Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (11 page)

“I think
so
!” I said, assuming that my most obvious symptoms had abated because I was better and they were gone, not because I’d possibly transitioned into the next phase of symptoms. “I feel pretty good.”

6.

Back in Haiti, things looked mostly the same. It had only been a few months. But I had a better lay of the land than I did on my first arrival. And this time, I fantasized incessantly about having sex at gunpoint. There was absolutely nothing in the Western Hemisphere I wanted so much as my back against a wall with a friendly gun to my throat.

Whatever. I considered an inability to think about sex without thinking about guns a huge improvement over an inability to think about sex without picturing rape. Maybe it was the guns I encountered every day—shotguns on the security guards in front of banks and gas stations. Rifles on the peacekeepers, who slung them carelessly across their laps in the backs of UN trucks, barrels pointed inadvertently at your face while you drove behind them in traffic. Rich people talking about the handguns used to kidnap other rich people who were bartered for ransom, rape activists talking about gun threats, and gunpoint rapes, too. Whatever the source of the fantasy, it nearly became reality when a regular at the hotel bar got desperate one night and, asking for the eighty-seventh time if I would sleep with him, grasped for anything that might change my mind, trying eventually, wildly, “We can do this at gunpoint if that sells it for you.”

It did.

That was a lucky guess on his part. But the plan was scrapped as quickly as it’d been conceived when I asked him if his firearm had a safety, and he said no.

I—even I—was not that crazy.

Although, when he offered to unload the gun, I declined, because then I couldn’t see what the point would be.

At the one-year mark since the quake, that January, sources I interviewed said that the idea that the country had made “progress” was a joke. They complained that the rebuilding was happening only for the rich; people in the displacement camps were becoming more desperate and dispirited. Part of my reporting plan was to check in with FAVILEK, the fierce group of rape survivors whose efforts I’d profiled in my previous feature, to see if the safety conditions in the camps had improved at all. They hadn’t. FAVILEK’s president told me that the number of reported rapes weren’t the same as last time I was there: They were worse. And since people had been so hungry for so long, she’d been seeing more child prostitution.

This trip, I’d insisted on taking a male photographer along with me as a man buffer. The propositions I’d been getting from men over the past few assignments were only what lots of women, and lots of female reporters, experienced everywhere, all the time. But I didn’t have the spirit to go through that again right now. There was a reason that during the oil spill in Louisiana, I’d taken a very tall and broad male reporter with me when I went to cover “female oil wrestling” night at a club frequented by BP cleanup workers. As one of the only (non-stripper) women in the rowdy crowd, I’d been safer with him there. Arriving in Haiti the second time, the moment my photographer-escort and I landed, I’d felt doubly justified in doubling the magazine’s travel budget when wouldn’t you know it the first person I ran into, just outside the airport, was Henri. We made surprised faces at each other. Though I continued on my way, I went so stiff that my photographer could apparently see it. “That’s the guy?” he asked, turning around to look.

I entered the country more prepared, better rested, and less friendly this time. Much as I liked to think I could sufficiently project fuck-off-ness on my own, the photographer’s presence made me feel like I didn’t have to spend all my energy keeping my back quite as far up. While having him may not have deterred every proposal—he wasn’t by my side every second; while we were standing on just opposite sides of FAVILEK’s driveway, I of course ran into Marc, who took the opportunity to tell me how delicious I looked, acting injured that I hadn’t called him to tell him I was back—he did keep threats down. But even my photographer wasn’t safe from the language violence that pervades the global rape culture. We’d only just got our dinner the first night at the Oloffson when my old friend The Doctor sat down with us and started explaining to him that if you were trying to rape a woman and couldn’t stay hard, you’d have to resort to violating her with a bottle, or a piece of wood, or maybe even a pen—which he helpfully pulled out of his pocket for demonstration.

My photographer promptly slid his tumbler full of white rum across the table to me.

I drank more than I did on the last trip. I was quite practiced, after all, by this point. But there was no crying. No nightmares. I can’t say if I ever dissociated, because I was so drunk or post-drunk at all times that I wasn’t particularly connected or self-aware in general. Every morning, I woke up early, pulled my hair back, put sunscreen on, and jumped in my new fixer’s car. I was more than a week into my trip when Baby Doc Duvalier surprise-returned from two decades of post-overthrow exile in France—big news—and I accepted my editors’ proposal to extend my stay. Even though I’d contracted a parasite. Intestinal fortitude was a bragging point I brought up more often than was decent—I’d never got sick abroad, from Asia to Micronesia to Mexico. “I can digest anything,” I would always say, then add obnoxiously, pointing to whatever table I was sitting at: “I could eat this table.”

