Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (5 page)

It was my editors, I lied. They were looking for me and freaking out and poised to call the embassy, the UN, if I didn’t get back to my hotel and my computer and contact them immediately. He ceded to my repeated assertions, although much too slowly, and eventually he opened the door he’d been blocking and we went outside and got back in the car. Throughout the interminable drive back into the city, he pawed at me in the passenger seat. I tolerated it politely, having no idea where I was and no idea what could happen, little pieces of myself shrinking and dying off as I said and did nothing.

I would have to worry about reviving them later. But for now, back at the hotel, I consumed a lot of booze.

The next morning, I went to the hospital again with Marc. After seeing a rape victim off to surgery, I sat slumped on the lobby floor while Marc, too, was quiet and tense. When he finally asked me what next, I shook my head and picked myself up, and we got back into the car to travel to a new displacement camp set up on the outskirts of the capital. “They moved all those people out in the middle of the desert,” Marc said, “like Moses or some shit.” A chalky, shadeless tent city on sharp gravel, where disaster capitalists had convinced already-disgruntled tent dwellers that the free Oxfam water was giving them stomach and genital infections so that they’d buy water with any money they could get. “We have nothing but misery,” yelled one of the residents during our interview, a tall man holding a little bar of soap he said he’d bought on credit. Marc and I went back to the hospital on another rape-care errand afterward. It was late by the time I got home that night. And that night, when I got home: booze.

I took a two-day trip to the Central Plateau, to the northeast, through green and rolling terrain with distant cloud-shrouded mountains, where impoverished residents were excited to have temporary jobs through an international aid program. They sung gorgeously while hoeing together, clearing the way to build a road, but then asked the visiting Mercy Corps representative worriedly when the program would end. After that, for me: booze! More booze, after a day of interviewing domestic-development advocates. At the office of the Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative—that is, non-foreign—Development, the program director fumed across the conference table in a breeze-cooled room that aid was a self-serving interference of foreigners who hijacked rebuilding plans and tried to control Haitians’ destiny. From there, I went to a training seminar for teachers trying to handle students’ post-quake trauma (“My students are very afraid of noise. Any rumbling truck passing by shakes them up.…”) in their classrooms, and after that, I had booze again, and booze again after all the other days.

With each passing night, I got increasingly drunk. Extremely, almost falling-down drunk, stunning myself with how much whiskey I could hold. I got drunk and locked myself in my room and called my dad or my best friend Tana or my other best friend Alex, incessantly clutching my BlackBerry, whether I was on it or not, in my palm or sometimes against my chest like it was an infant or an important medical device. One afternoon, after I’d finished working but before I started drinking, I started crying.

This crying, I couldn’t control. For two hours. Embarrassed but desperate, I wrote an e-mail to my editor about my declining mental health. I cried so hard that when I called my dad, my dad started crying, something that I’d seen him do so few times I could count them on my fingers.

“I don’t feel good here,” I wailed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I’m so sorry, Mac,” he said, his voice breaking. The sound of it made me cry harder. I was being such a baby over nothing, alarming everyone and myself. “I feel so terrible,” he said. He could barely talk as he started weeping. “I don’t know how to help you. I don’t know what to do.”

When we hung up, I kept crying. Inside those two hours I was unfortunately scheduled to give a phone interview to a media outlet from the States, and I cried through the whole thing, then asked the reporter quoting me please not to mention the crying.

In bed, at night, I listened for every sound. Each one hit my eardrums like a knife, painful and startling and sharp, my eyes so wide open my face ached. As the rain came and went, the power went out frequently, and in the darkness, it was easily 100 degrees in my room with no fan or air-conditioning. I thought about the people in those airless, hotbox tents as I sweated, too scared to open the windows though they weren’t the kind someone could fit through. Whenever I dozed, I woke up fast, wet and heart racing, from nightmares that someone had got in, or had grabbed me there on the mattress.

It wasn’t much better while I was awake. Not having my eyes closed didn’t stop me from picturing it, the men involved in what I’d witnessed, or men dragging the FAVILEK women out of their homes so hard they nearly tore their arms off. Men coming out of no place, to hurt the women I’d met, or me.

