in, or had grabbed me there on the mattress.
It wasn’t much better while I was awake. Not having my eyes closed didn’t stop me from picturing it, the men involved in what I’d witnessed, or men dragging the FAVILEK women out of their homes so hard they nearly tore their arms off. Men coming out of no place, to hurt the women I’d met, or me.
* * *
The sky opens up fast and spectacularly in Haiti. One minute you’re sitting in dusty, broiling traffic, and then the car is being assaulted by wind-split leaves and hard-driving rain. In the camps, the gusts ripped the tarps from their tethers. Outside, rivers of water and garbage ran through the streets. With three days left in town, my two weeks almost up, I went to visit Daniel in camp again after one of these storms. Though it had rained for only half an hour, at least five camp dwellers in the city had died, and thousands of shelters were destroyed. Daniel showed me that his was one of them. The back half of his “house” was a collapsed pile of plastic; inside, under the remaining shelter, everything—clothes, sheets—was soaking wet. His fiancée was wiping and wiping at their ceramic tiles, but when anyone moved, more mud oozed up from beneath.
“I guess it’s actually good we don’t have electricity,” Daniel said. “All that floodwater and all these people, with downed wires?” His daughter, Melissa, wasn’t radiant anymore. The storm terrified her, Daniel explained. If only that were the scariest threat to her here. At ten, she wouldn’t be the youngest reported rape victim from the camps. Not by eight years. She sat on a rumpled, fallen tarp, legs tucked up under an oversize white T-shirt, quiet and distant. “She was shaking like a leaf,” Daniel said.
Back at the hotel, the power was back on. It had gone out in the biggest rain, three days earlier, and for a long time; I’d been pleading a combination of exhaustion and Internet unavailability as my defense for failing to file any more Web stories. But I was on track for the print piece. Marc and I sat at a table on the hotel balcony, as we often did after a long day, fact-checking details. That day, we additionally needed to discuss some e-mails I’d got from the American lawyer and charity founder who had granted my access to parts of the story the night Marc and I had met. I’d been sending updates via Twitter about everything I was reporting, partly by force of habit and partly because I was contractually obligated to for work, so she was aware of all my observations—at the hospital, driving around with Marc—so far. She wanted me to leave one source’s real name and some specifics of her background out of future stories, which wasn’t a problem. I changed sensitive sources’ names all the time; I’d only used this one because Marc had specified that the story had been on television before I’d arrived and locally was old news. I apologized profusely. But the lawyer also asked me “not to demonize” the doctor I’d seen blame a rape victim, which would require me to pretend I hadn’t seen a lot for possibly questionable reasons.
Marc and I discussed the lawyer’s objections for a while—she’d said she might want to use the doctor again in the future. Afterward, our conversation meandered. We were both thinking about ordering chicken for dinner. Then at some point the conversation turned, suddenly and via his steering, to why we weren’t screwing.
He was an attractive man, he said out of nowhere. I was an attractive woman. So, he wanted to know, what was the problem?
I would tell almost no one about this. Later, I would write about it only in an unrelated story and without names or context. How many sexual harassers could I have, honestly, and for fuck’s sake, before the problem was not them but clearly me?
And Marc. Marc who’d made a couple of comments recently about my looks but Marc the ambulance, the rape-victim hero. Marc who’d been shook up, too,