Love and Other Ways of Dying (39 page)

In a photo that accompanied the story, Philip Staufen looked to be in his midtwenties, boyish, with a pronounced nose and shaggy blond hair and dark eyes, one of them trailing slightly to the right. His mouth was set in a grim line. He seemed beleaguered and lost, like a stray. Living on $525 a month of state assistance, he said his days were spent reading sonnets at the public library.

The article outlined his attempts to gain Canadian citizenship and went back to the beginning of his story, or what was known of it. The more I read—and afterward, the more of everything else I could find about this Philip Staufen—the more the tale took on an utterly fabulist air. In November 1999, Staufen had first appeared at a Toronto hospital. He arrived with a broken nose, unable to walk. The labels were missing from his clothes, and he had no idea who he was or what had happened to him.

Had it been a mugging? A hate crime? Self-inflicted?

At some point, he’d called himself by the name Staufen, but police officials failed in trying to match it, or his fingerprints, to anyone in various databases at home and abroad. The only certain facts about him were these: He was white, five feet nine, and 150 pounds. He was unusually tan, had muttered something about Australia, and, later, was diagnosed with postconcussion global amnesia.

His case became a cause célèbre, and though he was a young man, it carried with it the intimation of every child ever separated from his family while roaming the mall or the neighborhood
or Disneyland, the primal fear of that separation. And of course, a country responded to that fear. Who couldn’t feel for a wounded fellow human trying to find his lost family?

“I am quite depressed and would like to leave Canada in search of my identity or be able to lead a decent existence here if given the right to work and travel,” he wrote the court in his appeal for citizenship. Further, he stated that he had a digestive disorder, couldn’t sleep, and had been forced to the brink psychologically—a choice, as he put it, between “suicide or becoming a criminal,” neither of which, he hastened to say, were options. “My life is senseless,” he wrote.

On May 28, 2001, the court denied his application, primarily because of the same ambiguous question Philip Staufen seemed to be asking himself: Who was he? And if a majority of amnesia cases are transient—that is, one’s memory returns within a short duration of time—and Philip Staufen showed no permanent brain injury, why after eighteen months did he still remember nothing at all?

Initially, a detective named Stephen Bone from the Toronto police department was assigned to the case. He was the first to meet Staufen in the hospital, to take his fingerprints, to call upon a linguist, who determined that Staufen had a well-bred English accent with notes of Yorkshire. Because the boy with no memory genuinely seemed to want to find his family and because Bone, then a twenty-two-year veteran of the force with a still-intact gift of empathy, genuinely wanted to help, photographs were circulated around the world through Interpol. Newspapers in Yorkshire and Australia—among other places—ran articles about the amnesia victim the press soon dubbed “Mr. Nobody.” A couple of documentaries were made and aired abroad; news reports circulated in the United States, where, it was said, Philip Staufen hoped to one day hitchhike coast to coast.

After living in Toronto for a year—moving from shelter to
shelter, being taken in by Good Samaritans touched by his story (a young couple, a God-fearing spinster)—Philip Staufen moved on to Vancouver, where he met the public advocate, who took his case pro bono. Manuel Azevedo was one of the city’s high-profile human-rights lawyers. An imposing bearded man with Portuguese roots, he accepted Staufen at his word and allowed him to move into the basement of his family home in December 2000. Six months later, when the court denied Philip Staufen a birth certificate, Mr. Nobody undertook his first hunger strike in protest. With utmost belief in his client, Azevedo likened Philip Staufen to Bobby Sands, the Irish Republican who died after sixty-six days on a hunger strike to protest prison conditions. “Weak, depressed, and paranoid … Philip Staufen will surely die,” wrote Azevedo in a press release. “Canada will not be remembered for its compassion toward this man, but rather its indifference.”

Despite all the attention focused on our man during those first years of his Canadian incarnation—or, as he might put it, incarceration—and despite all the hopeful mothers calling to claim this Staufen as their runaway son, no one emerged with a credible shred of evidence about who he really might be. No one could make a match.