*   *   *

The sky opens up fast and spectacularly in Haiti. One minute you’re sitting in dusty, broiling traffic, and then the car is being assaulted by wind-split leaves and hard-driving rain. In the camps, the gusts ripped the tarps from their tethers. Outside, rivers of water and garbage ran through the streets. With three days left in town, my two weeks almost up, I went to visit Daniel in camp again after one of these storms. Though it had rained for only half an hour, at least five camp dwellers in the city had died, and thousands of shelters were destroyed. Daniel showed me that his was one of them. The back half of his “house” was a collapsed pile of plastic; inside, under the remaining shelter, everything—clothes, sheets—was soaking wet. His fiancée was wiping and wiping at their ceramic tiles, but when anyone moved, more mud oozed up from beneath.

“I guess it’s actually good we don’t have electricity,” Daniel said. “All that floodwater and all these people, with downed wires?” His daughter, Melissa, wasn’t radiant anymore. The storm terrified her, Daniel explained. If only that were the scariest threat to her here. At ten, she wouldn’t be the youngest reported rape victim from the camps. Not by eight years. She sat on a rumpled, fallen tarp, legs tucked up under an oversize white T-shirt, quiet and distant. “She was shaking like a leaf,” Daniel said.

Back at the hotel, the power was back on. It had gone out in the biggest rain, three days earlier, and for a long time; I’d been pleading a combination of exhaustion and Internet unavailability as my defense for failing to file any more Web stories. But I was on track for the print piece. Marc and I sat at a table on the hotel balcony, as we often did after a long day, fact-checking details. That day, we additionally needed to discuss some e-mails I’d got from the American lawyer and charity founder who had granted my access to parts of the story the night Marc and I had met. I’d been sending updates via Twitter about everything I was reporting, partly by force of habit and partly because I was contractually obligated to for work, so she was aware of all my observations—at the hospital, driving around with Marc—so far. She wanted me to leave one source’s real name and some specifics of her background out of future stories, which wasn’t a problem. I changed sensitive sources’ names all the time; I’d only used this one because Marc had specified that the story had been on television before I’d arrived and locally was old news. I apologized profusely. But the lawyer also asked me “not to demonize” the doctor I’d seen blame a rape victim, which would require me to pretend I hadn’t seen a lot for possibly questionable reasons.

Marc and I discussed the lawyer’s objections for a while—she’d said she might want to use the doctor again in the future. Afterward, our conversation meandered. We were both thinking about ordering chicken for dinner. Then at some point the conversation turned, suddenly and via his steering, to why we weren’t screwing.

He was an attractive man, he said out of nowhere. I was an attractive woman. So, he wanted to know, what was the problem?

I would tell almost no one about this. Later, I would write about it only in an unrelated story and without names or context. How many sexual harassers could I have, honestly, and for fuck’s sake, before the problem was not them but clearly me?

And
Marc.
Marc who’d made a couple of comments recently about my looks but Marc the ambulance, the rape-victim hero. Marc who’d been shook up, too, by the screaming that one morning.

I was sitting sideways in my chair at our table, my back against the wall. I couldn’t bring myself to face him head-on. I gathered all my energy to enumerate, as forcefully as possible, the reasons this conversation was completely unacceptable.

“I am your employer,” I said. “Also, I am in a relationship”—I’d told him I was in a relationship; I always told everybody I was in a relationship to help avoid this kind of scenario. “And anyway, regardless of the inappropriateness of your having raised the question: because I’m saying no.”

But I couldn’t look him in the eye. As I spoke, I directed my face and stern voice at the table.

Marc didn’t find my answer satisfactory. He repeated the reasons he thought we should have sex, which seemed mostly to consist of his finding me sexy.

