Normalcy Bias, in Writing
“At the moment of disaster, people suffer cognitive dissonance, which they resolve by disbelieving external stimuli. Research has shown that, under ideal situations, the brain can take eight to ten seconds to process new data. Stress situations slow that further. Thus, the brain may fixate on a solution, which may not necessarily be the life-preserving option. Alternately, people may also refrain from taking direct action while awaiting additional information or external validation of the situation — resulting in what is known as ‘analysis paralysis.’ This reaction may have its roots in evolutionary biology, as predators are less likely to consume prey who are not struggling…”
Piotr will wonder whether or not to put this into his report. He will run it by Ted later. Out in the living room, Katia will play with her pet rabbit, which means keeping it from chewing through electrical wires. Mikhail will finish his homework. Rana will prepare dinner. They will know his work can be dangerous. He imagines them, frozen in place, having received news of his death. The world would not hesitate to swallow them whole.
IES Subscale: Avoidance
How are you feeling? People continually ask him, as if feelings were an adequate measure of health. Health-wise, he is fine. Feeling-wise, he is fine. Currently, there are four DARTs deployed around the world, including Lorraine’s. There’s another earthquake team in El Salvador. One in posthurricane Belize. Yet another in Java for the landslides. Maybe something else has happened that he does not yet know about. He wonders if they also get pestered about their feelings.
If he were really to answer how he feels, he’d say, angry. He’s angry because Ted has hung out the laundry on a rainy day, and now he has that much more work to do. He needs to revise distribution maps. Tomorrow, he’s supposed to test the city’s water supply. And he must have another meeting with the military heads about security. His feels his right hand ball into a fist, and the hard plastic body of his mechanical pencil shatters. It sounds like a bone snapping.
“Piotr,” says Lorraine. “Take it easy.”
She pats his hands until they flatten. Hands upon hands: this is a language Piotr cannot decipher, and the more it speaks, the more it is gibberish.
IES Subscale: Intrusion
Rana has nightmares, terrible ones. She thrashes as if trying to gain a foothold in reality. Sometimes Piotr wakes to find her sitting up, staring at the space before her eyes. Or nothing. Or both. She disappears into the dark body of the apartment. When she returns, slipping into bed like a card folded into a deck, Piotr wonders if the time spent away indicates a particular state of mind. If he were to chart the ratio of the violence of her movements to the length of wakefulness, he might find a correlation. It would make more sense to administer an IES. Even so, there’s a difference between knowledge and useful knowledge. He doesn’t need empiric confirmation to know that she uses the time to walk off the violence in her heart.
One day, he fears the walk will not be enough, and she will return to bed, blinded, confused, unable to distinguish him from the faces tormenting her. He fears she will take a pillow and press it onto his face. Or take a knife and plunge it into his body, again and again, until she feels his warmth splashing her arms. And if this happens, he will not restrain her or move to stop her, either in word or action. First, he knows that if this happens, no words could break through her madness. There is no language that can speak to her demons. Second, and more importantly, he knows that he would rather surrender his life than bring harm to her.
Abnormalcy Bias, Defined
The flip side of normalcy bias is abnormalcy bias, wherein people expect only the worst. After disasters, people think only panic, shock, and looting can result. Piotr has seen all three. But the years of chasing bad news have made him blind to anything except bad news. Unlike Lorraine or Ted, he has little interaction with the populace. He joined Lorraine’s team because she had a reputation for caution, because it would put him out of harm’s way.
There are DARTs that are even less strenuous: ones dealing primarily with food aid, for example, or ones responding to health crises. Rana has never asked him to request a reassignment, but it’s there, in the back of her mind. It must be. When it comes time for the winter holiday celebration, Carter will tap a plastic champagne flute with a knife. “Ting, ting, ting!” he’ll say. The room will quiet. “I’d like to take a moment to remember those who lost their lives in the line of duty.” Everyone will bow their heads. Carter will read the list alphabetically. Rana will take Piotr’s hand and squeeze it. The list will continue, and Piotr will never be surprised to learn how many people he knows who are now dead.
Recovery
For Piotr, recovery means the retrieval of dead bodies. One recovers one’s dead. When he hears others speaking about recovery, it takes him a moment to understand that they mean the type of recovery that does not involve face masks, plastic gloves, or grave sites. It must be a relief to engage in recovery that involves talking rather than digging.
Therefore, he is confident that Ted will recover. Ted is very much like Lorraine: always talking. The two of them natter on incessantly, and now that Piotr’s Walkman is broken, he doesn’t know how he’ll drown them out. Sometimes, when he was trying to ignore them, he’d hear a burst of laughter, a raucous joy, and he’d take off his headphones to see if he could glean what was so funny. But of course he was too late, and the moment had passed. It’d be superfluous to exhume the joke for his sake alone. Besides, he has plenty of things that make him laugh: Katia’s increasingly desperate pleas for a pet, Rana’s scolding when he only has one serving of dinner, or anything Mikhail does. He can think of any of those, and he laughs. Sometimes, it helps.
IES Subscale: Hyperarousal
This happened only once: an ordinary day. Months ago, it seems. Maybe almost a year. February. Yes, that was it, Chinese New Year. Funny to think back on it now. The sound of firecrackers, rapid-fire, startling. He had been caught off guard. But for a moment, he honestly thought he was hearing semiautomatic machine gun fire, and he’s almost embarrassed to admit it now, again, only for a second, not even a second, a fleeting thought, a grim fantasia, but he was filled with a terrible dread, an unshakable certainty. His reason failed him, and he simply knew that, at that moment, armed men were storming his apartment, sending a fusillade of bullets into the air, into the walls, into his family, and he was too late to save them, and when he returned home, there wouldn’t be enough for even dogs to find, and with that realization, he jumped up, startled, filled with so much rage and fear that his head felt molten, his body aflame at the incomprehensibility of it: Who would want to hurt his wife, his children? Though he already knew: it didn’t matter. Chinese New Year. They were already dead.
And then Lorraine, she was clutching him in a bear hug, her tiny body belying a surprising tensile strength, yelling at him again, “Piotr, where are you? Where are you?” until the moment had passed, and the world came back into focus: the office, New York, reality. His clothes were soaked with sweat, and even though the moment had passed, the dread remained. Not because he feared his family’s death, no, that was clearly a momentary hallucination, but because he knew that what he’d been teaching his children — how fears become smaller and smaller as they grow older — was a lie. Fears remained the same size, and it was only the love holding them at bay that shriveled, day by day, until it had become nothing more than a period at the end of a life.