Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (14 page)

“I know Congo is hell,” the same source said. “But better to stay in
this
hell. I feel that I have to help my country.”

“I gotta get the fuck out of here,” Joey said at breakfast on one of our last mornings, nightmare-frazzled. I laughed at him a little bit—me! Of all people!—but then Colonel I Know How You Drink Your Whiskey called my cell unexpectedly. When I asked him what he wanted, he said he just wanted to say hello. Just to see what I was up to. After we hung up, I put my earphones in and my iPod on shuffle in my hotel room, and it randomly picked “Private Eyes.”

They’re waatch-ing you. They see your evvvvveryyy moooove.

I stopped in my tracks on my way into the bathroom, feet on cool tiles, toothbrush in hand.
Oh I see you, oh I see you. Private, private, private eyes, girl.
I looked around the room, which was worn down but bright and airy; I looked out the wide window for anything suspicious in the field next door. It was still and grassy as usual. I turned toward the door and watched it hard, trying to intuit what might be on the other side in the dark hallway where the lights never, ever worked, for a second—before laughing and congratulating myself on not believing in signs or letting paranoia, and Hall & Oates, paralyze me. Even if it was justified: Human Rights Watch later assured me that I really was being followed.

Right. It was an intense trip. And being cool and prepared did not necessarily mean being well balanced.

“You are so calm all the time!” my Congolese fixer said.

“You are
verrrry
adaptable,” my Ugandan fixer, Geoffrey, said, too, when I arrived in Kampala via Rwanda for the next assignment. I took both these statements as supreme compliments. But what kind of person should be calm all the time, anywhere? Much less on the human rights beat? In East and Central Africa?

One day I interviewed a Uganda expert at a café while riots raged down the street. We could hear intermittent gunfire, the bursts followed by people fleeing past us; that afternoon, the police killed two protesters. Later that night, I watched the news footage of men being bashed in the head with police batons on a projector screen at Sappho Islands, Uganda’s only gay bar. That was why I was there: to cover the Kill the Gays bill on the table in Parliament. It proposed upping the penalty for having “aggravated” gay sex (with a minor, with an HIV-positive diagnosis, or with any frequency) from prison time to a death sentence. The good news was that no one I talked to thought it was going to pass, and the stories of the gay activists I was profiling were remarkably inspiring; they had either never been in the closet or had come out despite their knowing that it would cost them friends and school expulsions. They maintained offices for their activism organizations in the face of murder and arson threats. They gathered in this tiny bar, lit by Christmas lights inside and with a rainbow sign out front, for karaoke night. When the news was switched off and the karaoke started, I watched a couple slow-dance up front, near me, the boys so tender—unconcerned, for the moment, about being arrested. I recognized it as heartbreaking. But I couldn’t feel my heart break.

I felt the brief clench in my chest for a second, and thought I would get misty-eyed. But I didn’t. And in an instant, the feeling was gone, though I could still hear its logical iterations in my head.
That is so moving,
I thought
. That is so heartbreaking
. But feelings: Gone.

It wasn’t that I had
no
feelings. It wasn’t that I felt cheerless. I had a good time at karaoke. I performed a rendition of “… Baby One More Time” that earned me the nickname Britney Spears among members of Uganda’s gay community who weren’t even there. In Congo I’d had a lot of laughs with Joey and with my fixer, who called himself The Congolese Jack Bauer and called me Madame President, which was a
24
reference I didn’t get. I felt an affinity for the Ugandan activists, and when Jack Bauer said, “There are few journalists who behave like you,” and I had no idea what that meant, he added: “Your boyfriend must be the happiest.” So I must have seemed delightful. But something was missing.

