wanted to see us as much as we wanted to see him.
Emerging from Customs and Immigration, Uncle Joseph looked slightly different than I remembered. He’d gained some weight, and his rounded belly made him appear shorter. Bob and I both ran to him and wrapped our arms around his body. I was nearly as tall as he was now and it felt odd to reach his shoulder, to look him so easily in his eye. He tapped our faces and smiled, then pointing to our father, who was standing a few feet away, walked over to say hello.
My father wrapped his arms around my uncle’s shoulders, embracing him, then he took a few steps back to formally shake his hand. Grabbing Uncle Joseph’s suitcase, Papa commented that it was heavy.
“I’ll let Bob take care of it,” my father said. “He’s nearly a man now.”
My uncle nodded and put his hands together, confirming that it was a good idea. The suitcase had a long strap and our father handed it to Bob, who, gawky but strong, pulled it forward easily. As Bob managed the bag, I found myself walking between Uncle Joseph and my father, with both their arms around me as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
“How’s Denise?” my father asked.
My uncle mouthed, “On ti jan malad.”
I was amazed that I could still read his lips more easily than my father could.
“What did he say?” asked my father.
“Tante Denise is a bit sick,” I said.
“She functions,” my uncle mouthed, “but struggles with the diabetes. And now her blood pressure is high too. Like mine.”
“Why don’t you bring her to see a doctor here?” my father asked.
“Li pa vle,” my uncle said.
“She doesn’t want to,” I said to my father.
“She relies heavily on her herbs,” my uncle said. “Her country medicine.”
It was a humid afternoon. When we reached my father’s cab, Bob, sweating, stopped and waited for Papa to open the trunk. I stepped aside, joining Bob by the car. My father paused and looked into my uncle’s eyes.
“Do you see your children?” my father blurted out as though he’d been waiting a long time to say it. “Do you see how much they’ve grown?”
My father decided it was best that I take my uncle to his appointment at Kings County Hospital the next day. Unlike anyone else, I could now doubly interpret my uncle, both from silence to voice and Creole to English. Sitting next to him in the packed waiting room of the ear, nose and throat clinic, with the glossy posters of decaying necks and lungs looming over us, I saw his cancer come to life in the men and women around us. Some, like him, had had radical laryngectomies and couldn’t speak at all. Others had had partial laryngectomies and spoke in breathless whispers by pressing fingertips against various points along the neck. Leaning forward to listen, my uncle seemed to envy those in the latter category their ability to make some of their basic wishes known, even though they could no longer carry on long conversations.
After examining my uncle, the doctor, a young blond man with a cherubic round face and a bowl-shaped mop of hair, pulled out a sausage-sized machine and placed it in my uncle’s hand.
“Tell him,” said the doctor, “that this is a voice box, an artificial larynx, something that can amplify his whispers and allow people to hear and understand him.”
The doctor placed his hand on my uncle’s fingers and helped him form a fist around the machine, then he guided it to a spot above my uncle’s gullet and told him to speak.
“Speak?” my uncle asked.
The machine buzzed, letting out a clamor of static. The doctor moved my uncle’s hand a few inches, then said again, “Speak.”
Uncle Joseph opened his mouth and tried to utter a few words, but no sound came out.
The doctor moved his hand a few more inches, then asked, “What did you have for breakfast this morning?”
“Ze,” he said. Eggs.
The sound of the word emerging out of his own body in a robotic monotone seemed to shock my uncle, who raised his eyebrows in surprise.
“Keep talking,” the doctor said. “What would you like to have for dinner?”
“I don’t know,” Uncle Joseph said, the mechanical voice a bit clearer now.
His face lit up. He smiled, baring nearly all of his false teeth.
“Where can we buy it?” he asked.
The artificial larynx was sold in a medical supplies store near the hospital. After the doctor’s visit, we went there and got one.
Later that afternoon, when we returned to my parents’ apartment, my mother had not yet come back from her job at the textile factory, but my father was there, sitting on the blue plastic-covered sofa in the living room and sifting through his mail while occasionally glancing at the television set, which Bob, Kelly and Karl were watching from the floor. Uncle Joseph turned off the television, causing the boys to silently protest with grimaces. He walked over and sat down next to my father, signaling for them to also pay attention.
“I was worried,” my father said. “I thought they’d kept you in the hospital.”
The plastic squealed under my uncle as he leaned even closer to my father. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the voice box and raised it to his neck. The machine screeched with static when he turned it on. Uncle Joseph adjusted the volume, then pressed it more deeply at the curve between his chin and neck.
“Mira, I can speak,” my uncle said, drawing out each mechanized word.
The boys rushed over to the sofa, circling my uncle. My father pushed his face closer to my uncle’s. His eyes widened as he looked into my uncle’s mouth, dumbfounded.
“How’s it happening?” he asked.
“It must be a miracle,” my uncle said. “What else can it be?”
“Science?” my father absentmindedly offered.
“Science is God’s way of shielding miracles,” Uncle Joseph replied.
My father took my uncle’s hand and led him to a lamp in a corner of the room, so he could better see the machine and its interaction with my uncle’s neck. This was their first two-sided conversation in many years and they both seemed to want to move it past the technicalities to a point of near normalcy.
“How does it sound to your ear?” my father asked.
“How does it sound to yours?” my uncle countered.
My father paused to think, searching perhaps for the most tactful and encouraging description of what he was hearing.
“It sounds like yon robo,” he replied. A robot.
My father was trying to be more exact than heartening. My uncle was not fazed.
“To my ear,” my uncle said, “it sounds like two voices, my own voice inside my head and the one you hear. I know that voice is going to sound strange to people.” He was smiling now,
