Working Stiff

by Judy Melinek, Md

  The shift ended at eight at night. I was wiped out. It’s hard enough to do an autopsy on a decomp homicide on a normal day—but following that with six hours on the World Trade Center recovery line had left me so drained I didn’t even shower, despite the stench of decomposition and jet fuel permeating my clothes and hair. I just wanted to get home to my husband and son.

  The next day, two police cruisers came roaring up to our tent compound. Four officers piled out of the car and marched with great purpose toward the collection area. Two of them were carrying, between them, a single boot. I later found out the boot was empty. Apparently it was the sort that state troopers wear, so it merited a full escort. The empty boot went to the personal property tent.

  The remains arriving from the Pile had begun to show changes from decomposition. The smell changed, less strongly of jet fuel and more of rotting flesh. It got harder to guess at race from skin color. The parts were more charred too, since the fires under what used to be the Twin Towers were still smoldering. I started to worry about the soot-smeared firefighters and cops who had to bring these things to us. Every day they looked more exhausted. Whenever we identified one of their own, his buddies would stop by and tell us about the dead man—how he had just gotten over the flu and come back to work, or his kid had a birthday coming up.

  Gaggles of medical students showed up to volunteer, and that morning I was tasked with training a bunch. After orienting them to the layout of our tent morgue, I warned them about the things they were about to see—the degree of decomposition, the mangling of bodies, the stench. I gave them tips. “Wear two hairnets. The tighter your hair, the less odor it will absorb. Choose your gloves carefully and make sure they fit right. Do not look at those ‘Missing’ posters people have put up at NYU, on the subway, or anywhere. It’ll just stress you out, and we need you focused.”

  T.J., with Danny in his umbrella stroller, came to meet me for the dinner break in the middle of my twelve-hour shift. They were waiting for me just outside the police barricade. My husband was ashen with anger.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The trucks on Second Avenue,” was all he needed to say. We were stockpiling empty refrigerator trucks on the east side of Second Avenue until we filled up Trucks One through Four. They had started arriving the day after the attack. Now the line of big-rig trailers was parked end to end for three full blocks. T.J. had passed them as he’d pushed the stroller from Grand Central down to my office at 30th Street.

  “My God,” he choked out, still shaken by the sight. “There must be two dozen of them. And they’re huge! Each semi holds . . . I don’t know, two, three hundred bodies?” I nodded while helping Danny out of his stroller, and the three of us began walking away from the cordon line. I didn’t have the heart to tell T.J. there weren’t that many bodies, not whole bodies, anyway. He didn’t need to hear about the bits and pieces we were trying to puzzle together before we would resort to DNA matching, or the human remains we were storing in test tubes. I could tell him about that another day.

  “And nobody else knows,” he continued, folding the stroller in an automatic motion and slinging it over his forearm. “I only know because you told me. All these other people are just walking down Second Ave. going about their business, and they don’t realize what those trailers are there for.”

  “One, two, three, swing!” Danny demanded. T.J. took his right hand and I took his left, and we heaved him way up in the air between us on every third step.

  “All those trucks, for blocks and blocks. I don’t know how you do it, Judy.”

  “Training,” I replied, and meant it. Charles Hirsch, Mark Flomenbaum, Barb Sampson, Monica Smiddy, Susan Ely, and half a dozen other skilled and conscientious veteran doctors had shown me how I could do it; how public-health professionals break down a mass-casualty disaster into soluble problems, tackle them, and move on. Without their guidance and example, I’d have given up after the first twenty-four hours. “It’s my job, I’m trained for it, and that’s how I do it.”

  “Higher!” Danny hollered.

  “Okay, zero g’s. Ready for zero g’s?” his father asked.

  “Zero g’s!” Danny squealed.

  “One, two, three—whee!” we chanted together, while giving the boy a monumental liftoff. He achieved weightlessness for a half second, plummeted, then landed with a two-point stomp on the sidewalk, his arms stretched out between us.

