Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story Read online

  * * *

  After a long time, I finally napped. After that, I got up, met with one contact, talked to some locals at the hotel bar so I’d have a story for the Web site the next day, and went straight back to bed.

  The Hotel Oloffson’s front porch, high up two sets of stairs, was vast and beset with tables, an open-air restaurant populated with foreign and elite Haitian drinkers and diners. Journalists held court there, the only place in the hotel with Internet, meeting with politicians and each other. The next day, I set up an impromptu office there as well, filing the story, making phone calls, arranging interviews.

  I worked reluctantly, in my fatigue. The breeze off an intermittent rain was pleasant, and as I watched a slow trickle of patrons come and go through the day, I had moments when I wished I could hang around drinking tea, too. Outside, there was always a lot to take in, and given the hard-running, news-breaking, petro-tragedy I’d just worked in Louisiana, I’d resisted this assignment’s timing. But I was on a publication deadline. By the end of the afternoon that first day, I wouldn’t say I was ready to go out reporting, but I was pleased with my progress toward getting ready to do it. I’d resolved to make myself game. As the early evening came, I continued to e-mail and lay groundwork, stopping only to look around, or to scowl now and then at a large, loud group partying at a long table to my right.

  Eventually, a prospective driver and translator—a “fixer,” in journalism parlance—that I’d called joined me at my table. His name was Marc. We made introductions and haggled over fees, and after we’d agreed to work together, I told him more about my assignment. When I told him that I wanted to cover the rape survivors and activists trying to help new victims, he told me that, coincidentally, he worked with these groups and could make introductions. Sometimes he drove rape victims to the hospital—women who’d been gang-raped, mutilated. He helped orchestrate their care and took them money and medicine—when money and medicine were to be had—or moved them to secret locations when their rapists threatened to revictimize or kill them—again, if funds allowed. Actually, he said, he was doing work like that tomorrow.

  Marc retreated to a quieter section of the grounds to phone an American lawyer who had founded a charity that paid for some of the assistance he’d be providing the next day, to see if everyone involved was willing to share their story. While he was gone, I observed my fellow patrons in the low-lit ambience. I got a better look at the obnoxious partiers, who were, I realized eventually, belting out songs in French. They were abnormally attractive, every one of them too fit and lithe; probably soldiers like the military-cut guys I’d seen outside my room window earlier. Those guys had been making an all-out waterpark of the old, largely unused pool, diving and cannonballing and synchronized-backflipping into the water in their Speedos. Indeed these were likely the same assholes, unless there were multiple packs of underwear-model-grade Frenchmen roving the grounds. Which, given the flood of post-quake foreigners, also seemed entirely possible.

  Marc returned to the table, then went home, with an arrangement to pick me up at this same spot early the next morning if all the sources were still comfortable with my presence. I would be ready to go just in case. I wrapped up my work, and headed toward my room. I’d resolved to go swimming before going to bed, to try to settle, try to wrest some of the tiredness and tension from my muscles, try to exercise myself into a hard and healthy sleep. When I got to my room to change, I cursed the Frenchmen. I could see they’d overrun the pool again.

  I forced my plan forward. I made eye contact with several of them in the darkness as I approached the pool, entering the water without a word. I swam around them, sticking to the narrow edges. As irritated as I was, I couldn’t help watching one through the dim light at the side of the pool as he leaped over another who had bent at the waist, somersaulting through the air into the water.

  What must it be like, I had to marvel, to have so much trust in one’s center of gravity?

  “Excuse me,” he said. He swam over slowly, but purposefully, as if we had something to discuss. I saw when he was close that it was the one with the shining green eyes who’d caught my gaze every time I’d glared at them on the balcony. In fact, he was swimming over now because he’d told his platoon mates at the table that I kept looking at him as if I wanted him, and they’d told him that now was his chance to prove it.

  “Do you speak French?”

  I didn’t. He and his best friend, Jimmy, turned out not to speak English, though we’d taken each other’s languages in school.

  We tried words in our own languages, slowly, until one sounded familiar enough in the other’s to get the gist, or used the few French or English words in our vocabularies. I was a pro, one of the best I knew, at deciphering heavy accents—and thank God, as neither of them had exercised their pronunciation since high school. Mine wasn’t any better. But pretty efficiently, we were able to clear up that I was American, not British. After that, I confirmed my suspicions about them.

  “Are you military?” I asked.

  “Yes,” they said. “Police.”

  “You’re military? Or police?”

  “… We are … military. And … we are police.”

  They knew the words “United Nations,” so I understood that the French government had lent them to Haiti’s international peacekeeping force. They asked me what I did, with as few words as possible (“You?”); we all said where we lived. Though they repeated it six times, I didn’t recognize the name of their city—or know if it even was a city or a region—but they had heard of San Francisco.

  We talked, occasionally swimming. After a while, the one with the eyes, who introduced himself as Nico, tried pantomiming something to me for several minutes to explain where their lieutenant was. He touched his forefingers and thumbs together to make a little circle with his hands. He made sort of a V in the air, with a circle maybe on top of it. He said some words I didn’t know, but then “gateau” and “glace,” and threw his hands up exasperatedly when I said “Dessert?” because he hadn’t tried that word. And it was the same word in both languages.

