Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story

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  For Nico

  and for Chris

  PROLOGUE

  He was on his knees when he did it, but I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing at all. Or rather, I was doing what people are supposed to do, which is cry, but not like that, because I’d been crying, for hours already, before he slid off the couch where were we sitting, dropped down in front of me, and proposed. Actually I’d been crying, choking—sobbing, really—on and off for three days straight in our rented room in a winter-abandoned wine village. Or actually, since almost the moment I’d arrived in France. Or, in fact, since I’d been diagnosed seventeen months earlier, when these kinds of episodes became part of my personality, when it became not at all unusual to break down like this. Just that now, something electric bloomed in my gut and shot through my torso, constricting my throat. So I turned my face away from him and cried some more.

  Nico did not say “Will you marry me?” That is not what the French say. A few months before, he had seen the English version of Jerry Maguire for the first time and learned that Tom Cruise had not asked Renée Zellweger if she wanted to marry him as he had in the dubbed French translation—Veux-tu m’epouser—but if she would. “Do Americans really say that?” he’d demanded. “It’s so … aggressive.” So he’d inquired after my desire instead.

  “This is as bad as it gets,” he said about my crying. “But I still want to make my life with you.” He said, “Even though you tell me this is what you’re really like.”

  I’d been telling him that since shortly after we met, a year and a half ago, while he was peacekeeping and I was reporting a story in Haiti—where I’d experienced something that had shaken me such that I’d never managed to properly put myself back together. Where two days later I’d escaped an isolated room where a stranger stripped down to his undershirt had backed me into a corner and promised me that my father should be worried. I’d told Nico that I had nightmares, flashbacks, that I dissociated—an interruption of normal psychological functioning in which my consciousness was suddenly and completely unable to integrate with reality. But he hadn’t really seen what that looked like yet.

  “You tell me this is what you’re really like,” he said. “And I tell you I’m still here.”

  Empirically speaking, he could be forgiven for thinking that I was good wife material. I had a job, and a savings account. Straight A’s all through school, master’s degree, summa cum laude. Culinarily and sexually outgoing. Tall. Healthy hair. Relentlessly on time. I’d kept my shit relatively together during a year and a half of brief reunions with him in Dutch hotel rooms, Belgian B&Bs, a borrowed Parisian apartment, rented Riviera or French Caribbean abodes, in cities on the way to one of my assignments or to which he’d been deployed. And the few scenes I’d caused could be mistaken for jet lag or disoriented fatigue or even a penchant for high relationship drama instead of what they really were: symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

  But then the other morning, I’d been stepping into our chalet bathtub when I glimpsed myself in the mirror, and paused.

  No, I thought. Oh, no.

  Changes in self-perception and hallucinations—those are some of my other symptoms.

  Historically, I was on good terms with mirrors, which generally told me that I was lucky for having been born with the long, athletic shape that happened to be popular at the time. But now, the two big mirrors hanging on the walls to the front and side of the bathtub were saying something else.

  All I could see was a boy. A flat, weak, castrated, insubstantial fragment of a boy. The curve of my hips seemed medically wrong. Awful. I shouldn’t be showing any of this to Nico, I thought urgently. I shouldn’t be letting him see this disgusting thing.

  I ducked down into the tub, out of sight of the reflection, and pressed my hands into my face.

  You are fucking insane, I told myself. You know it’s not true. Look again.

  I hesitated, remaining crouched, nude.

  Look at it again.

  I popped my head and chest up.

  No. Not better. I could see breasts this time, but they were misshapen, meaningless lumps.

  I went about turning the water on and washing myself, careful to keep the mirrors out of my line of vision, but by the time I emerged from the bathroom, I was nearly hyperventilating, partly because I was the grossest thing I’d ever seen, but mostly because I couldn’t convince myself that it wasn’t true, even though I knew for a fact that it wasn’t. I couldn’t trust myself. I’d lost all credibility with, of all people, myself. And I’d been in rough shape already; the day before, I’d woken up incapable of believing in possibility. Can you make a coffee cake? I asked myself on days when I suspected I wasn’t mentally well, and when everything in my being responded, No, though everyone knows my blueberry coffee cake is delicious, I knew I wasn’t stable, and shouldn’t listen to anything else I said.

  After the bath, I turned shameful and cold. When I walked into our bedroom, Nico told me I was gorgeous, and I yelled that he was a liar. Started screaming when he tried to touch me, pulling clothes on spastically, strangled by tears. Hurled myself around the kitchen, fuming that we’d let a baguette go stale.

  I knew that one thing that would help alleviate the grief and fury suddenly charging through my veins was opening up my mouth and throat and screaming and screaming. But I wasn’t going to do that in front of another person. As usual, I considered how effective it would be to do myself harm, open my skin up or shatter a bone, perhaps, get a real crisis on my hands, the kind of crisis people I met the world round were uniformly impressed I took in such stride. But even when I was alone, I acknowledged that that was a line I wasn’t supposed to cross—doctor’s orders—and if I did it in Nico’s presence, he might have me committed. Half a liter of Johnnie Walker would have done the trick, too, but I didn’t consider that, because I didn’t have any, and because it was 9 A.M., so Nico would be alarmed.

