Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

squinted into the glare as we walked down the central thoroughfare, before winding through the narrow passages between tents toward Daniel’s house. “Did I call it a house?” he asked in his near-perfect English. He’d spent some time in the States, before getting deported. “I’m sorry, should I say ‘tent’?” He laughed. He led me past row after row of stick-supported plastic. “And here we are,” he said. “My piece of Tent City.”
    Daniel’s shelter, like the rest, was several sheets of sturdy tarp cobbled together. The few floodlights didn’t permeate here. The ceiling was uneven, low, and leaky, and the shelter was built on a steep dirt slope. Daniel said water got in from all directions when it rained. And oh, how it rained: hard, monsoon-season buckets pouring in through gaps in the roof and the sides, the earth floor liquefying, a mud flood forming under the higher-up rows of lean-tos until it collapsed under its own weight and slid fast downhill into the tents pitched below. Inside Daniel’s place, the only source of light was a flashlight aimed at the gray tarp overhead. The dim beam illuminated the USAID decal printed on it—which announced the gift as FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE —but little else. While I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, a child materialized at my left thigh.
    “This is my daughter, Melissa,” Daniel said. “She’s ten.”
    “ Est-ce que je peux te donner un bisou? ” she asked, barely audibly. I sensed the outline of braids in her silhouette, but couldn’t be sure.
    “ Bien sûr ,” I told her, she was welcome to give me a kiss, and I bent down to accept it, supersoft and tiny against my cheek.
    Daniel overturned a bucket to offer me a seat and told me, as he, his fiancée, and Melissa sat on the ceramic tiles he’d placed over the mud, about the handicap-aid organization he was starting. He said that when the American soldiers came after the earthquake and set up this camp, he’d helped run errands for them, delivering babies, doing whatever he could to aid the aiders.
    There was just enough room for the four of us to sit; my shoulder touched Daniel’s fiancée’s; my feet touched Daniel’s feet. Melissa was sprawled across his lap.
    “Fortunately,” he said, “it’s not that hot in here right now.”
    I nodded. All our arms were slick and our faces running with sweat. But this was nothing compared with the daytime, when being under the plastic was like being in an oven.
    Daniel asked me if I was thirsty, and I was, but I didn’t want to drink anything because Daniel had also said I shouldn’t use the communal portable toilets. It was only eight o’clock, but dark, and plenty of gals before me had been assaulted on that trip to the bathroom. That was one of the reasons the inside of this tent smelled like urine. To avoid the communal toilets, Daniel’s family used a bucket in a corner. The three of them kept their plastic-walled hovel fantastically neat, and emptied the bucket often, but at some point I inhaled sharply and breathed in too much of its stink. I puked into my mouth, and pretended I hadn’t. I suggested that we go for a walk.
    Outside, it was clear that plenty of other residents were improvising bathroom facilities, too. The air was still, and within seconds my nose and throat were coated with the reek of hot rotting shit. “People have a lot of needs here,” Daniel said as we strolled along. The difficulty of getting around the steep muddy trail was one example of the trouble that disabled people, particularly recent earthquake amputees, were having. He introduced me to some neighbors, a woman who’d lost her husband, a tall smiley fellow who was deaf from rubble that had fallen on his head; he needed a hearing aid but couldn’t get one.
    The camp buzzed. People gathered in the wider paths, vendors cooked hot dogs and sold water, and someone had run long electrical cords to steal power to play a garish remake of “We Are the