If there was any assignment I would’ve expected to overwhelm me emotionally, it was this one. Gay rights had always caught at something especially deep. The gloom I’d felt as a college kid at a Matthew Shepard vigil, like my organs were filled with thick blackness. The same heavy sensation had crept inside me when I was fourteen and a carful of guys whipped a screwdriver at my head from the window of a passing car, yelling something about fags, as I went for a romantic walk along the road. Ironically, the person I was snuggling then was a guy, but I was so butch-looking that they thought we were gay men. At sixteen, when I started making open displays of coupledom around northeast Ohio in a relationship that actually was gay, I entered places—restaurants, parking lots, Old Navy—proudly, but with my back up. My girlfriend, who had a blunt manliness to her but a feminine-pretty face that made people feel confused, and subsequently angry, had got in fights about her sexuality more than once. She’d had her car windows smashed in. When a guy at my school asked me out but I wouldn’t go because I was dating her, he threw a locker door into my face.

In Uganda, I’d had to carefully vet my fixer for the assignment, feeling him out when I hired him, asking him what he thought about all of this antigay hullabaloo. After he’d considered for a moment, and said that it seemed a bit wild and unnecessary, he asked me what I thought, and it was my turn to consider my answer. An honest one involved the disclosure that I was bisexual, and I sat with it in my mouth, trying to remember the last time that particular anxiety had arisen, wondering if someone would refuse to work with me, or stop being nice, or start being weird, or hostile. I remembered: It was in Oklahoma. Not that safe passage was guaranteed even in San Francisco, famously the world’s most gay-friendly city, where more than 200 incidences of antigay violence had been documented the previous year. I had two seconds to decide if I owed it to my convictions to tell Geoffrey the whole truth or if that was idiotic and unnecessarily reckless idealism. I chose the former.

Geoffrey didn’t care. Mostly he got curious, and started asking me questions about whether a gay couple had to choose which one was going to be the man, and if so how the couple went about deciding that.

In Uganda, I could still sense it a little, the gloom. I felt it while I was sitting at Sappho Islands with Kasha, the bar’s owner, a lanky, ropy dyke with dreads, asking her if she wasn’t worried that someone would come in and hurt or arrest people, and she said that we weren’t doing anything wrong, though she knew the penal code. The simultaneous fearlessness and danger about her. I felt it, too, when I walked into her gay-rights organization’s secret office and into a meeting of dykes looking as unabashedly dyke-looking as any dykes, with polo shirts and baseball caps and squared shoulders. I felt it when I imagined them walking around outside that way.

But I didn’t feel it as much as I should have. Not when I met Dennis, from another organization, and he had a scar near his eye from having had a bottle broken across his face, and it reminded me of my old boss in New Orleans, who was beaten so badly when he left a gay bar one night that he lost his right eye. Not when I saw the boys slow-dancing. Not even when I was leaving karaoke, and the lesbian who walked me to my taxi outside gave me her cell number. She said it was so I could call her when I got back to the hotel safe because “it happens” that a taxi driver would rape a girl out by herself, particularly “correctively” rape a girl who he just saw with a bunch of lesbians. I sat in the taxi still and ready to fight, waiting for the first move with a detached and matter-of-fact dauntlessness about battling until one of our last breaths. I was confident it would be his. But if this guy did manage to strike nonconsensual carnal treasure that night, he was going to be prying it from my cold, dead thighs.

A lot of folks who’ve survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life
, Meredith had said.

There were other hints that I wasn’t running on all emotional pistons. Though I drank on only a few nights—I wasn’t going to
not
drink at gay karaoke night—I spent as much of the trip as I could as checked-out as a person can be while sober: watching TV. I’d started doing this to some extent toward the end of my Deepwater Horizon deployment, sitting down on days off for three hours or four at a time, tired, ultimately watching every episode of
30 Rock
. Then between Haiti I and Haiti II, there were days, everyone knew, when I did nothing else.

In Uganda, my TV binges were epic for a person on a work assignment. The third-rate movie station in my gleaming, ultramodern Kampala hotel played the same film almost constantly, in which Alec Baldwin lives on the bayou and gets caught up in a murder mystery. It was boring—though I did like that the characters were realistically doused with Southern Louisiana sweat. I did my job when I had to, but my reluctance to leave my room was becoming pathological. It wasn’t that I couldn’t, as in Haiti; I just didn’t
want
to. A couple of days into Uganda I was struck down with some African flu that Joey, my translator, had been puking all over the Rwandan roadside as I escorted him from Goma (which had no international airport) to Kigali for his flight back to the U.S. before I continued on. It was horrible crawling back and forth to my hotel toilet, alone, with no company for days but the maid who kept threatening to tell her boss and force me into the hospital if I didn’t get better soon because if I died in one of her rooms, there’d be trouble. I was in agony. But I was really glad to have the excuse not to go anywhere.

