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Coroner Hal Dopkin, M.D., and his crews of highly trained N.Y.C. coroner department specialists picked carefully through the mountains of dust and bricks which had once been the grand Lambrecht Theater. Hal and his forensic assistants had reached the mother lode of bodies right where they stood atop the building’s wreckage. Tiny pieces of corpses were resting everywhere intertwined with chairs floor boards and ceiling materials. Usually he’d come upon a hand or some hair. Then, upon dusting and pulling away the debris, he got down to the person or at least what was left of him. A lot of black tar had oozed into the area of each one. Dr. Dopkin and his forensic staff referred to alot of this material as black tar, but it wasn’t the type of tar roads and parking lots were covered with. It was the black tar of congealed blood.
In Hal’s mind, the tar was a sort of metaphor for many tragedies. It was the stuff of pain and fear emitted from a dying person. The tar had swirled inside their frightened cries which came from whatever end-life terror the audience might have had to endure in their last seconds. Dr. Dopkin, M.D., poked his tools into the fertile soil of death, extracting its hidden victims bit by bit, most of them fully intact even though many were physically broken and disfigured by tons of fallen debris.
The construction workers had cleaned off the debris in what had become a six-day labor of remorse. It was a time of wreckage and dust, of trucks backing in beside the mechanical diggers which loaded them down with the stuff of history, mostly brick and mortar mixed with a bit of angry, busted construction wood as well as roofing tiles. The mechanical claws tore it up and dumped it into the boxes attached to the dump trucks’ bodies. Yesterday evening they had reached the first bodies. Then, Dr. Hal Dopkin, M.D., and his forensics staff took over.
Construction men stood around with their shovels, hoes, and gloves, lending their hands to the further removal of debris whenever asked by the forensic staffers.
“Got a cold one here, boys,” Cindy Elefson called. “I need some good gloves to extract it.”
Bob Edwards and Sam Bernard came forward. The corpse was that of yet another suit draped man. He was bent over this woman who held a child about four years old. She had covered the little girl with her body at which point her husband had protected her body with his. This was typical behavior during emergencies. The coroner had seen it many times. Each group had its protectors and its protected. For Dr. Dopkin, people protecting their families from guns, knives, and car crashes was an old story as ancient as the hills upon which New York City had been built. The DSLR cameras as well as smaller cameras housed in smart phones flashed over the entire graveyard of destruction as they documented the victims body by body. At times, their operators selected video mode to reveal their extraction. Then they returned to their flash mode. Cards were placed on each body as it was discovered and photographed, and these cards had numbers. They were later attached to the outside of the victim’s body bag. “Victim number 257. Male, approximate age, 37, brown hair, brown eyes, multiple lacerations. Tattoo on left arm shows an artistic rendering of a dragon wrapping itself around a heart-shaped shield that read Mom in its center, body in fairly good shape but crushed in parts, both legs and left wrist shattered. Discovered and placed in bag at 3:30pm, 7 days after building’s collapse.” Dopkin directed a body picker over to his side. There were more complete bodies than he would have guessed, and that was good to know. “This one is bagged and ready. Please pause a few moments out of respect before you leave with it on your cot. And be sure, you do this with each person. I think that is very important,” Dr. Dopkin said. “These are our family now.”
“Yes, of course, sir,” Bob said. “Be assured, they are our family, also. Mine and Sam’s.” He and Sam lifted the body. “Up we go,” Bob said. “We are going to take you out now and clean you up.” They placed the man’s lifeless body on the stretcher and hobbled through the debris to the ambulance. There, they lifted it, placed in on a medical gurney, and slowly pushed it inside. “Wait here,” Sam told the driver. “He is part of a small group. The coroner says they were this victim’s family members. Two of them are coming in a few minutes. We want to keep them together out of respect.”
“Yes,” the driver said. “I’ll wait for them.” The driver respectfully dusted the bag with a towel. He was as depressed as the other workers over the incessant transport of hundreds of theater goers including families, friends, and writers, actors, etc., all of whom had the lucky opening night tickets. He had shed many a tear when people weren’t watching him, mostly as he drove slowly down the street on his way to several of the morgues that were being called upon to spread out the huge work load. The driver’s name was Ed and his associates were Bill and Edna. All of them were certified medical technicians. They were used to tragedies. Victims of deadly and near deadly accidents, heart attacks, assaults, and shootings. These were their daily take. But despite their outer veneer of jaded disgust, many of them still had tender hearts of gold based on personal physical contact with the dead and dying, giving them comfort along the streets to the hospital emergency room. They broke down a lot and attended psychological sessions with counselors whenever they felt the need and nothing whatever was said about it. It was a part of the job.
Dr. Dopkin continued pulling family members from the catastrophe. Their sadness weighed down upon his shoulders. These people really could have been his own family. His family attended Broadway productions hundreds of times over the years. It would have taken very little to have placed them beneath another coroner’s gentle searching hands.
Hal tried to picture in his mind what these dead would have felt as they were being retrieved from the wreckage. Would the coroner’s gloved hands not be welcomed in kindness as they were pulled up from their mangled graves? Would he himself not be aware of his own tenderness and respect for them? He imagined his reaching hands enclosing themselves about his own arms and shoulders as some future coroner hauled him out, dusted him clean, then placed him inside the body bag’s plastic shroud of welcoming darkness. What would he think as he dissected himself upon the autopsy table, the scalpel opening his body, his organs being lifted and turned for inspection, his brain sitting atop the table prior to being reinserted into his awaiting cranium? Hal was not sure he’d feel the love, even though he dearly wished that he would.
Dopkin remembered his first autopsy. She was a little girl who had been tossed against the wall by her mother’s angry boy friend. She was just a tiny little girl two years old. Her mother was an African American junkie and so was her boyfriend. According to court documents, in the midst of an argument the boyfriend had used the child against its mother. He picked her up like a rag doll and slammed her against the wall, until her head lost its shape and opened like a tiny watermelon. It spilled its load of undeveloped brain matter against the wall. Dopkin remembered cleaning black tar brain materials from the little girl’s body. He sawed open the top cap of her skull and removed the brain. It was mostly loose material left there from the beating. Most brains were still solid and kept their shape. The little girl’s brain was different because of its freshness. Her brain was more like a soft jello salad of juggled membranes. “I’m sorry this happened to you,” he said to her as he held up what was left of her perceptual organ. “I’m truly sorry, my dear. I hope you are in a better place now where you can be happy all the time.”
He realized heaven was just a useful psychological crutch. There was no such place. Only the mournful used it. They needed something to hold onto to make something awful have a good turn at the end.
But lives are not like Broadway plays. Lives and blood and guts and the damaged brains and kidneys in a corpse’s final autopsy were where the truth of life’s brutality stepped forward and took its bow.
As Hal Dopkin, M.D., placed the children of the wrecked Lambrecht Theater into their body bags, he said a prayer to them the same as he had to his first patient. He wished each of them a swift journey to a better place and a full life with their own children, their innoc
ence, their smiling faces, and their laughter. Dopkin knew in the depth of his most exquisite coroner’s fantasy that God existed, even though Dopkin himself was an atheist. Despite his rational skepticism, he still entered into a compact with the devil by negotiating a respite for autopsied children. His dignity for life itself demanded that he do this and that he pretend to all the world of endless scalpels and spreading chest clamps that the grand persona known as the great one come down off his high horse. The great one had ridden so far away into the distant heavens that even the Hubble telescope had not been able to find him there. If Dopkin ever experienced the unlikely event whereby he stood naked and oppressed before the face of the mythical lord in heaven, he would ask him what in the world he had in mind in allowing these tragedies to happen.