  “Boom!” said Danny. Then he jumped, landed again, and repeated the word. T.J. and I looked down at him—and we couldn’t help but smile. I unwrapped an Uncrustables for Danny. I had picked it up from the Salvation Army tent during my lunch break, to tide him over.

  “I don’t understand why the people at Sal’s Place always want to pray with me,” I said to T.J. as we continued toward the hole-in-the-wall restaurants on Third Avenue. “And they always God bless me and tell me Jesus loves me. I appreciate them, and they’re really warm and all, but it’s getting a little creepy.”

  T.J. stopped, and looked at me like he was waiting for the punch line. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  I was flustered. “Well, I mean, I don’t want to be ungrateful or anything, but, you know, I’m just not used to people being so religious. I guess.” My husband started to laugh. Danny joined in, just because he always took any opportunity to. “What’s so funny?” I demanded, offended.

  “Judy, the Salvation Army is a Protestant church.”

  “What?” I was flabbergasted. “How do you know that?”

  “It’s called the Salvation Army.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “I always thought it was ‘salvation’ like ‘salvage’—you know, when you drop off clothes you want to give away!” T.J. doubled over when he heard that. “I was wondering why they’re so nice all the time!” Our combined hysterics got so bad we had to stop and sit down, gasping for breath, on a stoop.

  So that’s how we spent my dinner break of September 15, 2001: laughing, despite the weight of the dead, the phone calls to the families, the hum of refrigerator trucks. Danny laughed along because his parents seemed to be happy. For that hour, we were.

  * * *

  When the towers fell, such a huge crowd of people had materialized at the World Trade Center site to offer, bare-handed, to dig people out, that the police had to turn volunteers away. In a matter of hours, every hardware store in the city had sold out of work gloves, shovels, and flashlights. I began to feel fortunate to have a well-defined and important task to perform on the disaster recovery line, and I was rewarded for it whenever I read in the newspaper about families who had obtained a positive ID of a missing loved one. Candy and granola bars, wrapped in notes from schoolchildren, arrived by the box load from around the country. My favorite note, which hangs in my office to this day, is from a fourth grader in Idaho. It reads, “Thank you! You are going to Haven for this.”

  Every day I witnessed the generosity and creativity of ordinary New Yorkers doing whatever they could to help us identify the victims, and I found these efforts inspiring and revitalizing. Iconic companies with New York roots helped out too, without seeking publicity for it. “What size shoe?” was on the list of inquiries our office gave to the families of the missing, so Macy’s Department Stores donated foot sizers for the rolling carts at each body station. Tiffany’s donated ring sizers. Colgate sent a huge shipment of toothbrushes, which we used to clean off bones before taking DNA samples. The Salvation Army trucked in so much food to Sal’s Place that we never had to leave the compound.

  Working proved curative for Amy Zelson. Her condition improved daily, though she still looked battered. The ugly bruise across her forehead had drained down to surround her eyes, giving her a classic bilateral periorbital hematoma known as raccoon eyes. “You’re going to love this,” Amy told me one morning, while we were gowning up for another day on the line. “A detective pulled me aside yesterday for a private word. He looks at me with my two black eyes and says, ‘Just tell me the name of the guy
who did it and I’ll take care of him.’ I laughed and said, ‘Osama bin Laden. Good luck with that.’ He didn’t think it was funny.”

  Dr. Hirsch was back at work full-time, still a little bruised, but with the spark in his eye rekindled. “The work at the World Trade Center site will soon be officially designated a recovery operation,” he told us during afternoon rounds on September 19. “The rescue operation will cease. This means that the fire department will no longer be running things on the Pile, demolition companies will. The operation down there will no longer be done by hand. Heavy construction equipment will be moving the debris, and the condition of the remains you receive will be affected by this change.” Hirsch also revealed that our legal team had assembled a plan to issue death certificates for victims of the attacks based on two affidavits—one from the family and one from the employer of the missing person. “There will certainly be some victims who will never be positively identified, even by DNA,” he said. In those cases, the legal requirement for a death certificate would have to be met through sworn testimony of the people who last saw or heard from the vanished persons. “We will link the cases electronically once, and if, DNA or some other method identifies a missing person who has been issued a death certificate by judicial decree.”

