by Gil Reavill
Even more than forensic detectives, Aftermath deals in the most rudimentary, physical aspect of existence. But Aftermath allowed me a window into the most spiritual aspects of life too. As Upton Sinclair wrote, knee-deep in gore in the Union Stock Yards, “One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical.” Over the course of my time at Aftermath, I had become philosophical with a vengeance: about death and dying, about the human stain, about my own complicity as a voyeur. The Fellow in the Bright Nightgown and I had become, if not friends, then at least much better acquainted.
I left Ryan and Dave still scrubbing the leuco violet off the hallway walls. I closed the front door to the Twyman apartment and stepped out into the insipid sunshine of a midwestern winter afternoon. I had done the last job I would ever do with Aftermath. I drove to Midway Airport, dropped off my rental car, and took a plane for home.
EPILOGUE
The Dead House
A ZAKA volunteer at the scene of a bombing
You need any help with the coffin, call me.
—Erich von Stroheim, Sunset Boulevard
I’ve never heard of a crime I could not commit.
—Goethe
The New York City firemen on “the pile,” as the hulking wreckage of the World Trade Center was called during its removal process, objected strenuously to the term “cleanup.” Its use, they considered, implied that the bodies of their comrades who had died in the attack were so much dirt or refuse to be expunged, scrubbed away, and carted off. They also objected to the location of the processing station for sorting through the debris from Ground Zero, at a former city dump on Staten Island called Fresh Kills. The name was Dutch, kills being the Dutch word for stream, but again, the fire personnel protested their dead being associated with garbage.
The removal of the dead in the Trade Center attack represented a bioremediation effort on a scale never before attempted or imagined. Aftermath writ large. Of the 2,749 victims who died in the collapse of the towers, only half have been identified, in spite of a massive DNA typing project. The rest of the victims were pulverized by the collapse of a 1.5-million-ton structure, or immolated by fires that reached fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit and did not burn out until January 2002, five months after the 9/11 attack. Workers in the recovery effort were reduced to sniffing shovelfuls of dirt, vigilant for any scent of decay.
As part of my work for Maxim, I attended press briefings at the New York medical examiner’s facilities that handled the bodies recovered from the Trade Center. The facility was an ad hoc affair, some of it spread out beneath canvas tents. Workers at the site referred to it as “the Dead House.” While at the Dead House I became interested in the work of a group of Israeli volunteers known by the acronym of ZAKA.
When I told a Jewish friend about working with Aftermath, he said, “My people have been doing that for a long time.” He was probably thinking of ZAKA, which stands for the Hebrew words Zihuy Korbanot Asson, which in English means “identifying victims of disaster.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but the ZAKA volunteer I spoke with that day in the Dead House, who gave his name only as Yehudi, was the first bioremediation tech I ever met.
Yehudi was a slight Yeshiva student with a wispy beard and glasses. He seemed nervous among the bustle of the New York media, and uncomfortable talking to me, who was clearly a goy and far from his ultra-Orthodox roots. He carried with him but did not wear the ZAKA vest he normally donned whenever responding to emergencies. The fluorescent “safety yellow” color of the vests rendered the volunteers instantly recognizable at disaster scenes.
“I started doing this work two years before,” he said in accented English. “Now I am here in New York to help.” He told me the Torah declared that working to protect the sanctity of the dead was among the highest mitzvahs, or good deeds.
“The dead cannot repay the favor,” Yehudi explained. “So the mitzvah is pure and without motive.”
The strictures of Orthodox Jewish law are exact about the treatment and purification of the dead. Whenever possible, burial takes place within twenty-four hours. Bodies of the dead must be protected from desecration. An Orthodox burial society, or hevra kaddisha, will even provide watchers to guard the body. Most important, however, is the need for the body to be buried as intact as possible. This means that the gathering up of every particle of biomatter takes on a religious significance.
ZAKA was founded in 1989, and grew out of the horrendous task of applying the principles of Jewish law to the recovery of Israeli bombing victims. For the volunteers of ZAKA, there was no other option: Every shred of flesh, fingernail, skin, tooth, or bone had to be religiously reclaimed for burial. ZAKA developed into a first-response organization that worked not just on the Trade Center attack, but the Challenger disaster and the Asian tsunami relief efforts.
Remediation comes from Latin roots meaning to “heal again.” At its highest level, at the ZAKA level, the kind of work Aftermath does can reach a healing, spiritual plane. Aftermath is unabashedly a commercial enterprise, but in the unlikely sensitivity of its techs—most of them caustic young ex-jocks, and the last people you might expect to embrace the spiritual aspect of anything—I detected the kind of deep, age-old respect for the dead that ZAKA runs on, and which so many health professionals and hospice workers participate in too.
After working alongside the techs over the course of a year at several dozen Aftermath jobs, I was still unsure where I fit into the equation. I had developed a tremendous respect for the work they did, especially their sure-handed manner of dealing with emotionally fragile people. They seemed half businesslike and half empathetic, an odd combination that should not have worked, but did. Recognizing that I didn’t have the innate sensitivity demonstrated so effortlessly by Ryan and Dave, and even by Greg Banach, I rarely spoke to bereaved clients for fear of sticking my foot in my mouth.
