Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (10 page)

As the weeks went by, this effect failed to lessen whenever sex crossed my mind—a memory of having it, the very idea of the existence of it, made every muscle in my body tense painfully, my eyebrows knitting together to keep the bad pictures out. I made some timid and quickly abandoned attempts that soon became a desperate determination to touch myself like a normal, wholesome person. One time, I managed to keep the rape thoughts at bay all the way until the end. But then, even with the dazzling sunshine flooding the walls of my safe, locked apartment, flashbacks of the screaming incident in Haiti burst into my head and I lay there, soft and failed, choking on instant hard sobs.

I could not process the thought of sex without violence. So, I started picturing orchestrated violence against myself. The moment I thought about sex, I thought about having sex while simultaneously having a fight. Someone nice, someone I knew, but someone forcing me, while I struggled, with my permission, to have sex with them. My choices were to picture violence I controlled, or to picture the abominable uncontrolled things that had happened to rape survivors I’d met. I pictured the former often.

“All I want,” I told Meredith, sitting down for a session one day, “is to have incredibly violent sex.”

I thought about getting slammed against a mattress, getting slammed around. During the night, I dreamed of the Haitian women, or of men attacking me. During the day, I thought about getting choked and hit, and having sex while fighting mightily.

Meredith didn’t even blink. She’d been working with trauma clients and running a sex-abuse support group for years, and I was hardly the first person who’d come at her with something like this.

“Being aware and understanding what’s going on in your system and then literally working it through your body, like retraining your body how to calm down, is really useful,” Meredith explained. Somatics works on the assumption that your body and nervous system and emotions and any kind of spirituality you might have are all connected. You don’t just talk and talk about your asshole father until you think you’ve resolved something; you let surface the sensations you’ve buried—sadness, disappointment, shame—letting them out of lockdown in your stiff hip or that knot behind your shoulder, letting them run their true painful course so they can become a part of you that is integrated, not compartmentalized or denied.

For many of Meredith’s clients, it was a long and horrible process. But not as painful, ultimately, as not going through it. “A lot of people don’t heal, and it manifests in a lot of different ways throughout their lives,” she said once. “Because when trauma doesn’t get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down.” Which is why, Meredith said, “A lot of folks who’ve survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life.”

Personally, I had a lot of fear and helplessness to start working through at the moment, among other things. I wasn’t looking for violent sex as a matter of recreation. For whatever reason, it was what my body felt like it needed. Experts had different theories for why people were driven to reenactments—Freud’s contemporary Pierre Janet, who never abandoned his own conclusions that hysteria was caused by abuse (and suffered controversy and obscurity for it), saw it as a means of restoring agency, or power. Some practitioners used “flooding,” a controlled re-creation of traumatic events, with their patients. Rather than analyze, pathologize, or categorize, Meredith simply supported me.

“Do you have anyone who can do that for you?” she asked.

I had an ex-girlfriend who would have been into smacking me around, I told her, but I wasn’t having rapemares about women. I did have an ex-boyfriend I thought would be amenable. We hadn’t slept together in a while, and although we were a terrible couple, we loved and respected each other et cetera. We’d had aggressive sex before, anyway. This was going to be a whole other story, but I guessed he’d still be up for it.

“Isaac,” I told Meredith. Isaac could do that for me.

*   *   *

In an expensive pizza restaurant with exposed-brick walls, Isaac got a little more than he’d bargained for when he accepted my invitation to catch up.

“So, apparently, I have PTSD,” I told him, voice quaking.

We were in the San Francisco Mission. I felt embarrassed. I felt alienated, surrounded by supereducated white people with tattoos. I, too, was a supereducated white person with tattoos, but since I’d been back, I’d failed to for one second achieve the feeling that I was of this city, or the rest of the human species. It shouldn’t have been so surprising, since I’d also yet to feel like I was of my own self.

