My Brother Read Online Free PDF Page B

Hebrew prophet, one whose prophecies were about pestilence and doom. But when he lay in the hospital, none of his friends came into his room to visit him. They came to see him. They would stand in the doorway of his room and they would say something to him. They never came in. After they had seen him they left and they never returned again. My mother said that they came to see if it was true that he was HIV-positive, that he had AIDS. Had he been in their shoes, he might have done the same thing. We are not an instinctively empathetic people; a circle of friends who love and support each other is not something I can recall from my childhood. A girl he used to know saw him in the hospital while I was there with him. I could not tell if she had been one of his lovers. He and I were sitting outside in the sun at the time. He spoke in a very friendly way to her; she was friendly but not too much so, she never came too near him. She went inside to visit someone else. When she came outside to leave, she did not come over to say goodbye to him. He called after her. She waved her hand at him without looking back. He asked her if she would come back to see him. She raised her shoulders high, in an I-don’t-know gesture. She never looked back at him. But not long after, while we were still sitting in the sun, he saw a woman wearing a pair of tight-fitting pants that outlined the curves around her pubic area, and while staring pointedly at her crotch, he said some words to her, letting her know that he would like to have sex with her (“That would fit me very nicely, you know.” He said it exactly like that). She, too, would not look at him. This made me wonder at the confidence of men. There he was, diseased and dying, looking as unattractive as a long-dead corpse would look, and he could still try to convince a woman to sleep with him.
    One day years ago—I was thirty-six and he was twenty-three—I was visiting my family, I was lying on my brother’s bed in his little house with my feet resting on the windowsill and in the sun. I used to do exactly this when I was a child: lie in bed with my feet resting on the windowsill and in the sun, because my feet then were always cold. I would read books then, and this whole scene of me lying in bed and reading books would drive my mother to fits of anger, for she was sure it meant I was doomed to a life of slothfulness, but as it turned out, I was only doomed to write books other people might read. At the time I was lying on my brother’s bed, he was sitting in his doorway. Usually he was lying on his bed. He would lie on his bed in a drug-induced daze. His mother would not have allowed him to do this if he were female; I know this. The walls of his house were plastered with magazine pictures of Americans who have been extremely successful in the world of sports or entertainment. All these people are of my and his complexion. My daughter likes to sing. It is perhaps the pictures on my brother’s wall that make me discourage her from singing in a way that might bring her public attention. I have said to her father, “Does the world really need one more somewhat brown person singing?” My daughter loves math and is very good at it. Maybe she can find satisfaction singing to herself while poring over numbers that will explain some small mystery in the universe. There may be someone of my brother’s hue, or my daughter’s hue, or my own hue who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics or chemistry, but if such a person exists, my brother does not know of it, my daughter may know of it, I do not know of it. In his room that time were some books on a table and a radio cassette-deck player. The books were his old school textbooks. One of them was a history of the West Indies, though it was mostly a history of the British West Indies, and it was exactly like the textbook from which I had been taught when I was in school. I was reading it, lying on his