The Best American Essays 2011 Part 1

The Best American Essays 2011.

Edwidge Danticat.

Foreword: Confessions of an Anthologist.

WHILE SPEAKING AT A PANEL devoted to the essay a few years ago, I was surprised to be introduced as one of America's noted anthologists. No one had ever called me that before, nor had I ever thought of myself that way, but afterward I began to reflect on the unusual compliment, which I a.s.sume it was.

I had never considered anthologizing as a special talent, but, I admit, I have compiled quite a few. Not just this annual-which is now in its twenty-sixth edition-but numerous collections of short stories, poems, political and cultural commentary, memoirs of movie stars, even historical advertis.e.m.e.nts. Had my early submissions of poems and stories met with more receptivity or had my first publication, a 1973 college anthology called Popular Writing in America (the t.i.tle is still in print), which I coedited with a very good friend, Don McQuade, not been a success, I may not have risen to the esteemed rank of a "noted anthologist." But in publis.h.i.+ng (as in so many industries) a success in one endeavor is often followed by an invitation to do something similar, and so one anthology followed another, but not always successfully.

I'm certain that no one ever set out to be an anthologist. It is hardly a conventional career path. "What would you like to be when you grow up, kid?" "That's easy, sir-a noted anthologist." But I did possess the one important characteristic that qualified me for the job. As far back as first grade, I enjoyed reading anything and everything. I even loved to read the required Baltimore catechism with its endlessly fascinating questions-"Why did G.o.d make us?-and all the textbooks the good sisters pa.s.sed out to us on the first day of every school year. On the opening day of third grade I brought our reader home and finished it that night. Given the typeface and all the ill.u.s.trations, it was hardly a challenge; I would realize in time that as the books got harder, the print got smaller.

I was not just a voracious and indiscriminating reader, I was an obsessive one. This sometimes worried my father, who never read anything other than the New York tabloids and daily racing sheets, which of course I devoured as well once he was done. He was concerned that a kid who always had "his nose in a book" would grow up unfit for the rough-and-tumble conditions of our sketchy environment. So I reduced his worries by playing baseball, though there were many times while standing alone out in center field inning after inning waiting for a fly ball that I wished I had hidden a Zane Grey paperback inside my perfectly oiled Rawlings.

I'm not usually sold on epiphanies, especially of the life-transforming type. I'm more interested in the opposite experience: not those rare moments of startling insight or realization, but-what I suspect are more common-those sudden flashes of anxious confusion and bewilderment. I distinctly recall experiencing one of these reverse epiphanies (is there a word for these?) shortly after I began high school. Before then I had been a regular visitor to our cozy, storefront branch library, where I borrowed book after book, usually biographies of Hall of Fame baseball stars, all through the summer months. But during the first week at St. Joseph's High School, one of the nuns suggested we obtain a card from the main branch of the Paterson Free Public Library. I had never set foot inside this imposing building with its stately columns that looked a little like the Lincoln Memorial (and no wonder-the same architect, I would later learn, had designed both). I entered the expansive lobby with some trepidation, not yet feeling a sense of belonging; libraries had not yet become the convivial community centers they are today. Libraries then were all about books, and librarians were the stern guardians of those books. An intimidating decorum of absolute silence prevailed as I timidly glanced about, astonished to find more books in one place than I had ever pictured, awed by the gleaming mahogany card catalogues that looked longer than the Erie Railway boxcars that click-clacked by our house hour after hour. As I walked out past the columns and cautiously down the steps, now a card-carrying member of this humbling inst.i.tution (and, by some sort of worrisome magical extension, an adult), I rejoiced that with so much available to read, I would never be bored in my entire life. And yet with a dizzying sense of unease, I simultaneously felt a terrifying rush of unknown possibilities.

The word anthology derives from the Greek antholegein, which literally means to gather (legeiri) flowers (anthos). The anthologist in a sense gathers a literary bouquet. Or as the founding father of all anthologies, Meleager of Gadara (now the city of Umm Qais), and apparently my ancient countryman, called his first-century B.C. compilation of short verse, a garland. Despite its unusual etymology, one that very few readers probably know, the anthology has remained a popular publis.h.i.+ng product for over two millennia. So we anthologists possess a long literary tradition, though I know of no history that charts our endeavors or the progress of Meleager's Garland into the Norton Anthology of Poetry.

The first anthology I remember owning was Oscar Williams's Pocket Book of Modern Verse. I acquired this while a high school senior and read it for years until it finally fell to pieces. Williams became one of the nation's most influential promoters of poetry, and his inexpensive paperback collections could be found in the 1950s and '60s in every bookshop, on drugstore racks, and in countless college cla.s.srooms. They are still being sold on Amazon.com, to the accompaniment of many warm and nostalgic reviews, a few of which informed me that my copy was not the only one read to pieces. Any hist ory of the modern anthology would need to include Oscar Williams, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, born Oscar Kaplan. Williams was also a poet about whom Robert Lowell wrote, "Mr. Williams is probably the best anthologist in America today."

