The night Philippe told him it was his turn to play police chief of Place Pigeon’s one-man police force, Alain went with the flow and assumed his responsibilities, as with everything in the passive existence he’d accepted after the earthquake. He accepted his turn in the rotation without protest in the name of solidarity with his ragtag group of new neighbors, even though he was one of the least physically able men or women in the refugee camp. Alain had a nonfunctioning leg with problems that had scared off visiting doctors. Malnutrition had left him without arm strength to swing a bat with any meaningful force, not that a baseball bat was available. (Christian, Philippe’s new contact at an aid agency who worked in procurement, had yet to come up with one bat for the camp. Apparently, demand was high. No shit.) This night Alain was meant to sit outside his tent and listen to the radio to scare off potential burglars and malefactors with a display of vigilance, insomnia, and sentient life. Yes, some people actually burgled refugees’ tents in Port-au-Prince after the disaster. Don’t ask Alain why. It was one of so-called God’s many fucking jokes. Ha-ha, very funny, motherfucker. There was nothing of value left to steal among these invalids, except people’s last shred of dignity and courage. Those commodities were at their lowest ebb. Haitians found facing the future to be exquisitely difficult after the most reliable thing they had ever known in their lives, the ground they stood on, had decided to violently betray them without warning. When it came to the thieves, Alain was actually forgiving. I guess some people clearly have habits that were hard to break even after an apocalypse, he thought. Even in hell those people will be around, looking to cut corners, Natasha would add if she had been by his side, sitting on the dirt, head on his shoulders while listening to his trembling whine and staring at the firelight. Alain tried not to think about Natasha too often. It was too disabling. The emotions her name generated in his heart were hot and ranged from desperate yearning to rage. His memories of Natasha were wonderful and dangerous and thus a distraction, a luxury he couldn’t avoid in the leadership thrust upon him by fate after the disaster. Besides, his love for her lacked purity. Purity was a new word to him. Even in business, Alain was never a numbers man. He was man of nuances, not blacks and whites. Shades of gray. Everyone and every problem was negotiable. And for what? What were you looking for back then, Alain? What returns on investment were so good that you channeled so much of your energy for them? What was the point of you?
Alain sighed, defeated by the presence of silence instead of answers. In fact, his head now hurt whenever he tried to think hard. Tea. He could use a cup of tea. With lots of milk and lots of honey. What’s that sound? Straight ahead and walking toward Alain were four men, two in each alley of tents. They were poking their heads in and out of tents of sleeping refugees. They were the land pirates of Port-au-Prince, and they had appeared out of thin air, like boogeymen, looking for bounty. The men were cloaked in darkness and they did their thieving with the assurance of soldiers wearing night-vision goggles in a desert. The whistle. Alain was supposed to whistle loud and high the minute he spotted intruders. The hope was the alarm would scare them into leaving the camp. In fear of what? As far as anyone could tell, the meager Haitian National Police had disappeared in the earthquake. The United Nations soldiers were there to work on their tans and protect shady political manipulations and not protect the lives of common men. Where the hell was that whistle? Alain patted the ground around him ever more frantically for a whistle that was actually tied around his neck. He knocked over a can. The fire shuddered.
The thieves turned toward Alain as one. They saw Alain and Alain saw them. Their leader, tall and light-skinned with feral teeth and a half-afro—a half-fro—walked quickly toward Alain, an index finger over his lips to order the crippled security volunteer to be quiet. Without breaking his stride, the man pulled a baseball bat from behind his back and proceeded to prepare to go Reggie Jackson on Alain’s head. It all happened fast, too fast for Alain to even think about screaming for help. Arms crossed over his face, Alain braced for the coming thump and the cracking of his skull . . . and death, yes, fresh-ass death. Darkness, his new friend. Alain put his arms down and turned his chin up toward the fast-coming fat end of the baseball bat. Then Alain heard a crunch, but felt nothing but the spray of a liquid across his face. He opened his eyes and saw a man, a white man, whack another marauder with a backswing of a baseball bat. What the fuck? Alain thought, How come everyone in this town has a baseball bat except me? The foreigner was clearly deft with a bat, so the last two thieves decided to abort their mission and sprinted out of the camp, damn near impaling themselves while jumping over its pale green fence before disappearing into the night. Alain’s unexpected savior watched them scamper with a faint smile of satisfaction on his face. It was a familiar face, lined and expressive even in repose. A dimpled chin, a forest of malleable hair. The man was handsome. Movie-star handsome.
Are you OK, buddy? he said.
Wait, he is a movie star, Alain realized, though he couldn’t place the man’s most famous film. Something in the eighties. It was the reassuring twinkle of the man’s eye that gave it away. When Alain was in graduate school in Greenwich Village, Hollywood stars were commonplace in the neighborhood. Buying records at Tower, lunching at the coffee shop, even buying weed in Washington Square Park. The girls were occasionally seducible. The men were unapproachable. They all had that twinkle at the ready, though. It functioned like a shield and a dagger of otherworldly charm. Successful politicians and CEOs have a variation of it. Musicians too. The theatrical variation was a tad more delicate and effervescent, which is maybe why it had a longer-lasting effect on most mortals.