But suddenly I couldn’t digest a single food product. For the last several days in Port-au-Prince, I stopped consuming almost everything but bread, whiskey, and Barbancourt rum. And, while I was at it, cigarettes.

The wisdom of my nutritional decisions aside, I felt good about my apparently vastly improved emotional functioning this time around. During the last trip, I’d managed to file exactly one dispatch while I was in the country—on the morning after I’d arrived. This trip, I posted nine. I wrote about the concept of recovery after such a disaster; I wrote about rebuilding efforts, and the scrappers around debris-removal sites. I covered a protest against MINUSTAH, and a one-year-anniversary ceremony at a mass gravesite. I saw Bill Clinton. The unveiling of a new market. A tent-city shack that opened up as a tiny movie house, one of three in that camp, showing ninja movies and porn for about a quarter. I chased newly arrived Baby Doc through the airport and around his hotel with a swarm of other reporters, and went to multiple orphanages. I spent one muggy Saturday with The Robber Baron, who’d been trying to convince my photographer—his newest drinking buddy—and I that if we were going to cover all that disaster business during Haiti’s most disastrous time we had to make time for the best of Haiti, too. One morning, he spirited us away to Jacmel, a historic waterfront city in the south. On the way out of town, we drove through slums where the crush of humanity got heavier, the piles of garbage higher, taller than a man, with naked children picking their way around flaming mountains of trash. But as we continued west, the Caribbean to our right, the population thinned out, and as we cut due south across the peninsula, we blasted Billy Squier and Billy Idol and Britney Spears along the narrow, climbing switchbacks over the mountains. The pavement cut into the hills like California’s Highway 1, but with rolling green valleys instead of ocean below. I stuck my head out the window, happy but carsick. When we reached the port city, we feasted on whole grilled fish seaside, plus lobsters, and Five Star Reserve rum. On the beach, one of The Robber Baron’s other rich friends showed up on a Jet Ski. They told us to come back for vacation sometime.

On the way home, back up and over and down the mountains, my photographer and I dozed in The Robber Baron’s truck, drunk but having to get up early the next day. Haiti Part II was sweating and running and working nonstop, and I remained tired but wired throughout, exhausted at the end of the day but with a restless energy that I poured into getting plastered and then, in bed, playing gunpoint-fuck scenes in my head.

Never any crying. Passed-out fine sleeping. Parasite-eaten insides. Still, one of the most important differences between the two Haiti trips, to me, was the absence of Nico. I’d spent a combined total of four hours with him on the first one, but they had been consuming; we’d met, we’d slept together, we’d said I love you. This trip, we reached another big milestone.

*   *   *

By the time I was back in Haiti, more than three months since the last time we’d seen each other, Nico and I had exchanged hundreds of e-mails. We were ready to take our relationship to the next level. The highest level that long-distance couples can attain: a video chat. On the same Gothic mansion deck where we’d first laid eyes on each other, we finally came face-to-face again one night through our respective MacBooks. I stared at him for two hours, sitting outside there at the Oloffson. We regarded each other with something approaching awe.

We Skyped another time while I was working in the courtyard of a hotel downtown, where lush plants overflowed their decorative pots and “La Vie en Rose” came over the speakers. We Skyped yet again before I left the country.

After I got home, we graduated to Skyping from my apartment in San Francisco. We didn’t actually talk, as we still didn’t share a language; we just looked at each other while we typed, looking up translations as we messaged along. We Skyped while he was in barracks, and on long journeys in the backs of police trucks; I saw his face in the various cities where he’d been deployed, in the morning before guarding the embassy, at night before going out with the other guys. We talked through the eight weeks after Haiti II before my next two back-to-back assignments, to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, while I was putting together the complicated plans for them.