Although The Pocket Book of Modern Verse was well thumbed and well loved by thousands of readers, it did not approximate the literary impact of Harriet Monroe's famous 1917 collection, The New Poetry: An Anthology. That authoritative book proved to the public that something indeed had happened to poetry around the start of the century's second decade. Monroe's collection was the literary equivalent of the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show, a visual "anthology" that mapped the enormous changes occurring in the world of art. By gathering a large sampling of the emerging poets of her time, Monroe (who included a dozen of her own poems) was able to demonstrate-as no single collection by an individual poet could-that a distinct movement was afoot and that modern readers had better start to swim with Ezra Pound rather than sink with Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

I've mentioned two influential poetry anthologies and I could mention others. Poetry movements have often been accompanied by anthologies that serve as manifestoes. But what about essays? Although there have been a number of excellent essay collections, mostly with a historical sweep-the best of which is Phillip Lopate's comprehensive and indispensable The Art of the Personal Essay (1994)-I can think of no dedicated, single-volume twentieth-century essay anthology that did for the modern essay what Harriet Monroe's book did for modern poetry. That might be because the essay was so slow in coming to terms with modernism: as I've written before, the essay, with very few exceptions, was the vehicle for understanding modernist literature, not a key part of that literature. Perhaps the most important anthology to showcase essays with a new voice and edge was Alain Locke's 1925 landmark collection, The New Negro: An Interpretation, which served as the major statement of the Harlem Renaissance. Though multigenre, the collection featured a preponderance of essays that clearly disa.s.sociated the form from the popular genteel essay and positioned it solidly in the new century. Another collection that would give voice to a new movement, not essayistic yet closely related, was Tom Wolfe's and E. W. Johnson's The New Journalism, the 1973 manifesto/anthology which celebrated a new style of nonfiction prose that had grown out of the ashes of the finally deceased novel.

But unlike The New Poetry or The New Journalism, there was no twentieth-century anthology ent.i.tled The New Essay, no gathering of key selections from a single period that demonstrated a vital literary movement gaining momentum. But as the twenty-first century opened, one young essayist, John D'Agata, noticed a new, hard-to-label form of essayistic prose that didn't resemble the traditional personal essay or nonfiction narrative or literary journalism. He collected these in a 2003 anthology that he called The Next American Essay. To be sure, some of these essays went back a few decades (such as John McPhee's brilliant 1975 New Yorker piece "The Search for Marvin Gardens"), but all the selections had something in common: a determination by their authors to push the genre into new territory, to feature prose that-to put it quickly-depends more on poetic fragmentation than rhetorical coherence and discontinuous narrative than straightforward self-presentation. The trick, of course, is to employ innovative forms without sacrificing ideas, substance, or urgency.

This annual anthology represents no movement or literary agenda and is wholly receptive to the "next" American essay, as can be seen by the fact that nearly half of the authors collected in D'Agata's fine anthology have appeared in this series. In the 2011 volume readers will find essays of lyric power as well as those that are more dependent upon reflection and reporting and that do their literary work within more conventional parameters. We will wait and see whether the second decade of the twenty-first century will resemble that of the previous century and introduce seismic changes in the arts, though it is difficult to imagine the disappearance of time-honored essays that narrate compelling personal stories or engage head-on with controversial issues or ruminate about ideas both large and small.

The Best American Essays features a selection of the year's outstanding essays, essays of literary achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are gathered annually from a wide a.s.sortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.

To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholars.h.i.+p), originally written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today's essay is a highly flexible and s.h.i.+fting form, however, so these criteria are not carved in stone.

Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit issues or subscriptions to: Robert Atwan, Series Editor, The Best American Essays, P.O. Box 220, Readville, MA 02137. Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed or evaluated. Please note: all submissions must be directly from the publication and not in ma.n.u.script or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers should not a.s.sume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the essays (with full citations) to the address above.

I'd like to thank my a.s.sistant, Kyle J. Giacomozzi, once again for all his help throughout every phase of this book, and I wish him well-deserved success as he now departs to pursue an MFA in nonfiction. As always, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt staff did everything to bring so many moving parts together in so short a time, and I once again appreciate the efforts of Deanne Urmy, Nicole Angeloro, Liz Duvall, and Megan Wilson. Working on this volume with Edwidge Danticat was a delightful experience, and I believe the 2011 book represents one of the most diverse in the series, both in its range of writers and in its exciting array of themes and topics. Given the remarkable reach of her own fiction and nonfiction, this should come as no surprise.

R. A.

Introduction.

THROUGH RECENT EXPERIENCES with both birth and death, I have discovered that we enter and leave life as, among other things, words. Though we might later become daughters and sons, many of us start out as whispers or rumors before ending up with our names scrawled next to our parents' on birth certificates. We also struggle to find, both throughout our lives and at the end, words to pin down how we see and talk about ourselves.