What the hell are you doing here? Alain said. I was doing fine.
You were? Really? What was that hands-down, chin-up move? Some form of Haitian jujitsu?
Fuck off.
Naw, I’m too tired from saving your ass.
The guy plopped down on the patch of brown grass next to Alain’s tent. His chest heaved. He was clearly exhausted. Obviously, playing hero against hungry thieves in a park in the middle of the Caribbean night with a baseball bat was not a routine night out for him. He looked to be around fifty, fit, for sure, but gray at the temples. Wiry and lean, probably vegan, all the veins in his bright pink face and arms popped out, throbbing. His heart was probably playing a tambourine in his chest. In front of them, the two marauders lay unconscious, lifeless. Hollywood, as Alain dubbed the white man in his head, avoided looking at them, as if he felt distaste for the violence he’d just practiced. Alain looked at them. Under the light of a piercing silver moon, their lifeless faces made them look younger than he’d expected. Their clothes were threadbare. Their faces just plain bare. Maybe they were just hungry and couldn’t sleep and were looking for help. Maybe they weren’t the leaders at all, just frontline pawns now nursing frontal lobe fractures. Either way they had gone about looking for help the wrong way. The poor bastards. Why they had come out here looking for trouble? In a couple of hours, the first Place Pigeon residents would wake up and see their bodies and feel as though they had come face to face with loups-garous, werewolves, the monsters of the night featured in Haitian bedtime stories. These two boys would serve as a deep reminder about how screwed up and scary people could still be, not just the traitorous earth.
We have to move their bodies, Alain said without taking his eyes off them.
Yeah, Hollywood said.
Hollywood went to work. Under Alain’s jealous eyes, the man from the city of pretend heroes solemnly picked up and dragged each dead stranger’s body with the help only of the bright moonlight over to the camp’s cemetery, then dug a hole and buried them. Alain saw the foreigner tenderly bury his dead compatriots with disbelieving eyes and pangs of guilt from his inability to help. The graves were crude, not that deep. The dirt covering them was thin. A good gust of prehurricane wind in the summer could unmask the dead and their seemingly slumbering faces. People around the world tended to presume the dead were innoc
ent, or that each death, with its complete finality, deserved our pity, even sympathy, because a dead bastard, even though he was a bastard, is, after all, still dead, dealing with the great unknowns of fate, reinforcing our core belief that no one deserves to die, especially us. There had to be something self-serving in this view, Alain had come to think. It must mean that if one accepts that some or most people deserve to die—since until God tells us otherwise, everyone will die, and deservedly so, as far as He seems concerned—the implication is that I deserve to die too, and this idea sucks too much for a lot of people to accept. No one wants to die. Even people who believe in heaven don’t want to die. Even the elderly, reduced to infantilism and practically mute, stunned with constant pain, always feel death is a dish that will be best served to their friends and not them, because, well, they are special, and their friends clearly less special and more deserving to die than they are, though they love their friends and wish them heaven. Those on their deathbeds are probably not unlike most of us in that way too. They believe deep in their bones that a last-minute escape from death will materialize and protect them when they need it most, when death comes calling, whether they expected her or not, and whether they believed they earned heaven or hell.
Alain stopped being one of those people after the earthquake. The second after he woke up on the dirt from the earth’s blow, and for the many days afterward that he spent helplessly watching piles of extinguished human bodies grow and grow around him and be removed from sight like so much trash, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he deserved to live and so many people deserved to die during and after those fateful thirty-five seconds. The numbers of dead from the earthquake and aftershocks were estimated to range from a few thousand to a million, according to news reports on Radio Ginen. Knowing full well that the correct number would fall somewhere in the middle, about a half million, if Haiti was lucky, Alain found the blow to his society to be particularly grotesque. He couldn’t find the optimistic muscles to forgive God. He couldn’t question God’s sanity candidly, even to himself, so he did what so many people do when convulsed by divine deception: he put his own faith in question. He wondered whether he deserved another dawn, another dream, more human touch. He found himself wanting. His impulse was to negate his own existence. He accepted a growing belief that life was fleeting and trivial and death could be a respite, and even a reward, from it all. Though the presence of strange little Xavier occasionally pacified his spiritual torment, when the boy slept, Alain felt the misery in the people around him and across the island fall over his head, against his will, like an assault of a thousand jackhammers. He’d sit on his cardboard cushion and stare at his stretched-out wounded leg and zone out. Anything was better than sleep and the recurring nightmare of an avalanche of crippled and dead Haitians asking him, Why? Why? Why? WHY? as he ran away. They were always in a fucking forest. Running and running and running, breathlessly. The dead kept chasing Alain from all angles. Their questions were louder each time. Why? Why? WHY? I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know! Alain screamed while running for his life.
