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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 story for herself. This, too, was a clever coping device. “I said, ‘Those idiots! They were racing! And they ended up hitting us. I can’t believe people are so stupid.’”
    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