  Compared with these, crying was the best option. I let it overtake me and flush out, and after I sobbed for hours, I sat an exhausted Nico down. “I know I’ve been telling you this the whole time we’ve been together,” I said. “But now you can see what I mean. Sometimes I can’t experience emotion, when I go into self-defensive shutdown. And when I can, it often looks like this.” I told him how unpredictable and nonsensical the PTSD triggers could be, how a month ago on a subway platform I’d become engulfed by a rage so strong I couldn’t take it standing still, honestly fearing that if I hadn’t started running up and down the platform my arms would take hold of my left leg and rip it out of my pelvic bone as the first step of my body’s tearing itself to pieces. Just because I missed a train. Even though the next train was coming in seventeen minutes. I told him how when I was in Congo I interviewed people who swore to me that if I didn’t help them they would be murdered, and my translator was shaky
and breathless, as any normal person would be, and I … wasn’t. I told Nico that I had days like this all the time, when I could not stop crying, even if I was only watching TV, much less trying to have an intense romantic relationship. Especially once I had already failed the coffee cake test. Then everything flooded in worse, and it wasn’t better until it just was, no matter how hard I tried to make it otherwise.

  Now here we were again. Another night, another breakdown, because of the tone of something he’d said. Because of my sudden conviction that I was a monster. Because I’d awakened from a nightmare that morning with all-day pain and fear quaking my limbs.

  And he still wanted to marry me.

  Could I be forgiven for consenting, when, empirically speaking, I knew the things that I knew? Like how many people with PTSD never recover? How many spouses contract PTSD from their partners, the symptoms of one traumatized person absorbed into another through psychotic osmosis? How long and sob-strewn the path to “normal” sex is for trauma survivors?

  Over the past couple of days, I’d already made Nico cry. Two days in a row. And hard, hard enough to shake his sturdy frame one of the times, then hard enough to put him in a bed, temporarily immobilized, during the other. An otherwise healthy twenty-six-year-old soldier, he wasn’t much of a crier. But he’d been blitzed by my sickness. When, finally defeated by my paranoia, panic, and despair, he couldn’t stop his own tears from coming, he looked more than sad. He looked surprised.

  “Just think about it,” he said now, repeatedly, after proposing. “Don’t answer me now. I just want you to know that I’m ready.”

  Well. I certainly wasn’t. Since my diagnosis, I’d written about PTSD, researched PTSD, was taking more assignments about PTSD while still trying aggressively to treat my own PTSD. There was no way I was permanently attaching Nico to me until I knew more, did more and better work toward recovery, even if he was the best thing about being alive, one of the only good things left that I recognized, the most magnificent miracle of a being. Not until I was sure people who were “severely impaired,” as I’d been deemed in a state-certified psychiatric evaluation, could get better, and how much better I could get, and what impact I would have on my loved ones in the meantime. I hadn’t even got to the point where I thought I had the right to be traumatized and impaired—acceptance being one of the earliest getting-better steps.

  That night, I woke to moonlit silence and trained my eyes on the strong, smooth back muscles under Nico’s skin. He spent 230 days a year in barracks and was accustomed to being disturbed in the middle of the night, but never by something as pleasant as a naked lady. So he was never mad to be awoken by a kiss to his shoulder or hand on his chest, no matter how tired he was or what he had to do the next day. But this time, for the first time since we’d met, I stayed alone, restless, watching him.

  Yes, I had too much more work to do. This was hardly sustainable, staring hard through the dark at his form, preferring to weather my distress and insomnia by myself, even for hours, rather than touch him. You are poison, I chanted silently to myself to keep from reaching out. And your poison is contagious.

  PART ONE

  If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

  —LORRIE MOORE

  1.

  Later, I would go back over every detail. Like it was a crime scene. Like a detective. But when I arrived in Port-au-Prince on a mid-September morning in 2010, everything seemed—everything was—perfectly ordinary.

  As ordinary as could be expected in Haiti’s capital then, anyway. Nine months earlier, a 7.0 earthquake had shaken the country into a shambles, dropping or damaging 290,000 buildings, killing or maiming at least as many. You wouldn’t know it just to step off a plane. I smiled at the band that greeted us, several guys singing and playing upbeat twoubadou on guitars and maracas. They were cheerful in the blasting heat. But inside the airport, I waited at customs in a long line of other after-disaster interlopers: aid workers, religious workers, groups in matching T-shirts—a youth mission, old ladies spreading the wisdom of naturopathy. Guys I suspected were journalists, like me, and guys I knew were journalists, with the aloofness and cameras and occasional opening up and rearranging of black trunks full of equipment. I stripped down to a tank top, and forgot to fill out some form. Got waved through anyway, and grabbed one of the drivers crowding around outside baggage claim. Hopped in a nice white van, and made the acquaintance of post-earthquake, mid-recovery, pre-reconstruction Haiti. Three and a half million people had been affected. Fewer than 10 million people lived there.

