In the darkness I can’t tell when I’m dreaming and when I’m just thinking. I hear the dead hand beside me scrabbling, scrabbling at the floor. For a moment, I’m scared. Then I think, well, at least I’m not alone.
But I realize it was probably just the rat, come back to gnaw on the dead people again.
I see people coming through the walls, pulling the concrete apart with their bare hands, coming to rescue me. I’m pretty sure they’re not real cos I see them, and it’s not possible to see anything real in here – it’s too black. But they seem real, these people, with their strong hands and their smiling faces.
I’m hallucinating, I know this. Do I? I’m seeing shit that isn’t there. I’ve taken drugs before – everyone does in the Site – so I know what it feels like. Maybe I even dreamed those people calling?
My mouth has grown enormous again. Hours or days ago I had to pee and I collected the liquid in my hands, as much as I could, and I drank it.
Oh, Manman. Look at me now. You told me I would get what was coming to me.
At some point I close my eyes. Suddenly I’m drifting up, up through the half-fallen ceiling, the concrete flesh of the building skeletoned with rods of steel, and then further through floors upon floors of twisted metal and bodies, and then up into the sky. It’s light out here. I can see the hospital below me. It’s so broken that it doesn’t look man-made at all; it’s just a pile of random blocks.
I’m in the clouds. I think, maybe I am magical, maybe I am still Marassa, even if my sister is gone. In the Site, ever since we were born, people said we were special. They said we were Marassa, and that gave us powers to change the world. They said we had been given life by Aristide, and so the spirit of the people and the revolution was in us.
Even after Marguerite was taken from us, people said these things. They said that Dread Wilmè had died to protect my life, so all that rebellion had been made even stronger, like when you put carbon into iron and it makes it harder, makes it steel. Some even said that Dread Wilmè lived inside me, and they would look at me strangely as I walked down the street.
I thought that was stupid, but now I think, maybe it’s not so stupid after all.
I can see the whole of Port-au-Prince – the palace, the homes of the rich, the open-air prison of Site Solèy. It’s all collapsed. The palace is just dust and rubble, the homes are destroyed. Only Site Solèy looks the same, and that’s cos Site Solèy was a ruin to begin with.
There’s a gull beside me in the clouds. It peers at me, and banks and screams. I can see planes circling above the airport, and helicopters flying back and forth above the city. There are people crawling over the wrecked hospital below me, like little ants in hard hats.
Earthquake, I think, cos it’s the only thing that could smash everything up like this. When we were little, my sister and me, we would make cities out of the mud in the gutters of Site Solèy, and then we would say we were dinosaurs or earthquakes and stomp those cities to nothing.
The devastation I pictured in my head never got close to this, though. From above, Haiti looks like it’s been wiped off the earth by an angry god. Maybe Dread Wilmè was made into a zombi, and he’s come back to punish the land and has shaken everything to pieces in his anger.
I wonder if I can fly, and I try to bank toward the palace to get a better look. But I can’t move where I want. Suddenly I’m rising again, up, up among the clouds and then bursting through them, and it’s like the flattened city had never been there; I’m in clear blue sky above soft white clouds and it goes on forever.
Then I’m descending very fast. It’s night-time now, which seems strange and at the same time not strange. I must have flown far over the clouds, cos I’m not above the city, either; I’m looking down on marshland, dense with trees. There are no electric lights, though I can see a tentative, reddish light on the other side of the trees, flickering like bloody water, which must be torches or candles.
My speed increases. I’m breaking through the treetops now and I see that there are people below; they’re standing in a circle and looking very intently at a man who’s dancing and singing like a mad person. They turn from him and look at another man – he’s big and tall and wildly ugly, his nose sort of squashed and swollen. He’s leaning back, screaming, it seems to me, looking straight up at me as I hurtle downward. I just have time to see that he’s foaming at the mouth – he’s having some kind of fit – then his mouth is getting bigger and bigger, like mine did when I was so thirsty, and his mouth takes over the world, like mine did, contains it within its twisted and blackened teeth, its diseased gums, and I’m inside it and I’m sinking, sinking into the darkness.