In 2001, I had offered up personal item reference samples and bio samples, per instructions from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. I’d expected his blood relatives’ spiral lattices to do the heavy lifting, but I obliged with the trinity of hairbrush, comb, razor, and a river card: the panties I wore Monday, the day before he was killed, and the spermatic deposits thereupon. Later, I discovered a fork in the dishwasher. I delivered it to OCME. A few weeks later I found hairs in the bed, bagged and delivered those. In December, a fingernail clipping revealed itself from within the padded confines of a ball of dust behind the toilet. I bagged it. I gave away every tangible piece of Vik I could find.
I was told that he, like his colleagues, was pulverized, reduced infinitesimally, reduced to dust. A finely sifted flour. Particulate matter. A single particle. A speck floating among motes. He was made so small that photons in a sunbeam struck him like waves breaking over the bow of a ship. He was inhaled, expelled in a mass of phlegm, transported by Kleenex to waste bin, to garbage truck, entombed in a landfill to await the next millennium’s archaeologists. Arguably, he still existed in some microscopic sense. What constituted him? Two molecules retaining their bond? A single molecule once associated with his cellular structure? And after his dust degraded and he was split into the component atomic elements, where was he then? When did he cease to be?
Elusive Vik. At first I forced myself to believe these things, to believe that he’d vanished into the mound of rubble, been pestled by the concrete slabs and plummeting I-beams. I forced myself to believe he’d been incinerated, his carbonized particles elevated in the pillar of black smoke, absorbed into the mesosphere. In the absence of a body, paperwork became his corpse. I had the DX certificate, official pronouncement of death by judicial decree. But what I wanted—what we all wanted—was the DM, the physical remains certificate. Eventually all the other girls got theirs. Goddamnit, Vik, where was mine?
Were they my friends, the other widows? If we’d been friendly before, cocktail party cohorts, left-hand partners at dinners requiring the presence of a full contingent, the smiling soft-serve ice cream our husbands brought around to please potential investors, now we were comrades, veterans of a flash battle that had wiped out half our battalion.
For everyone else, for the DMs, the problem wasn’t that their husbands had vanished, but that they kept coming back. There was a white tent on 30th Street overlooking the East River, a high-quality aluminum frame shrink-wrapped in slick polyester. The remains were stored there until the memorial park was finished and they were relocated to subterranean shelf space beneath the plaza’s selfie zone. Officers of the state tested and retested the remains, turning an infinite row of prayer wheels while chanting the mantras of forensic tech. When the universe granted a hit, they’d call. They’d call every time until you couldn’t handle any more and signed the form begging them to stop.
I never saw the blue glow of the caller ID: OCME MTTN. But they kept pushing the prayer wheels, retesting, retesting—thousands of unidentified tissue remains, thousands of bone fragments. And there were millions more out there in the world, too small to detect. I kept up with the literature. I knew the technology was advancing toward infinite sensitivity. It was only a matter of time before they’d point a spectrometer wand at the sky and transmit me the coordinates of Vik’s atomic remnants. There he is, hovering over Germany today, tomorrow Sweden, drifting Arcticward, catching a lift on the polar jet, circumnavigating the world’s crown. There he is, parting the seas from atop a plankton’s rostrum. Look there, in yonder deer gut, amongst the honeycomb of the reticulum. In a volcano, in a carburetor, under my fingernail. Everywhere, nowhere.
Unless you asked, they didn’t tell you where they were finding all the new pieces. You had to go to the white tent and they’d point to a map. Your husband was here: The pit. Fresh Kills. A rooftop. Sewer. A shard here, a sliver there.
But after so long and no call, I’d formed some theories, some unsound ideas, by the time he came home. Ideas like: not dead, just gone.
On the occasion of the initial identification he returned with a herald. An officer of the NYPD, fidelis ad mortem, was in the lobby asking to see me. I told Peter, the doorman, to send him up and Peter, stooped Peter who could barely climb off his stool, escorted the officer himself. I didn’t trust it, he said to me. A cop? You? No, I didn’t trust it one bit.
Even so many years later, standard operating procedure still applied in the case of this particular mass-fatality incident. Upon identification of human remains, OCME issued the coveted DM certificate and notified NYPD, which was then compelled to notify me in person. So, there he was, an old hand from the Twentieth Precinct, wedding ring, removed his hat and secured the threshold, framed in full 3D by the jambs, which gave way to his elbows as he awaited my invitation, Peter doing his best impersonation of an octopus behind him. Come on in, I said. We sat, I displayed my government-issued identification, he said, no, not necessary while scanning it nonetheless, he on the couch, me on the ottoman—weird, right, my apartment, but with bad news/good news in the pipe we’d assumed stage positions intended, though unintentionally, to communicate to our audience, dear old Peter, that order and authority were in balance, all was right in the world, chaos held at bay for just a moment more. The officer did then address our rheumatic chaperone, whose pose of angular discomfort, one gnarled hand on the jamb of the French doors