  Dr. Hirsch finished his presentation that afternoon a week into our recovery efforts with an uncharacteristically intimate and emotionally resonant gift of thanks. “I am personally gratified by you all and am very impressed with the way things are going. Every day I feel I have never in my life been so proud of my colleagues and coworkers.”

  * * *

  As the weeks after September 11 passed, I grew more accustomed to the disorienting mix of “regular” postmortem investigations and World Trade Center recovery work—day shifts, night shifts, and weekends. It rained in torrents when I did the night shift on September 20–21, but the tents our technicians and the DMORT teams had erected over the outdoor morgue proved perfectly watertight. Still, it was a macabre experience, picking over decomposing body parts while thunder clapped and lightning flashed through the canvas overhead. I worked that shift with a medical examiner from the Queens office, a stately Haitian woman I had never met before. We were both gushing over an especially good Sal’s Place dinner when she mentioned the massages.

  “Massages?” I asked. It turned out a local business called the Olive Leaf had sent a team of massage therapists to volunteer at our office, right on the first floor of the 520 building. On our next break the Queens doctor brought me there. As she was waxing poetic about the quality of the Olive Leaf massages, who should come walking out the door but Dr. Hirsch himself. He looked happy but embarrassed, as if we’d caught him leaving a brothel.

  I had a wonderfully rejuvenating half-hour massage before going back to work. “You’re under a lot of stress because your chakras are way out of whack,” the pleasant young masseuse informed me.

  That, and I’m working a graveyard shift sifting through fetid human remains under Frankenstein conditions, I thought privately. That, and the chakras.

  After three weeks, the appearance of whole bodies became rare. One eight-hour shift consisted of sorting through nothing but clattering bones. Another day I opened a fireman’s jacket to find it empty except for the bones of his arms in the sleeves. The pocket held some working papers, so he got a tentative ID, and I sawed into a humerus to try to get viable DNA material. Along with the jacket came five pails of mixed debris that contained a lot of small bones and some mummified fragments, including a partial hand with a dried thumb, which could be useful for fingerprints. The remains didn’t even have the stench of decomposition anymore. They smelled like charcoal and dust.

  On some night shifts, long stretches of time passed with no remains arriving from the Pile. There were few places for us to sleep, so Dr. Flomenbaum arranged a call room in a fourth-floor office. When I came in at eight p.m. on September 29, he suggested I try it out, promising it would prove better than sleeping on the lumpy futon in my office that Stuart and I had bought for fifteen bucks off an NYU student. After I got a good look at the call room, I wasn’t so sure. There was a military cot on one side and a leatherette sofa bed of early ’70s vintage parked against the far wall, along with a big bag of sheets and towels supplied by NYU housekeeping. Half past midnight I claimed the cot but opened the sofa bed to make it up for a visiting Defense Department forensic anthropologist who I knew was working the same shift.

  “Goddamn son of a bitch sofa!” I grunted as I yanked away at it. Stephanie, my friend the staff photographer, popped in to render aid. The heavy spring that was supposed to suspend one corner of the mattress had come unhooked, and the two of us spent fifteen minutes wrestling with the ancient sofa and cursing ever more loudly before we gave up. I put a fresh sheet on the thing and left a note for the DOD anthropologist, warning her to sleep on the left side or risk falling through. I was wiped out, and lay down on the cot. My watch said one a.m.

  At one fifteen the walkie-talkie squawked. “Doctor on call, doctor on call. Two MOSes coming in.” An MOS is a Member of the Service, NYPD shorthand for anybody in a uniform—police, firefighters, paramedics. I leaped off the cot and tried answering the call by holding down the button on the walkie-talkie. “This is the doctor. I’m coming down.” No response. “Um. Over. This is the doctor. I’m coming down now. Over?” Still nothing. My pager started trilling furiously. I gave up on the electronics and went for the stairs.

