and a bass-steel-drum player in the most prominent steel band in Antigua). His voice broke as he spoke of his brother; I cried when I heard him speak of his brother, but why did he and I do that, for so many times we used to say that if by some miracle Devon could be cured of his disease he would not change his ways; he would not become industrious, holding three jobs at once to make ends meet; he would not become faithful to one woman or one man. But this was the end and he was lying in the coffin, the least expensive coffin in Mr. Straffee’s display of coffins for adults; he was thin, so diminished that his bedclothes and bed linen, freshly cleaned by his mother, had to be packed inside the coffin to keep his body from rattling around (though really he would not have been able to hear it and he certainly would not have been able to feel it).

I became a writer out of desperation, so when I first heard my brother was dying I was familiar with the act of saving myself: I would write about him. I would write about his dying. When I was young, younger than I am now, I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life. When I heard about my brother’s illness and his dying, I knew, instinctively, that to understand it, or to make an attempt at understanding his dying, and not to die with him, I would write about it.

For many years I wrote for a man named William Shawn. Whenever I thought of something to write, I immediately thought of him reading it, and the thought of this man, William Shawn, reading something I had written only made me want to write it more; I could see him sitting (not in any particular place) and reading what I had written and telling me if he liked it, or never mentioning it again if he didn’t, and the point wasn’t to hear him say that he liked it (though that was better than anything in the whole world) but only to know that he had read it, and why that should have been so is beyond words to me right now, or just to put it into words now (and it was only through words that I knew him) would make it either not true, or incomplete, like love, I suppose: why do I love you, why do you love me? Almost all of my life as a writer, everything I wrote I expected Mr. Shawn to read, and so when I first heard of my brother dying and immediately knew I would write about him, I thought of Mr. Shawn, but Mr. Shawn had just died, too, and I had seen Mr. Shawn when he was dead, and even then I wanted to tell him what it was like when he had died, and he would not have liked to hear that in any way, but I was used to telling him things I knew he didn’t like, I couldn’t help telling him everything whether he liked it or not. And so I wrote about the dead for the dead, and all along as I was writing I thought, When I am done with this I shall never write for Mr. Shawn again, this will be the end of anything I shall write for Mr. Shawn; but now I don’t suppose that will be so. It was because I had neglected my brother when he was two years old and instead read a book that my mother gathered up all the books I owned and put them on a pile on her stone heap, sprinkling them with kerosene and then setting them alight; I cannot remember the titles of these books, I cannot remember what they were about (they would have been novels, at fifteen I read only novels), but it would not be so strange if I spent the rest of my life trying to bring those books back to my life by writing them again and again until they were perfect, unscathed by fire of any kind. For a very long time I had the perfect reader for what I would write and place in the unscathed books; the source of the books has not died, it only comes alive again and again in different forms and other segments. The perfect reader has died, but I cannot see any reason not to write for him anyway, for I can sooner get used to never hearing from him—the perfect reader—than to not being able to write for him at all.