But I also recognized that my attraction to Aftermath work was not, strictly speaking, kosher. I was a spy in the house of the dead, presenting myself under false pretenses. Was I a tech or a voyeur? Was what I was doing a mitzvah or a betrayal? And I felt the same conflict more broadly within myself. I was repelled by crime, violence, death, what Arlo Guthrie called “blood and guts and veins in the teeth.” I was also drawn to it.
A spy in the house of the dead. The background of death and violence at Aftermath job sites could be gruesomely spectacular, but another aspect of the work, the ordinary evidence of lives lived, affected me almost as much. I felt guiltily privileged to enter the personal spaces of the deceased. The mundane, everyday textures of American life spilled open to me in the bedrooms, kitchens, and upstairs-over-the-garage spaces where Aftermath worked. The clutter of the households, frozen at the time of death, was somehow transformed by tragedy into something engrossing, meaningful.
My father used to call the obituaries in our local newspaper “the meaning pages.” In the rooms I entered as an Aftermath crew member, I read an obituary of objects. Congeries of old mail, a yellow bowling shirt with a red-ink Bic pen in its pocket, a stack of National Geographic videos, a book on real estate left open spine-up, a refrigerator magnet snapshot of a granddaughter, a small Tupperware tub filled with pennies, a collection of empty amber-plastic prescription containers—on and on it went, the detritus of interrupted personhood, varves of biographical sediment no longer accumulating.
This, as much as the coagulated blood and embarrassing spill of body fluids, left a deep impression on me. The commonness was wrenching. There was the familiar chalk-outline quality to it. What we leave behind defines us. It made me want to run home and pick up my house, toss a whole lot of things out.
“Master, what is the meaning of the universe?” said the young student in the Zen koan, to which the Master replied, “Clean your rice bowl.”
An aura of moral certainty attracts both writers and readers to crime. Crime fiction, at least, is a world of white hats and black hats. Even when portraying ambivalent heroes such as Hammett�
�s Continental Op or Chandler’s Marlowe, the author usually manages to come down squarely on the side of what’s right. For the weak, against the strong. In less capable hands, this Manichean crime-thriller world degenerates into a rigid catechism of snarling avengers battling evildoing monsters.
In the most expansive view of the subject, a great deal of world literature can be classified as true crime, from Gilgamesh and Hamlet to The Passion of the Christ. But for me, the world of true crime, like the world of Aftermath, was the opposite of clear-cut, morally certain territory. It was a deeply compromised place, just as messy and difficult to clean up as a job site itself. Yes, I knew and honored the traditional forms of respect for the dead. But neither could I shake the relish, the satisfying sense of not-me, the voyeuristic thrill.
I couldn’t quite adopt only the pure white hat, as Ryan, Dave, and the other techs did so effortlessly. I was somewhere between the white and black. I wore herringbone. I identified with the dead, to be sure, but I also identified with the murderers. In the right (or wrong) circumstances, I could all too easily imagine myself with a knife in my hand.
“If my thought-dreams could be seen,” sang Dylan, “they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”
I emerged from the bloody cocoon of Aftermath not quite as a butterfly, more like a mangled moth, a night creature still attracted to the flame. I recall easing back into my “normal” life in quiet, crime-free Westchester. I was restless. I couldn’t really share what I had done with my wife and daughter, and it bothered me to be set apart from them. I called the techs repeatedly, wanting to be filled in on all the gritty details.
“Joe said they’re really busy,” I told my wife after one of these calls. Then I blurted out, “I wish I was out there!”
I was caught in the middle of a conversion experience. People were still dying out in the suburban wastelands of Chicago, but I had returned to my sanitary life. I could leave it all behind. The techs couldn’t, and even more to the point their clients could not.
“You’re in withdrawal,” the Moral Compass said. “You need some sort of twelve-step program.”
I felt estranged from my suburban world. I recall one afternoon at the local community pool, describing to some friends what happened to Donald Gene Buchanan on the tarmac out on El Paso. I acted out the crouch Buchanan assumed as he worked on the CFM 56 engine, then the straightening up and the fateful single step forward. I got into it. But looking to my audience, a handful of soccer moms and dads, I suddenly registered their uneasiness and disgust. Young kids packed the concrete apron around the sunlit pool. I was casting shadows. I could have made the point that there was no difference, no separation, that sunlight and shadow always coexist, but I didn’t. I finished my story with an abrupt, lame joke, and my audience moved away as from a bad smell.
But the coin had another side. I was at one of the Moral Compass’s book parties, when two of-a-certain-age women but-tonholed me and asked what I was working on. I remained vague, but they wormed it out of me. Their eyes began to sparkle avidly as I spoke about my Aftermath experiences. They smiled and nodded. They wetted their lips with pink, prehensile tongues. They began to scare me.
“And the blood,” one of them asked with obvious savor, “were you actually up to your elbows?”
