The Locker Room

In remembrance of Zijie Yan

Below is a reflection on the violence that occurred at UNC on August 28, 2023.

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CW: gun violence

I had just finished my Monday laps, 1,000 yards of front crawl and backstroke, when the alarm started at the UNC pool. I took out my earplugs, pushed out of the pool, and tried to discern what the aquatics director was yelling from the balcony. She was serious, and insistent.

I assumed it was a fire alarm, grabbed my towel, and headed toward the building exit.

No no no, she said. I could hear her now. Armed and dangerous. Shelter in place. Go back to the locker room.

I whipped around and splashed into the women’s locker room in my yellow flip-flops, kicking away the doorstop that held the entrance open. A minute later, I was locked inside with ten strangers.

During the first few minutes, while everyone looked at their phones and wondered how serious the situation was, I jumped into my clothes. I had dressed nicely that day to teach a writing workshop for graduate students, in a blouse that I used to wear when I worked as an admin at UNC. It’s dark blue with a repeated pattern of fine lines which, when you squint at them, become horses, galloping away together.

*

I was the first hire into UNC’s Department of Applied Physical Sciences, a department that was born in 2013, just as I moved to Chapel Hill from Chicago. At the interview, nobody could tell me exactly what the job was, or what this new department was all about, but I needed a salary and health insurance, so I took it.

The first few years at APS were a dream. I was the department manager, in charge of all things administrative, which were few and far between. We didn’t have any designated faculty, just a few from other departments who had agreed to help out with whatever this new endeavor was but were too busy with their existing jobs to do much of anything. The beginning felt a bit like a buddy cop movie, just me and the first chair theorizing about how to realize APS’s bold vision of recruiting top-notch faculty to build a team of translational scientists whose research would “solve the world’s problems.” On the ground, my tasks included booking hotel rooms for recruitment visits, submitting receipts for reimbursement, and ordering pizza for seminars. When there was truly nothing to do, which was often, I went to the journalism library and worked on my novel.

In truth, I was an unlikely hire: I had no formal accounting training or knowledge of UNC systems. But I could think on my feet. And I was working on my first novel, which is nothing if not an exercise in outlandish courage, fashioning a thing out of nothing, continuing to show up at the desk day after day, and maintaining the belief that one day something coherent and maybe even beautiful would emerge.

*

Years before the letters UNC ever even came into Zijie’s mind, I was scheduling active shooter trainings for the department. I tried to have them at the beginning of the year, when new grad students arrived. It’s only in the last few weeks that I’ve realized all the grad students who have ever been in APS and had an American childhood have been doing active shooter drills since kindergarten.

The training was led by a member of the UNC police force, who showed a video. The shooter is wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat. I wondered what aspiring actor had to debate accepting the role of active shooter in an educational video, whether it had been disappointing or a relief to find out about the sunglasses, what he was paid for his work.

Run. Hide. Fight. These are the basic directives. Get as far away as you can. Barring that, conceal yourself. Barring that, fight back.

The enduring image I have from that video is a group of people spread out, crouching behind a set of tables. The shooter enters the room and everyone starts throwing stuff—books, backpacks, chairs—all in an effort to injure or even distract the shooter long enough to take them down. (I say them. I mean him. It’s always him.)

The doors to the locker room were locked on the day it happened to me, but I could not stop myself from imagining a shooter breaching them. There was nowhere to hide—all the lockers were half-sized, too small for me—so I moved the trash bin and some tall cones to the area where we were congregating, pulled a combination lock from my swim bag, a hairbrush.

Until that day I had believed that, if confronted by a gunman, I could fight. But then somebody in the locker room said, Shooter near Caudill. Two blocks away. Where I used to work.

Panic welled inside me, ungovernable, untenable, and utterly paralyzing. My breath shortened. Tears formed. I tried to calm myself down, but I knew that if I heard gunfire in the hallways, the only thing my body would be able to do was run, and cry. With nowhere to go, I’d be stuck in a corner, waiting for my end.

*

Zijie was the seventh faculty member I hired into APS. I say “I” because although I never understood most of the science that went on in APS, I did know that not one faculty member would have worked there if not for the mountains of paperwork I did to get them in the door.