  So as their lieutenant had dessert—on the balcony, I gathered from the pointing—we chatted. The rest of the guys had disappeared, and the three of us treaded the quiet black water together. Nico and Jimmy spoke among themselves often, in French, sometimes to try to come up with an English word. When Nico turned his back to me, I wondered what he would do if I wrapped myself around him, pressing my chest into his shoulders.

  It startled me a little.

  I wasn’t given to wrapping myself around strangers. As they continued talking, I interrogated myself. Was I lonely? That didn’t seem right; I’d been away from home for four months, but in New Orleans, I’d connected with an old love interest, and loved, been loved while I was there. I figured I was probably disoriented, but I couldn’t see why I’d try to orient myself around some random French guy.

  Eventually, he hopped out of the pool and put pants on. When he came back, we sat next to each other at the edge of the water. We pointed to each other’s tattoos and talked about them by giving key words about their histories, our faces close. “I cannot make tattoo,” Jimmy said, from where he was hanging in the deep end near us, shaking his head. “About ze needles … I am.…” He mimicked cringing, a kind of prissiness, while searching for any English word in his vocabulary that might convey it. “I am … gay.” When I left to go shower for bed, both of them urged me to instead shower and meet them back on the hotel porch.

  There, Haiti’s most famous mizik rasin (“roots music”) band, fronted by the hotel’s proprietor, was gearing up to play the regular Thursday-night gig that drew huge mixed crowds from across Port-au-Prince. I made an appearance, as I’d promised the boys, but only briefly. The hotel was suddenly packed. It was hot and loud. Nico reached in his pocket and shook car keys at me when I mimed that he wasn’t drinking like everyone else, and I wasn’t, either. I told them I couldn’t stay, that I had to get up early to may
be go with Marc as he helped rape survivors, and they shook their heads and pooled their English to say it was like that all the time in the camps, the violence and rape—a lot of rape, they repeated. Soon, the rest of their unit crowded around us, thrilled to meet a U.S. citizen; they were provincial French, not Parisian-mean. They spoke even less English than Nico and Jimmy did but were drunkenly determined to try, enthusiastically shouting one word at a time in my face, any word, as it came to them.

  “Hello!”

  “New York!”

  I said good night. I kissed everyone, the men, their female lieutenant, on both cheeks when they leaned in the way the French do. “Too many French people,” I said as I kissed Nico’s second. I paced the floor when I got back to my room, brushing my teeth and debating going back to get him. Tired, conscious of my work and wary of the crowd, I reluctantly decided against it.

  When he knocked on my door five minutes later, he could tell, he would say later, what the answer was the moment he saw my face, but he asked me the question he’d been standing outside practicing the whole time anyway. “Excuse me. But, just to know please if I can to kiss you.”

  Minutes later, he was gone. Within those minutes, I became desperate to remain in his presence, which, despite how fast I could feel his heart beating, felt anchored, solid, despite his being sent to a country where he didn’t belong, touching a girl he didn’t know. I’d been right to want to be close to him in the pool, rooted low and deep as he was. When he had to leave, his curfew calling him from the perfect connectivity of our mouths, time to round the troops back up into the truck, we parted with surprising resistance and inappropriate quantities of tenderness given the circumstances.

  He went back to the camp where they slept. I went to bed with earplugs in, blocking the rock show still raging above, depending on sleep to help me settle into my surroundings, however unsettled they felt. The previous night, one of the locals at the bar had tried to tell me how the earthquake had affected him, and had resorted to a rhetorical, unanswerable half-question. “When the very ground beneath your feet betrays you?” he’d said, shortly before trailing off entirely.

  The next morning, I woke up early and had a roll with some butter on it and went out to work and something happened inside me, and whatever it was, however many years I would spend trying to figure it out, I wasn’t the same anymore after that.

  2.

  As my early interviewees, and the Frenchmen, had said: In the dark, security-less tent cities, full of orphans and widows living under plastic sheets, rape was rampant and unchecked.

  Marc called to say he was indeed picking me up. From the moment I got into his car, every conversation and every interaction centered on sexual violence and violation; dripped with horror and graphic details of bloody injuries. Of course the trauma didn’t end—it never ended—with the rape itself, and I started the morning watching how it continued in ways that I had never anticipated. I was speechless during our first stop, when a female doctor turned to me during a consult with a rape victim and demanded: Did I understand the situation? Did I understand that this was what happened to girls like this one, who have children but are not married? That this wasn’t one of those tragedies in which an innocent girl is raped?

  “Remember when I told you that in Haiti people blame the woman when she gets raped?” Marc asked me quietly as we walked out of the hospital. Later, he said, “Some people say going to the doctor when you get raped is like getting attacked again.”

  And then, after we drove away from the hospital, I saw something.

  That’s all. I’m not going to say much about it. I witnessed something very suddenly. It had something to do with a rape. I was extremely startled by the scene and by the sudden screaming—not mine, but the closest I’d ever been to anyone’s complete and abject terror. So close and so shocking that I lost myself to it.

