Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [95]
“I Wasn’t a Human Being”
Cho came back to the French classroom, just as Violand had expected. When he returned, Violand lay perfectly still once again. But this time, the gun fired too many times. “He began unloading what seemed like a second round into everyone again. It had to be the same people. There were way more gunshots than there were people in that room. I think I heard him reload maybe three times.” Violand waited to discover what it would feel like to have a bullet tear through his body. He thought about his parents. At one point, as the shots kept coming, he locked eyes with a girl lying in front of him. He didn’t know her name, but they stared at each other, unflinching, under the desks.
Finally the gunshots stopped. Cho had killed himself last. The police pounded on the door, shouting directions that Violand does not remember very well. He remembers getting up and going directly to the door, with his hands up. He doesn’t remember seeing his teacher, dead on the ground, or anyone outside of the immediate vicinity of his desk. Later, Violand would learn a startling fact. Of all the students in the French classroom that day, the only person not to be shot was Clay Violand.
After Violand answered my questions, he had some questions for me. “Do you know what makes one person respond one way and another a different way? I mean, is it your personality or what? Do they know why some people do this?” I told him I didn’t know for sure, and then I gave him one of those true but unsatisfying answers. I told him that our behavior is almost always a product of our genetics and our experience. He politely disagreed. “I don’t see how life experience has anything to do with this situation. You’re not a person with experiences anymore. You’re just surviving,” he said. “I wasn’t a human being when that was happening.” I asked him what he meant. He had a hard time explaining it. “I don’t even know what emotion I was feeling. I wasn’t crying.”
Human beings think, reflect, and make decisions. We don’t always realize how much other work our brain is also doing all the time, with or without us. In retrospect, Violand has created a narrative, as all survivors do, about what he did. “If I had to sum it up in one word, it was all about movement. I wasn’t really playing dead to convince him that I was dead so much, but just so that I wasn’t moving.” But at the time, he adds, it didn’t feel like he was making any choices at all. “Only now that I think about it a month later, I guess I had a strategy. The week after, I would have said it was chaotic, I didn’t know what I was doing.” When I asked Gallup if Violand’s story resembled all the thousands of paralysis cases he has studied in animals and humans, he said, “It sounds like a textbook case.” Violand was attacked by a lethal predator, and he experienced a radical and involuntary survival response. It may or may not have been the reason he survived.
The summer after the shootings, Violand decided to stay in Blacksburg, Virginia, where the university is located. When we spoke, he said he was doing well so far. He found himself crying about once a week, but otherwise he felt OK. His friends seemed to expect him to be doing worse than he was. Three survivors of the World Trade Center had e-mailed him, for which he was grateful. They warned him that he might go through a more difficult period six months or a year from now. He didn’t know what to do with that information, so he decided to stick to his original plans. He spent the summer break playing in his band and working. Then he planned to spend the fall semester studying in Paris, speaking French in a place where no one knows what happened to him.
A Cigarette Break on a Sinking Ship
Certain kinds of disasters, like shootings or rape, closely resemble the predator-prey encounters we evolved to survive. In those situations, paralysis may effectively deter a predator. There is always that chance. In other cases, paralysis