“Come to me, child,” the Sénateur said.
“But I can’t see you,” the boy said.
“Follow my voice.”
Soon the boy was at his side. He told the boy to touch his face, and he could feel small hands wandering across his broad, bony skull. He could smell the child’s hair. He could feel his heart beating. The Sénateur began to laugh. His story had not ended. His people needed him. Life needed him. Old Baron Samedi had come for him, and he, the Sénateur, had been too tough.
* * *
Only when Nadia began to hear a woman’s screams, “Jesus save me! Jesus save me!” did she realize that the thing was done. She began to crawl in the darkness, slipping and gliding through the oozing lake of oil. Something grabbed at her ankle—it was a hand attached to a body trapped under a slab of concrete—then slid off her greased limbs. She saw a distant light, wavering in the powdery clouds of dust. Past the olive oil there were pickles, which she knew by their vinegary smell. She moved steadily on her hands and feet in the direction of the light, which grew ever brighter and more distinct the closer she came to the hole in the supermarket wall. She slid over bodies and across exploded sacks of flour, found her forward progress stopped by an overturned shopping cart, a pair of hands still attached to the handle, the remainder of the body under collapsed refrigerators, writhing slightly.
Nadia slid through the hole in the wall and into the supermarket’s parking lot. She blinked at the sharpness of the light. She stood up and saw that her hands and legs were red with blood, scintillating with shards of glass. The pain arrived from a distance. The others who had survived were coming out of the supermarket also. Nadia looked with a vague curiosity at their hysterical, frightened faces. She felt her baby kick and was comforted.
Nadia stood in the parking lot, breathing heavily. Her heart was leaping, bounding at her chest. Her lungs were raw. She could hear rising from every corner of the destroyed city an assortment of human voices: screams, groans, shouts, and cries. She looked at herself in the mirror of a car and began to laugh. Her face was white with flour, attached to her oily skin. She felt a greatness in her soul, a mastery such as she had never before experienced: She had lived. She had triumphed. She was not afraid.
* * *
For three days and three nights the Sénateur kept the boy alive. For three days and three nights the Sénateur never stopped talking, except when the boy slept, his small, warm body pressed close to the Sénateur’s. Stories, poems, and doggerel—jokes, verse, and song—came forth from the Sénateur’s tired, ragged consciousness like water from a spring. He told the boy stories of Bouki and Ti Malice.
“Krik,” the Sénateur said.
“Krak,” the boy said.
“He is taller when he sits than when he stands.”
“I don’t know.”
“Think, child.”
The boy began to whimper.
“A dog!”
The boy giggled as the Sénateur began to sniff like a beagle at the boy’s dark curly hair. The boy giggled and relaxed.
Then the Sénateur confided in the child. He talked about politics, and a man’s duty to protect his children. The Sénateur told the boy stories from his childhood, the sweetness of his first kiss, the rapture of love. He told him of everything that awaited him in manhood. He tried to teach the boy everything he knew, everything he felt was important: how to treat a woman, how to steer the voilier into the wind, how to compose a line of living verse.
They had no water and no food. The room was stiflingly hot and close. The Sénateur felt Baron Samedi approaching, circling, prowling, and he kept him at bay. The Baron had been working hard, but was not tired from his exertions. When the boy slept, the Baron told the Sénateur of the legions of freshly dead he had shepherded into his domain. And still the Sénateur told Death, “I’m not ready yet! Not ready! I won’t cry fire!”
The boy was tiring. Now he whimpered and cried for thirst. The Sénateur told him to close his eyes and imagine a tall glass of Coca-Cola, the glass condensing. He told the boy to drink that glass of Coca-Cola and feel it filling up his empty tummy.
Later the boy would insist to his rescuers that there had been a Coca-Cola in the bathroom of the collapsed hotel. That he had drunk Coca-Cola.
And now the Sénateur could last no longer. He had kept the implacable Baron at bay so many hours, so many days. The firing squad was ready. The army had yielded: they would allow the priest to order his own execution. But they would wait only so long. There was work to be done, so many others to shoot. The Baron’s patience was finite. All that the soldiers awaited was the word, and when the Sénateur—finally, after so much work and suffering, so much love and sorrow—could hear the voices of rescuers chipping at the walls of the bathroom, he cried, in a voice of command and resolution and hope, “Gentlemen, you may fire!”
PART NINE
I saw Terry again three years after the earthquake.
It had taken a few years longer than I expected, but I finally completed the novel I had begun in Jérémie. The work had been interrupted by the earthquake: that was too much Life and Death, too present and too intense, for me to retreat into my room and spend my days imagining. Serving no end and motivated by nothing, an earthquake is everything that fiction is not.