When my brothers and I first learned, in the fall of 2004, that our father was dying, one of my brothers bravely asked him a question which led to my father narrating his life to us.

"Pop, have you enjoyed your life?" my brother wanted to know.

Stripped bare of any pretense and fully vulnerable, my father gifted us with his life experiences to do with as we pleased. We could use them, as such statements are often said to do, to inform, instruct, or inspire ourselves, or we could simply revel in them, or in the fact that he was even sharing them with us, then move on.

Seven years later, we have still not moved on. I can't say that I remember every single word my father uttered on his deathbed, but every story somehow feels like it's still within reach.

Such is the power of the stories we dare tell others about ourselves. They do inform, instruct, and inspire. They might even entertain, but they can also strip us totally bare, reducing (or expanding) the essence of everything we are to words.

Having written both fiction and nonfiction, I sometimes have my choice of the s.h.i.+eld that fiction offers, and perhaps bypa.s.sing it, when I do, leaves me feeling even more exposed. As most people who take on this task know, along with self-revelation often comes self-questioning of a kind that is perhaps more obvious in some essays than others. When we insert our "I" (our eye) to search deeper into someone, something, or ourselves, we are always risking a yawn or a slap, indifference or disdain. How do we even know that what interests or delights us, alarms or terrifies us, will invoke a raised eyebrow in someone else? Perhaps the craft, the art, in whatever form it takes, is our bridge. We are narrating, after all (as my father was), slivers of moments, fragments of lives, declaring our love and hatred, concerns, and ambivalence, outing our hidden selves, and hoping that what we say will make sense to others.

The beauty of this series is that it reminds a handful of the many persistent and gifted pract.i.tioners of the various forms of this craft that they are being heard. Essayists, it seems, occasional or regular, are a bit more vulnerable these days, and as if the backlit screens of computers or smart phones were a metaphor for this, essays are now read under an even more glaring spotlight. This also forces us to push beyond certain boundaries, to be less formulaic and stereotypical, however that might manifest itself. But essentially we are guided in part by what Ralph Ellison in his groundbreaking essay "Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience" calls "art hunger," and what he defines as our urgent desire to put faith in our ability to communicate with others both directly and symbolically.

The Best American Essays 2010 guest editor, Christopher Hitchens, who is a contributor to this year's edition, recently wrote a moving essay about what it means for a writer to have a "voice" when he has lost his ability to speak. "The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed," he wrote in the June 2011 issue of the magazine Vanity Fair. I hope you feel, as I did, personally addressed by each of these essays.

In the beginning, it is biblically said (not a flawless transition from Mr. Hitchens), was the word. And no matter where we are along the span of our existence, we are perhaps all searching for that word, the one that is sometimes conciliatory and sometimes contrarian, enlightening or disturbing, the one word that will launch us stumbling into a sea of other words, most of which we will discard and some of which we will keep, as we write ourselves anew.

On, January 12, 2010, I was home in Miami-as I am most days-trying to get a bit of writing done while looking after my two young daughters. If thirty-five tumultuous seconds had not rattled Haiti, the country of my birth, at 4:53 P.M., that day would probably have blended into all the others, except that my girls and I had been scheduled to take a photograph that afternoon.

I did not want to take the photograph. I had grown photo-averse because of some baby weight that I just couldn't seem to shake. My girls, however, were very excited. A friend had given them identical embroidered white dresses and they wanted to wear them. (At least the older one did; the one-year-old did not get a vote.) So off we went that afternoon to a photographer neighbor's studio to get our picture taken.

Of all the pictures we took, my favorite is one of my five-year-old leaning her head ever so gently on my shoulder as her younger sister tries to choke me by yanking the heavy necklace around my neck. When I look at that picture now, it further deepens for me the sadness of that day. Looking at our serene, half-smiling faces reminds me how much we instinctively trust the ba.n.a.lity and predictability of daily life. Until something larger shatters our world.

After the photo session, I drove to a supermarket in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood and picked up a few things for dinner. As soon as I cleared the checkout aisle, my cell phone began to ring, and from that moment on the lives of 10 million Haitians and others, and to a much lesser extent my own life, have never been the same. Losing two family members and countless friends who had no time for last words was the least of it. Watching hundreds of thousands of others continue to struggle to survive adds daily to the weight of those losses.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die. And at any moment these stories can change.

In "Port-au-Prince: The Moment," Mischa Berlinski recalls surviving the January 2010 earthquake. However, his essay, which poignantly and powerfully describes the height of disaster, echoes an instinct we might also display even as we attempt to capture the quietest, most predictable moments: our yearning to preserve our words. Berlinski was working on his novel when the earthquake struck. When his chair began to roll, his first thought was to press Control+S on his laptop keyboard and save his novel. He started leaving with his laptop, then went back and put it on the table, reasoning that the book would be safer inside than outside. Though we might disagree on some things-that, for example, "without the presence-and the guns-of the United Nations, the [Haitian] government would have been nothing but a band of refugees and exiles"-reading, like writing, is never a dispa.s.sionate act. Essays, in the end, are not monologues. Whether we are nodding our heads or shouting back or writing protest letters in response, the most compelling essays often demand a reaction, either instantly or much later, when the words have settled inside us, under our skin, within us.

