The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (5 page)

At the intersection ahead they could see a scarecrow of a man urging a dump truck
to back up to allow a group of men to push a battered pickup, its bed loaded with
passengers who refused to get out, off the road where a row of grimy makeshift garages
strewn with iron carnage awaited it. Across the street, a dealership’s lot was filled
and gleaming with row after row of Japanese-made SUVs. A few minutes later a pair
of men dressed only in soiled pants, a ruffle of sweat at each man’s waistband, came
weaving through the clot of traffic with a casket balanced on their heads, six brass
handles to a side and upholstered in velvet the color of a green lollipop. Good God,
Dolan observed drily, they’s burying James Brown, and they inched forward toward the
sooty crucible of the city.

What do you think? Tom asked Dolan, nodding out the windshield as they began to enter
the ramshackle neighborhoods and Dolan said he’d seen worse, the slums of Rio, San
Juan, Bogotá. But he hadn’t seen anything yet.

Where the road gullied at the next intersection a traffic cop stepped out of nowhere
and whistled for Tom to stay put and when Tom tried to go around the policeman skipped
in front of him and banged his fist on the hood. All right, Tom said, smiling coldly
back at the man’s glare. No problem.

And as they sat watching the cross traffic pour through he told Dolan of the night
a month after the invasion when he was stopped in this exact spot, everything pitch-black
except the double and sometimes triple row of taillights of the cars in front of him
snaking up the hill toward the choke point at Delmas, bumper-to-bumper and no one
moving, no one coming down, either, because the people trying to go up had blocked
the lanes. A storm that had been up on the mountains had slid down on them and it
rained catastrophically for twenty minutes like it was coming out of a fire hose,
a constant artillery of thunderclaps. In the white flash of lightning he saw a roaring
avalanche of broken, brilliant glass crashing down, and then it stopped for a minute
and Tom rolled down his window to get some air. Everything was quiet, people had turned
off their headlights and everything was dark. Then he began to hear a deep, approaching
rumble and as the wall of water came down the gully Tom could hear the screams of
the passengers inside one of the cars in front of him as it surged up and rolled and
tumbled in the flood down toward the sea. Lightning flashed again and he could see
people, families, children, swept out of their shacks, their arms flailing, the water
rising until he could feel it tugging at his front wheels and he got out shaking and
went down the line of cars behind him trying to get people to back up but they were
paralyzed. Tom could see the glowing terror of their eyes as he came out of the darkness
to their windows, the white ball of his face bobbing around, adding to the horror,
but the flash flood wasn’t the worst of it.

He went back to his car and the water hadn’t come up any more but it started raining
again, not heavy this time but steady and unpleasantly cold, and as he looked across
the new gorge of the flooded intersection at the line of cars on the other side, four
cars up he saw a cracking sprinkle of lights, like flashbulbs popping out little tongues
of hot color, then a huge boom detonated off over the harbor and the sky was illuminated
just long enough for him to see a guy move from the fourth car up to the third car
up and then it was black again and then he saw another pop of yellow-red lights and
then the form of this man moving to the next car and
bzzrt,
he had a machine pistol or an Uzi and was going from car to car spraying people as
they sat cowering from the storm and Tom thought,
Shit, there’s only one car left and the water’s going down and what’s he going to
do, wade across and keep going down the line?
but when the killer walked up to the driver’s window of the last car and bent over
to look in, a blue-edged cone of white light took his head right off. Finally, cars
behind Tom were backing up, their tires spinning on the wet tar, and he got his own
car turned around and got out of there, going the opposite direction from where he
wanted to be, and he wasn’t thinking clearly because he thought he’d go to the airport
and get a plane out in the morning but of course there weren’t any flights because
the airport had been closed for months and he thought,
Okay, I’ll still go to the airport because the 10th Mountain Division is there,
thinking they can do something, they can help, so he drove up to the main gate into
a sudden blinding sun of kleig lights and voices yelling at him to get the fuck out
of his vehicle and lie on the ground and he’s lying in the mud screaming,
I’m an American for God’s sake,
and they shout back,
Are you in trouble?

Not me, Tom tried to explain, but there’s people—

The soldiers he can’t see behind the lights shout back,
Then get the fuck out of here, man. What’s wrong with you, you crazy asshole?