  “It’s intense,” a program officer for a nonprofit had told me at home in San Francisco two days before. She’d admitted that as much as her organization dealt deep in countries’ worst problems, forced disappearances and femicide and hate crimes, she hadn’t quite been prepared for the shape Port-au-Prince was in. But she couldn’t quite say why.

  My editors wanted a narrative postcard from Haiti, a description of a disaster that people knew but couldn’t meaningfully imagine. I was going to be in town for two weeks, and I was supposed to write shorter stories for the magazine’s Web site daily, then a feature-length cover story for print when I got home. How was the aid delivery and rebuilding going. How was morale. Based on my prearrival interviews, the story would probably include the epidemic of sexual violence against women. One of the activists to whom I’d spoken before I left had encouraged me to investigate “coerced transactional sex” for food-aid cards. Two had mentioned “rape gangs.”

  Beyond the gates of Toussaint L’Ouverture International, the first thing you saw was the camps. “Tents” was the word everyone used to describe what constituted them, but the shelters were barely deserving of that designation, the makeshift tarp boxes erected with sticks and held together with ropes and strings. They undulated along and away from the road in seas of various sizes, camps all the way to the hotel, tucked into every spare space, plastic sheets in gray and white and blue, plastic from USAID, plastic from any place that it could be had. More than a million Haitians, they said, lived displaced like that, crammed into more than a thousand camps. As the months wore on, and the interminable summer, they’d become mires of starvation and increasing hopelessness.

  The driver of my hired van was a slim twentysomething named Henri. He was eager to share his expansive knowledge of American rap, and proudly dialed up an iPod playlist with his lanky fingers while I surveyed the scenes of my new assignment. Standard no-infrastructure traffic chaos. Diesel fumes and hot urban dust. The shops were crowded next to each other, as were the people who walked in front of them along the side of the road. There were peacekeepers all over the place, one of the largest United Nations forces on the planet, on foot and in trucks, Koreans and Nepalese and Italians in uniform, the Brazilians in particular decked out for war with assault rifles and helmets and flak jackets. Everywhere there were half-shaken buildings that looked bombed out, gaping holes in their cement facades, or buildings that had been reduced to piles of debris. Nineteen million cubic meters of rubble—enough, people liked to say, that if you put it all in shipping containers, the line of them would stretch from London to Beirut.

  Henri gave me the audio tour to this exhibition of his country: It looks different, he said, with people and cars skirting rubble—one of the debris piles a car wash he’d used just hours before it crashed down—but there was also a lot that had not changed. It didn’t help now that most of the national government buildings had been damaged, but politicians had always been corrupt, he said. There were always people who were too poor to know what they were going to eat the next day. Henri was from a middle-class family, but said he was going to become upper class someday.

  We drove for forty-five minutes. Though the van was air-condition
ed, we sweated. Everybody honked, whether to say Thank you or Fuck you or I’m turning! Another car hit us, but nobody really cared. As Henri explained why this was the most opportune time for a businessman to invest in Haiti, I registered my surroundings—the tent citizens wet and nearly naked next to the car, taking baths out of buckets in the street along the edge—a bit mechanically. Like, I remember thinking, a person who’s too used to registering surroundings. I and Henri both, maybe. He said his heart was breaking when two tiny kids pressed themselves against my window to beg for money at a traffic stop. But when we inevitably passed another displacement camp fifteen seconds later, and I asked him if that wasn’t heartbreaking, too, he shrugged.

  I was tired. I’d spent nearly four straight months in New Orleans covering a disaster of the manmade kind, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and I’d been on a beach vacation for a week and back home in San Francisco for just two days before hopping a plane to Miami, spending the night at the shabby airport hotel, then rising early to clear security again and catch the plane to Port-au-Prince. I was relieved when Henri pulled up to the Hotel Oloffson, a storied Gothic gingerbread mansion at the top of a steep driveway. The rest of the street was all bustle, and across it was a displacement camp, but on this side of the road it was high gates tended by men in uniform and, behind them, the hotel’s pretty white face rising from among palm and pine trees. I walked up the outdoor stairs and across a huge porch to the reception desk. I took my key straight to my room, a freestanding concrete cottage with a thin wood door, down some stairs to the right of the porch. It was just behind the small pool. My movements were automated as I prepared myself for bed and climbed into it.

  Exhausted though I was, I was restless once I lay down, the way one is in a new place. There were new smells of food and fumes and humidity. Despite how the twoubadou guys had made everyone feel for an instant at the airport, I wasn’t on holiday. But it was always stimulating to be on the brink of getting to know a place.