In "A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay," Christy Vannoy writes, "I am a Personal Essay and I was born with a port wine stain and beaten by my mother." Thankfully, essays like the twenty-four included in this collection are brilliant examples that the essay, port-wine-stained or otherwise, continues not only to survive but to thrive.

EDWIDGE DANTICAT.

Buddy Ebsen.

Hilton Als.

FROM The Believer.

IT'S THE QUEERS who made me. Who sat with me in the automobile in the dead of night and measured the content of my character without even looking at my face. Who-in the same car-asked me to apply a little strawberry lip balm to my lips before the anxious kiss that was fraught because would it be for an eternity, benday dots making up the hearts and flowers? Who sat on the toilet seat, panties around her ankles, talking and talking, girl talk burrowing through the partially closed bathroom door, and, boy, was it something. Who listened to opera. Who imitated Jessye Norman's locutions on and off the stage. Who made love in a Queens apartment and who wanted me to watch them making love while at least one of those so joined watched me, dressed, per that person's instructions, in my now-dead aunt's little-girl nightie. Who wore shoes with no socks in the dead of winter, intrepid, and then, before you knew it, was incapable of wiping his own a.s.s-"gay cancer." Who died in a fire in an apartment in Paris. Who gave me a Raymond Radiguet novel when I was barely older than Radiguet was when he died, at twenty, of typhoid. Who sat with me in his automobile and talked to me about faith-he sat in the front seat, I in the back-and I was looking at the folds in his scalp when cops surrounded the car with flashlights and guns: they said we looked suspicious; we were aware that we looked and felt like no one else.

It's the queers who made me. Who didn't get married and who said to one woman, "I don't hang with that many other women," even though or perhaps because she herself was a woman. Who walked with me along the West Side piers in 1980s Manhattan, one summer afternoon, and said, apropos of the black kids vogueing, talking, getting dressed up around us, "I got it; it's a whole style." Who bought me a pair of saddle shoes and polished them while sitting at my desk, not looking up as I watched his hands work the leather. Who knew that the actor who played the Ghost of Christmas Past in the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol was an erotic draw for me as a child-or maybe it was the character's big beneficence. Who watched me watching Buddy Ebsen dancing with little s.h.i.+rley Temple in a thirties movie called Captain January while singing "The Codfish Ball," Buddy Ebsen in a black jumper, moving his hands like a Negro dancer, arabesques informed by thought, his a.s.s in the air, all on a wharf-and I have loved wharfs and docks, without ever wearing black jumpers, ever since.

It's the queers who made me. Who talked to me about Joe Brainard's I Remember, even though I kept forgetting to read it. Who keep after me to read I Remember, though perhaps my reluctance has to do with Brainard's a.s.sociation with Frank O'Hara, who was one queer who didn't make me, so interested was he in being a status-quo pet, the kind of desire that leads a f.a.g to project his own self-loathing onto any other queer who gets into the room-How dare you. What are you doing here? But the late great poet-editor Barbara Epstein-who loved many queers and who could always love more-was friendly with Brainard and O'Hara, and perhaps the Barbara who still lives in my mind will eventually change my mind about all that, because she always could.

It's the queers who made me. Who introduced me to Edwin Denby's writings, and George Balanchine's "Serenade," and got me writing for Ballet Review. Who wore red suspenders and a Trotsky b.u.t.ton; I had never met anyone who dressed so stylishly who wasn't black or Jewish. Who, even though I was "alone," watched me as I danced to Cindy Wilson singing "Give Me Back My Man" in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a house that my mother shared with her sister in Atlanta. Who took me to Paris. Who let me share his bed in Paris. Who told my mother that I would be okay, and I hope she believed him. Who was delighted to include one of my sisters in a night out-she wore a pink prom dress and did the Electric Slide, surrounded by gay boys, and f.u.c.k knows if she cared or saw the difference between herself and them-and he stood by my side as I watched my sister dance in her pink prom dress, and then he asked what I was thinking about, and I said, "I'm just remembering why I'm gay."

