Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (6 page)

But Nico did get away. The next day, when I e-mailed him to say I was leaving early. This time, when I answered the door, half-dressed in a bra and cargo pants, he kept using the word “pretext” to explain how he’d come to knock on it again; I couldn’t follow what the pretext was but that it involved the word “shirt.” Anyway, we had “ten minutes,” he said, indicating that this time limit was military-tight, pointing at his military watch. We kissed, and I grasped at him, at anything concrete, my palms on his ass muscles through his uniform, my pelvis against the gun at his waist. This time, there was no denying my dysfunction. Even after I had him take off his gun and his shirt, my bare arms around his chest, my hands on his back, it wasn’t just that I couldn’t feel my limbs again. They felt like active absence. I could feel only something static and empty in the places they usually occupied. The sensation slapped me with an onslaught of volatile emotions; I couldn’t tell if I was more shocked, or nervous, or excited, or panicked, or terrified. I had no idea what to do. What was I supposed to do?

“This is crazy but.…” Nico said, standing with his forehead against mine, his hands on my hips. He shook his head at the craziness of it. “At this moment … I want … to say you … I love you.”

My torso disappeared to wherever my arms had gone.

“I love you, too,” I said.

He thanked me. And then he turned to leave. “I really hope to see you again,” I half-called after him, loading as much earnestness and sincerity as I could into one sentence, shirtless and barefoot and alone. He turned his head over his shoulder as he took the last step out my door, one last flash of green eyes and a smile, and was gone.

*   *   *

As soon as I’d locked the door behind him, I broke down. The gasping, hyperventilating, doubled-over sobs seemed dramatic and unrecognizable to me, making me curse myself.
Who cries like that? Why would
I
cry like that?
I couldn’t say what I was crying about.

Within an hour, I’d packed my things. I put on some Justin Timberlake and pulled myself together, and acted normal on the way to the airport, but once I was on the plane, whatever last semblance of stability I was mustering was over.

A couple of weeks earlier, as I’d flown into Haiti, the Haitian woman sitting next to me had started weeping just before we landed. She said it was “not a good sensation,” but couldn’t explain how come, and started crying harder. Now, approaching San Francisco, it was my turn to cry, for my own inexplicable reasons. Landing in a city where I wasn’t an obvious foreigner all alone and with no allies, where appearing strong felt less crucial to survival, I dissolved into a pile of public tears, awash in relief, but also something ominous.

3.

Four years earlier, in 2006, in a cramped, dingy room serving as an office in Mae Sot, Thailand, I sat with a refugee from Burma in between summer rain showers. I was there as a volunteer, recently out of grad school; I’d been stalking information about the Burmese refugee crisis as best I could for a couple of years, since stumbling upon it accidentally in an Internet search before a vacation to Asia. Explanations had been difficult to find and then unsatisfactory, and so there I was finally, living with some of them on a quiet residential street tucked behind the whizzing motorbikes and grime of a small but hectic border town. My housemates were runaways from refugee camps. Their organization had responded to my e-mail queries and invited me because they needed to practice their English. It was about a day after my arrival that I realized most of the 150,000 refugees were from an ethnic minority fleeing state-sponsored genocide, and this day, a few weeks into my trip, one of them was showing me a video of it on his computer. A pile of dead bodies, a line of murdered children on the ground. Close-ups of a kid with a land-mine wound, a woman crying that she would like her kidnapped daughter back.

“I can’t believe I never heard of any of this before,” I said.

“So,” Lah Lah Htoo said, nodding, spiky black hair standing up from his serious, caramel-colored face, “you will tell everybody in America.”

It was another accident that, four years later, I had a job as the human rights reporter for a national magazine. I had applied for a paid internship as a fact-checker there when I got back from Thailand, figuring it would be difficult to make the connections to publish a book about refugees as an adjunct college composition instructor. The internship program didn’t want me, but then it found itself in need of an extra intern at the last second. I moved to San Francisco.
Every
move I made was in the service of one goal: to tell as many people as I could in America.