Hiring a new faculty member was bureaucracy to the nth degree—I could recount visa applications, purchase orders, and HR procedures until you fell asleep from boredom—but it somehow remained pleasant, both because it was part of the exciting mission of growing APS and because it was deeply interpersonal.

I was in frequent contact with a hired faculty member in the lead-up to their arrival, and my job as ambassador and admin wrangler felt important to me. It was satisfying to be able to say your UNC email address should work soon / the requisition has gone to purchasing / I’ll have the link to the postdoc posting to you tomorrow.

But before all that could happen, they had to sign on the dotted line. In 2019 we were still a new department and Zijie, like every other hire before him, had other offers on the table, good ones, from established departments that were less of a wild card. We wooed, and we wooed hard.

After the chair sent Zijie the offer letter, he sent me to the bookstore to buy every adorable UNC-branded item I could find that would work as gifts for his young child. The chair wanted a giant box of Carolina blue to land on Zijie’s doorstep in rural New York, where he taught at a university not far from the Canadian border.

When Zijie accepted, we celebrated. The chair sent a buoyant email to the department, with lots of exclamation points. Every hire made APS more solid and viable. It was like watching the pages accumulate on a first draft, slowly proving its realness.

*

I spent the first hour in the locker room in an abject panic. There were reports that someone had been killed in Caudill, maybe Kenan.

My spouse was on the medical side of campus, which felt miles away, working in his boss’s office, texting me steadying words: he was safe, I was safe, this would be OK. I told him this was my nightmare, exactly what I’d always feared would happen. He wrote back My nightmare is you still working at APS.  

I sat on the floor, on the ancient brown tile that had been installed in the locker room when the pool was built in 1938. Next to me was a chemistry graduate student whose lab was in Caudill. Her labmates were sheltering in place, with no more news than we had. It felt better to sit next to her, someone who also felt close to whatever was happening, our backs supported by the teal metal lockers.

At some point we went around and said our names and affiliations. There was a director of career services and two undergrad lifeguards, a senior majoring in exercise and sports science, and a sophomore who plans to major in environmental science. She had left her shoes on the pool deck and cried, shoeless, for most of the 3 hours we were in the locker room. There was a medical student and another undergrad, with headphones and a towel around her dry shoulders to ward off the a/c, who all afternoon said nothing besides her name. On the far end of the bench there was a biochemistry professor who didn’t have her phone. She spent the afternoon calmly reading on an iPad.

At some point, it seemed a shooter had been caught, but other terrifying possibilities circulated: multiple shooters, hostage situations. Some in the locker room were watching newsfeeds on their phone, which I knew would only make me more panicked. I asked my spouse to send only confirmed information. It was from him I learned the gunman was an APS grad student.

*

Zijie was a delight to work with. As his long time mentor said, he had resting sweet face. He was a department manager’s dream: he efficiently and courteously completed every shred of paperwork, jumped through every hoop that the university bureaucracy put up, and always respected my time and workload when he made requests.

But by the time he arrived in the summer of 2019, I was struggling at work. What had started as a fun adventure had become a grind. When I started at APS, the HR portal showed 5 employees and 5 funding sources. Now the roster approached 100 and there were so many funding sources I needed a spreadsheet to keep them straight. The work, once a trickle, was a fire hose.

My refuge was the pool, where there were no new emails or meeting requests, no knocks on my door, no fires to put out. In the pool, I went deep into my thoughts and myself, even spared a thought or two for the novel I had stopped working on.

In the pool there was only clear, chlorine-filled white noise, the simplicity of swimming back and forth in a line. In the pool, no one could touch me.

*

Two hours after we entered the locker room, the situation shifted. The shooter was definitely in custody, the myriad rumors were dispelled. I looked over somebody’s shoulder at a phone and saw that just up the road from where we were was swarmed with barricades, police, SWAT, which simultaneously scared and reassured me.

It became clear somehow that emergency personnel were sweeping the buildings systematically. The shelter in place order persisted, but the danger seemed to have passed. A little after 3pm, I ate my lunch.