It's the queers who made me. Who laughed with me in the pool in Lipari. Who kicked me under the table when I had allotted too much care for someone who would never experience love as suchness. Who sat with me in the cinema at Barnard College as Black Orpheus played, his bespectacled eyes glued to the screen as I weighed his whiteness against the characters' blackness and then my own. Who squatted down in the bathtub and scrubbed my legs and then my back and then the rest of my body the evening of the day we would start to know each other for the rest of our lives. Who lay with me in the bed in Los Angeles, white sheets over our young legs sprinkled with barely there hair. Who coaxed me back to life at the farmers' market later the same day, and I have the pictures to prove it. Who laughed when I said "What's J.Lo doing in the hospital?" as he stood near his bed dying of AIDS, his beautiful Panamanian hair-a mixture of African, Spanish, and Indian textures-no longer held back by the white bandanna I loved. Who gave me Michael Warner's The Trouble with Normal, and let me find much in it that was familiar and emotionally accurate, including the author's use of the word moralism, to describe the people who divide the world into "us" and "them," and who brutalize the queer in themselves and others to gain a foothold on a moralish perch.

It's the queers who made me. Who introduced me to a number of straight girls who, at first, thought that being queer was synonymous with being b.i.t.c.hy, and who, after meeting me and becoming friends, kept waiting and waiting for me to be a b.i.t.c.hy queen, largely because they wanted me to put down their female friends, and to hate other women as they themselves hated other women, not to mention themselves, despite their feminist agitprop; after all, I was a queen, and that's what queens did, right, along with getting sodomized, just like them, right-queens were the handmaidens to all that female self-hatred, right? And who then realized that I didn't hate women and so began to join forces with other women to level criticism at me.

It's the queers who made me. Who said: Women and queers get in the way of your feminism and gay rights. Who listened as I sat, hurt and confused, describing the postfeminist or postqueer monologue that had been addressed to me by some of the above women and queers, who not only attacked my queer body directly-you're too fat, you're too black, the horror, the horror!-but delighted in hearing about queers flinging the same kind of pimp slime on one another, not to mention joining forces with their girlfriends of both s.e.xes to establish within their marginalized groups the kind of hierarchy straight white men presumably judge them by, but not always, not really. Who asked, "Why do you spend so much time thinking about women and queers?" And who didn't hear me when I said, "But aren't we born of her? Didn't we queer her body being born?"

It's the queers who made me. Who introduced me to the performer Justin Bond, whose various characters, sometimes cracked by insecurity, eaglets in a society of buzzards, are defined by their indomitability in an invulnerable world. Who told me about the twelve-year-old girl who had been raised with love and acceptance of queerness in adults, in a landscape where she could play without imprisoning herself in self-contempt, and who could talk to her mother about what female bodies meant to her (everything), which was a way of further loving her mother, the greatest romance she had ever known, and who gave me, indirectly, my full queer self, the desire to say "I" once again.

It's my queerness that made me. And in it there is a memory of Jackie Curtis. She's walking up Bank Street, away from the river, a low orange sun behind her like the ultimate stage set. It's my queer self that goes up to Jackie Curtis-whom I have seen only in pictures and films; I am in my twenties-and it is he who says, "Oh, Miss Curtis, you're amazing," and she says, in front of the setting sun, completely stoned but attentive, a performer to her queer bones, snapping to in the light of attention and love, "Oh, you must come to my show!" as she digs into her big hippie bag to dig out a flier, excited by the possibility of people seeing her for who she is, even in makeup.

Port-au-Prince: The Moment.

Mischa Berlinski.

FROM The New York Review of Books.

MY CHAIR WAS ON CASTERS and began to roll. A large earthquake starts as a small earthquake. I saved my novel: Control+S. The horizon swayed at an angle. I had time to think many things-that's how long the quake lasted. I thought that I should stand under the lintel of the doorway. I took my laptop and started to leave. Then, unsteady on my feet, I wondered whether the laptop wouldn't be safer where it was. I put it back on the table. I went outside.

The office was a bungalow in a residential complex owned by a man who had made his fortune in powdered sugar. His wife had planted an elaborate garden of hanging and potted vases; they were falling or had fallen. The quake was a series of rolling waves, each sharper than the one before. I expected them to stop but they didn't. The visual effect was precisely that of the grainy videos that would later be shown on television, as of somebody shaking a camera sharply. It was tremendously loud-like huge stones grinding; I am not sure now if the sound was produced by the movement of the earth or by the simultaneous collapse of so many buildings.

I was alone on the sugar magnate's flowery terrace. I dropped to one knee, not shaken to the ground, but unbalanced, as if I had spun around in circles too many times. It did not occur to me for a second that I might die. I was panting heavily. A fissure in the earth opened up in the concrete beside me, perhaps a foot wide, a foot deep, and at least thirty feet long. The earthquake seemed to last an immensely long time, seemed to gain in power always, and when it was over the movement of the earth did not subside or taper down: it simply stopped. For five seconds or perhaps longer, the world was perfectly still and immensely quiet. Then the screaming began.

I knew that Cristina, Leo, and Bruno-my wife, my ten-month-old son, and my father-ln-law, on vacation from Italy-were at home, and that I had to get to them as quickly as possible. But I wasn't worried. I knew that something could have happened to them but I knew that nothing had happened to them; a kind of reptilian optimism. I began to run. I had always imagined that the adrenaline response augmented one's energies. But the opposite was true: the run to the house was all downhill, yet I was gulping for air, almost vomiting. Cristina, Leo, and Bruno were waiting for me at the bottom of the driveway. Cristina was in tears. The baby was collected and calm.

