Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Terry waited for me while I signed a couple of dozen books and shook hands and made small talk. Then we went to the Starbucks together. He got a black coffee and I ordered a double latte; then Terry pointed at a slice of chocolate cake and said, “I guess I can break the rules and get one of those too.” We had a little tussle over who was going to pay, which he wouldn’t let me win. But I had to carry the tray to the table while he limped on ahead.

* * *

Any two people who were in Haiti on January 12, 2010, at 4:53 in the afternoon — that’s what they’ll talk about first, that earthquake.

“I didn’t feel it,” I said.

“What the fuck do you mean, you didn’t feel it?”

“I was with my wife, the two of us swimming at Anse d’Azur. Pretty big waves that day. Just didn’t feel a thing. Afterward, everyone just looked at us like we were crazy when we asked what happened.”

“Believe me, you didn’t miss a thing,” Terry said.

Jérémie suffered almost no damage in that earthquake, but we had plenty of drama nevertheless. The town was totally cut off from Port-au-Prince and the rest of the world for a while, and then the refugees arrived, tens of thousands of people made homeless in the capital. Soon my wife was transferred to the capital, where the needs were far more urgent, and we were living full-time in a city where half a million people were living in tents. That year I thought about nothing but the earthquake. I wandered through the ruined streets and asked everyone who wanted to talk to me to tell me their story. It amazed me how quickly Haitians turned this most random, most inexplicable of events into a story. It was always the same: grievance led to anger led to death. The only difference in this story was that that aggrieved party was God. But nobody could tell me what made Him so angry. I suppose I’ll never get a good answer to that one.

Then Terry told me his earthquake story.

“I was dead,” he said. “What you got to understand is that there are forces in this universe, and I felt them that day. People talk about God, but I just say ‘forces.’ Things more powerful than you.”

It was strange to sit in that Barnes & Noble drinking Starbucks coffee, hearing Terry talk about his soul leaving his body and going toward the light. At the next table someone was on the phone scheduling dental surgery, and a couple of teenagers were giggling. Terry told me that he’d seen his sister walking down the hall of the collapsing building, then felt his soul rising up through the concrete. He wasn’t alone: he’d been surrounded by the vast hordes of the newly dead.

“Were you scared?” I asked.

“The part of you that feels scared gets left behind. The part that feels happy too.”

“But you’re here now.”

“I didn’t want to come back. But it was like the Light was getting farther away, not closer, and then I was just lying there in the dark, my friggin’ leg hurting like hell.”

I asked him how the experience had changed him.

“Before, I used to believe in God, you know? I’d talk to the Old Man before bed, think He was looking out for me. But all those people who died, they weren’t talking to Him? Those kids that died — their parents weren’t asking Him to keep them safe? I guess what that experience taught me is that He’s got his plan, and what we want doesn’t count for shit in it. We’re just along on His ride.”

What got Terry through the year after the quake, he told me, was Kay. She was by his side the whole year he was in and out of the hospital. He’d had seven surgeries, and after each and every one, she’d been the first face he’d seen on waking up. Then, a year after the earthquake, when Terry was finally able to walk and take care of himself, she told him that she was moving to Atlanta alone. There was no rancor, no anger, no meanness on either side. “She gave me more than she owed me,” Terry said. “You can’t ask for anything more than that.”

By now Terry and I had been sitting for the better part of an hour. We didn’t have much more to talk about. Had Terry asked, I might have told him about life in the Sahel, or about the book that sat on the table between us. I had yet to sign it; I doubted he would ever read it. The conversation began to flag, and Terry revived it, telling me about his job (he was a consultant to a company that did security at twenty-three Florida malls) and trying to talk politics, both American and Haitian. He asked if I wanted another cup of coffee. I was starting to wonder just why he had come to the mall that afternoon, whether he had simply been lonely.

I was just about to excuse myself — I had a flight out early the next morning — when he asked if I had any news about Nadia.

* * *

The look on Terry’s face made me understand why he had hobbled out to the Barnes & Noble to see me.

I had followed Nadia’s career after the earthquake, but at a distance. She was four months pregnant when the earthquake hit, and that spring she gave birth. The second round of the senatorial election had been, of course, postponed: it took almost a year before the state and the international community could organize the event. When the election was finally held, Nadia rarely said more than a few words on the campaign trail, just waved to the crowds or sang. Her campaign slogan was, “Let’s build his dream.” Haitian electoral law allowed the Sénateur’s political party to replace him with another candidate, but the result was a foregone conclusion: Nadia won her seat easily.

I only saw her once more. It was in Port-au-Prince, at the Boucan Grégoire. She had been in office three months or so. She was seated at a table with Madame Mireille, the onetime presidential candidate, and a number of other important members of the Haitian political elite. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but the conversation at one point grew animated: the men were waving their arms, and Madame Mireille was shaking her head furiously. Then Nadia said something. Whatever she said captured the attention of the whole table. I spent an hour watching her, the way you watch anyone who has a natural talent for something. But just watching her was enough for me. I didn’t say hello, and I don’t know if she noticed me.

I told Terry that little story. I didn’t think it would really satisfy him.

Then he told me that he had gone to see her just a couple of months ago.

* * *

Terry first heard the rumors when he was in the hospital in Miami. This was about six months after the earthquake, his third time under the knife. A time of terrible pain for Terry: not just the leg and pelvis (which felt like it was crushed between black iron pincers) but searing soul pain. Not a day passed when he didn’t think of the judge, when he didn’t miss Nadia, when he didn’t think about rising to the Light and being cast out again into the world of things and regret. He’d made two promises in his life — one to Kay and another to Johel — and had broken both of them. He wondered if he’d been sent back just to feel the pain.

After the surgery Terry went into physical therapy. His PT was a Haitian immigrant, body in Florida but soul still down in the old country — not that different from Terry, really. The PT was good, moving Terry’s body, all the while following the train of Terry’s thought where naturally it led: to the judge, to Nadia, to the situation on the island. Like a lot of Haitian expats, the PT followed the situation back home closely. There were dozens of Creole chat rooms where obsessives could toss around the latest rumors, gossip, and innuendo, everyone churning themselves up into a political frenzy. All the major Haitian newspapers were published online. And if that wasn’t enough, Twitter had caught on big in Haiti. So the PT, who hadn’t been home in years, knew the situation almost as well as Terry did.