Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (4 page)

This camp, unlike most of the others, was lit sporadically by a few floodlights on improbably high poles for security. I squinted into the glare as we walked down the central thoroughfare, before winding through the narrow passages between tents toward Daniel’s house. “Did I call it a house?” he asked in his near-perfect English. He’d spent some time in the States, before getting deported. “I’m sorry, should I say ‘tent’?” He laughed. He led me past row after row of stick-supported plastic. “And here we are,” he said. “My piece of Tent City.”

Daniel’s shelter, like the rest, was several sheets of sturdy tarp cobbled together. The few floodlights didn’t permeate here. The ceiling was uneven, low, and leaky, and the shelter was built on a steep dirt slope. Daniel said water got in from all directions when it rained. And oh, how it rained: hard, monsoon-season buckets pouring in through gaps in the roof and the sides, the earth floor liquefying, a mud flood forming under the higher-up rows of lean-tos until it collapsed under its own weight and slid fast downhill into the tents pitched below. Inside Daniel’s place, the only source of light was a flashlight aimed at the gray tarp overhead. The dim beam illuminated the USAID decal printed on it—which announced the gift as
FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
—but little else. While I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, a child materialized at my left thigh.

“This is my daughter, Melissa,” Daniel said. “She’s ten.”

“
Est-ce que je peux te donner un bisou?
” she asked, barely audibly. I sensed the outline of braids in her silhouette, but couldn’t be sure.

“
Bien sûr
,” I told her, she was welcome to give me a kiss, and I bent down to accept it, supersoft and tiny against my cheek.

Daniel overturned a bucket to offer me a seat and told me, as he, his fiancée, and Melissa sat on the ceramic tiles he’d placed over the mud, about the handicap-aid organization he was starting. He said that when the American soldiers came after the earthquake and set up this camp, he’d helped run errands for them, delivering babies, doing whatever he could to aid the aiders.

There was just enough room for the four of us to sit; my shoulder touched Daniel’s fiancée’s; my feet touched Daniel’s feet. Melissa was sprawled across his lap.

“Fortunately,” he said, “it’s not that hot in here right now.”

I nodded. All our arms were slick and our faces running with sweat. But this was nothing compared with the daytime, when being under the plastic was like being in an oven.

Daniel asked me if I was thirsty, and I was, but I didn’t want to drink anything because Daniel had also said I shouldn’t use the communal portable toilets. It was only eight o’clock, but dark, and plenty of gals before me had been assaulted on that trip to the bathroom. That was one of the reasons the inside of this tent smelled like urine. To avoid the communal toilets, Daniel’s family used a bucket in a corner. The three of them kept their plastic-walled hovel fantastically neat, and emptied the bucket often, but at some point I inhaled sharply and breathed in too much of its stink. I puked into my mouth, and pretended I hadn’t. I suggested that we go for a walk.

Outside, it was clear that plenty of other residents were improvising bathroom facilities, too. The air was still, and within seconds my nose and throat were coated with the reek of hot rotting shit. “People have a lot of needs here,” Daniel said as we strolled along. The difficulty of getting around the steep muddy trail was one example of the trouble that disabled people, particularly recent earthquake amputees, were having. He introduced me to some neighbors, a woman who’d lost her husband, a tall smiley fellow who was deaf from rubble that had fallen on his head; he needed a hearing aid but couldn’t get one.

The camp buzzed. People gathered in the wider paths, vendors cooked hot dogs and sold water, and someone had run long electrical cords to steal power to play a garish remake of “We Are the World” over the steady, chattery thrum. It was early on a Friday night, but the noise was already starting to die down, Daniel pointed out. People had to wake up early, lest they roast to death in their plastic ovens once the sun had risen. Suddenly, a skinny guy came tearing up the path. He was asking Daniel, he was asking some guy behind Daniel, he was frantically asking everyone nearby: What should he do? Some thugs were threatening his family because they wanted the space and piece of tarp his family occupied. The thugs said they would set it all on fire if he didn’t move his family out. Was there anyone to talk to? Could he find a cop around here or what?

