My Brother Read Online Free PDF Page A

that—you never knew when a cure might come along—and I could not tell if, in that, he was asserting native Antiguan foolishness or faith in science. Antigua is a place in which faith undermines the concrete. He said my brother did not look too bad, he had seen people who looked worse; what he meant of course is he had seen people who were on the verge of dying, and by the time he saw them, it was too late to do anything. But what could he do, I wanted to ask him, if there was no medicine available, if the people suffering did not have a sister who lived in the United States and this sister could call up a doctor who would write a prescription for some medication that might be of help, what would happen then? He is a very loving man and the other reason I have for saying this is I saw that wherever he went, people, ordinary people, would go out of their way to greet him and ask him how he was, but not because they really wanted to know: it was just to hear his voice.
    I went to hear Dr. Ramsey give a lecture about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases to a group of twelve people who were attending a workshop on counseling the HIV-afflicted. I had never seen any of their faces before. Among them were a man and a woman, Antiguans, whose thirty-year-old daughter had died of AIDS. She was their only child. They carried with them pictures of her which they showed to the other people in the workshop. They were attending this workshop because they hoped to be able, if need be, to give solace to other parents who might also find themselves losing a child to this disease. This was something very new to me: ordinary people in Antigua expressing sympathy and love for one another at a time of personal tragedy and pain, not scorn or rejection or some other form of cruelty. Dr. Ramsey explained to us what the HIV virus is, how it behaves in the body, how a virus behaves and how the HIV virus, a retrovirus, differs from a normal virus, but I cannot really remember any of it because he showed extraordinary slides of people in various stages of affliction from sexually transmitted diseases. The pictures were amazing. There were penises that looked like ladyfingers left in the oven too long and with a bite taken out of them that revealed a jam-filled center. There were labias covered with thick blue crusts, or black crusts, or crusts that were iridescent. There were breasts with large parts missing, eaten away, not from a large bite taken at once but nibbled, as if by an animal in a state of high enjoyment, each morsel savored for maximum pleasure. There were pictures of people emaciated by disease, who looked very different from people emaciated from starvation; they did not have that parched look of flesh and blood evaporated, leaving a wreck of skin and bones; they looked like the remains of a black hole, something that had once burned brightly and then collapsed in on itself. These images of suffering and death were the result of sexual activity, and at the end of Dr. Ramsey’s talk, I felt I would never have sex again, not even with myself. This feeling I had of pleasure being overwhelmed by fear and death was not new; I remembered how as a child when I was living in Dominica with my mother’s family I would look up at a black sky with a big moon full of light in it and the large mountains in the distance silhouetted against the mysterious (to me, a small girl) horizon, and I would find this the most beautiful, the most wonderful thing in the world, but then I would see a light moving about in the mountains and knew that it was a jablessé and would run inside to bed and pull the sheets over my head. And lying in bed with the sheets over my head, I would become afraid to fall asleep with the sheets over my head because I might suffocate and die.
    Someone told me that many years ago Dr. Ramsey led an effort to make women in Antigua conscious of methods of birth control and that it was a success, because had I