Gillian Anderson - A Vision of Fire

They turned a corner into an open patch of ground between several of the market’s long, open-sided, orange-roofed sheds. This gap in the sheds, like others, was nearly filled with garbage, full of plastic bags with food skins and peelings, the occasional animal carcass, and human waste from when someone couldn’t wait for one of the few portable toilets. It was all rotting in the tropical noon sun. Yet the screams, more hideous than the smell, dominated his attention.

The screamer was a young Haitian woman, definitely under twenty, wearing a yellow T-shirt that said “Twerkin’ for the Weekend.” She was not desperately thin, as many Haitian women were, so he guessed she was getting regular meals from somewhere and probably was not a member of the poorest poor. She was standing barefoot in the mud, her hands raised slightly as if in supplication or protection, or both, and her whole body was rigid. She was staring up past the sheds at the sky, mouth agape.

No one was touching her but all the ladies who sold the food in the market were watching. Aaron heard the word “ fou ” many times over and knew they were saying the young woman was psychotic.

He placed his hands on her arms. She didn’t move them. He pressed a little. She resisted. He released them and placed his hands on her face. She didn’t register his presence, even when he pulled gently at the corners of her eyes to see if she would look at him. Nor did she stop screaming.

Aaron had been trained to respond to post-traumatic stress disorder but this was different. He’d been in Port-au-Prince for five years, having arrived three weeks after the devastating earthquake, and he’d seen things that had kept him up vomiting at night. But he had never seen anything like this young woman. This was fresh trauma happening now . There had been no storm or earth tremor. There were no traces of blood on her body.

He balanced his medical kit on a stack of calabash gourds and rifled through it, wondering what the hell he had that he could use. He wasn’t equipped with the effective sedatives of wealthy countries.

Well , he thought, when in doubt, eliminate pain, even if a source of pain isn’t evident. He loaded a syringe with codeine and slipped the needle into the young woman’s bicep. She showed no reaction to the pinch.

He stood back for a moment and, out of habit, looked at his kit to make sure no one was edging near it to steal something they could use… or sell. He realized that most of the children gathered in the square were watching a couple who were both aiming horizontal smartphones at the girl, shooting video. Half of Haiti now owned ordinary handsets but smartphones were still prohibitively expensive. Aaron did not have time to be disgusted by the couple. He suddenly noticed that he could hear motors and horns from the road again, and a cheerful music station from a hand-crank radio nearby. The young woman had stopped screaming.

“ C’est la fils avec vous? ” Aaron asked the couple, remembering that the little girl had referred to the young woman as having a phone.

“ Mais non, non ,” the man said with an American accent, reinforcing the denial with a wave of his hand.

The woman put away her phone, tugged at his arm. They held trinkets from peddlers, had probably been walking through the market and sought to capture the drama of a native in distress. Aaron wondered what had been lifted from their pockets while they indulged themselves. He didn’t feel sorry for them. They could have offered something , a donation for medicine.

He turned his attention back to the young woman. She was still staring at the sky, but now her physical behavior had changed. He could not say it was a more comforting sight. With her head tilted back and her mouth dropped open, she appeared to be holding her breath. Her arms were waving back and forth slowly with her hands curled in clawlike shapes. She seemed to want to move her legs as well but her feet were rooted to the filthy slop on the ground.

What now? Aaron thought anxiously. He pawed through his kit again—bandages, dressings, ibuprofen, nothing that was going to help.

The crowd of whispering women parted. Some moved aside willingly, others grudgingly. Aaron watched a few of them make the sign of the cross, and some sucked their teeth, a severe insult in Haiti. Others nodded respectfully toward an approaching figure. Aaron suddenly smelled a cigar, somehow able to penetrate through the stink of the garbage.

“Mambo,” some of the onlookers said, explaining and introducing the woman who stepped out of the crowd. The Vodou priestess looked dismissively at the American doctor.

About fifty years old, she was not wearing a hand-me-down American T-shirt but a threadbare, short-sleeved ivory blouse; a skirt that had once been a pale pink; and a thin white kerchief tied around her hair. Her elbows and hips were sharp with undernourishment, and her strong cheekbones would have been envied in another world. Her eyes, tough and fierce, regarded the young girl.

Be respectful , Aaron thought as he stepped aside to admit the woman.

“That girl is drowning,” the mambo said in clear English.

Aaron was speechless. After a moment he said, “I don’t understand.”

“You better hurry,” the mambo said. “She got ice-cold salt water in her chest.”

The woman raised a cigar to her lips and stared at him.

Aaron wrenched his eyes away and looked at the girl. He glanced from her arms to her neck to her open mouth, and, yes, if this girl had been in water, those hands might have been trying to claw to the surface. His mind shoved the thought away hard but… He looked at her face and, by god, her lips were turning blue. Her ears too. She was trembling all over and her arms were slowing down.

This girl has hypothermia. In Haiti.

Aaron waved at several women to move cabbages and stalks of sugarcane off a sheet that was spread beneath them on the ground. He turned to his kit and pulled out two packages and ripped them both open. As soon as the sheet was clear he put his hands under the girl’s armpits and dragged her to it as gently as possible. Supporting her body, he laid her down. He pulled a crackling silver Mylar emergency blanket from the larger ripped package and spread it over the girl to keep her warm under the scorching-hot sun. Then he checked for anything in her throat that might be obstructing her breathing—there was nothing. With one desperate glance at the mambo smoking her cigar, he interlocked his hands and leaned on the young woman’s chest to perform CPR. He ignored his brain, which demanded to know what the hell he was doing.

After five pumps he pulled a piece of plastic from the smaller ripped package and placed it over the girl’s mouth so that he wouldn’t infect her with anything he might be carrying. He placed his mouth over hers to breathe into her lungs and was shocked to feel that her lips were warm. He pulled away, second-guessing everything, but the blue of her lips was unmistakable. Exhaling deeply into her, he then moved back to her chest and pressed on her heart, two, three, four, five, inhale… exhale into her, back to the chest…

Suddenly the girl spasmed and hacked, hard. If they had been on a beach, by a swimming pool, in the flat bottom of a boat, a spout of water would have arced out of her mouth. Here, there was nothing. And yet, when she lay back down, she was coughing and breathing hoarsely exactly like someone who had been drowning only seconds ago.

“Good God,” Aaron murmured. He turned to the mambo, a look of awe and confusion on his face. “Thank you,” he said.

She tapped the ash off her cigar onto the foul ground. “ Se bon ki ra ,” she replied. “Good is rare.” Then she turned and walked into the crowd as it closed behind her.