Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [12]
During the first thirty floors of her descent, Zedeño learned that the explosion she’d heard was a plane hitting the tower. She promptly made up a story for herself to explain what had happened. Her brain reached into its database of patterns for a reasonable explanation, in other words. “I said to myself, ‘Poor pilot. He must have had a heart attack or a stroke.’” She would revise the story again and again that day, underestimating the gravity of the attacks each time.
At the forty-fourth floor, someone told Zedeño and the people near her to switch stairways. She’s not sure who said this, but she remembers someone saying there were fires below in that staircase. So they all filed out into the sky lobby and queued up at another stairway entrance. Zedeño stood facing the windows of the sky lobby. About seventeen minutes had passed since the first plane hit.
Suddenly, another explosion shook the tower. Zedeño looked up and saw balls of fire and black smoke. “I don’t remember the sound, for some reason,” she says. Like many people in disasters, her memory and her senses switched on and off at certain key points. But she does remember somebody screaming: “Get away from the windows!” Zedeño turned and ran toward the center of the building.
Until now, Zedeño had been mostly calm and quiet. But as she ran from the explosion, she felt a new sensation. She was filled with a rush of anger. I ask her whom she was angry at, expecting her to say whoever was causing the explosions. But what she says, very slowly and deliberately, is this: “How…could…I…have been so stupid to put myself inside this building again after what happened in 1993? I should have known better.” Zedeño was furious at herself. As she ran, she experienced a moment of clarity—which can be decidedly unhelpful. “I kept saying to myself, ‘I’m on the forty-fourth floor of a building. Where am I going? I’m still way up high. I can’t go anywhere!’”
Then everything changed again just as quickly. The group stopped running, the anger faded away, and things returned, instantly, to the previous calm. “Every single one of us turned around and marched right back to the stairway as if nothing ever had happened,” Zedeño says. She smiles when she says this. She knows it sounds strange. Disaster victims often oscillate between horrifying realizations and mechanical submission. As Zedeño describes it, they can be remarkably obedient:
We were like robots. There were no comments as to, “What do you think happened outside?” Nobody ran to the windows to see what was happening. Nobody pushed anybody. Nobody tried to get into the stairway before anyone else. Everybody just went right back as a group and continued to funnel into the stairway in an orderly fashion.
I ask Zedeño what she thought the sound of this second explosion was. At that moment, she says, she did not think about it at all. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m telling you, it was as if it didn’t happen. It’s not even that I forgot it. It’s just that it was as if it never happened. Never.” Psychologists call this “dissociation.” Most often, you hear the word used to describe the way children distance themselves from physical or sexual abuse. But it happens in life-or-death situations too. It can be a coping mechanism—a productive and extreme form of denial, in a sense. As Zedeño puts it, “I could not afford to dwell on it. My job was to just take it one step at a time.”
Soon afterward, though, Zedeño heard someone in the stairwell say that another plane had hit the towers. That information conflicted with her heart-attack theory. So she promptly made up a new