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too, was quiet and tense. When he finally asked me what next, I shook my head and picked myself up, and we got back into the car to travel to a new displacement camp set up on the outskirts of the capital. “They moved all those people out in the middle of the desert,” Marc said, “like Moses or some shit.” A chalky, shadeless tent city on sharp gravel, where disaster capitalists had convinced already-disgruntled tent dwellers that the free Oxfam water was giving them stomach and genital infections so that they’d buy water with any money they could get. “We have nothing but misery,” yelled one of the residents during our interview, a tall man holding a little bar of soap he said he’d bought on credit. Marc and I went back to the hospital on another rape-care errand afterward. It was late by the time I got home that night. And that night, when I got home: booze.
    I took a two-day trip to the Central Plateau, to the northeast, through green and rolling terrain with distant cloud-shrouded mountains, where impoverished residents were excited to have temporary jobs through an international aid program. They sung gorgeously while hoeing together, clearing the way to build a road, but then asked the visiting Mercy Corps representative worriedly when the program would end. After that, for me: booze! More booze, after a day of interviewing domestic-development advocates. At the office of the Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative—that is, non-foreign—Development, the program director fumed across the conference table in a breeze-cooled room that aid was a self-serving interference of foreigners who hijacked rebuilding plans and tried to control Haitians’ destiny. From there, I went to a training seminar for teachers trying to handle students’ post-quake trauma (“My students are very afraid of noise. Any rumbling truck passing by shakes them up.…”) in their classrooms, and after that, I had booze again, and booze again after all the other days.
    With each passing night, I got increasingly drunk. Extremely, almost falling-down drunk, stunning myself with how much whiskey I could hold. I got drunk and locked myself in my room and called my dad or my best friend Tana or my other best friend Alex, incessantly clutching my BlackBerry, whether I was on it or not, in my palm or sometimes against my chest like it was an infant or an important medical device. One afternoon, after I’d finished working but before I started drinking, I started crying.
    This crying, I couldn’t control. For two hours. Embarrassed but desperate, I wrote an e-mail to my editor about my declining mental health. I cried so hard that when I called my dad, my dad started crying, something that I’d seen him do so few times I could count them on my fingers.
    “I don’t feel good here,” I wailed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
    “I’m so sorry, Mac,” he said, his voice breaking. The sound of it made me cry harder. I was being such a baby over nothing, alarming everyone and myself. “I feel so terrible,” he said. He could barely talk as he started weeping. “I don’t know how to help you. I don’t know what to do.”
    When we hung up, I kept crying. Inside those two hours I was unfortunately scheduled to give a phone interview to a media outlet from the States, and I cried through the whole thing, then asked the reporter quoting me please not to mention the crying.
    In bed, at night, I listened for every sound. Each one hit my eardrums like a knife, painful and startling and sharp, my eyes so wide open my face ached. As the rain came and went, the power went out frequently, and in the darkness, it was easily 100 degrees in my room with no fan or air-conditioning. I thought about the people in those airless, hotbox tents as I sweated, too scared to open the windows though they weren’t the kind someone could fit through. Whenever I dozed, I woke up fast, wet and heart racing, from nightmares that someone had got