When I later asked him whether the “Mr. Nobody” label ever bothered him, he said, “No, why should it have? There are two things about me. First, I am a very happy person, though I’ve lived an unhappy life. And second, I’m happy until I have to say my name, which carries a great deal of negativity for me. What troubles most people is that I want to be anonymous, without an identity. To them, this idea seems absolutely dangerous.”

It was true: Our Mr. Skeid
did
seem dangerous. Even there in the lobby at the Ritz, he conveyed an air of passivity and menace,
each by turns masking the other—and masking deeper still a presumption, a serrated sense of entitlement. In an e-mail before my arrival in Lisbon, he urged me to bring my bathing trunks because there was a quite nice spa at the hotel. “I might want a swim,” he wrote. His was a priggish kind of self-obsession. It was inconsequential whether
I
might have wanted to swim—or could swim at all. I would merely facilitate his desire.

But arrogance alone didn’t constitute danger. And as far as I could tell, he wasn’t mingling with arms dealers or underworld figures. No, what was most unsettling about our Mr. Nobody was the idea of him, the affront he posed, the ghost he made moving among the rest of us corporeal beings, the cipher he presumed to be in the lobby at the Ritz. Here we were, creatures so weighted down by our own identities, trapped beneath our own monuments—the record of our every purchase, trip, and rented movie, the sum of our online aerobics—that we’d lost the strands of our freedom.

Our predicament now narrowed to this possibility: We, as human beings, possessed less and less mystery. Who in this world could dream of being as light as air, as traceless as smoke, as unidentifiable and invisible as this man here? Who among us wouldn’t consider, at least for a moment, the potential joy of being released, in one swift blow, from all the back matter of one’s own life?

Mr. Skeid’s story fulfilled a central escape fantasy for those who indulge such fantasies: that a life could be exited through a series of closing doors that might lead somewhere completely new and alien, without fear of past recriminations, debts, or crimes. That is, you might pass through a portal on one side of the world and arrive in a hospital bed in Toronto, Canada, with manicured fingernails and dyed blond hair, not knowing who you’d ever been—and perhaps not caring to remember.

But even then, it wasn’t quite so easy to be Mr. Nobody. As
the weeks passed after his hunger strike, the curiosities and suspicions began to accrue. Even if his memory loss was permanent—which would have been extremely rare—even if he couldn’t reach back to reclaim his family, there was still, despite massive publicity efforts, no one who came forward. Not a soul. And then this Mr. Nobody, who professed to want to find his family, who swore that his condition was driving him to the brink of suicide, refused all medical help and counseling. Even Detective Bone began to wonder why, when they spoke over the phone, Mr. Nobody failed to show much interest in the detective’s attempts to locate his identity or kin—and worse, soon ceased to cooperate at all with the authorities.

When I asked Mr. Skeid about the souring of these prior relationships, he was succinct. “People only want to help you when they have power over you,” he said.

Yes, he said, he had refused medical help, but only because he was offered electroshock therapy and hadn’t wanted it. And yes, he refused to accept a special minister’s permit, one that would have allowed him the right to live, work, and attend university in Canada, but only because he thought he deserved a birth certificate instead. He came to see the outpouring of help from Good Samaritans as an insult, and he didn’t hesitate to let people know. It became a repeating pattern: He would push until he’d reached a cul-de-sac, though he claimed he wanted only what was his “by right of law.”

In the summer of 2001, a call came to Detective Bone from England. It wasn’t exactly the aristocratic connection some had expected but a publisher of pornography who claimed to have known Staufen. Further investigation turned up a photographer who claimed to have taken nude shots of him. They characterized Mr. Nobody as “the ultimate chameleon” with “a plan to get to America.” They told Detective Bone they knew that Philip
Staufen went by a different name, the one on another passport he carried at that time: Georges Lecuit. It was alleged that this Georges Lecuit had made several gay pornographic movies—with titles like
Exposed
and
Crush
—posed for nude pictures, and worked as a masseur in a gay bathhouse in London called the Pleasuredrome.

The photographer produced for Bone a waiver that this Georges Lecuit had signed by means of which he was paid $300 for test photographs. To cap it off, one of Britain’s leading forensic facial reconstruction experts said that there were striking similarities suggesting that Mr. Nobody and Lecuit were one and the same.

