the sex-related flashbacks even after they were over, the memory of the way they had cringed and twisted and closed my body down lingering like a misery hangover. But now I could think about sex, and write e-mails about it, and have it. My faith in almost everything else remained shaken, too, but it was soon rare that a movie rape scene triggered immediate, whiplash-inducing weeping. Within a couple of months, the gagging fits seemed for the most part to have ceased. One month, I told myself I was allowed to drink on only five days of that month; I ended up drinking on way more days than that, but on some of my days off, I managed to do something other than lie in bed watching Grey’s Anatomy reruns for fourteen hours at a time while eating heaps of popcorn, like my parents used to make when we all watched TV together. My dad and I had liked to eat the half-popped kernels at the bottom of the bowl. We called them “burnt seeds” and hunted for the best ones, each handing them to the other. I looked for them alone now while bingeing on medical dramas, finding it comforting, though sometimes painful, to crack them between my teeth.
Three and a half months after I returned from Haiti, I was assigned to go back. In January 2011, my editors called me in to discuss coverage strategy for the first anniversary of the quake.
And to discuss something else. “Are you … ready to go back?” they asked.
I still drank too much. I almost always got drunk to have sex, with Isaac or anyone else, but I didn’t drink every day, and I could get out of bed in the morning.
“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
Three and a half months after I returned from Haiti, I was assigned to go back. In January 2011, my editors called me in to discuss coverage strategy for the first anniversary of the quake.
And to discuss something else. “Are you … ready to go back?” they asked.
I still drank too much. I almost always got drunk to have sex, with Isaac or anyone else, but I didn’t drink every day, and I could get out of bed in the morning.
“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
Similar Books
