Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

But, Terry thought, horizons do not sway.

He went toward the office door. They were on the first floor. A long corridor led out to the open air. The bombs were dropping faster now, and coming closer. Terry, unbalanced and dizzy, reached for the wall, and the wall was gone. He could see through the sheared concrete the cement rods bending, twisting, deforming. He heard but did not see pieces of concrete tumbling to the ground and exploding.

The hallway was crowded with men and women sprinting toward the closed door. Terry’s office was adjacent to the door; he was closest. The door swung open inward, into the hallway. He could step through the doorway and out into the parking lot or step backward into the collapsing building. If he stepped outward, the door would close behind him: the people on the inside would be trapped. Terry didn’t hesitate. He swung the door open and stepped backward and out of the way, pressing himself against the corridor wall.

* * *

The walls began to roll, the floor buckled. The Sénateur held on to the ceramic urinal and clung to it with all his might. He wrestled with the writhing urinal for what felt to him like a day and a night. He felt a puddle of hotness spill out of the urinal onto his trousers. The urinal pitched left and back and forth, and then the urinal won: the Sénateur was on his back. Then the sound of an immense building collapsing just above his head, and he was in darkness, his leg crushed under something heavy from which he could not extricate himself. The Sénateur strained with his great force, but could not pull away the massive concrete pillar that pinned him to the rolling earth.

He had never feared Death, whom he saw as a fellow traveler, a companion and deliverer. His oldest friend was Baron Samedi, lord of the underworld. How many times had Baron Samedi come down the poteau-mitan to inhabit his own soul. But the Sénateur had suffered a lifelong revulsion at the idea of imprisonment. Even as a child, dark and enclosed spaces had terrified him; even in the coldest winter night of exile, he had slept with the window ajar. In his will, he had commanded Dr. Philistin, the executor of his estate, to cremate his body and disperse the ashes to the hills of the Grand’Anse: no coffin for him, no concrete tomb, no marble sepulcher. He wished to be delivered into eternity on the winds of the Gros Nord , blowing down from the Atlantic in the north, crossing over Port-au-Prince, swirling and eddying in the gorges of his country. He would be forever like a great bird, mounting and soaring in the glens and hills, always in sight of the sea.

He felt the rising tide of panic. This was how his story was to end: trapped like a rat in glue. The dread swept up from his viscera. He was an old man. He had never been old before. He could not feel his foot or his leg, and his groin was wet with urine: the earthquake had struck midstream. How nasty to think that they would find him this way, soiled like a child. When he was young he would have simply risen up, no matter what lay across his legs, tossed the obstacle aside, and with a roar announced to Death, This is how you come for me? Try again, old man! Try better! I am the one who shouts “Fire,” not you! And I am not ready!

Or perhaps this was the afterlife. Perhaps Baron Samedi had found him after all, and his old companion had deceived him. Here in the darkness was the place where zombies wandered. Had he been separated from his soul? Or was he a soul away from body? He had never been able to forget the sight, as a young man coming home from an evening of love in the mountains, of a string of zombies shuffling down a mountain path, led by a hooded condeur . These men had been separated from their souls: they were just animated bodies. Their souls had collapsed and been encaged in ceramic jars. Had the boko taken his soul also and enclosed it in a canari , to sell in the market, to infiltrate into the body of a cow, to make him a slave?

The panic was now total: it had him by the balls. Thank the good sweet Lord they were still attached, pulling downward toward the uncertain earth. But even the feel of his manhood in his hand was not enough to stifle his nausea. He felt himself drifting into darkness.

There was a voice crying in the darkness, the voice of a child.

* * *

On January 12, 2010, at 4:53 in the afternoon, the cereal boxes at the Caribbean Market fell down. They didn’t fall one by one, but the supermarket tilted on its side and they all fell: the Special K, the All-Bran, the Wheaties, the Raisin Bran, the Chex. Then the supermarket tilted to the other side, and Nadia heard glass breaking as shelves of olive oil smashed at her feet. Then the supermarket tilted again, and the wall of sodas fell; and then the supermarket seesawed again and the massive refrigerators toppled over. Nadia began to pray. Her prayer came from the deepest recesses of her spirit, as spontaneous as a child’s smile. Lord, give me victory, give me victory. Jesus, give me victory . She heard the sounds of the collapsing building and was aware that she was in darkness, buffeted from side to side as the reinforced concrete walls of the market buckled and gave way. Knowing that she would soon fall, she sat down, and then to protect herself from the hard-edged or sharp things flying down invisibly upon her, she huddled into a fetal position. She breathed in a cloud of dust and began to choke, but still she managed wordlessly to pray.

* * *

Only later would they comment on his heroism, the men and women Terry saved that day. They moved past him, not noticing him, not thinking in which direction the hinge of their fate had swing. Terry pressed himself up against the wall of the convulsing building. He held the door open and encouraged the people leaving to move quickly, waving at them with his free hand, knowing that to let go of the door would be to condemn others. When Rose-Marie Dessault, who worked as a secretary, stumbled at Terry’s feet, he scooped her up, not gently, and pushed her through the open door.

Here were some of the people who rushed past Terry White out of the Villa Privé and into the open air: Ludmilla Voskoboynikova, from Ukraine, mother of three, on her third day on Mission, who had brought binoculars with her because she liked to watch birds; Lucner Antoine, Haitian, electrician, at the Villa Privé to replace a failing fuse box, who seduced the female members of his gospel choir; Alain Chirac, Canadian, who believed until the day of the earthquake that he was immortal; Li Chin-Yai, from China, who thought Michael Jackson understood better than any other man the intricacies of her heart; Serge Thibaut, French, who in the evenings composed his memoirs of life as a street cop in the roughest quarters of Marseilles; Michelle Rosamond, Haitian, a maid, who ran from the collapsing building still holding her mop and thinking of her six-week-old baby daughter, whom she did not know was now dead.

Terry held the door open for everyone who ran past, and for his sister also. It did not seem strange to him that Jackie was in the building, returned to her youth and beauty. Her red hair cascaded across her shoulders. When she saw Terry, she smiled at him: he was her hero. She meandered down the hallway, oblivious to the collapsing building — so typical of Jackie, who would not run to catch a plane if she was late at the airport, who had lived her whole life according to some private calendar of her own devising, arriving late and leaving all too early.

Terry was the last to leave the convulsing building. He could smell his sister’s cleanliness as she pulled him into the light.

* * *

The Sénateur heard the child cry “Maman!” and he knew that he was alive.

“My child,” the Sénateur said.