Free My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid

work; he found a job, but the person who had employed him ran out of money. He was better beyond anyone’s expectation, he had gained quite a bit of weight, he was staying out all night, he was drinking beer, and when I asked if there was a certainty that there was only beer in the bottle, my mother was actually surprised that a beer bottle might have anything but beer in it; but immediately I heard he was drinking beer, I thought he would not stop at beer. He was seeing a lot of girls and presumably having sex with them; there was the Guianese girl and there were other girls, but no one ever said where those others came from. He and my mother had huge quarrels and unforgivable things were said, but after the quarrels were over, they would both feel that everything said had not really been meant.
    One day a woman who, when we were little girls together, was my best friend called me on the telephone to tell me that some books I had given her had been stolen and could I replace them. She was in tears. I was very touched by this, because they were books I had written and when I had given them to her she did not seem particularly pleased to have them. We speculated about who might have taken them and why. Just as she was about to hang up, I asked her about my brother and she said he was quite well, he saw his friends, he was not working, he stayed out all night sometimes; he was drinking, he was never without a bottle of beer in his hand, there was always a girl waiting for him. She said his hair had gotten very thin. She said his lips had gotten red again. When I first saw him in the hospital, lying there almost dead, his lips were scarlet red, as if layers and layers of skin had been removed and only one last layer remained, holding in place the dangerous fluid that was his blood. His face was sharp like a carving, like an image embossed on an emblem, a face full of deep suffering, beyond regrets or pleadings for a second chance. It was the face of someone who had lived in extremes, sometimes a saint, sometimes a sinner.

 
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    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