Port-au-Prince is a city of high walls, all of which came down. At first glance, the city seemed prettier in the fading light of day as all over Port-au-Prince secret gardens and hidden terraces covered in flowers and lawn furniture emerged from behind the collapsed walls. Inside these clandestine gardens, security guards fingered their guns and householders sat on curbsides. A wall had fallen on a neighbor's pickup truck. A barrel of gasoline had overturned, leaving the road slick. Crowds began to arrive almost immediately at the Primature, the residence of the prime minister. There was a mood of fragile gaiety in the air, like the first minutes of a very lively party, ripples of giggles and laughter. A few women were in complete hysterical collapse-wailing, pounding the pavement, dragged along by men to the relative safety of the Primature.

A cl.u.s.ter of women began singing hymns; soon other women would join them; they would not relent for days. There were women dancing. A very large woman wearing a yellow bra cradled an unmoving bloodied child in her arms. (For some reason, my memories of the event are chiefly of women: women wailing, singing, dancing, crying, cradling the wounded, or wounded themselves; then later as corpses.) Beside my office, a large apartment complex had been in construction, two buildings, each four stories. It was a landmark on the horizon. Now one building was gone, and the other listed at a sharp angle.

All evening long there were aftershocks. We pulled a couch and chairs out of the house and sat in the driveway. Our house had suffered almost no damage; we were in no immediate danger. We had food and water for at least a week. We arranged Leo in his portable crib and covered him well with a mosquito net. He fell asleep at his habitual hour and did not wake up until the morning. We heard singing and drumming all night long-and high throbbing prayer like chanting, which as the aftershocks came redoubled in intensity to shouting. "Tanpri Jezi. Tanpri,"they chanted. We beg you, Jesus. We beg you. Every now and again through the night there was a thud or an explosion. Our cellular telephones did not work. Our neighbor claimed to have been able to call on his network, but his phone, which functioned like all Haitian phones on a prepaid basis, was out of credit. I went out to look for cell-phone credit.

A large knot of people had gathered on the cul-de-sac leading to my office: a woman there had Internet access via satellite. She allowed me to write to our families that we were fine. Cristina's radio with the Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haiti (MINUSTAH) did not function. "Sierra Base, Sierra Base, this is Papa Golf 224," she said. There was no response, only static. We listened to the car radio. Across a normally busy dial, there were only three operating stations. One was playing lively konpa music. Another was Radio France Internationale. On the hour they had news briefings announcing first a quake in Haiti, then an hour later a ma.s.sive quake in Haiti, then two hours later a catastrophic quake in Haiti; this was between news of an African coup and interviews with French artists, writers, and intellectuals. Then there was a Creole news station. The director of a private morgue was on the air, asking for the emergency donation or loan of a 10- to 15-kilowatt generator. Later there was a preacher on the same station, announcing the "fin des temps."

It was a remarkably clear and beautiful night. The electricity was out all over Port-au-Prince, and when the moon set in the absence of light pollution and as the dust settled, a night sky of remarkable clarity emerged-the Big and Little Dipper, clouds of constellations. The night had a chill to it. Cristina was worried that Leo was cold and covered him with blanket after blanket. Even between aftershocks the earth did not feel stable but rather seemed to sway slightly as on the deck of a s.h.i.+p. The cat finally came home, tentatively meowing her presence, only to have the neighbor's dog chase her off. She fled to the roof of the house.

The very strange thing was this: there were no sirens, no helicopters. We spent the better part of the night making lists of people we knew: our nanny, our friends, Cristina's colleagues. Smith the real estate agent-he had a newborn daughter; so did Pierre the taxi driver. Boss Reginald the mechanic. We were alone in the driveway of our house as if the earthquake had sheared off the rest of the world, but for the sound of the praying, which finally abated not long before dawn.

In retrospect, the chief emotion I suffered in the days immediately following the quake was a powerful curiosity; an overwhelming desire to see for myself just what had happened. This was one of the most powerful emotions I have ever experienced. The next morning, I went on foot to the Hotel Montana. I had heard a rumor in the night that it had collapsed but did not believe it-the Hotel Montana was like a fortress! I was in San Francisco for the Loma Prieta quake of 1989. We had heard rumors that the Golden Gate Bridge had fallen into the Pacific, that the UC Berkeley library had burned to the ground. I imagined that now, too, the rumors far outstripped the truth. In this case, however, n.o.body knew what had really happened to Port-au-Prince.

