Haiti Noir

That, Doctor Oliver knew, was the current word for zenglendo or bandits or occasionally lawless persons who might sometimes engage in political thuggery, abruptly materializing, then fading away. Those on the barricades were chimè as well. The literal translation was “chimera.”

“They cut her heart out,” Charlie added.

“Jesus. Why?”

There was a flash behind the bar, where a server had silently appeared, his eyes widening white in the shadows at what Charlie had said.

“Scare the bejabbers out of everybody.” Charlie shrugged.

He had known her, Doctor Oliver realized, this harmless madwoman who’d styled herself the Queen of Haiti and did the stroll from Place Montarcher to the Boulevard de la Mer, capturing whomever she could in tight lassoes of her crazy talk.

“There’s always a sort of big energy buildup,” Charlie Chapo was saying. “Between Pentecost and Trinity-and it releases in the ceremonies. Normally it should. A thing like this, though… it can all start going in the wrong direction.”

“I need to get out of here,” Doctor Oliver said. The demonstrations had cut him off from the airport, which was probably out of service anyway; he was meant to have flown to the States three days before.

“Right,” said Charlie, “it’s inconvenient for me too.”

Doctor Oliver touched the bottle in his pocket. Two pills left and why was he saving them? So there would be that much between him and the void. He resolved to speak about this to Charlie Chapo, who was sometimes something of a fixer.

“Charles. I need to…” A delicate matter. “Um. Refill a prescription.”

Charlie was looking at him slantwise. “For what?”

“Um.” Too much delicacy and he would not be understood. “Well, it’s Dilaudid. But I can substitute! OxyContin, Percocet even…”

“Or heroin would do.”

“Yes,” replied Doctor Oliver, naked now, and almost unashamed. “It would.”

But Charlie Chapo was shaking his head. “There’s coke around,” he said. “There’s even crack, believe it or not… but what you’re after-it’s not obvious.”

“At the hospital maybe?”

He felt Charlie Chapo withdraw a little, though his body had not moved. “You do the medical missions, right? So you know, they never have enough painkillers for…”

… nonrecreational users, Doctor Oliver thought, his shame bitter now.

“I’ve got a couple of cats to kill,” Charlie said. “I think you shouldn’t be kicking around by yourself-not today. Magloire’s looking for you, maybe he can help.”

“Oh,” said Doctor Oliver, remembering the name scrawled in the dust. It gave him a faintly reassuring sense of connectedness. “I thought he was looking for you.”

“I don’t have anything for him, though. All this traka- I’m light in the pocket.” Charlie Chapo put his hat back on and winked as he stood up. “I’ll check you tonight at the hotel.” In the burning doorway he turned back again. “Watch yourself, will you? Drug jail here’s not funny.”

Surely no one could be in greater pain than this, Doctor Oliver kept thinking as he followed Magloire in an aimless stroll around the town. His organs were shriveling in withdrawal, his brain withering on its stem. The sensation worsened when Magloire persuaded him to buy a hat-a gaudy monstrosity designed for some nonexistent tourist. But the sunstroke warded off by the hat left him prey to all the rest of it. They were then in the thick of the crowded market streets with people pressing into them on all sides, picking their way to avoid stepping on wares spread over the gummy ground and Magloire’s eyes staring hungrily at everything. Among the market women strode a coat hanger of a man who shook a plastic jug of filthy yellowish oil in one hand crying “Lwil, lwil, lwil” like a crow. Seeing that Doctor Oliver was faint, Magloire procured a ladder-back chair for him, but sitting down in the midst of the crush was not helpful and Magloire led him out of the market, up the hill where the streets were calmer. They passed the gateway of the Hôpital Justinien, and paused to look at the whitewashed trunks of the corridor of palms receding to the stairway, but they did not go in.

Doctor Oliver held himself up with a fist wrapped around an iron spear of the hospital gate. Somewhere in all the moil of frantic exchange there must be something to answer his need. Or else he would simply have to kick. He had done it before, but here? Not here. It seemed to him that somewhere the heart of La Reine d’Ayiti must be impaled on a fencespear like the one he grasped, deflated, tightening, the blood blackening to the iron as it dried.