But most of the human remains were already in pieces; the force of the aircraft impacts and of the ensuing collapses had seen to that. Indeed, of the 1,209 victims identified within the first ten months of investigation by the Medical Examiner’s Office, only 293 were nearly whole bodies, and the others were identified from among 19,693 parts. Of course, some of these parts were clustered, and some were collected at Fresh Kills, but the great majority of them were excavated, mapped, and tagged one by one in the chaos of the pile. Many of the parts found during the first few weeks were easy to distinguish. I saw bones scoured by fire, and a section of vertebrae with tissue hanging off, and a single severed arm with no sign of other remains nearby. It was the weight of the parts that made them seem most real. The arm was placed in the standard red biohazard bag, and it stretched the plastic as a fireman lugged it to an all-terrain “Gator,” trying to hold it away from his body to keep it from bumping into his thigh.
After the first few weeks, work at the site settled into a certain rhythm. The fires continued to burn, water was poured onto the pile, the backfill operation delivered dirt to the south side to shore up the slurry wall, and the contractors began pushing in roads of finely ground asphalt, known as millings, which they laid on top of the rubble. All this and the passage of time meant that the scattered body parts began to look like lumpy cakes, similar to the ordinary debris into which they were mixed. The only way to spot them was to stand practically on top of the places where the grapplers were working. The placement of the night lighting was very important: without multiple angles of illumination shadows were created, and in those shadows entire lives could be missed. The safety officials at the site announced an exclusion zone of fifty feet around the machines, a rule so obviously impractical that people assumed it was merely for the record, something like, “Here are your orders (now please ignore them).” Sam Melisi said, “Fifty feet? You might as well be two hundred feet away with binoculars. You might as well not even go into the pile.” He himself frequently reminded the other searchers about the dangers of working near these machines. But in practice it was usually a subtlety that gave the body parts away—a shred of clothing, the texture of striated muscle, a certain brownish color that was just a shade out of place in the gray-black mud of the pile. More important still, there was the smell—and you had to be close, with your respirator off, to pick it up. The human nose seemed to be correctly calibrated for the work on the pile, largely because of its insensitivity. Only once in my memory, in early November, was a large area enveloped in the stench of death. Otherwise the smell of rotting meat meant that a remnant lay practically underfoot, and with a rake or a shovel could quickly be found. Because of the Trade Center’s restaurants and cafeterias, not every remnant was human. Word came from the forensic anthropologists working off the site that among the recovered materials were cuts of beef and chicken, and a significant number of hot dogs. This caused hardly a comment on the pile, where the difficulty of distinguishing one kind of meat from another was accepted matter-of-factly.
At the receiving end of the effort, in a building uptown known informally as the Dead House, sat a master of the matter-of-fact, the Medical Examiner’s principal liaison to the Trade Center site. He was David Schomburg, a bald, middle-aged man who had been the butt of predictably macabre jokes of the “Igor” variety, and who indeed was pale, but who also possessed a lively intelligence and a necessarily unsqueamish approach to death. Though he rarely spoke at the meetings at PS 89, Schomburg turned out to be an impressive monologuist. I went to see him one winter day, and asked him about the normal functioning of the Medical Examiner’s Office. He looked me in the eyes and began to talk. What he said, in shortened form, was “We are an independent finder of fact. Our duty is to take and conduct independent investigations of deaths under our jurisdiction. We serve all of New York City. We have jurisdiction over anyone who has a death arising out of casualty or injury. Trauma, for example. What you have to understand is there is a difference between cause of death, mechanism of death, and manner of death. Cause of death is the disease and /or injury that is responsible for the mechanism of death. Mechanism of death is the pathophysiologic means whereby the disease and /or injury exerts its lethality. Manner of death is a classification system—and it’s like death is a multiple-choice event. We have six manners to choose from. One, we have natural death, which means it’s caused exclusively by disease. Two, we have accidental death, which means it’s a death arising out of an injury that came from an unplanned sequence of events: basically, we learned what ‘accident’ was the second time we spilled the milk at the breakfast table. ‘Gee, Mom. It was an accident.’ Three, we have homicide, which is death at the hands of another with degree of intent. Four, we have suicide, which is death at one’s own hands with degree of intent; self-homicide, if you would. Five, we have therapeutic complication, which is a little complicated, but basically the easiest way to understand it is the ‘but for’ logic test, as in ‘But for the therapy, the patient would be alive.’ Six, we have undetermined, which is when we cannot decide the manner of death with reasonable medical certainty.”