Maybe I was burned out. Maybe something in my body didn’t want to do any more of the type of witnessing that going out entailed.

“Where were you?” Dennis, of the under-eye scar, hollered at me when we went to a bar’s unofficial Gay Night a few nights later. (“We’re the biggest clients,” Dennis explained of the establishment’s tolerance.) Geoffrey, who’d driven us and a couple of other homos to the club, was by then taking gay company in stride, feeling that he’d learned some things. “They are just like any other human beings, with feelings and entitlements,” he remarked to me sagely. Also: “They are so courteous!”

So I’d felt comfortable leaving him and Dennis together, wandering away from our table to interview the patrons, all soap-and-cologne-smelling, wearing impeccable jeans. There was dancing and flirting, and the occasional lip gloss. Over by the bar, a toned and sanguine gentleman commented that I stood too much like a man not to have sex with women; when I confirmed that I did, he asked me if I was “free” to disclose it to my parents. I admitted that I hadn’t been, since before I could decide to come out I got caught, at sixteen, the immediate aftermath of which involved my father telling me how twisted and fucked up I was. When I asked the gentleman the same question in turn, he dropped his head and smiled.

It wasn’t always as free as people thought it was for gays in the States, either, I told him. At one point in college I’d had a roommate who was also queer, and I remember the day her mother called our apartment at six in the morning, demanding to speak to her. “She’s still sleeping,” I said when I answered the phone, laughing because most people would still be sleeping. “Do you want me to wake her up?”

Her mother, who’d somehow discovered evidence of a lesbian relationship, was not laughing. “
Yesss,
I want you to wake her up,” she said, “so I can tell her how DISGUSTING she is.”

I wasn’t talking to the boys at the bar for long. But when I returned to Dennis, he was hollering. “Where
were
you?” he demanded.

I told him where I was.

“I couldn’t see you! I thought you were kidnapped for corrective rape.” When I made a horrified face, he grabbed my arm and yelled, “Just kidding!”

“Do you know a lot of women that has happened to?” I asked.

“Nooooo, not a lot,” he said. “Like, five.”

One tried-and-true impact of trauma
, Meredith said,
is people just really shutting themselves down
.

Two transatlantic flights and ten days later, Uganda to New York to Paris, in the curtain-filtered morning light of Jonas Salk’s apartment, my sweater draped over Claude Picasso’s childhood desk, there was Nico with his sweetness and his bowl of perfect strawberries. And I did seem to be having some trouble responding to it, yeah.

*   *   *

I seemed fine enough to me. Both in Paris—if I wasn’t having any feelings about Nico, that was Nico’s fault—and when I finally returned to San Francisco, after seven and a half weeks away. I had never freaked out, or been crippled by sadness, though everyone I’d interviewed was under threat of being gay-bashed or murdered. I had not been afraid. Because fear is a normal response—something to overcome, not something to stop experiencing entirely—I might have been concerned about my lack of human emotions. Instead, I congratulated myself. I was not hysterical. This was not, as far as I was concerned, constriction, the name for post-traumatic emotional anesthesia, a concept I hadn’t heard of yet. This was—I was—an awesome feat of efficiency.

I didn’t think therapy was in order. I didn’t have time, anyway. In less than three weeks, I would start a monthlong assignment living with a married couple in Columbus, Ohio; they were, like me, Ohio State graduates, and they were likely about to be laid off by the new governor’s budget cuts.

In the meantime, I got ready, and resumed my walks with Alex. We labored up the hills in bright but crisp Pacific air, the city’s abutting, painted houses looming above us, as we puzzled over how weird it was that no number of shared gelatos or café conversations on cobbled Paris streets had evoked any feelings for Nico. Unable to find another explanation, I chalked it up to failed and fleeting chemistry. I took a break from packing, and called him up on Skype to tell him we had no future together.