So he got up out of the mud and gave the finger to the 10th Mountain Division and
drove across the road to the LIC, which was still abandoned and full of squatters
and refugees and he parked next to the night watchman’s kiosk and crawled into the
backseat and smoked a pack of cigarettes and then pretended to himself,
I’m sleeping
. The sky began to turn light and Tom wanted a shower and his bed back at the Oloffson
and he wanted a drink, he wanted ten drinks, so he got behind the wheel and went back
the way he was trying to go the night before and the road was empty. The intersection
was ripped up, a gouge in the earth stinking strongly of death and sewage, the cross
streets above it and below it torn apart, houses sheared in half, awful-smelling red
mud and soggy household trash everywhere but no cars, nothing, empty. Nobody and nothing
on the road but Tom. Nothing in Haiti ever gets cleaned up, so what was he supposed
to think? He climbed down into the debris-strewn channel of the intersection and followed
the raging path of the water down to the sea, where he stood staring at the unspeakably
contaminated shallows. Nothing. He couldn’t go to the police—the police had been disbanded—and
the American military was too obsessed with protecting itself from God knows what
to be bothered. For days he queried everybody he thought might know something, he
knocked on doors of the houses that had survived the deluge, he went to the Haitian
radio stations, but no one had heard of a car being washed away or a gunman going
from car to car assassinating people and then getting shot himself and Tom thought,
What am I supposed to do with this?
And it dawned on him, if he wrote it into a report, it happened; otherwise, it never
happened.

So what’d you do? asked Dolan.

I haven’t really thought about it, he said, until that cop brought his fist down on
the hood, and Dolan told him, You know, Tom, you can’t go bearing witness to every
fucking terrible thing.

CHAPTER FOUR

In the final days of the occupation the photographers owned the veranda at the Hotel
Oloffson. From midmorning until lunch you’d find them here in their bulging vests
stirring coffee and passing around a pack of cigarettes, their cameras in pieces on
the tables, a glossy-black clutter of expensive metals and indestructible alloys,
canisters of film scattered about like unchambered rounds of ammunition, telescopic
lenses like mortar tubes, their vernacular as esoteric as the military’s, distilled
with acronyms, equipment referenced by numbers alone. But most of the time, and this,
too, like the soldiers, the photographers were waiting, slumped on the cool veranda
in wicker chairs, passengers on an old riverboat trapped in the stagnant eddy of Port-au-Prince,
saying little, the light gone, the light coming, the light something nobody has time
to stop and think about, the story over, the story just beginning, the world being
created here and the world in agony and dying.

On that Thursday morning, on a day as dull as all the others in the aftermath of the
elections, the photographers gathered as usual for a late breakfast—nothing planned,
exactly; a farewell meal but they didn’t bother to call it that. Like the correspondents,
they were always forming and dissolving, bumping into each other in New York and London,
in Berlin and Paris and Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City, regrouping as a tribe in every god-lonely
place in the world where hatred gushed through the streets in order to supply the
citizens back home with the images of the endlessly playing movie called Other People’s
Problems. The ones who had gotten up early to find something to shoot were trudging
back in from their prowl across the festering city; the ones who had closed down the
bars straggled red-eyed to the veranda from their rooms in flip-flops, shirttails
out, hair still wet, camera bags slung over their shoulders. Tables were dragged together.
Joseph, the waiter, brought glasses of watery orange juice and omelets.

Tom Harrington sat by himself at the table to the left of the diamond of steps leading
to the flowered grounds, doodling in the margins of his running list of phone numbers.
He waited for a callback granting him an audience with the recently installed Minister
of Justice or a few minutes of conversation with somebody, anybody—the incoming president,
the outgoing president, the chief of the National Police, the family pets of the children
of any member of the high court—but the new government and its followers were no longer
immune to the international press and its toxicity, no one was talking, and for the
immediate future, it seemed, that phobia had splashed over onto the NGO community
as well and Harrington’s painstakingly arranged schedule of meetings had stalled in
a limbo of postponements. Give us time, the nouveau politicians had assured him, to
get accustomed to the idea that we are actually running the country, since we’ve never
even run so much as a gas station in our ass-whipped lives. Even Gerard, his fixer,
had become bored after their breakfast together and had gone down to the gates of
the compound to sit with the other drivers and translators playing cards in the shade
of the coconut palms.