He took a breath. “Overall, our mission is to determine the cause of death and certify the dead with their manner of death. I guess that’s why people think the Medical Examiner’s Office is just the Dead House. In one door, autopsy, and out you go with a certificate. But it’s more complicated than that. There are parts of the death certificate that are opinion, and there are parts that are fact and legally binding. One of the legally binding parts is, who died? Where and when? It’s our responsibility as certifiers to say that this is in fact the person who died. And we do that via a variety of ways. Sometimes it’s easy. If you were to drop dead and people know you, they could look at you and say, ‘Yeah, this is my friend Bill!’ However, there are times when we have to realize that people are kind of like bananas. You buy a bunch of bananas, they sit on the counter, you eat a few, and there’s always a couple that hang around, get a little freckled, and pretty soon they’re not too appetizing. You stick them in the refrigerator to make banana bread later, and they get shoved to the back. Several months go by, you discover them back there, ‘What the heck is this?’ It’s a rotted banana, and it looks like every other rotted banana. People are a lot like that. Left dead, unattended in warm environments, you can’t tell them apart. Also, injury can take and disfigure or remove people’s identifying features, make it very difficult. So we have to rely on other means—fingerprints, dental records, x-rays that were taken prior to death, and DNA analysis. It’s embarrassing to have somebody you certify dead show up on the beach in the south of France enjoying the insurance money with a girlfriend. Or boyfriend. We routinely process twenty thousand deaths a year. But when it comes to IDs we generally don’t rely on just one method. We’re kind of fussy. That gets us to our involvement in the World Trade Center, which is interesting because our approach has been different. We felt early on it was unfair to make families wait years to have somebody declared dead, and that at some point we should be allowed to issue a death certificate even though we may not have been able to confirm the presence of a body. So we have actually two channels of certification going on. We have the real one, where we find somebody, identify who they are, and issue a death certificate. And we have this other side, which is a death certificate based on court declaration. And then when we do find somebody, we replace that court certificate. It’s a long, tedious process, but the goal is still to identify as much of the material as we can and return it to families.”
What Schomburg meant, in Dead House terms, was that he, too, was improvising in response to the Trade Center attacks, and pioneering new ground. We walked through the uptown processing facility to the end of the line, a large white tent where the remains were stored in twenty refrigerated trailers, and we stood there and talked. The discussion was clinical at first. It was about procedure, forensics, and physical conditions on the pile. For both of us it was all by that time ra
ther routine. But then I asked him a question for which there was no simple answer: What is it in the bewilderment of loss that drives people to want so desperately to retrieve the bodies of their dead and, in the extremes of this case, to retrieve those bodies even after they are unrecognizable and torn to shreds? Schomburg was a specialist in death, and deeply involved in precisely that process, but even he was unsure. He said, “It’s everywhere, I’d guess. The body becomes like the ultimate symbol. It represents the person we knew, the person we loved. And when that body no longer reacts—when it’s dead—in our minds, now we have to accept that this is so. We’ve seen it with our own eyes.” True enough.
But if that was the extent of it, if that was the only justification for this enormous effort of retrieval and identification, there was a legitimate question of how far a sane and healthy society should go along. Schomburg seemed to have anticipated my doubt. He said, “Or maybe it’s just that every culture, every society, has its own kind of funeral rite.”
The next afternoon it snowed, and by evening the site was transformed, covered by a tentative blanket of white, though muddy still along the access roads, and black amid the hot debris near the North Tower ruins, where the pile still smoked and vented steam. The crews had been anticipating the challenge of snow nearly from the start, and they spread salt to keep the trucks from slipping, and maintained the pace of the work without the slightest hesitation. The snow continued to fall, filling the air under the emergency lights with a density of crystals. It was a Saturday night, and out beyond the perimeter Manhattan was returning to a normal life. People here were enjoying the weather too, and profoundly, because it deepened the sense of inhabiting a special world. I ran into Sam Melisi on the pile near a recovery team, standing next to freshly turned debris; he looked like a northern woodsman with snow on his moustache. Pablo Lopez came over and complained about the cold as if it were an affront to his heritage. Late in the night Bill Cote and I walked the site; for a while we simply stood and gazed at the ruins. They seemed impossibly beautiful.
In the morning four inches covered the pile, smoothing its surface. I followed footpaths across the slippery steel, and broke a trail high into the ruins of Building Six for a better view. Below, the footpaths wove like little veins across the terrain, and joined the main access roads at the center, where the heavy equipment was hard at work. A thousand people must have been there overnight, tearing into the debris with their ferocious machines, but such was the scale of the scene that in the fresh snow now the ruins seemed hardly to have been visited. We’d come a distance nonetheless. The attack was still vivid in people’s minds, but it was drifting into a category of memory assigned firmly to the long ago. I perched on the edge of a fallen steel column, and for a while did nothing more than let time pass. One of the grappler operators came up and sat beside me to smoke a cigarette. He was impressed by the overnight transformation, and said that it calmed him strangely. We spent a few words on it. There was something about the snow—its majestic indifference to human events—that seemed to provide perspective on what was happening here. Maybe it was just that we had become residents of such an intense private place. After so many weeks, whatever calm the snow could provide was welcome.
