Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (13 page)

I wasn’t anticipating getting attacked on my next assignment. But I felt stronger in general, more able to stand my ground. It was the first time in my life I’d had an extensive discussion of even the idea of standing my ground, enforcing my personal boundaries, like that. Talking to Nico about it in the days following, he, too, seemed less concerned about my fast approaching departure. He looked proud.

Eight weeks after I’d landed in San Francisco, I left again. From my first stop, where I attended town hall meetings between angry crowds and the government’s oil-spill compensation czar in New Orleans, I went to Mississippi to speak at a panel about the state of the oiled gulf a year after the spill. It was there, in a drab hotel, that I was settling in with a Styrofoam box of takeout dinner when Nico called with big news.

“It’s good,” he typed simply when his face came up on my computer screen.

“What?” I asked. It was three days before I was to embark for The Hague, where I had appointments at the International Criminal Court. “What?” I asked more loudly, as the realization of what he was saying sunk in.

I started shrieking excitedly.

“
What
?”

He wasn’t due for any missions that week; he was free to take some time off. He was going to hop in his car and meet me in the Netherlands. We were going to see each other again.

I could not stop screaming and laughing, but he was playing it cool. “It’s good” was all he would say. He shrugged as if it were no big deal, but smiled slyly.

7.

Nico walked into my hotel room using the key I’d left at the front desk on a Tuesday afternoon in April, seven months after we’d met. I’d finished my meetings and war-crimes trials for the day, so had been trying to nap off some jet lag. He climbed into bed. When he kissed me, his face was cool from the cloudy Dutch skies.

He was shaking.

“Hey, baby,” he said nervously; it was how all our Skyping chats had begun in type.

I said what I always said, too. Elated to say something to a face that wasn’t separated from me by two computer screens and 6,000 miles, I sighed, smiling. “Hi, gorgeous.”

It was a little bit awkward.

I’d had my concerns, obviously, about the language barrier, telling Tana and Alex that I didn’t know what the hell we were going to say to each other, or how—since even when we typed, in the easier mode of reading rather than listening, our dialogue still moved at the excruciating pace of a sentence per minute. Nico hadn’t tried
speaking
my language, the one we’d chosen as our primary, since the few sentences he’d choked out when we’d last seen each other. When he opened his mouth now, his words came with the thickness, slowness, and hesitation of a person who hadn’t used his voice in years. As if his throat were full of syrup.

We were, additionally, strangers to each other’s presence. No matter how many e-mails we’d sent about our love, our textures and smells and airs were entirely foreign again. Pleased as my fingers were to land on the smoothness of his skin and the strength of his arms, amid the further disorientation of being in a country that was alien to both of us, my body hesitated at his unfamiliarity, asking,
Who is this person
?

We didn’t mind so much. That would all pass. We stowed ourselves away in bed at the Hotel Ibis Den Haag, a slick chain with Ikea-looking furniture about as charmless as the city’s weather, with nothing but a glass of water and a French-English dictionary. Nico pressed on bravely and undiscouragedly, without verb tenses and articles, looking up or pantomiming nouns as we talked in simplified sentences, repeating ourselves repeatedly. That first night, after seven or so hours of sequestration, we left the room only because we’d become dizzy with hunger, going downstairs to order a pizza at the bar before the kitchen closed. We looked up
pineapple
together in his dictionary, and chatted over drinks while we waited for our Hawaiian to come out.

For a couple of days, I went to work, interviewing the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, or mean-mugging the Congolese politician who was on trial for multiple counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. I sat a few feet from him in the observation gallery while he watched the proceedings against him with his cantaloupe head sunk calmly into hunched shoulders. Then I came back to the hotel. And there was Nico.

Since Haiti, I’d been having sex with members of The Roster, but I’d entered nearly all of the encounters inebriated, and occasionally so disconnected that it was as if they hadn’t happened at all, or at least not to me. Now I was having sex daytime-sober. It was not cloaked in the savvy city-person irony and cynicism of the elites I knew, but savagely earnest—
European
earnest—involving more eye contact than I’d had with everyone I’d ever slept with in my life combined. I could feel that it wasn’t perfect, the uncomfortableness of unknown bodies. I could feel that
he
wasn’t perfect. He looked like a romance-novel cover, but I didn’t perceive him naively; I noticed a guardedness that I hadn’t before, an edge that could fast turn him cold. It struck me as artificial, impermanent—as if I knew the real person inside this person I barely knew. But I could finally feel my limbs. And his weightiness. I managed to remain mostly present through the raw naked weirdness. Maybe I couldn’t attach my feelings, the good ones as well as the questions about this highly improbable relationship, completely to my body, not get them permeated all the way down to the cellular level. But at least I had them.