It was only when my wife found a new job, far from Haiti, that I was finally able to get back to work. Now my publishers were sending me on a publicity tour: twelve cities in twenty-four days, to an average audience numbering about twenty-five, average age about sixty, most of them there for the other writer on the program. But I saw cities I had never seen before, slept every night in comfortable hotel beds, and in every audience there was someone who told me that the black marks I had made on the page had helped them pass a long night or reminded them of times past or made them laugh. That’s all that a writer can ask for, really.
When I posted my tour schedule on Facebook, both Kay and Terry, the one in Atlanta, the other in Miami, had promised to stop by and see me. But I was surprised that Terry, not Kay, had made the effort. I didn’t notice him during the reading, but when I looked up from the table where I was signing books, there he was, an almost nervous look on his face.
I stood up and walked around the table. “Terry Fucking White,” I said, and I hugged him. The last time I had seen him was on the night Johel Célestin won the first round of the senatorial election, and he had taken one hell of a bruising since then: his hair had gone gray and he was walking with a cane. A ton of concrete on your leg will do that to you. They took three days just to dig him out of the rubble—at one point the Watsonville County Herald reported him presumed dead. It took a week before he was medevaced out of Haiti, and the first doctor who touched him, in Santo Domingo, botched the operation. There had been some doubt whether he was going to keep the leg at all. He was in and out of hospitals for a year after the earthquake. That thing Terry always had, the almost animal quality, athletic and feral, that hinted at physical menace—that was all gone now. He suggested fragility, like you could take him in a fight. That’s what made me feel such tenderness toward him, that and the memory of all the places we’d seen together and the people we’d known. And I must have reminded him of something also, because he hugged me longer and harder than I expected, the two of us standing in the Coral Gables Barnes & Noble, book buyers watching us and wondering.
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.
That was the first time Terry heard the story about Nadia and Johel. He said, “It’s not true.” His whole body stiffened under the PT’s hands, as if the therapist had twisted a nerve: the PT had to take a break and let Terry sweat the pain off. But Terry remembered what the PT said, the old Creole proverb: “There’s no such thing as a natural death in Haiti.”
After that, Terry started haunting the chat rooms himself.
The real inside dirt was all in Creole, but the written language was hard to understand, and Terry would spend hours sitting at his laptop, puzzling out what people were saying. He started following Nadia’s career obsessively. He followed her election, her rise to prominence in the sénat, her alliance with the new president, himself a former musician. Terry read that several months after the installation of the new government, the long-delayed Memorandum of Understanding with the government of Canada allowing for the construction of a new road had been approved. Nadia was present at the signing. None of that exactly surprised him: she’d always given the judge shrewd counsel, and he’d known she was no fool. B
ut if Terry was honest with himself, he never really imagined anything like that happening. And wherever he went on the Internet, there was always the same story.
When Kay moved up to Atlanta, she told Terry that Haiti was finished for her. And one reason she was leaving him was the way Terry was obsessing over the Internet. She knew it was never going to be finished for him. But Terry knew that wasn’t exactly right. He knew that Haiti would be finished for him when he knew the truth.
* * *
Terry went down to Haiti unannounced. That was something he knew from two decades’ experience in law enforcement: you want to talk to the suspect at the time and place of your own choosing. So he flew down on American Airlines, Miami to Port-au-Prince, with the missionaries and the aid workers and the diaspora coming home, then took a taxi over to the domestic airport, where he bought himself a ticket on the afternoon flight to Jérémie.
The next morning, Terry sat outside the judge’s house in Calasse with the regular folk who came to see Sénateur Célestin and ask her for favors. The women wore clean, neatly pressed dresses, and the men were in good dark suits. A mason had filled in the bullet holes that had pockmarked the cement wall, but the fresh yellow paint, not bleached by sun or rain, showed where the damage had been done.
There were half a dozen plastic chairs in front of the house. They were all full, but a young man noticed Terry’s cane and saw the beads of sweat on his face and bounded to his feet. Then Terry sat with the sun on his face, thinking of an afternoon he’d spent here a few months after he’d started working with the judge. Johel had an old football in the closet, and he and Terry had started tossing it around in the courtyard, right where Terry was sitting now. He was surprised what a clean, tight spiral the judge could put on the ball. Then Nadia showed up, and the three of them had started horsing around together. Because the courtyard of the house was narrow, they’d gone out onto the dirt road to have a little more space, and as will happen in Haiti, there were soon a dozen neighborhood kids playing with them. At first it was the adults against the kids; then Nadia, not so long out of girlhood herself, drifted away from Terry and the judge’s squad. Terry and the judge tried to explain to her and the kids the complicated rules of American football, but the only thing anyone really understood was throw the ball, catch the ball, and run with the ball—but that was enough for a good time …
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