THE DANCE OF THE DINOSAURS
On the morning of Friday, November 2, 2001, seven weeks and three days after the Twin Towers collapsed, tribal fighting broke out at the World Trade Center site. The battle was brief and inconclusive. It occurred near the northwest corner of the ruins, when an emotionally charged demonstration turned violent, and firemen attacked the police. Within that intense inner world it came as no surprise. Resentments and jealousies among the various groups had been mounting for weeks, as the initial rush to find survivors had transmuted into a grim search for the dead, and as territoriality and the embrace of tragedy had crept in. The catalyst for the confrontation was a decision made several days earlier by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to rein in the firemen, who for nearly two months had basked in overwhelming public sympathy and enjoyed unaccustomed influence and unlimited access to the site. In the interest of returning the city to normal life, Giuliani declared that the firemen now would have to participate in a joint command, with the New York and Port Authority police and the civilian heavy-construction managers in the DDC. This did not sit well. Moreover, access would be restricted, new procedures would be imposed at the pile, and the number of searchers would be reduced by two thirds.
The reason given publicly for this new arrangement was “safety,” a term so often used to mask other agendas in modern America that it caused an immediate, instinctive reaction of disbelief. Ordinary frontline firemen were the angriest. As many as 250 of their colleagues lay unaccounted for in the ruins, and they intended as a matter of honor to find every one of them. That week alone they had found fourteen. They were convinced that only they could sustain the necessary attention to detail on the pile, and that in his eagerness to “clean up” the site (a term they despised), Giuliani was willing to risk overlooking some of the dead, scooping them up with the steel and concrete and relying on the sorting process at Fresh Kills to separate their remains from the rubble.
To a degree the firemen’s suspicions may have been well founded. Certainly the unbuilders themselves, operating under the direction of Mike Burton, were pursuing the most aggressive possible schedule of demolition and debris removal. Even Sam Melisi had doubts about the city’s motivations. To me he said, “If you do a good job, and you do it in record time—who knows what record time is, since nobody’s ever dealt with this before—is there a bonus? Do you get to be a commissioner or something? I don’t know. Burton’s just hard to figure out. Sometimes he’s very personable and human: ‘Oh, geez, you found X amount of people. Oh, that’s great.’ And then other times: ‘You’re really taking way too much time to look at this stuff, and we’ve got to keep moving.’ Putting his arm around me and winking. ‘We really have to move on this.’ But you know what? We’re going to take as long as it has to take. We’re not going to compromise on that. We just can’t do it. I don’t have an allegiance to any construction company, or even to the City of New York. My only allegiance is to the people who lost their lives—to their families. The best we can do is try to retrieve as many people as we can in the most humane fashion. And then when all this is over, I can just go back to doing what I do.”
Melisi was the reasonable one, and the most broadly involved of any person at the Trade Center site. By comparison, the ordinary firemen were narrowly focused on the rubble underfoot, where the remains of civilians and police officers were regularly discovered, but only the recovery of their own people seemed genuinely to interest them. Though their attitude was sometimes offensive to others working on the pile, it was not difficult to understand: the firemen were straightforward guys, initiates in a closed and fraternal society who lived and ate together at the station houses, and shared the drama of responding to emergencies. Some had lost family when the Trade Center fell, and nearly all had lost friends. Their bereavement was real. Still, for nearly two months they had let their collective emotions run unchecked, and they had been indulged and encouraged in this by society at large—the presumption being something like, “It helps to cry.” The effect had turned out to be quite the opposite: rather than serving a cathartic purpose, the emotionalism seemed to have heightened the firemen’s sense of righteousness and loss. Now, with the city ordering cutbacks in the firemen’s presence on the pile, the agitation among the rank and file was so great that the firefighters’ unions warned the city that they had lost control, and would have to organize a protest to avoid a break with their own membership.
None of this was conducive to clear, calm thought. Two days before the fighting broke out, a fire captain and union trustee named Matty James presented the situation starkly to the Daily News, as if retrieval of the bodies were an all-or-nothing affair. He said, “The city may be ready to turn this into a construction job, but we’re not. We want our brothers back. By
doing this, the city is taking away from these families, these widows, these mothers and fathers, any chance for closure. What are we supposed to do? Go to the Fresh Kills landfill to look for our people?” In a similar style, the mother of a dead fireman whose body had been found said, “Our memorial Mass became a funeral. It gave me an opportunity to hug the casket and to say good-bye. It’s just awful, what they are trying to do . . . to deprive other women of that wonderful feeling.”
Such was the rhetoric during the days leading up to that Friday morning, when hundreds of firemen began to assemble at the corner of Chambers and West Streets, by the red-brick walls of PS 89. In the emergency command center on the second floor, most of the site-management team from the DDC made plans to stay inside and out of sight. Mike Burton looked worriedly down at the scene in the street—at the slowly growing crowd, the opposing lines of blue-uniformed police officers, the television crews that were just then arriving. As if to himself he said, “These guys are not happy . . . not happy at all.”
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