Years later, I would get in touch to ask him about this, and he would say he didn’t remember the conversation. But I remember so clearly the way he said, “I know your room is just over there,” pointing over to where my room was, eliminating the possibility of my feeling that I could safely retreat to it. Not that he was dangerous. But I felt paranoid and paralyzed. I continued to protest from my seat, and it went on for more than half an hour. How could it go on for so long? He continued to protest my protestations, Marc who had called me partner. Marc who was finishing law school in preparation for a career in human rights advocacy, so he could cut through the corrupt government—Marc who was outraged that the whole previous year, only eighteen rape cases had been brought before a judge in all of Port-au-Prince—Marc who hoped to find a way to make a difference and get justice for women.

Marc, who, despite all that, wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Over Marc’s shoulder, I saw one of the hotel regulars walk in, a big guy who always kept a .45 in his waistband. I called him The Robber Baron, because he seemed to drop hundreds of dollars on his bar tab nearly every night; he carried the .45 because he was paranoid about getting robbed and shot, having once been robbed and shot. I jumped up, saying I had to go to the bathroom, and grabbed his arm as I passed, whispering fast that I’d give him $500 to come sit down with us, not leave until the other guy at the table left, and make it clear that he wasn’t going to leave for the rest of the night. He seemed amused, but after I returned from the bathroom, he came to our table. He refused to take my money, as he’d been looking for someone to drink with anyway. He brought glasses of whiskey
and
a bottle of vodka.

That night I got so drunk I was almost blind. Marc made irritated faces in The Robber Baron’s presence for a while, but then went home. When my impromptu bodyguard finally left as well, also plastered, he hugged me, and I held onto him for too long. For life.

Locked back in my room, I called my friend Gideon, who was in a time zone I could dial at 2
A.M.
Haiti time. I rambled at him, slurring wildly and tearing up. Just having some trouble, I said. I didn’t sound any worse talking to him than I had talking to Tana or Alex or my father, telling them again and again, about the witnessing and screaming, about feeling threatened by Henri, while they panicked about how bad I sounded but had no idea what they could do.

Gideon, however, had been part of reporting teams in Pakistan and Colombia. “You’re done,” he said.

No, no, I said. I still had three more days.

“Mac, you’re done. You are clearly not handling yourself. You’re not handling things that you might otherwise be able to shrug off, so you’re done.”

This infuriated me.
I
was the problem? The problem was that I was overreacting, and I shouldn’t be this upset, and if I was my usual self I’d just be breezing through all this? It infuriated me because I agreed with it. Nothing had happened, really. Not to me. I’d only been scared. I had no reason to be flipping out.

That wasn’t what Gideon meant. He was making the argument that fleeing for safe-feeling ground, whether within the same city or outside a whole country, was a necessity on any assignment. He said that the news corporation he’d worked for had mandatory rest periods for a reason. When you were working away from home, if you couldn’t take care of yourself and had no support network, regardless of the reason, or even if you could but had been out too long, time to go was time to go.

“Admit that you cannot do it,” Gideon said, “and get the fuck out of there.”

“No,” I said. I wasn’t a loser who couldn’t do my job, I said. I pointed out defiantly that I was still in fact successfully doing it.

Plus, now that the subject of leaving had been raised—it had never even occurred to me—I thought of an additional argument against it. “I met this guy,” I said. “If I leave now, I won’t have even a chance of seeing him again.”

Gideon was flabbergasted by the absurdity of this. But Nico and I had continued to stay in constant touch. I missed him with astonishing fervor, and couldn’t imagine leaving the country he was in just like that, no matter what else was going on, or how unlikely it was that we’d be able to meet.

“I love him,” I told Gideon, weakly.

I’m not stupid; I know how stupid I sounded.

“No, Mac, you don’t. He’s just the only thing that’s made you feel human recently.”

I had considered that, too. I’d even inwardly accused Nico of the same thing when he’d asked me why he felt in love. But it didn’t seem like quite the right explanation. It couldn’t be sufficient to explain the efforts I’d made to reconnect in person. I’d offered to visit his camp, professionally, just to be in the same room with him, but his superiors refused to assume the liability for an American’s safety, however briefly. And though I’d offered to find a car and a driver to come pick him up, he said it was impossible for him to get away again; it was a miracle it hadn’t cost him his career the first time.