Sometime after 4, the all-clear was called. Like people who’d been indefinitely delayed in an airport, we gathered our strewn things and simply left the locker room, moving up the stairs and out of the building, a little bit groggily. For the 3 hours that we were in the locker room, we were connected somehow, a unit of some kind. As we pushed through the doors, we returned to being ten swimmers.

I walked past the science complex, where I’d worked for 7 years, and looked straight at Caudill, where I used to have an office. It was the best one I had at APS, spacious with a big window. On the most stressful days, I closed the door and took a nap curled up under my desk. Zijie’s was across the hall.

*

A year after Zijie joined APS, as we entered the first summer of Covid, I could no longer outrun the truth: working at APS was putting me at odds with everything I wanted, valued, and excelled at. For a year I’d been struggling to swallow the seemingly foolish idea of turning my back on a steady paycheck and 401k to become self-employed, to devote myself to writing and teaching writing.

But stuck at home, suffering through endless Zoom meetings, the truth was inside me when I lay on my yoga mat and tried to breathe: I was miserable. And here we were, in the middle of a pandemic. Morgue trailers in NYC, Italians singing from their balconies. Life, we were reminded, was short.

When I told the chair I was resigning, he reacted with his typical charisma and ebullience. Julia, he said, we will miss you, but the smile on your face says it all. I looked at my Zoom box and saw I was beaming as I had not in years.

A week later, I joined a faculty meeting to break the news. As I talked about devoting my attention full-time to writing, the chat box filled with caring indignation, all caps NO!!!!!!!!!!!s, and other declarations of how the place would fall apart without me.

It was Zijie who slipped the URL of my website into the chat box, who had bothered to google “Julia Green writer” and share what he’d found.

*

Three days after Zijie was killed, one of my clients asked me about the name of my newsletter. Writing is joy, they said tentatively—is that why you do it? Just because you enjoy it?

The short answer is YES. I genuinely enjoy writing, the process of creating sentences, arranging them, building paragraphs and plots, watching characters try and fail, struggle and change. But as with everything in life, there is a longer answer.

I stayed at APS long after it became too much and no good for me because I understood and felt connected to the mission, the desire to build something new out of nothing, to create. But what I didn’t understand until long after I left is that the day to day matters more than the goal. As Annie Dillard says, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

I began to understand that after it became clear the first novel I’d written, that I’d spent seven years on, that an agent loved and tried to sell to editors at dozens of publishing houses, was destined not for the bookshelf but the drawer. That turn of events spun me into a kind of grief I’d never experienced.

When I came out the other side, I saw something I had never seen before: I had written a novel. The accomplishment was not the book deal—it was devoting myself to something I cared about deeply and worked hard at. It was about the hours, the days, the months, and the years I spent staring at a screen, a notebook, writing words, moving words, building a story—an entire world filled with people I cared about—out of nothing.

In short, I realized that writing is joy because process is where the delight is—and also the control. Publishing a book is an externalized goal, an outcome that relies on too many other people and variables to be useful to my day-to-day happiness. But writing—writing I can do whenever I want, about whatever subject or character I please.

I also told my client that I write because I have to, because I cannot not write. I never told myself, you must write about those hours in the locker room. You must write about the death of a person you knew, in a place that you worked. You must write about your terror and grief. And I certainly never thought: You must write about those things because people need to hear your perspective, gain some solace from your experience.

I just wrote because I had to. I just started making sentences and moving them around because I know no other way to move through the world, to make meaning from it.

*

When we brought Zijie to campus for his first interview, we all asked: how do you say your name? We want to say it correctly. Zijie told us all the same thing: It’s a little tricky to pronounce in Chinese. Just call me Zijie, he said, pronouncing his name zee-gee. Zee-gee, we said, nodding our heads, taking it in. He smiled at us encouragingly, as if to say you’re doing great.

I don’t have anything new or useful to say to you about politics and legislation, individuals and institutions. What I can tell you is that my heart aches for Zijie’s family, for all the people who worked with him, many of whom I knew well. What I can tell you is the night after Zijie died, I dreamed I was swimming in open water with a group of people, heading away from the shore, toward a distant point I was worried we could not possibly return from. But we reached it, and started back toward land. When I saw the shore again, I was flooded with relief. We will make it back, I thought. I awoke with the words “I’m alive” on my lips.

Zijie Yan