Those who had come to the neighboring Caribbean islands or the Dominican Republic on vacation must have been delighted with the weather that morning, warm with a deep blue sky. Now the great lawn of the Primature was almost full. There was no organized aid or a.s.sistance, no Red Cross station, no sirens, no sign of the Police Nationale d'Haiti. The only official presence was a single security guard cradling a shotgun and dozing in a chair. People were stringing tarpaulins from trees to shelter themselves from the strong midmorning sun. One shady patch of the Primature served as cemetery, the bodies wrapped in blankets and discarded there, a few powdered limbs escaping. The predominant smell of the earthquake in my experience was not decomposing bodies, as has been often reported in the press, but p.i.s.s and s.h.i.+t.

The road to the Montana hugs a deep ravine, on both flanks of which and in the valley below a vast bidonville had been constructed, a cinder-block city densely reticulated in its narrow pa.s.sageways like an Arab souk. This was not the housing of the very poorest, but of the Port-au-Prince middle cla.s.s: people who could afford to rent or buy shelter. In our own house, one bottle had broken while its neighbor remained upright. In the bidonville, some houses had collapsed and the collapse of one house brought down the next; but in other places a patch of ten or twenty houses clung stolidly to the side of the hill. The collapsed houses were a smear of cement. Within the bidonville there were large open s.p.a.ces-a soccer field, for example-and in these open s.p.a.ces cl.u.s.ters of people had settled. Afterward, people who were not in the quake always asked about the bodies. But at the time, the bodies were far less shocking than the collapsed houses. The dead were discreet. The ma.s.sive untidy solidity of a collapsed building was awful.

The side of the mountain had collapsed on the road, partially burying a pickup truck. A woman had been caught in the flatbed. Her eyes were open; the impact had split open her guts; she was covered in a film of gray dust. I thought to myself that she would haunt my nightmares but in fact writing this now is the first time I have recalled her since the event. On the side of the road there were souvenir vendors with brightly painted metal lizards and other handicrafts.

The mountain reeked of cologne: a small parfumerie had collapsed. On a large green lawn, wounded from the hotel lay in the deck chairs in which they had been evacuated. One man was still in a swimsuit. An Argentine helicopter landed, one or two of the wounded were loaded up, and the helicopter took off again, disappearing out of view into the vastness of the city. The twenty-foot steel wall surrounding the Montana was still standing and its gate was closed, hiding the damaged hotel from view. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances, the hotel loomed far above the walls. Now it had simply disappeared.

My wife and I came to Haiti in the spring of 2007 when she found a job with MINUSTAH. We had spent almost two years in the provincial town of Jeremie, then after Leo's birth moved to Port-au-Prince. I was writing a novel about MINUSTAH. The protagonist of the novel was a former deputy sheriff from Florida, who joined the mission as an UNPOL-a police officer working with the UN to monitor, mentor, and support the Police Nationale d'Haiti. I wrote: In the restaurant, they had a DVD of Aristide on the television. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was Haiti's crazy ex-President. In his time in power, he dismantled the military and the police force, fearing, not without reason, a coup d'etat from one or the other. Then he distributed arms to his cla.s.s allies, the gang lords who ran the slums. This created social stability to about the extent you can imagine. By the time Aristide fled Haiti in 2004 and the United Nations arrived, the country had fallen apart. Some blame Aristide, some blame his enemies. Drunken rebels ran riot on the streets of Port-au-Prince. c.o.ke-mad teenage gangs controlled the cities. The new government of Haiti, such as it was, had no military and no police force. That's why there was a United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti: soldiers were brought in to maintain order; I was there to train the new police force, the one that was going to keep order in the absence of the old police force.

My wife, unlike my protagonist, was a civilian employee of MINUSTAH. A lawyer herself, she worked with lawyers from a dozen other countries in an attempt to reform and stabilize the Haitian legal system-an effort that had so far borne only limited results. There were still several thousand Haitians in prison awaiting trial; some had been waiting for years. (The main prison collapsed in the earthquake and the surviving prisoners all escaped, effectively resolving this particular problem.) But there was only so much the United Nations could do: the UN in Haiti-unlike in Kosovo-did not possess executive authority. In my wife's case, MINUSTAH could do little but gently coax local judicial authorities. At best, the UN and the government of Haiti had a delicate coexistence: the United Nations was in Haiti only with the permission of the government; but without the presence-and the guns-of the United Nations, the government would have been nothing but a band of refugees and exiles, some in Miami, some in Brooklyn, still others in Montreal.

That afternoon, leaving the baby with my wife, I went along the same road that led to the Hotel Montana but in the opposite direction, toward my wife's offices in the Hotel Christopher. The impa.s.se leading to the Christopher was blocked by barbed wire and protected by a few Filipino soldiers. A small crowd of Haitians stood at the wire; a man was pleading to be admitted, on the grounds that his car was parked inside. A Filipino said, "If I let you in, I have to let everybody in." This debate continued in reasonable voices on both sides. I presented my wife's badge and was allowed in.