I treated Isaac to the same spectacle Tana had been party to so many times: watching me drink while I recounted, thin-voiced, heart racing, some of what had gone down. When dinner was over, and we were back out on the sidewalk, I was a little calmer. By which I mean drunker.

I proposed tequila. And a sleepover.

My new general anxiety, that too-heightened idling state and incessant hyperarousal, returned full force as soon as we got into bed at my apartment, tequila or no.

What
, I agonized,
was my stupid brain going to do?

The moment we started making out, my violent feelings welled up. I stopped for a moment, and looked at him.

“I’m gonna need you to fight me on this,” I said.

He paused, weighing that.

“OK,” he said. And because I was different, and the stakes were different from those of any fun tussling we’d done before: “I love you, OK?”

I know, I said. OK.

And with that, he was on me, forcing my arms to my sides, then pinning them over my head, sliding a hand up under my shirt when I couldn’t stop him.

The control I’d lost made my torso scream with anxiety.

I cried out desperately as I kicked myself free. With all the strength in my limbs, I managed to knock him over to the other side of the bed. And then again, when he came back at me. But it didn’t matter how many times I tossed him off and escaped. He had sixty pounds on me, plus the luxuries of patience and fearlessness. When I got out from under him and started to scramble away, he simply caught me by a leg or an upper arm or my hair and dragged me back. By the time he had pinned me by my neck with one forearm so I was forced to use both hands to free up space between his elbow and my windpipe, I’d largely exhausted myself.

It had taken less than ten minutes. Just like that, I lost. It was what I was looking for. But with no free hands to defend myself, my body—my hard-fighting, adrenaline-drenched body—exploded into panic. The comforting but debilitating blanket of tension that had for weeks been wrapped around my chest solidified into a brick. Then the weight of his body, and of the inevitability of my defeat, descended on my rib cage. My worn-out muscles went so taut that they ached. I stopped breathing.

I did not enjoy it. But as it became clear that I could endure it, I started to take deeper breaths. And my mind stayed there, stayed present even when it became painful, even when he suddenly smothered me with a pillow, not to asphyxiate me but so he wouldn’t break my jaw when he drew his elbow back and slammed his fist into my face. Two, three, four times.

My body felt devastated. But relieved. I’d lost, but survived. When Isaac lay down and gathered me up in his arms, I shattered into a thousand pieces on his chest, sobbing so hard that my ribs felt like they were coming loose.

“One tried-and-true impact of trauma is people just really shutting themselves down,” Meredith told me when we talked about it. “Also, stuff comes up for people like the way it came up for you: Folks can have a counterphobic approach, moving toward fear instead of away from it. And sometimes people have fantasies like that after trauma, putting themselves in dangerous situations, almost to try to confirm with themselves that they were not impacted. ‘Look, I did it again. It’s fine. I’m fine.’”

Isaac pulled my hair away from my wet face, mustering a supportive mantra and repeating it to me while I cried. “You are so strong,” he said.

“You are so strong.

“You are so strong.”

I didn’t believe him. Not that day. Not anymore.

*   *   *

The flashbacks of the witnessing and screaming every time I thought about intercourse did stop. Isaac and I went through a miniature renaissance, celebrating, happily and filthily, the successful safe space we’d created.

As exes, we weren’t beholden to each other, and my reclaimed sexual functioning seemed to extend beyond him. That year, between the book tour and reporting trips and holidays, I was out of town for seven months. I didn’t become celibate or start sleeping with strangers; instead, I’d inadvertently cultivated a collection of geographically scattered sex partners with whom I shared no obligations but was in regular and affectionate touch. In the Southeast and in the North, in Cleveland and New York and California, we’d get together whenever I was in town. Even after Haiti, I forced myself to go through with planned short trips, to the East Coast, to Ohio, to work panels and family obligations. When in the interest of full disclosure I informed one gal who was clearly trying to seduce me that she was about to join what my friends had come to call The Roster, she seemed taken aback.