My refugee housemates’ story had taken over my consciousness. It was all I talked about—for years. If you didn’t want to talk about genocide, you did not want to get stuck talking to me, my talking about the story only a mild antidote to its kicking around my insides. I wasn’t entirely sure why. It wasn’t as if before that moment I’d been naive about atrocity. I was liberally educated and aware. Even as a child I’d watched
Unsolved Mysteries
; I knew people did horrible things to each other. More personally, when I was six, my Aunt Karen and Uncle Tim were killed in a car accident, and their four-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son became my siblings almost overnight. I was excited about them—my other sister, Jessica, was ten and had long ago grown tired of looking at my boring face—but it robbed me of my illusions that the world was an untragic place. If I’d had any. Another of my relatives had randomly been murdered by a stranger. As a collegiate adult, I was friends with the type of people who put Darfur posts all over their MySpace pages. But there was something about these refugees that obsessed me. Combined with my love for them—my hilarious, brave, sincere housemates-cum-friends—their tragedy lived and grew and stirred inside me.

My housemates’ story was that they snuck back and forth over the Burmese border collecting information—videos, photographs, interviews, proof of a genocide they were stockpiling until the day someone might care enough to look at it or prosecute their government for war crimes. When they asked me to tell more Westerners about their cause, I didn’t have any more of a platform than they did, but they of course recognized my increased access to one. I had citizenship—anywhere, for one, but in
America
, of all the magnificent places. I had education, and perfect English, the Language of Important People. I was white. I’d grown up working class in Cleveland, and we didn’t have any extra money—my father confessed to me once that when my grandmothers sent birthday cards to me as an infant, my parents took the money inside with elation that they’d be able to buy
good
beer—but we’d had enough. The largest point of my personal disenfranchisement, my sex, was hardly an obstacle to be discounted, but it was outnumbered by the refugees’ many. Total lack of citizenship. Zero access to higher education. Non-whiteness. Obscure native language. Inability to legally work in any country on Earth. My childhood hadn’t been flawless, and my early adulthood, even less so, but my life was never destroyed by the invasion of a racist marauding army. My privileges, a constant point of conversation in the refugee house, gave me the luxury to do, to pursue, so much.

Once at the magazine, I wrote a couple of little stories. One of them got me an agent. Four years after Lah Lah Htoo had been sitting in his organization’s office showing me videos, the book came out, in 2010.

By the time it was released, the magazine had offered me a writing job. Though I hadn’t had any specific ambitions beyond publishing the book, that was great by me. I’d spent huge portions of my life writing and rewriting sentences in my head for no reason. When I was five, I got lost on a family vacation to the North Carolina coast when I was walking along the ocean writing mental sentences, so absorbed that I wandered far off. They had to form a search party to find me. I’d briefly fantasized, as a teenager, about being a documentarian, voraciously consuming social-justice films, so an appointment as a journalist was beyond ideal.

Six months before I went to Haiti, I spent a month on a book tour blathering about refugee issues. My dream.

A month after that, I went to New Orleans, where I’d gone to grad school years before, to do a story on the public defender’s office.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico shortly before I arrived. One morning before I was due to leave the city, the other story done, I was looking at the
Times-Picayune
over breakfast, with a map of the growing slick from a well that had somehow failed to be plugged for weeks. I thought oil might make landfall on Grand Isle, an inhabited barrier island to the south; I made the two-hour drive to check it out. The oil and I seemed to get to the beach at about the same time. I didn’t even realize it until I was standing in it, that the brown dots all over the shore were balls of tar. I couldn’t wash them off my feet, and they burned my skin. They were still small enough then that the tourists and local families hadn’t noticed, either. Little kids were splashing around in the water.

I started reporting stories about the oil spill. After several weeks on the Gulf Coast, I went back to San Francisco for a few days. But within a week, I was back in Louisiana. The tar balls that washed up were replaced by entire sheets coming ashore, and I wouldn’t leave the South for the next three months.

It was in that time that any ignorance I had about my vulnerability to other people’s suffering had started to dissolve.

