Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [13]
Several floors later, as the slow descent wore on, she heard some more disturbing information. A man behind her noted that one plane had hit about fifteen minutes after the other. She turned to him as if he had told her something new and surprising, and she announced to herself as much as to him, “It was intentional!” He looked back at her. “Yes,” he said. Her carefully constructed narrative could not absorb this information. So Zedeño did the most pragmatic thing she could do: she ignored it. “I put it out of my mind as if it hadn’t happened,” she says. Denial can be remarkably agile.
Around the twentieth floor, Zedeño started passing a lot of firefighters coming up the stairs. Again, the instinct of the crowd was to be generous. “I remember thinking the firemen looked tired. I wished we had bottles of water to give them,” she says. The evacuees kept moving to the side to give the firefighters more space, but the firefighters urged them to keep going down, don’t stop, don’t stop.
Zedeño remembers certain sounds from that descent with perfect clarity. There were two men, probably firefighters, coming up below her. At each floor, they would stop and yell, “Does anyone need help? Is there anyone here?” She heard their voices floating upward several minutes before she saw the men. Then they passed her and she heard their voices above her, getting farther and farther away. She doesn’t know what happened to them. “Their voices stayed with me. I can still hear them now. Their voices haunted me for a long time.”
Nothing imprints the brain more effectively than fear. Certain details from life-or-death events stay with us for the rest of our lives, like scars in our consciousness. They can cause debilitating problems. They can require years of therapy to repair. But, like most disaster behaviors, they can be helpful, too. They are there to protect us from getting into the same situation again.
A Woman in Red
Finally, about an hour after she had left her cubicle, Zedeño emerged into the light of the Trade Center lobby. She felt a flush of happiness. She was on the ground at last. She looked around and saw firefighters and other people moving in slow motion, a common distortion in extreme situations. Then she looked outside and gasped.
As when she’d emerged from the elevator after the 1993 bombing, she’d expected to see normal life, bustling on indifferently. Here is how Zedeño describes this powerful presumption that the trouble was limited to her immediate vicinity, which psychologists call the “illusion of centrality”:
When you’re in trauma, the mind says, this is a very local problem. This is your little world, and everything outside is fine. It can’t afford to say that everything outside is horrible. The sound that I heard on the seventy-third floor should have told me, this is bad. The feeling of the building shaking should have told me, this is bad. The explosion when I was on the forty-fourth floor: bad. The smell of debris in the lower stairways: bad. Yet in every single moment, I made it my little world here. And nothing else exists.
But on 9/11, when she looked out the windows of the Trade Center lobby, Zedeño could no longer suspend disbelief. Pay close attention to what happened next, as she walked toward the front doors, staring at the bodies lying motionless on the plaza. It is the story of how the human mind processes overwhelming peril:
I’m slowing down because I’m starting to realize I’m not just looking at debris. My mind says, “It’s the wrong color.” That was the first thing. Then I start saying, “It’s the wrong shape.” Over and over in my mind: “It’s the wrong shape.” It was like I was trying to keep the information out. My eyes were not allowing me to understand. I couldn’t afford it. So I was like, “No, it can’t be.” Then when I finally realized what it meant to see the wrong color, the wrong shape, that’s when I realized, I