But after a second she shrugged. “As long as it’s more like, a basketball roster than a football roster,” she said.

Everyone knew about Nico. A picture he’d sent me of himself and some other soldiers shirtless in the jungle had become the background wallpaper on my phone. And Nico was busy with another romantic life, too. When he returned to France, he went back to the girlfriend with whom he’d been on and off for years. He was giving it another honest shot. Therefore, since the unifying theme of our correspondence was how in love we were and that we couldn’t live without each other, we had to stop talking. He knew I was hardly saving myself for him, but he asked me not to get married until we figured everything out.

I thought that sounded good, if admittedly insane.

In the meantime, I was inconsolable. Not like I didn’t have bigger problems to worry about. Nor was I lonely by any stretch. But the days without Nico’s grammatically disastrous notes felt additionally isolated and empty. I missed him as if we’d been together every day for years. I described my sadness about it with such weight and frequency to Alex that she composed a fake letter from Nico, complete with a broken-English haiku about the quality of my blow jobs, and sent it to me to help fill the void.

The rest of my friends thought I had lost my mind. As though more evidence of my instability were necessary during the great sobbing drunkenness of late 2010, here I was babbling about how my soul mate was this guy I’d fucked one time in the middle of a mental health crisis. Who didn’t speak English. Who lived in France. Who—let’s not pretend class was no major issue here; a foreign software engineer or architect or fellow journalist would have sounded more viable—was a soldier. Who was, frankly, too young.

“How old are you?” Nico had asked me almost immediately after we’d had sex, when I was still on top of him and everyone was still panting and we were staring at each other, dumbfounded:
What just happened?

“Thirty,” I’d answered.

“
Thirty
?” he’d exclaimed. “
Thirty
?”

Oh, my God
, I thought.
Oh, no!
Had I just had sex with a teenager? He hadn’t looked young, but
did
you have to be an adult to enlist in France? Hadn’t they told us in school that the French were allowed to start drinking when they were like, six?

“How old are
you
?” I asked, eyes wide.

He answered in French. I guessed the translation (correctly) out loud in English, but as he didn’t know the English words for the numbers, he couldn’t confirm whether I was right. He traced some figures on the wall with his finger. Twenty-four. No, wait. Twenty-five; he’d just had a birthday there in Port-au-Prince.

I didn’t care. As I’d told Gideon, I told everyone else: I loved him. I felt the absence of his letters every day, while I was doing everything.

So when he e-mailed me again after nearly a month of silence, it was all joy and heart-stopping relief. He missed me, he said. He couldn’t stop thinking of me
all days
. From there, we were back to our old routine.

Things were looking up, then. I remained extremely shaken by the experience of the sex-related flashbacks even after they were over, the memory of the way they had cringed and twisted and closed my body down lingering like a misery hangover. But now I could think about sex, and write e-mails about it, and have it. My faith in almost everything else remained shaken, too, but it was soon rare that a movie rape scene triggered immediate, whiplash-inducing weeping. Within a couple of months, the gagging fits seemed for the most part to have ceased. One month, I told myself I was allowed to drink on only five days of that month; I ended up drinking on way more days than that, but on some of my days off, I managed to do something other than lie in bed watching
Grey’s Anatomy
reruns for fourteen hours at a time while eating heaps of popcorn, like my parents used to make when we all watched TV together. My dad and I had liked to eat the half-popped kernels at the bottom of the bowl. We called them “burnt seeds” and hunted for the best ones, each handing them to the other. I looked for them alone now while bingeing on medical dramas, finding it comforting, though sometimes painful, to crack them between my teeth.

Three and a half months after I returned from Haiti, I was assigned to go back. In January 2011, my editors called me in to discuss coverage strategy for the first anniversary of the quake.

And to discuss something else. “Are you …
ready
to go back?” they asked.

I still drank too much. I almost always got drunk to have sex, with Isaac or anyone else, but I didn’t drink every day, and I could get out of bed in the morning.