Aftershocks to the Psyche : Quake: ‘Normal life’ will never be the same for many in the Bay Area, resting as : it now does on the certainty of uncertainty.

The mice in a Berkeley psychology laboratory behave differently now, after the earthquake. Some wander idly in their maze and some refuse to move; others jump out of their boxes at the first chance. Their nerves are shot; their once-feisty spirit is subdued. Traumatized by the temblor, these mice provide erratic and useless data, say the researchers.

The reactions of the mice are similar to ours, we who experienced the quake. We are changed, our perspectives and behavior modified. We suffer to various degrees what the earthquake counselors call post-traumatic stress disorder. Tu-Minh, a social worker friend of mine, cannot sleep soundly; her dreams are easily disrupted by the distant rumbling of a bus or the disquieting footsteps of a neighbor in the hallway--or for that matter, by her own heartbeat. My literature professor complains of stomach pains; my sister of recurring headaches. I feel an unusual fatigue and turn the alarm off and hide under my blankets for a few extra minutes of sleep each morning.

We live in California, as Joan Didion put it, “close to the edge,” and, some of us, literally, on it. The aftershocks of Oct. 17 keep reminding us how fragile our lives can be. On one such occasion I was at my door ready to run outside, expecting “the big one.” At any given moment--who knows?--the Earth will again shake so violently that our cities may topple, burying our bodies in glass and concrete debris.

Disaster, calamity and morbidity have insinuated their way into our consciousness and left a disturbing imprint. It is not surprising that some psychologists predict an increase in domestic violence, and a steady climb in the suicide rate.

One senses a gloom in the air, a thin shroud of hopelessness. The New York Times reported that the earthquake survivors have “experienced psychic upheavals so intense that their lives are shaken for years.”

For the homeless, for the terminally ill, the quake has been an extra menace. Some people with AIDS have been displaced from their shelters and hotels. “Those who are on a life-support system face even an extra stress,” says Chris Alexander, a social worker for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

“It’s not business as usual,” observes a clerk in the admissions office at San Francisco State University. An alarming number of students apparently have lost interest in attending the school in the past few weeks.

People do unexpected things. Roger, my ex-roommate, decides to quit his job at a law firm and work as a Red Cross volunteer in Puerto Rico. An English tutor decides to become a writer. “It seems trivial what I did before,” she says. A shy Vietnamese girl speaks to me in class and I speak back to her. We rekindle our ethnicity--this, we decide, is the time for cultural bonding.

If we reacted well after the disaster, even impressing President Bush with our sense of community, we are now feeling disenchantment. It weaves its way slowly into our psyches as we begin to come back to a routine life. With the physical shock from the disaster dissipating, we expect normalcy. Yet daily life is no longer fulfilling for some, impossible for others, and lackluster for most.

And so into the psychological maze we wander, hoping to find a goal at the end. The mice in the laboratory, I hear, will soon return to their pre-earthquake behavior. With humans it’s less predictable, for our memories may be long-lasting, and our way of looking at life may never again be the same.