The peacekeepers you saw everywhere in Port-au-Prince had a presence in the camp. Nico and Jimmy, in fact, patrolled this one. But people complained that the troops didn’t do much to protect camp residents or any other Haitians. There was a police substation in this camp, because Sean Penn, whose aid organization ran it, had fought for and won it, but we hadn’t passed any police or soldiers or security on our long lap around. Daniel suggested to the panicked man where they might be. The man went running in that direction.

“You won’t find Haitian police in the camps because they’re at your hotel,” Marc joked when I got back into his car. He had picked me up at the edge after my walk with Daniel, a couple of hours after we’d parted. And indeed, when we drove back to the Hotel Oloffson, through traffic that was less crazy that late at night, several men in uniform were standing guard at the high gate.

I was supposed to write a story, the daily online story. But by then, my whole body was vibrating and tingling and buzzing. The hotel felt like another stage set. I was unsteady and far from creatively capable; I couldn’t even imagine working on a story. I sat down at a table on the balcony, ordered cold gin, and drank it fast.

I chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes I’d bought from the bar, though I’d mostly quit years ago. I at least wrote some necessary e-mails, again at the open-air tables, feeling hot and unmoored, but bizarrely not exhausted. Intermittently, I opened and reopened an e-mail from Nico, the reading of which was a strange and almost unbearable contrast to my day.

When I’d woken up that morning, I had the message from him. It appeared he had composed it with the painstaking help of a French-English dictionary at dawn; I’d read it before Marc had picked me up. There were a lot of lovely words, he said, to
described
me. He said that
when he came front my door he believed his heart will be explode
. Then, during the day, this intense, at times horrible day with Daniel and the hospital and the screaming, he’d sent some texts to my Haitian cell, too, the number of which I’d written on the back of the business card I’d given Jimmy.

Now that the day was over, we seemed to be online at the same time. We sent a few e-mails back and forth. What was my secret, he wanted to know.
How I had captivated him so?

We continued corresponding the next day, when I had a hard time getting out of bed. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t will myself to move around. Forgoing work, I confined myself largely to my room, texting and e-mailing from my BlackBerry and pacing. I didn’t go out. I got very hungry but stayed behind my feeble wooden plank of a door. Nico and I wrote back and forth that we missed each other urgently, crazily, all afternoon. It didn’t make any sense, to either of us, and it probably didn’t help my persisting feelings of unreality. But neither of us could stop. Nico wasn’t allowed out of base camp except to work and for all-platoon “free time” to blow off steam, like they were doing when we’d met. It was the first time they’d done something like that in the month since they’d arrived, a fluke that we’d caught each other at my hotel. There was no way he’d be able to get back out to see me again, or for anything else. Captain’s orders, he said. I encouraged him to desert.

So when someone came knocking on my door after dark that night, it wasn’t him.

One of the old rich locals who frequented the hotel, a doctor, apparently, had instantly developed an unwholesome fixation on me, always finding me if I was in the extensive restaurant-balcony-lobby—and, it seemed now, anywhere else on the grounds. The night before, when I’d returned from work, he’d arrived at my table with a bottle of baby oil in a plastic bag and an offer to give me a massage. All The Doctor wanted to talk about was that there were lots of reasons I should have sex with him, chief among them that he was a gentleman, in that he lost his erection if a woman started to fight him off. I accepted his invitation to join him at the bar now, in the interest of keeping him away from my room, and had one drink before retiring quickly.

When there was another knock at my door hours later, I was already in bed. A flush of panic and weariness went through me. Unsure of what else to do, I got up and crept to the entry.

“Who is it?” I asked.

No answer.

I looked through the curtain of my window, my heart racing unpleasantly.

And there,
there
was Nico, leaning his head in front of the glass so I could see his wide-smiling face.

*   *   *

To describe how he’d come to arrive, Nico seemed to have looked up the word “cunning.” Somehow he had stolen a military vehicle and escaped the camp that served as the French UN troops’ base, but we didn’t share enough of the same language to discuss the process.

No matter.

When I opened the door, he kissed me immediately. I wasn’t dressed, and I hadn’t got dressed when I saw who it was, clutching a bedsheet to my front. When Nico realized this, he reached down for the trailing fabric and gingerly pulled it up to cover my backside. His fingers landed only so delicately on my skin, as if it were precious, or forbidden.