I fell asleep overwhelmed with gratitude that when I woke up, he’d be next to me. I woke up ecstatic that he really was.

Didn’t I think I was on top of my game, those couple of days in The Hague! Waking up early, walking with a purpose, pressed suits and morning meetings following efficiently ordered omelets, sober sex, no nervous breakdowns. It’s easy to feel that way when you’re moving, strutting through international airports on your way to a country you won’t stay in long enough to ever feel like you’ve really landed, and then it’s time to get in Nico’s car so he can drive you to Belgium—rather than your taking the train in the wrong direction back to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, for the next flight, to Africa—on his way back to France.

*   *   *

During our fourth and final dinner together, in the dining room of a converted seventeenth-century inn in Brussels, Nico told me he was disappointed in the way the trip had turned out.

We’d both been drawn to the white house, which was down the street from our B&B, by the ivy growing over its face. Inside, the ceilings were wooden, beamed; the room was warm and tight. Though Nico handled the ordering in this country—I’d been in charge of public interactions in English-fluent Holland—our waiters and fellow patrons, old and stuffy all, could hear enough of my native tongue to compel constant looks toward our table.

One moment, Nico was sitting next to me huddled close, sneaking kisses to the bare shoulder my shirt left exposed, and then the next, he was backing up, one forearm on the table and one at his side, head cocked back, chest tilted away from me in his chair.

“I hope[d] … you were … not amazing,” he said, watching me from the distance he’d created. Glasses of wine and our translation dictionary cluttered the table between us.

Before he’d arrived in the Netherlands, Nico had got his hopes up that things would go a certain way: He would drive to my hotel, be reunited with me, and be underwhelmed. He’d wanted, he explained, to be disappointed. He’d prayed that I was lackluster and overhyped, that once in front of me, he’d realize his love was baseless, founded on temporary insanity or a hormone imbalance or whatever it was that made him write me e-mails saying he felt like he could leave his whole French life for me. He didn’t need to say the reasons he’d wanted that, because they were obvious. We lived in different countries. Language, plane fares, citizenship, employment, family, roots, cultural divides. He looked sadder than I’d seen him yet when he uttered, defeated, “In fact, you are more amazing zhan I think before.”

In the morning, we went to the Brussels airport for my flight to Kinshasa. Our despondence showed. The clerk at the ticket counter who couldn’t find my reservation for a minute shrugged like it was no big deal that I might not have a ticket, nodding toward Nico, “He would be happy.”

We hugged and kissed for so long that Nico got a parking ticket. But it was unsatisfying. Sad, fleeting kissing, the sort you couldn’t give yourself all the way up to and that you couldn’t count on having again. When we finally parted, I stamped out my disconcertion on my way through the terminal. As it bubbled up in a panting kind of cry, I resolved not to talk to him much anymore. It wasn’t right that I felt like myself around him when he hardly knew me, and that he felt like home though I barely knew him, and certainly neither of us was anywhere near home then. Even if he for some reason felt inevitable—my main emotion in his presence was relief,
relief
that we were near each other—I couldn’t continue to get wrapped up in someone I never knew when I would see again. If ever.

But it was only a month before I saw him again. After both assignments in Africa, I stopped in New York for work; once I got there, it was determined I had to go back to The Hague by the end of the week for the International Criminal Court unveiling of an arrest warrant for Muammar el-Qaddafi. I had a few days to get there. I flew into Paris.

Nico hopped a train from his region, in the east, near the German border. He arrived shortly after I’d installed myself in a borrowed apartment. Pacing the carpet of the petite bedroom, I happened to stop and look out the second-floor window toward the street just as he turned his green eyes skyward.