*   *   *

In St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, in a cool, shaded plantation house, I sat in on a mid-oil-spill therapy group with a cluster of fishermen’s wives. As I took notes, they hollered out their panic that their newly unemployed husbands were suddenly drunk all the time. Or abusive. Or threatening to find BP oil executives and hurt them. A toddler sat on one of the women’s laps, watching. Their oil-spill claim checks weren’t coming, they said, and the charity grocery vouchers weren’t redeemable for necessities such as toilet paper. One of them kept announcing, and you could feel it from her across the room where she sat eight months pregnant and husky-voiced and dressed in white, that she was a nervous wreck.

After I left, I called back to San Francisco for a phone-counseling session with a brilliant specialist named Meredith Broome.

I’d seen Meredith for a while when I first moved to California, which coincided with the falling apart of a brief marriage—and a subsequent search for therapy. My husband and I were best friends and excellent partners, but even before the nuptials, we had been more an affectionate team than a romantic couple. As honest as the mistake was—he was bright, hilarious, and thoughtful, someone I loved and could easily picture living with forever—and as young as I’d been when I made it, I’d still felt conflicted about the divorce. And guilty, in the way that one, especially one who went to Catholic school for thirteen years, does. I’d been to therapy as a child, when the adoption court that handled my orphaned brother and sister’s entrance into my family had automatically mandated it for all of us. It had made the idea perfectly natural to me: When you were going through a major life event, you could seek emotional guidance from a professional.

Meredith had helped me process my divorce transition. Now I reached out because I, like the fishermen’s wives, was finding myself to be a bit distressed, too.

And I was alarmed about it. Hadn’t I spent six weeks living with refugees who talked about and showed me pictures of genocide all day, no problem? It was hardly a meal that went by without one of them pointing out how slowly I chewed my food, when
they
had been taught to chew as fast as possible in case soldiers came to murder them and burn their house down in the middle of dinner. But by the day I spent with the fisherman’s wives, I’d called Meredith for advice from the Louisiana assignment once before, having been unable to stop a weepy fit from coming on after a white oil-spill cleanup worker told me to notify him if any black cleanup workers hit on me, so that he could organize a lynching. That day, I’d been huffing crude fumes in near 100-degree heat for days, and also it was my birthday. Plus, Deepwater Horizon wasn’t my first run-in with apocalyptic misery on the Gulf Coast. When I was working, living, and going to grad school in New Orleans, it was 2005—when Hurricane Katrina made landfall. So though in retrospect some light weeping doesn’t seem unwarranted, I whined to Meredith then that I was a loser. All my complaints were obviously meaningless compared to my subjects’ strife.

“It’s OK to cry,” she said.

“Everyone’s going to think I’m not tough enough to do my job.”

“You don’t know what Anderson Cooper does when he goes home at night.”

He was in town, too, eventually. Tons of reporters were. There was a lot of newsworthy wretchedness going around the single largest accidental oil spill in history, with the companies’ malfeasance, the collusion of local police guarding oiled beaches and moonlighting as BP’s private security, hospitality and marine livelihoods ruined, and crude-drenched birds and turtles washing up. When I called Meredith about the fisherman’s wives, she suggested that when immersed in trauma I do exercises to prevent absorbing and keeping trauma. Visualize breathing in people’s distress, she said, and exhale compassion.

It was similar to the advice the fisherman’s wives had been given about weathering what their husbands were bringing into their houses. Breathe in your favorite color, said the clinical coordinator running the group therapy. She was part of a local nonprofit that was trying to mobilize resources around the uptick of depression and domestic violence. She had the wives practicing
iiinhaaale, one, two, three, four, five, six
—hold for a second with your abdomen, not just your upper chest, full of oxygen, then just as slowly imagine you’re breathing out black smoke.

Try to stay grounded so your husband, who will not go to touchy-feely therapy meetings like this, will stay more grounded, she said, as the oil well was still gushing, as it gushed away for eighty-seven days. Stay calm so maybe he will be calmer, to better protect yourself and your children.