It was eerily quiet in the cul-de-sac. The place had once bustled with purposeful movement. The Hotel Christopher and its adjacent buildings had been like a small college campus: the faces one encountered there were enthusiastic and alert, about half white and half black, either Africans or local Haitian staff. Signs had pointed the way to 'Justice" or "Elections" or "Human Rights." On the walls of the Christopher there were giant photographs ill.u.s.trating inspiring moments in MINUSTAH history: Sri Lankan soldiers in uniforms and blue helmets pus.h.i.+ng a stalled pickup truck, a Jordanian soldier with a bushy mustache holding hands with a little girl. A peac.o.c.k and a peahen had patrolled the grounds. Now the Brazilian army had transformed the narrow impa.s.se into a staging ground for heavy equipment in which the bulldozers and cranes were parked. There couldn't have been more than a couple of dozen soldiers in all. A few Jordanians stood around taking pictures of the rubble.

My wife worked in a building one hundred meters from the Hotel Christopher-her building had collapsed. Cristina had been home only because her father was visiting. The UNDP had collapsed. Human Rights had collapsed. UNAIDS had collapsed. Villa Prive, the headquarter of the UNPOL program, had collapsed. We later learned that many UN staff members had died. I walked into the courtyard of the Hotel Christopher, where the vehicles of VIPs were under ordinary circ.u.mstances parked. This tall building too was gone, eight stories reduced to one-but the collapse was neat. It might simply have been a one-story building. Then I was alone in the courtyard, directly in front of the empty parking place of the special representative of the secretary general.

By the next day or the day after that, the faces of those except the most profoundly bereft had returned to normal-normal in the sense that they were commensurate with the experience that we had undergone. Faces in the days to come would reveal weariness, despair, misery, grief, and very often joy. But everywhere I went on that first day after the quake, I saw a facial expression I had never before seen; I suppose I must have worn it as well. Our faces suggested only the most profound surprise.

What Broke My Father's Heart.

Katy Butler.

FROM The New York Times Magazine.

ONE OCTOBER AFTERNOON three years ago, while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her j.a.panese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. "Please help me get Jeff's pacemaker turned off," she said, using my father's first name. I nodded, and my heart knocked.

Upstairs, my eighty-five-year-old father, Jeffrey, a retired Wesleyan University professor who suffered from dementia, lay napping in what was once their shared bedroom. Sewn into a hump of skin and muscle below his right clavicle was the pacemaker that helped his heart outlive his brain. The size of a pocket watch, it had kept his heart beating rhythmically for nearly five years. Its battery was expected to last five more.

After tea, I knew, my mother would help him from his narrow bed with its mattress encased in waterproof plastic. She would take him to the toilet, change his diaper, and lead him tottering to the couch, where he would sit mutely for hours, pretending to read Joyce Carol Oates, the book falling in his lap as he stared out the window.

I don't like describing what dementia did to my father-and indirectly to my mother-without telling you first that my parents loved each other, and I loved them. That my mother could stain a deck and sew an evening dress from a photo in Vogue and thought of my father as her best friend. That my father had never given up easily on anything.

Born in South Africa, he lost his left arm in World War II, but later earned a PhD from Oxford; built floor-to-ceiling bookcases for our living room; coached rugby; and with my two brothers as crew, sailed his beloved Rhodes 19 on Long Island Sound. When I was a child, he woke me, chortling, with his version of a verse from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: "Awake, my little one! Before life's liquor in its cup be dry!" At bedtime he tucked me in, quoting Hamlet: "May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"

Now I would look at him and think of Anton Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis in 1904. "Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill," he wrote, "there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death." A century later, my mother and I had come to long for the machine in my father's chest to fail.

Until 2001, my two brothers and I-all living in California-a.s.sumed that our parents would enjoy long, robust old ages capped by some brief, undefined final illness. Thanks to their own healthful habits and a panoply of medical advances-vaccines, antibiotics, airport defibrillators, 911 networks, and the like-they weren't likely to die prematurely of the pneumonias, influenzas, and heart attacks that decimated previous generations. They walked every day. My mother practiced yoga. My father was writing a history of his birthplace, a small South African town.

In short, they were seemingly among the lucky ones for whom the American medical system, despite its fragmentation, inequity, and waste, works quite well. Medicare and supplemental insurance paid for their specialists and their trusted Middletown internist, the lean, bespectacled Robert Fales, who, like them, was skeptical of medical overdoing. "I bonded with your parents, and you don't bond with everybody," he once told me. "It's easier to understand someone if they just tell it like it is from their heart and their soul."

They were also stoics and religious agnostics. They signed living wills and durable power-of-attorney doc.u.ments for health care. My mother, who watched friends die slowly of cancer, had an underlined copy of the Hemlock Society's Final Exit in her bookcase. Even so, I watched them lose control of their lives to a set of perverse financial incentives-for cardiologists, hospitals, and especially the manufacturers of advanced medical devices-skewed to promote maximum treatment. At a point hard to precisely define, they stopped being beneficiaries of the war on sudden death and became its victims.