Every hour after sunset, the Eiffel Tower exploded in a glittering light show for the spring tourists. We walked the narrow streets behind Sacré Coeur in search of gelato, and stopped in a dark basement bistro for cassoulet. The staircase we scaled to get back to the flat wound past an ancient-looking mural of fleshy nude women and peacocks. But I didn’t have any reaction to that. To that, or to the history dripping from the apartment, which I’d rented from an acquaintance of my father’s named Peter Salk. It had belonged to his father, Jonas Salk, curer of polio and husband of Françoise Gilot, the painter who’d been Picasso’s muse and the mother of his children. I’d noticed my indifference almost immediately, reciting the facts about the place to Nico but not caring. Then while watching Nico, gorgeous, passionate, his face alive across dinner tables but far away, his body sturdy but somehow insubstantial to me, arched on top of mine like a picture or projection. It became downright absurd when I woke up one morning to find him crouched bedside and shirtless with a bowl of strawberries he’d washed and lightly sugared. They were so tiny and delicate. He’d been to the market while I was asleep. He held one out to feed it to me as he placed a rose on my chest, and I couldn’t make myself have any feelings about
that
. Not even when I tried.

At the very least
, I thought, watching his muscles flex as he tended to me,
you could react to the fact that YOUR LIFE IS AN ABSURD SCENE IN A HARLEQUIN PAPERBACK
.

“You weren’t there with me,” Nico would say when we talked about this moment later.

My body, my desire still worked in a perfunctory way. And I wasn’t upset, or crying, or melting down, which as of eight months ago always seemed like a victory. But no, back in Europe, just four weeks after I’d seen Nico there before, and though we had decided in the interim over a series of Skype conversations from Uganda that we would be exclusive—the ridiculousness of that be damned—I didn’t have any feelings at all.

*   *   *

“[A] rapid and dramatic return to the appearance of normal functioning,” Judith Lewis Herman warns in her book, though I hadn’t read it yet, “should not be mistaken for full recovery.”

Throughout the trip in Africa, where I spent the time between the Netherlands and Paris, I’d kept my cool and continued to feel good. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the assignment was to stalk a warlord, Bosco Ntaganda. He’d once led his own rebel group, but as part of a 2009 peace treaty had been incorporated into the national army. All along the way, Human Rights Watch and the International Criminal Court, which held an outstanding warrant for his arrest, had tracked his alleged atrocities: 800 civilians massacred in one town in 2002; 150 civilians massacred in a province in 2008; ongoing assassinations and disappearances; ongoing conscription of child soldiers. He’d recently disappeared a man who told researchers that Bosco had murdered his sister. His men had threatened some UN peacekeepers; his troops, several years ago, allegedly killed one. All my major Congolese sources were on the run from Bosco, who was so powerful and employed so many spies that I couldn’t use Congolese translators for the interviews because of the danger both to them and the sources. Since Human Rights Watch had suggested that translators from actually any nearby countries in Africa weren’t preferable, I hauled one named Joey all the way from the United States.

So it was still an intense trip.

After a long interview about assassinations with several guys in hiding one day, Joey was shaking. Understandably: The guys were under assassination threat as well, and toward the end, they’d begged us to help them by giving them money or getting them repatriated. Certainly you must know people who could help, they said. They said they’d certainly be murdered if we didn’t.

“I might need you to hold me later,” Joey said, nearly in tears, as they were leaving. But then looked at me more closely. “How are you so calm?”

A driver in Goma, eastern Congo, having also escaped a Bosco abduction, almost tossed me off the back of a motorbike while executing a hard skid to turn because he thought soldiers were following us. Another day, when an aid worker and I drove past Bosco’s heavily guarded house, we indeed appeared to acquire a tail of a truck full of soldiers. One night, I met with one of Bosco’s colonels at a bar. It gave me pause when he guessed that I usually drank my whiskey straight; I couldn’t tell if he meant that I seemed like that kind of girl, or if he knew for a fact how I drank my whiskey because his people were following me. But unlike Joey, I didn’t start having nightmares, even after we learned that another American reporter had been chased all over town after witnessing something he shouldn’t have, spending his last night before he fled the country with all the furniture in his hotel room pushed up against the door, barricaded behind it, sleepless, with his eyes wide open and a knife in his hand. When I told one of my sources that I wouldn’t publish any stories I wrote about Bosco until I arrived in Uganda, he shook his head. “They could easily kill you in Uganda,” he said, not because he was being dramatic but because there were a lot of alliances there, and he’d been chased farther than that across the continent himself.