During those two months, I told Alex at the time, I felt great. Alex was my going-for-long-walks friend—whereas Tana was more my long-bouts-of-drinking friend. Both of them were deep-talks-about-feelings friends, and what I told Alex about my feelings during our strolls was that I felt great. I felt a little out of body, but I attributed it to the fact that I was starving; I was still getting over my Haitian parasite for weeks after coming home. But maybe I should’ve given more credence to the fact that when the IT guy at work told me they were shutting down the company server that supported my BlackBerry, I was still habitually, fanatically clutching it. When he said he would have to take it away from me for another model, I begged him not to. When he took it anyway, I started crying. Clutching the new phone, I registered its shape only in terms of its difference from my BlackBerry’s, emptiness on the sides of my palms where the boxier BlackBerry had been when I held it all through Haiti, and I felt empty, too, and nervous.

Or maybe I should have seen a tell that I wasn’t a hundred percent cured during an NPR interview I did about rape gangs and displacement camps and personal threats, when the host asked me how I coped with my fear and I responded, so faint with parasite famishment that my ears were buzzing, “Whiskey.”

But I wasn’t thinking about what percentage better I was, just that I was much better than I’d been before. I was functioning. Those two months, I had a momentum, piecing together the logistics for the extremely complex Africa assignments, calling embassies, even planning a stop in New Orleans on the way to cover the one-year aftermath of Deepwater Horizon. After work, or on breaks, I chatted with Nico for hours at a time. Every second of which was transcendent joy.

“I have to stop in The Hague for a couple of days for interviews,” I typed to him one day. “You know, the Netherlands is only a six-hour drive from France.”

He laughed, saying he didn’t know his deployment schedule yet.

During any free time I wasn’t spending talking to Nico, I would head out to connect with Alex at our designated meeting point. Confidently, exuberantly, I would beat my way down the San Francisco street toward our walking rendezvous, blasting my iPod. I saw Meredith only three times, for post-trip decompression and pre-trip maintenance. I didn’t feel like I needed more professional help than that.

I felt prepared. I felt informed. “There are six physiological responses to crisis,” Meredith had kept reminding me after Haiti Part I. They were instinctual means of survival: flight, fight, freeze, collapse, dissociate, become hypervigilant. My shocking introduction to dissociation, in the car in Port-au-Prince, did strike me as wholly out of my control. And now I understood what it was. But my instinct to freeze—like a deer in headlights—was the object of great self-disgust, and of Meredith’s repeated lessons.

Lots of people—and animals—freeze, she’d continuously reminded me. Information about the world comes into one part of an almond of multistructured gray matter in your brain called the amygdala, which sends it to another part of the amygdala that administers instinctual responses. Mine was to freeze. I froze when Marc wouldn’t stop propositioning me, when I might have made a scene. I froze for too long, impotently watching it escalate to touching, when the guys in Oklahoma had started talking about what merriment it would be to gangbang me. I froze in front of Henri, retreating into myself when I sensed the problem, trying to disappear into my chair when it was confirmed, then demurely lying my way out, in all cases failing to engage, paralyzed like easy prey, spending all of my valuable energy and time to react being still and just wishing it wasn’t happening, wishing it would end and it was over.

It wasn’t my fault, Meredith had been trying to tell me. It was innate. Further, the instinct was reinforced by socialization. Hardly anyone is taught how to set her own boundaries; add a crisis or conflict to that mix, and it becomes drastically harder to enforce them. I was no debutante. But being bisexual and capable and hardworking didn’t necessarily make it any easier to make “No” come out of your mouth without a polite smile or adding a “thank-you” or even “sorry.” Not without practice. Especially not when as a girl, you’d been raised to practice the opposite your whole life.

So Meredith had qualified, many times, that it wasn’t my fault for feeling powerless. And that there were, granted, countless situations in which no amount of proactivity prevented a woman from being beaten or raped or killed. Still, I wanted to burn down her house when she pointed out that a woman who forcefully engages a harasser has a better chance of shutting down the situation. That a woman who fights an assailant increases her odds of not getting raped. Probably, anyway: The studies didn’t take into account your outlying but very real misfortune if
your
rapist turned out to be a sadist. And one study suggested that this might apply primarily to attacks by friends or strangers, since it found that fighting an attacker who was your intimate partner increased your chance of sustaining injury, horrifyingly, by double. One thing that was not in dispute, though, was that people who’ve been victims once often find themselves victimized again—that I’d basically been lucky that nothing worse had happened to me, because some human predators, like mountain lions, are more likely to confront a target that isn’t strong and active.