  The whole situation was immeasurably worse for those more directly involved, and they later decided they didn’t want to talk about it. The exact details are as bad as you might imagine, or worse than you could imagine, and I won’t share them so as not to risk retraumatizing anyone. Even if I did want to share them, I probably couldn’t, the subject so raw and complicated that it spiraled out in ways I can’t describe, with privacy and ownership debates and lawyers. Part of the chaos formed by trauma’s wide path. I raise the situation because the next several years of my life were shaped by it. It was a witnessing and a sound but, more, it was the way it landed on me, the screaming and terror from just a few inches away penetrating and dispersing me.

  That’s what I’m going to tell you about. The dispersing.

  For a second, I felt intense panic.

  Then suddenly, I disappeared.

  * * *

  On a street in Port-au-Prince on September 17, 2010, just before eleven in the morning on a Friday, downtown was hot and bustling, and I lost myself in place and time and in my body.

  In fact, I was in a car. You’re in the car, something inside me said, and I knew that I was in the car, but I couldn’t feel myself in it; I couldn’t feel my body sitting there, or feel myself inside my flesh, since there was that screaming and screaming and terror and I burst into a deep, frantic confusion about where I was. Soon, the screaming stopped. In seconds, the alarm was over. I could see that, sure as I was still registering the rest of the scene, but all I could feel was a disembodied version of myself hovering somewhere behind me and to the left, outside my car window.

  Who are those people? I could hear it asking about everyone inside. What’s that awful thing going on inside that car?

  I hadn’t ever had my consciousness separate from my anatomy before. That made me lucky, I would later learn. But in the moment, though it was extremely disconcerting, I didn’t have time to think or worry about it.

  I had a big workday ahead of me yet. There were hours of interviews to do and people to meet—whether I was in my body or not. And so I got on with my work with my fixer, Marc.

  * * *

  Marc, stocky Marc, in his late thirties and wearing designer eye glass frames, who sweated his balls off in his un-air-conditioned jeep and jeans and polo, weaving through cars and rubble and constantly answering his phone—“I’m like an ambulance,” he said. “People are always calling to say someone got raped.” Marc also seemed disturbed by the morning’s events. We went to the bank to withdraw funds to move the anti-rape activist we were going to pick up into hiding. Someone had threatened to shoot her for standing up for rape victims. While we waited our turn, Marc alternated between silence and shell-shocked exclamations about how terrifying the screaming and witnessing was.

  Silence, silence, sitting in the bank lobby’s plastic chairs. Then: “That was crazy!”

  Silence, silence, his elbows propped on knees knocked wide, before: “I’ve only seen things like that in movies!”

  My own continuing reactions to the morning’s events were more internal. I thought I was doing all right, but I did notice some intermittent numbness and weirdness as we sped around Port-au-Prince. When we got to the headquarters of FAVILEK, whose Creole acronym stands for Women Victims Get Up Stand Up, I seemed fine enough to sense the force of Marc’s colleagues. Rape survivors all, in their forties and fifties, their fierceness ended up being a principal subject of the print feature I eventually turned in.

  “We had this rape problem before the earthquake,” Yolande Bazelais, the president, told me. She was gorgeous and voluptuous, showing a lot of skin and sitting with the gravity of someone who didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought, gesturing calmly, the weight low in her hips. Her organization was founded by women who were raped during the 1991 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. “Now,” she said, “we have double problems.” That was a scary statement, given that a survey taken before the quake based only on reported rapes and sexual assaults put the number at fifty a day in Greater Port-au-Prince alone. More than half of the victims were minors. Marc and the FAVILEK founders said it
had always been that way, with perpetrators that were neighbors or street thugs or police and paramilitaries, who used rape as a tool of intimidation and terror or who raped just because they could. Now, they said, FAVILEK’s resources were stretched thinner than ever. They got three or four calls a week about new cases from the dozen camps the organization attempted to cover. There were 1,300 camps in all.

  As we sat in a circle of folding chairs, under a tarp in the driveway of another organization’s office because FAVILEK couldn’t afford one, the women explained that they needed two agents in each of the 1,300 camps instead of the one dozen agents total. Then, if they had the agents, and could pay them, which they couldn’t currently, they’d need the resources to help the victims. They said that the other day, a woman was raped and choked nearly to death; she called to say she was in hiding, but these women couldn’t help her, because they didn’t have the funds to pay for moving her someplace safe. They were struggling just to take care of their own, they said. The previous night, some hooligans who didn’t like that they were trying to help rape victims had ripped down one of their agent’s tents. As they talked, the women closest to me reached down to swat away the mosquitoes that landed on my bare ankles. One of them told me that in addition to being raped she’d had her legs smashed up. Another one had been shot.

  The woman who had been shot became frustrated as I continued asking questions about the situation and what needed to change to improve it. “We meet with white people, and white people, and white people,” she said. She started raising her voice, and two women beside her put their hands out to calm her, holding her back but smiling. White people make promises but nothing ever, ever happens, she said. She was tired. She was exhausted, and at least they could have given them an office, and if I, White Girl, thought I was actually going to make something happen, she would give me her goddamned e-mail address.…