  Fifteen minutes later, the Members of the Service arrived. There were two full bags, each with a well-preserved body. I was a little taken aback; I hadn’t seen a whole body come off the Pile in days. They were firefighters. Their heads were crushed and their limbs twisted, but the heavy fire gear had preserved their torsos.

  Since September 11 I had tried to shut off my emotions and remain on a professionally even keel—but these two firefighters were hard to bear. The first man had tattoos of baby angels on his upper arms, one labeled TIFFANY and the other HENRY JR. and their birth dates, in 1975 and 1978. There was Fire Department letterhead in his pants pocket with the name Henry on it, which makes a pretty good ID considering the tattoo. It was retirement paperwork. Henry was in his midfifties and had been on the force for more than twenty years. The protective gear he was wearing did not match the name in the paperwork. His buddies later told me that he’d been off duty when the planes hit, and had rushed to the scene after picking up another firefighter’s gear from a different station house.

  The second dead man wore a gold Claddagh ring, an Irish wedding band, on his left hand. So does my husband. The firefighter had a picture of a boy around nine years old in his wallet. Taking that twisted hand with the Claddagh ring in mine, I started to tear up. The tears broke over, ran into my surgical mask, and I had to break away. I stripped off the mask and my gloves and ran. I got out of the recovery effort tent, stooped down on my haunches, and started sobbing, face in my hands, there on the edge of the barricaded streets.

  After a couple of minutes I stood up. I was still crying, but I fought to pull myself together. Henry’s family and the family of that Irishman didn’t yet know what had become of them. They’d been sitting at home for more than two weeks now, wondering when they would find out. Those firefighters had died doing their job, and it was my turn to do mine. I walked over to the loading dock, grabbed another pair of gloves and a fresh mask, returned to my station, and went back to work. Nobody said a word. It had happened to plenty of us.

  * * *

  One of the first days in October I was late arriving for the four-to-midnight shift because my bus got stuck in traffic—there was a two-passenger-per-car rule in effect in Manhattan as an emergency measure, but traffic was still perpetually snarled. At my station was a pile of cooked bones in a body bag. Recovery workers had found them underneath three oxygen masks of the type worn by firefighters. Everything was thoroughly commingled, a thousand chalky little fragments, the smallest crumbling to ash when we handled them. We spent t
he whole eight-hour shift sorting—piles of skull shards, long-bone splinters, ribs, vertebrae. “Okay, I’ve located three left femoral heads, which means you’ve got three left legs in here,” Amy Zelson told us, “so you’re looking at a minimum of three individuals.” In the pebbly rubble I found fifteen intact teeth, mostly canines and molars. One even had a half-melted silver filling in it. Bits of intestine, dirt-encrusted muscle, a hank of skin knotted in copper wire. Belt buckles, jacket snaps, coins melted together. Bones tumbled out of a tube sock.

  The next day I spoke to the DMORT dentist working with us, and he told me they were hoping to extract DNA from the pulp inside the molars. “The absence of incisors is typical,” he told me. “The teeth in the front of the face are less protected from fire than the back teeth, which have more gum and muscle around them. Incisors tend to explode in the intense heat, blowing the enamel apart.” I hoped the intact teeth would end up revealing something from dental records, because I suspected that the DNA samples would prove useless. It takes a hellish amount of heat to break down DNA, but hellish heat is what the Pile had undergone.

  While we worked, the families had to wait. Our Identification staff offered them two options. We could notify the next of kin every time we identified a body part belonging to their loved one, or we could notify them only one time, when we confirmed the first piece of human tissue that belonged to the missing person. That was the awful decision the victims’ families had to make. By the one-month anniversary, we had also signed about three hundred death certificates under the new two-affidavit policy, declaring a missing person legally dead by judicial decree. Many families expressed their gratitude that our office, and the funeral directors who acted as intermediaries, had helped them to mourn even in the absence of remains to bury; though Dr. Hirsch was upset over some negative reports in the press about our multiple-choice notification process. “What do they want us to do—not ask the families at all?” Then, wryly as always, my mentor quoted his own. “Dr. Adelson taught me that the best way to respond to a reporter is with your hat. Put it on and walk away.”