Dimitry Leger - God Loves Haiti

My dear dead Natasha, Alain wrote, furtively, in the diary he began keeping in his tent.

Why did you leave me? I mean, leave me leave me. Oh I know why you left me, but where did the strength to do so come from? I know I approved of the marriage. I encouraged you to find a patron for your art. I needed more time. You needed a nicer life ASAP. I got it. The President’s not a bad man. A weak man, a man without a courageous bone in his body, but he was wise enough to take the quasi-love you made available to him. You gotta give him credit for that. We would have had great stories to tell our children after you left him for me to whom you rightfully belonged. Yeah, I said it. Belong. I owned you like you owned me. I’m sorry.

I don’t know what to do with my life now. I survived the earthquake. I can’t believe I survived the fucking earthquake and you didn’t. I’m supposed to be grateful. It’s some kind of miracle. I ain’t grateful. You alive is the miracle I would have preferred. The rest, I’m ashamed to admit, is noise. Thousands of people like you are dead. Estimates are wild. I’ve heard numbers as high as 100,000! But nine million of us remain, no matter what the number of earthquake deaths settle at. Probably half that number still living wishes they were dead too; they persevere. I can’t. You should see their toughness as work. I’m not them. I can’t handle life anymore. My nerves are shot. My own shadow scares me. I refuse to leave the refugee camp. I cannot bear the thought of the world beyond it, my father, our house, our society, and the flow of talk of books, politics, profits, children, beaches, football, travel, America, reconstruction, rubble, God. Maybe the earthquake shook away my Haitianness, our supposed innate capacity to grin and bear all God’s sick jokes. I don’t know. I’m being useful in the country’s darkest hour. I have a job, handling relations with foreigners who come around to offer help. I got our camp food, water, tents, first aids kits, even hygiene kits for girls, soccer balls, toilets, showers, even occasional police patrols. I have my own tent, lamp, pen, pad, cardboard to sleep on, crackers to eat, water. When it rained last night, I got mud too. I used it as a pillow. Might as well. My hair is falling out. The pillow was soft and gooey. Tasty too. Just kidding.

I have a roommate in my tent, just one roommate. A privilege. (Privilege, as you liked to point out, had a way of always finding me. It does even now in this damaged new world. At this rate, I’ll probably have my own cabin in the Devil’s cruise ship in hell.) Most people are piled in four to six in their tent. My roommate is a preternaturally mature orphan from nearby Fort National. He could be the Son of God, but I’m too afraid to ask. The last thing I want these days is to give my conflicted feelings about God a face to hate. I like the kid. He keeps me calm. You see, Natasha, I don’t want to do anything with my life now that you’re dead. I feel the country died too. Life as I knew it died that January afternoon. The new world is for the brave. I do not feel like one of them. Assuming you’re in heaven — surely adulterers go to heaven — you have to tell me how to join you as quickly as possible. Send me a sign. You have to help me figure out a way to gracefully escape whatever is trying to pass as life here on earth after Ragnarok. It’s gotten harder to kill yourself in Port-au-Prince since the quake, believe it or not. Or maybe mustering energy to do anything but lay in my tent — it is a nice tent; it’s from Taiwan — and play-acting at public servant will wear out soon. Some invisible damage I suffered internally during the quake may end me. It’s become a common phenomenon. We bury more seemingly unhurt people in the camp each day. It’s like they decide to not wake up. We bury more of these people than we help mothers give birth! An old lady or man or child sits in a corner staring into space for days on end, looking stunned, just shocked, that the earthquake did what it did to them and then they either close their eyes and tumble from their seat onto the dirt or someone touches their unblinking face and discovers their souls had long fled their bodies.

Have you seen your mom in heaven? Does my grandfather walk with a limp up there too? Dad can’t be dead, can he? Pétionville, I’ve heard, was spared by the quake. Shit, I should go check up on him. And mom too. If they’re alive, they’re probably worried sick about me. They approved of you, you know. I was only messing with you when I told you dad didn’t like you. I suspect they liked you because they knew you wanted to leave here permanently and they wanted me to leave too. They worried too much about my safety. They should have worried about my heart breaking. I loved you so much.

In the thirty-sixth second, the earth stopped shaking, and a fog of dust fell like gentle snow on Port-au-Prince. On the ground of the airport’s tarmac an old man in a torn suit lay flat on his back and performed snow angels in the dust with a big grin on his face. Of all the Haitian reactions to the earthquake, his will be the most scrutinized. His will be considered by millions of observers the world over as a call to arms or a call to surrender, or a reminder that death and life go on, and that life on earth was meant to suck, even when it seemed as though it could not suck worse than it did on the thirty-sixth second after the thirty-five-second tremor in Port-au-Prince that January afternoon. Slowly, oh so slowly, his eyes opened and took in… snowflakes? No, these flakes were small and dry. They caused the old man’s eyes to itch and his grin, which was stupid but involuntary, to fade. The picture of grim determination, he rose on his elbows then to his feet, patting dust off his suit jacket as he went along. Near him a plane stood in an unflyable position. The airport’s tower, as far as he could make out, had crumbled into itself, sending heaping chunks of red-and-cream concrete sprawling all the way to his tasseled loafers. The air smelled of brimstone. His throat felt choked. The first notes of the melody of his voice escaped him. However, a nauseating group of moaning voices belonging to others rose faintly, like mist, in the distance, the first sounds he’d heard since the sound of his voice got completely bossed by the mysterious force that ejected him off the airplane’s steps. Above, the sun shone a hazy white light. Yet he felt cold. Am I dead? he thought. Before the old man could raise a hand to shield his eyes from the white sunlight, which had grown intense and was causing his head to throb, his vision blurred. He rubbed his eyes, hard, then a vision, dream, or nightmare appeared to him.

The scene was lit like the eye of a hurricane in a film, bright but surrounded by a cold darkness and winds that roared. A tall, bearded man stood behind a lectern. Behind the man the President saw the entrance to what looked like paradise: one of Haiti’s idyllic beaches, like at Club Indigo, the kind of inheritance taken for granted by locals throughout the Caribbean but beloved by northern-dwellers. You never love something more than the moment you believe it to be lost. The President suddenly yearned to run and throw himself at full speed into the warm and blue sea that was his birthright. In front of him, however, was a line of about forty men, roughly the same size and age, but with different cuts of hair and clothes, reflecting different periods in Haitian history, from the Napoleonic era to the twenties to the bespectacled fifties to the guayabera-shirt eighties. The men were short and twitchy, and humbly looking at the ground or at the sky around them without saying a word.

A Napoleonic-costumed man was the first to meet Saint Peter. A hush fell over the group. The President started to recognize these guys. They were his predecessors. All of Haiti’s dead presidents! He saw all the other presidents take a step back and work hard to pretend to ignore the conversation the guy in front was having with their maker. Saint Peter was in a foul mood.