Dimitry Leger - God Loves Haiti

Papa would get up, turn and walk, and expect me to follow him like I was his equal, his friend. He’d never ask for my hand, like I was too mature for that. I’d grab his hand with both of mine anyway and nuzzle against his strong arm. He’d soften up his posture. I held on to him with both hands way longer than I needed and way tighter than I would hold on to anything else ever in my life.

Natasha stared at her new husband’s hand with a fine layer of horror. On his ring finger he wore a big gold ring crowned with blue diamonds. The diamonds sparkled in the afternoon sun. She felt the full weight of the cliché she was becoming collapse on her shoulders after months of denial. The cliché her ex who shouldn’t be an ex probably believed she had become, and, worse, probably always thought she would become. Part of her hated the ex for being right. And she loved him, too, despite her desperate wish to stop doing so. If she ever saw him again — and the feelings this thought created gave her heartburn — if he forgave her for what she did to him, the ordeal her rejection put him through, if she saw him again, just one more time, even if it was only to say a proper good-bye, she would be straight with him. She would love him for who he was and no longer hold all the things he wasn’t against him. On that day, she, the poor girl made damn good, would hope she would be spared the look of disappointment her father in the real heaven would someday give her if they ever met. She knew winning her ex-lover’s forgiveness would require her to withstand her lover’s pain. The boy would make her feel like shit. Or worse, he would go all Haitian on her and fucking hide his disappointment from her rejection with a shrug and a blank, distant, higher-minder stare. Indifference. Oh, that would kill her. She would rather die now than experience the killing stroke of his indifference.

Is something the matter, Natasha? the President said, his face obscured by the shadow cast by the immense erect American Learjet.

No, Natasha said. Everything’s fine. Allons, chérie . With that, Natasha clasped her husband’s hand fully. She squeezed the hand too, for good measure. The President was so visibly relieved his face and body shrank. He closed his cell phone and began climbing the stairs to get on the airplane with Natasha in tow. However, the minute Natasha put her foot on the first step, the earth shook. Wildly, like a beast. Then came the roar of an explosion, like the cracking of the biggest oak tree ever — the tree of life? — and the ground split and splintered, into ever-growing waves that extended as far as the eye could see. As if she weighed as little as a doll, the force picked Natasha up and threw her backward, but the ground reached her before she could begin a downward arc. The ground rose up to hit her, repeatedly, and rapidly, so quickly, in fact, she barely felt the blows. The sound beneath the wave of earth reaching for her was a roar, a guttural outburst like the explosion of thousands of volcanoes. The roar horrified and enveloped Natasha. It suffocated her, and she found herself floating, body-surfing in a cocoon of violent sounds. Her arms and fingers flailed, clutching nothing but air. In her panic, she looked to the soldiers for help. They were too busy being crushed by tons of cream-painted walls. The airport’s walls casually snuffed out their lives and newly lit cigarettes, as the falling walls of nearly every building in Port-au-Prince did to almost everyone else in their way that instant.

Alain! Natasha screamed, with, presumably, her dying breath.

The morning before the earthquake struck, Alain Destiné was trapped in a closet in the National Palace, paralyzed with self-pity after losing his girlfriend. Sitting on a carpeted floor, naked as a bird and staring at his shriveled glory with a dumbfound look, he spent the entire day trying to figure out how his luck had run out on him. How he didn’t get the girl. Before getting trapped in the closet, he was splayed on Natasha’s large bed in a sea of creamy silk sheets, awash in a postcoital glow. Caressed by streams of pale yellow light filtering through the venetian blinds of his lover’s mansion in the center of town, Alain watched the love of his life pack her things to leave him and their country for another man, yet, out of habit, for he was a born optimist, he still liked his chances of changing her mind.

Last night was incredible, baby, he said. He joked that she shouldn’t put their condoms away too early.

I’m almost ready for round four.

Alain did that, joke when life was taking a bad turn. Natasha wore that studious look she got whenever she wanted to create calm around her to lock in a decision, a quality he found deeply attractive, if unnerving. She looked lovely in her white sundress.

You do realize you don’t have to go, he said.

The crack in his voice made Alain wish he hadn’t said what he said as soon as he’d said it.

Natasha sucked her teeth. Really, Alain? she said. Please let’s not talk about this anymore. What’s the alternative for me? Stay here with you until you get tired of me and leave me behind?

I’ll ignore that provocation, he said. You know I will never leave you. You own me.

Alain smiled at this, for it was true. Despite her effort not to, Natasha smiled at this one truth they shared.

Stay, he continued. Together, we could turn the bookstore and all the other businesses I’ve started into something special. It won’t be long before someone pays my father a lot of money for the store. We’ll live in the big house. Have children…

You and your big business fantasies! They never stop, do they? They take too long to become reality.

Because they’re realistic. Growth takes time. It’s normal. It’s normal in the US and Europe, too. So it should be normal here. Come on, you loved hanging out at the bookstore. I told you about that Canadian couple that was interested in buying it a few months back. Once we spruce it up, we’ll get an even better price for it. I’ll have the nest egg to set us up in Montreal or New York.

Those cities are too cold for me, she said.

Miami then. Even though I hate Miami.

I love Miami, though I’ve never been. I hear it’s nice and small and warm.

It’s also dirty. You have to drive too much there for me. There’s a highway there, I-95. Almost every day you see a couple cars on the side of the road crunched up in ridiculous shapes after accidents. Sometimes I can’t even figure out how the cars collided to produce those shapes. I suppose you could have fun there, turning those scenes into paintings. You love the macabre.

Even while blustering to buy time, Alain Destiné could tell he’d upset Natasha. She stiffened in her thin white dress, which had acquired a bluish tint from the first rays of the dawn sunlight. She hated the way he, like many people, spoke of art, especially her art, as though the work allowed them to read the artist. Like they knew her. Don’t tell me what I love to do, she thought. Don’t tell me about myself because part of you was aroused while taking in my art. The connection between the work produced and me, my heart, is never as simple and linear as you want it to be. Alain remembered the first lecture Natasha had given her about this: I create because I like to do it when I’m moved to do it, and it feels natural, funny. The colors and shapes flow through me. I create images and not words because I’m not interested in debate or discussion. I even know novelists who feel the same way. I bet most do. I could care less what you think of it. Experience it as romantic or macabre all you want, for sure, but keep your theories about it, and me, to yourself.

She didn’t say all that to Alain this time, for she was tired and ready to move on with her life. Still…