That’s pretty good use of the word “fuck,” Hollywood said, ending Alain’s reverie.
The movie star had plopped down on the ground next to him. Thoroughly exhausted, he looked at least fifty years old, about twice Alain’s age. His face was heavily lined and pink and crinkly-eyed handsome. He radiated warmth, not grandiosity, probably to protect Alain’s ego, probably out of habit. He unpacked his duffel bag and seemed to need to connect with Alain to work through the adrenaline high of his extraordinary efforts that evening.
I think I recognize your accent, he said. Brooklyn, right? You’re a New Yorker.
Yeah, Alain said. Some of the time.
I was born there. Parents moved us to California not long after.
I was born here, Alain said, and moved out there soon afterward. California’s nice. Good weather.
Not as nice as the weather here.
You like it here, huh?
What’s not to like? The weather, the women, the music, the art, the food, the dancing, the women, the women. Did I mention the women? I could be very happy here. Say, that leg looks fucked-up. Have you had someone look at it?
Yeah, then they looked away.
Funny. Get some rest. I’ll be awake for another couple of hours.
No, man, you should get some sleep. You had a heck of a night. Just leave that bat with me.
I’d love to, but I can’t sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep since I saw the first CNN report on the earthquake. People running, crying, buildings falling, confused children. When I close my eyes and relax, I see them chasing me.
Me too.
Same dream?
Same nightmare.
Why don’t you go home? You sound like someone who probably has a nice home in the hills here. You know they were largely untouched right?
I’m not surprised. God protects the rich.
Look, God had nothing to do with what happened here.
Was that supposed to make me feel better?
You know what I mean.
Why don’t you go home? You have no business here.
In the black of the night, they heard a stirring. A crunch. It was creepy. Really, couldn’t the earthquake have left at least one functional streetlight? Alain thought. Alain and Hollywood tensed up and tried to play it cool at the same time. The noise came from behind where they were sitting. New marauders were in Alain’s tent. Fuck. A hand touched Alain’s shoulder from the side. It was Xavier. Only he could sneak up and touch you without scaring the shit out of you. How the hell does he do that?
Xav, c’est toi! Alain said.
The six-year-old newly minted orphan nodded in a way that told Alain it was OK for him to breathe easy. He was in good hands.
Meet our new neighbor . . .
Steve.
Hollywood’s real name was Steve, but Alain preferred calling him Hollywood, as he watched hands that had held Oscars shake Xavier’s hand. Xavier held the star’s hands in both of his and looked at the scars on Hollywood’s wrists. Hollywood turned red with shame. Hollywood looked away.
Nice to meet you, little guy, he said. I’m going to get some rest now. It’s been a long night.
With that, Hollywood crawled into the little tent he had pitched and promptly fell asleep. His Timberland boots poked outside it. Xavier looked at Alain and suggested he do the same. Alain dragged himself into their tarp tent and promptly fell asleep too, despite the crowing of roosters and the azuring sky outside.
Alain Destiné did not dream that evening, nor did he have time to write a diary entry to Natasha about the movie star who saved his life. In fact he didn’t get to sleep much at all before a commotion outside his tent woke him up. He heard a happy voice, that of Philippe, his comrade in refugee leadership, calling his name.
Alain! Alain! You got to hear this!
Alain rolled over and began to crawl out of his tent. His upper-body strength had improved enough that his face no longer grazed the mud in his tent when he crawled out of it. Once his face had appeared outside the tent, Philippe and another buddy, Gilbert, gave him a hand to get on his feet. Shading his eyes from the bright sun, he saw Hollywood sitting on the ground outside his tent, sipping a cup of coffee, casually, so cool in fact he might as well have been in Saint-Tropez or Saint Bart’s instead of disaster-struck Port-au-Prince. Beyond Philippe’s entourage, a crowd of refugees were coming toward Alain’s tent, no doubt to hear what the commotion was about too.
Man, listen to her, Philippe said. Her idea is genius! Genius.
A bright, freckle-faced little girl of about twelve years old emerged from the middle of the crowd. In that typically Haitian way of talking, as if addressing a nation after a march on Washington, she said her name was Alyssa. Mr. Alain, she said, I think the camp could use a memorial in honor of the people who died during the earthquake.
A what?
A memorial, sir. A piece of arc
hitecture, art, or a quiet area where, if you see it, you are meant to pause in tribute to all the lives we lost and be grateful and optimistic about the future. I had an uncle who visited from New York after 9/11, and he said just reading about people arguing about what shape the memorial should take helped New Yorkers begin to recover from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I think trying to put a memorial in Place Pigeon would do the same for people here.
What the fuck is this little girl talking about? Alain thought. To Alain, a moment of pause during these stressful times had come to mean time for reflection, and reflection meant time to cut yourself with soul-searing grief about the past events and the vagaries of the future, which was inevitably transformed into volcanic anger at the intolerably sunny but unknowable future of their people. “Our” people, that is the key word, isn’t it? Chill out, Alain. The girl might be on to something.
God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) Page 12