Eventually, I regained my balance. I still had post-traumatic flashes of blood and guts and gore. Somehow a photo of an Aftermath job wound up stuck in the sun visor of the family car (“Tinley Park suicide” was marked in pen on the back of the photo, “Banach, Sundberg, Bryan”). On the front, a massive, spectacularly variegated pool of blood showed black, brown, vermillion, brick, purple, pink, and yellow against a linoleum background. In the pool’s center lay a fat white rubber band. Every once in a while for a few weeks the photograph would drop down onto my lap as I was driving.
But another feeling grew in me, gradually dominating the dread. I realized I was thrilled to have had the wealth of experience that working with Aftermath had granted me. I marveled at it. It became a source not of dismay, nightmare, or estrangement but of secret pride.
During the last years of his life my father increasingly dwelt on a twenty-six-month stretch in his early twenties when he was in Europe with the army air force. He loved talking about his experiences. He fully inhabited the cliché of a veteran garrulously reminiscing over his war years.
“It’s only natural,” said the Moral Compass, after a bout of listening to my father gas on. “Think about the lives of these men. They were just hometown guys, teachers or mechanics or, like your father, salesmen. Going to Europe and fighting the Nazis? That was the most exciting thing that ever happened to them. By far. Of course they go back to it. How could they not?”
The horror, the horror. Well, maybe the horror drops away, and what I’ll be left with is not the foreign, but the human. The techs, the police, the families, the small colony of the saved gathers around the dead, formulating our good-byes, trying to find our balance.
Heading into its tenth year of operation, Aftermath continues to expand. Fourteen Aftermath offices cover an area that embraces every state in the lower forty-eight.
Dan Doggett works to enlarge the company’s presence in California, employing two of his sons in the business.
Tim Reifsteck’s older brother, Kevin, and his younger brother, Bryan, now oversee a vast territory stretching from Ohio south to Georgia and west to Texas.
“In terms of square miles, their territory is about the size of Mexico,” Tim said with a laugh. “They’ve got a lot of marketing to do.”
A new custom-built national headquarters for Aftermath, Incorporated, only a few miles away from the old Plainfield office, is under construction.
Chris Wilson sold the Mercedes G55 morgue-mobile back to the dealership from which he’d purchased it. “They called me and said they had another buyer, and would I be interested in selling.” He did so, trading laterally for an SL65. Not to be outdone, Tim Reifsteck bought a new F430 Ferrari.
Chris and Tim’s labor pool of techs constantly shifts and re-aligns itself. Greg Banach and Greg Sundberg no longer work at Aftermath. Banach, at least, went out with a bang, literally—slamming the door to the truck bay at the Aftermath offices, jumping it off its hinges after an argument with Chris and Tim. In a more amicable parting, Dave Creager, too, has moved on, joining his brother in a long-distance trucking service. Ryan O’Shea and Joe Halverson now partner as first crew.
The jobs keep coming. Business has never been so good.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the generosity and forbearance of Chris Wilson and Tim Reifsteck, founders, owners, and operators of Aftermath, Inc. They invited me into their company, but they also invited me into their lives. Equally necessary was the good faith and good humor of the Aftermath technicians, who put up with a rookie’s mistakes and a newbie’s nausea, and helped with guidance over difficult terrain. First and foremost were Ryan O’Shea and Dave Creager, who took me into their charge, along with Joe Halverson, Kyle Brown, Dan Doggett, Greg Banach, and Greg Sundberg. Nancy Doggett and Raquel Garcia cheerfully put up with the extra work at the Aftermath offices that my being there entailed.
Erin Moore, my editor at Gotham, combined enthusiasm with clear judgment and an always cheerful mien in the face of challenging subject matter. My agent, Paul Bresnick, and his partnering agent for this project, Byrd Leavell, and Greg Dinkin and Frank Scatoni at Venture Literary helped bring the book to fruition.
The staff at the Westchester County Library System worked tirelessly on my endless requests for material. Greg “Stickman” Klos aided research on the home turf invaluably, while Sally Howe contributed a vital phrase. Josefa Mulaire scanned some of the images. My former editors at Maxim, Jim Kaminski, James Heidenry, and Jason Kersten, taught me a lot about crime writing. Thanks to Lloyd Westerman for making the connection. I would be remiss not to give a shout-out to Sony for their M-630V microcassette tape recorder, tech
nology that is no doubt antiquated in this age of digital chips, but which served me faithfully.
My family provided support, even though they remained mystified about my choice of subject matter. Eloise Reavill recorded her memories about growing up in Chicago thirty blocks to the south of the Union Stock Yards, and about whether the names of Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, and Dion O’Banion were familiar from her childhood (yes, no, no).
Once more into the breach, Jean Zimmerman served as my comrade in arms, the enemy being me making a fool out of myself. The relative lack of success in that battle has nothing to do with the ferocity of her warrior spirit. Maud Reavill provided love, support, humor, and, probably most important of all, distraction. While I was up to my elbows in death, she modeled the life force in an invincible, effortless manner.
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