Eventually latecomers began to sit at Tom’s table—a tall, freckled, red-haired lunatic
from Colorado whom Tom had once seen photograph over the shoulder of a
macoute
gunman as the gunman emptied his pistol into a teenage boy; a shy photographer from
Japan with an upturned bowl of shiny black hair and a permanent smile who had begun
his career by snapping soft-porn shots of high school girls in Osaka; a blonde-haired,
deeply tanned woman from the
Washington Post,
all arms and legs in trekking shorts and tank top
who had cataloged the most grisly human rights abuses after the coup d’état, hundreds
of photos she had shared with Tom, the entire trove copied, cataloged, and stored
in his Miami law office in boxes marked Evidence. She was headed home to Washington,
the Japanese fellow had booked a thirty-six-hour flight to East Timor, and the lunatic
was off to Chechnya to disappear, Tom later heard, into the bloody storm of Russia’s
unforgiving little war, and if you love the zone too much that’s what happened—one
way or another you became your own vanishing act. A friend of Tom’s, Daniel, an AP
photographer, took the last empty chair, unclipping a walkie-talkie from his belt
and setting it on the table; he wasn’t going anywhere because Haiti was his home.
It was a fact few outsiders readily appreciated because it made no fucking sense to
most of them and to many Haitians as well, that Haiti was a world you might freely
choose to live in—You
live here
! For God’s sake, why?

The story was dead, the Haitian people were becoming invisible again, imaginary creatures,
right before the magnifying eyes of the international press and there was nothing
the
pep
could do about it—their success would not bring the journalists back, their failure
would no longer earn the dubious privilege of the media’s attention. The woman from
the
Post
mentioned she had gone to Cité Soleil yesterday morning, to document the inauguration
from the perspective of the gangrenous slums, but had left after twenty minutes, unnerved
by the hostility and threats. Journos had always been welcomed in the slums as protectors,
their presence evidence that somebody in the world had taken notice of the people
at the bottom but an unscalable fence of acrimony had been erected, kids with guns
were taking over the infested grid, forming gangs, against all
blans
because everybody was leaving and nothing had changed and in fact nobody cared. In
the past she would have persisted but now even persistence felt like part of the larger
betrayal of these youth who had paid in blood for the fraud of democracy.

Freedom has made them feral, said the red-haired lunatic.

None of the whites at the table wanted to talk about these things.

It was at this moment, sitting on the veranda of the Oloffson with the photographers,
that Tom Harrington saw Jacqueline Scott for a second time. She took one step out
of the shadow of the lobby onto the veranda and paused to glance around and she seemed
dulled in some way and uncertain, common traits of someone freshly arrived in the
muddle, but still her beauty rifled through him and he wanted very much just to be
able to look at her quietly and dream, as he might at the movies. A mere glimpse of
her energized Tom in the doldrums of the morning.

Do you know this girl behind you? he asked the
Post
photographer, who turned to look as Jacqueline Scott stepped back into the hush of
the lobby, all dark wood and rattan furniture and ceiling fans.

I think that was Jackie, she said. Right. I took her along yesterday to Cité Soleil.

You know her then? She’s a photographer?

She’s new. She asked to go. She needs someone to help her out. We all did, didn’t
we?

She looks like that actress, said Daniel.

She looks like Joan of Arc, said their future emissary to Chechnya.

I can’t quite picture her in Cité Soleil, Tom said.

Don’t you guys sell her short, said the woman from the
Post
. She doesn’t back off. She handled herself well.

Who’s she work for?

No one just yet. She has some names, contacts. So that’s it, the
Post
photographer sighed and stood up. Good luck, everyone. I have a plane to catch.

Without a word, the red-haired photographer from Colorado stood up as well, lifted
his bag over his shoulder and descended the steps to the parking lot and into oblivion.
The large group at the pushed-together tables began to break up; accounts were settled,
embraces exchanged, drivers summoned. The gear, piles of it, humped away. The Japanese
photographer finished cleaning his lenses and replaced them in a foam-lined case with
the care and delicacy of explosive charges.

Daniel said that he and his wife were hosting a dinner that evening for stay-arounds,
but Tom told him sorry, he had made other arrangements and couldn’t make it. Then
Jackie was there at the table, asking to buy black-and-white film, if anyone had extra.
She looked ready for the streets—a tan cotton vest over her T-shirt, olive-green slacks,
hiking boots, camera bag, a huge Nikon strapped around her elegant neck, her expression
unnecessarily grave, a slight urgency in her voice. It struck Tom, as it had that
night at the Kinam, that she was without charm, and perhaps that was her intention,
a way of muting or dampening the blaze of her physical appeal.