Something was wrong, though. I couldn’t make sense of it, but when he climbed on top of me, he felt weightless, a feather, closing me in with biceps I couldn’t feel.

“I wahnt to make love weez you,” he had whispered the other night, that first night we’d kissed.

I’d laughed. “I bet!” I said. The response was a reflex; honestly, I was surprised. For some reason he didn’t strike me, based on our extremely limited interaction, as the type to have sex with people he’d just met. In any case, I wasn’t. But now that I had Nico with me again, two days later, it seemed like I’d been waiting for him for months, and even if I couldn’t feel my limbs, or gravity, or the weight of him on top of me, I could feel that.

*   *   *

We lay next to each other for some time afterward, working our way through bits of conversation. Nico rolled over on top of me. “It’s not possible,” he said, shaking his buzzed head and struggling with both language and, now, sentiment. “But … I feel.…” he touched his forehead near my lips, talking into my neck. “I am a leet-tle bit … love. Why I feel that?”

I smiled at him.

Because you’re traumatized
, I thought.

Nico had been in Haiti for more than a month. The day I met him, he and Jimmy told me that that day they’d broken up a fight among children in camp who tried to break into an aid tent to steal food, like the gangs of rapists that sliced through the sides of tents to steal a woman, easy as pie. I couldn’t really think of anything more dispiriting to do for a living than hold back a bunch of starving homeless kids desperate enough to break into an aid tent in the aftermath of one of the deadliest earthquakes in recent history. Also, as part of MINUSTAH, the United Nations’ force of more than 10,000 peacekeepers, Nico was hated in most places he went. Haitians complained that the troops’ orders seemed to be to drive around in fancy trucks pointing guns at people rather than to protect them. When the UN renewed its peacekeeping mandate the following month, people rioted.

But I didn’t have nearly enough French to explain my theory, and this guy hadn’t come here to get psychoanalyzed—or projected upon. So I said nothing.

He lay back down, and I squeezed him tight. Petting his chest, I fingered the thick silver chain around his neck. “This is very important,” he said. “My father.”

“Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

He paused for a moment. “If … I …
make
myself?”

I tried to think of possible synonyms or words to fill in the blanks.

He tried a word in French. I didn’t know it.

“If I … make … myself?” he tried again.

I thought about it some more. “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head.

He made a gun with his fingers and mimed shooting himself in the temple.

I jumped up onto my elbow. “Jesus!” I said. “Your dad shot himself?”

“No,” Nico said. He made a fist, upside down, and pulled it up in the air, as if he were grasping something that also was attached to his neck, his head dropping to the side a little as he yanked at it.

“
JE-
sus!” I said. “He fucking hung himself? Oh, my God, I’m sorry. How old were you?
Quel âge?
”

He counted in his head in English. “Seventeen.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

I hugged him a little tighter, and we held on to each other, trying to navigate conversation, or not. When he said he had to go after a while—if his AWOL were noticed, he’d be demoted, likely, and almost certainly sent dishonorably back to France—I pleaded for five more minutes.

“Of course,” he said without hesitating, and I clung to him with my arms, even if, for mysterious reasons, they didn’t feel like they were there.

*   *   *

Probably it would have been better, in the long run, if I hadn’t gone to work the next day.

The next day was Sunday. But there are no scheduled days off on assignment, and I woke up feeling more solid, and Henri, my driver from the airport, had offered to act as my driver on Sunday. He suggested taking me to the beach on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, to show me his Haiti, real Haiti, on the way to some interviews that I’d requested. The beach was lovely, crowded with music and people relaxed and reveling. Then we drove to the interviews and they were so far out of town, too far, much farther than he’d told me, and when we got there and entered the apartment where he said the interview would be, he closed me in a single, small cement box of a room with a bed. I sat down in the only chair and pushed it into the corner, away from him; he said the interviewee was still coming; he followed me too close. He had taken off his shirt to reveal the wifebeater underneath, and I found myself assessing his physique.
Could I take this guy?
I wondered abruptly, then my BlackBerry beeped in my pocket, the voice-command function activating when it brushed against the chair as I tried to squish myself into it to gain additional space between us, and Henri told me it was my father. He told me my father was calling to tell me to watch out, because I was about to get kissed.