He offered her a seat but she didn’t acknowledge the invitation. The Japanese photographer
rummaged through his bag and found six rolls of Tri-X and she made no objection when
he gave her the film and wouldn’t take anything for it but karmic goodwill.

So what’s happening today? she asked with her eyes darting along a line somewhere
above their heads.

Zed, zero, zip. Everybody’s pulling out, said Daniel, but no sooner had he spoken
than the walkie-talkie began to fizz, and they listened to the crackled report of
his colleague checking in. A roadblock, a protest, tires burning on the highway in
front of Cité Soleil, a commonplace excitement but Daniel was the last man chained
to the story and his presence was required. Anybody want to come along? he asked and
Tom expected Jackie to jump at the chance but she said no.

What do you
want
to happen today? he asked her. She was beautiful and he didn’t know her and it would
be a game, he thought, to get to know her.

Can I sit and have a cup of coffee with you guys? she asked as she pulled out a chair
and sat. Impossible that anyone had ever told her no.

The conversation did not flow. She talked haltingly for a few minutes with the Japanese
photographer about editors and magazines and syndicates and then he, too, joined the
exodus to the airport. Her coffee arrived and she sat stirring sugar into it, clearly
uncomfortable, and so he stopped watching her and asked the simplest question—about
her home, where she came from. She jerked her posture straight from her intense, nervous
hunch and met his eyes and Tom didn’t think she had even heard what he said but instead
asked a question of her own.

Are you busy today?

Impossibly, he joked, hoping she would suggest a common adventure, an enterprise through
which he might invent some small usefulness to Jackie, a mutual purpose that would
legitimize his interest in her. Something in him—not his heart—reached toward her;
he was neither a fool nor a lecher but certainly a man intrigued by the myriad possibilities
that, at least on the surface, her youth and beauty and intrepidness implied. In fact,
he explained, since she didn’t seem to pick up on his sarcasm, I have a thousand things
to do but nobody in the government seems to want to work today.

I don’t want to get in your way, she said, and the hint of adolescent whine in her
tone annoyed him, as if now, after cracking a window to the possibility of their companionship,
she felt compelled by fickleness to close it without delay, the come-here-get-away
dance of teenage girls, woefully familiar to teenage boys and a glum memory for their
older selves.

You in my way actually sounds pretty good, he flirted, without an effect on her expression,
and he began to wonder if she ever retreated far enough from the constant tension
of her self-control to smile. Then Tom himself became more serious and wanted her
to tell him why she was here, just arriving when everyone else couldn’t jump ship
fast enough.

The UN isn’t leaving, she said. The Haitians aren’t leaving.

Point taken, Tom said, for what it’s worth. Then he couldn’t help himself and he lapsed
into a grand soliloquy, like every other horse’s ass who had ever sat too long on
the veranda of the Oloffson. And for what it’s worth, he continued, the pictures of
ordinary people, the ones mired in pathos, bearing the weight of it all, right? Rather
than the sensational images or the images that disseminate information, it’s those
pictures that explain the most, or have the deepest impact, but first somebody must
care, and you know exactly what I mean, care deeply and honestly, and right now people
are very, very weary of caring about Haiti, so best of luck because I think you’re
going to need it. He pontificated, his lawyer’s mouth running away from him. Personally,
Tom said, I can no longer believe in that which demands we see things anew. I think
that perspective is fundamentally dishonest, I think it’s a fucking lie. How about,
instead, images and words that make us finally see what we’ve been staring at blind
and dumb for most of our daydreaming lives.
To see things anew
makes it sound like insight awaits those who can’t make sense out of seeing things
as they are,
as if our innocence and inexperience were actually virtues. What do you think? You
think in pictures, don’t you?

But she did not want to philosophize about photography or altruism or ways of seeing
and his own impulse toward abstractions seemed suddenly not passionate but tedious
and didactic.

Can I ask you something? she said. Do you know about voodoo?

Know what about
vodou
? he repeated skeptically but thought,
aha
. With her question, the brooding enigma of Jacqueline Scott seemed to deflate into
the banal. He guessed she wanted to hear the drums, sweat in the pagan heat and immerse
herself in Haiti’s timeless theater of light and darkness. If you could not explain
what you were doing in a place like Haiti, here was a genuine reason that required
no attachment of war or revolution or screaming horror or saintly crusade. You were,
you could tell yourself, a tourist of the spirit. You were drawn by the mysteries,
such as they were.