These revelations came roughly a month before Mr. Nobody was to marry. In yet another twist, he’d proposed to his lawyer’s daughter. She was a thin, short-haired twenty-two-year-old named Nathalie Herve, who worked in her father’s office as a secretary. Mr. Skeid described her to me as “very innocent,” which may have been part of the attraction—as well as her shy beauty. But then, given that it’s much easier to obtain citizenship as the spouse of a Canadian citizen, was it love or convenience?

“I didn’t choose to fall in love,” Nathalie told one reporter at the time. “It just happened.”

“I wouldn’t say it was love,” Mr. Skeid told me later. “It made sense for us to live together. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could be a friend to someone, something I hadn’t been able to do before. There are so many opportunities to betray and so few to be loyal. But she never had the intellectual capability to understand me.”

Mr. Skeid admitted that he was genuinely shocked when people questioned whether his marriage was a sham. He recalled a conversation he’d had with a customs officer assigned to his case who asked him point-blank if he was gay. “I told him to mind his own business,” he said.

The British and Canadian tabloids made their usual tawdry hay about Mr. Nobody’s alleged pornographic past, but by then most Canadians had heard enough. For them, Staufen’s amnesia tale had become untenable and preposterous. “Oh, for the sweet, sweet taste of amnesia!” wrote one citizen to an online magazine. “To forget my huge complicated life, my husband, children, responsibilities, relatives, to banish them in a mugger’s blow!… Mr. Nobody wake up and do something with your life! You bitch like a medieval poet.… Live you fucking idiot!”

Was it possible that the man in the movies, the one who had the physical attributes of Mr. Nobody, who had a profile that seemed to explain a part of Mr. Nobody’s murky past, wasn’t in fact Mr. Nobody at all? After reviewing the evidence, Nathalie Herve, one of those in the best position to compare, stated for the record that this porn star wasn’t her husband.

As for her husband—the one who would have known for certain—he simply couldn’t remember.

Before our meeting at the Ritz, Mr. Skeid had spoken one sentence to the media, though reporters had stalked him in the streets of Vancouver and Halifax, at his various places of residence, at the gyms where he worked out. On May 7, 2004, reporters jostled in a pack, shouting questions as he emerged from jail in Nova Scotia. Fresh from his ten-day hunger strike, with Nathalie by his side, Mr. Skeid wore his black suit, with his hair now dyed black. He wore fashionable dark sunglasses and a dark beard as he made his way quickly through the scrum. “Can’t you understand that I don’t want to have anything to do with you or anyone else?” he said to the cameras—and then disappeared into the bright sunlight.

The detainment was a result of the work of Detective
Bone—a man who, to this day, Mr. Skeid thinks of as “one of the best I met in Canada.” In his investigation, the detective had come upon a police report filed in Paris by the real Georges Lecuit, claiming that his passport had been stolen during a break and entry on August 17, 1998. Had the thief been Mr. Nobody?

Meanwhile, during 2003, Mr. Skeid and Nathalie Herve had made a series of moves—from Ottawa to Montreal to Halifax, where they had landed in September—in order to escape the increasingly “bad energy” of Vancouver. And it was here that they were called to the immigration office, and on the grounds of the French Lecuit’s six-year-old grievance Mr. Skeid was detained on suspicion of theft.

The problem was that the real Georges Lecuit had no interest in pressing charges against the amnesiac, and despite the fact that Mr. Skeid had once allegedly been in possession of a stolen passport, there was no evidence that he’d done anything wrong. Eventually, the immigration board ruled that there was no basis for holding Mr. Skeid, and after those ten days in jail, he was released.

Was he a fraud or a victim, a man of the world or one who had been irrevocably injured by it? Was it possible to be all at once? At the very least, Detective Bone pointed out, he’d traveled under false documents. But was he really the bogeyman—“the vegan Hannibal Lecter,” as Mr. Skeid later put it—that the media now made him out to be?

Because Nathalie had dual Canadian and Portuguese citizenship, the couple decided to relocate to Lisbon, to escape the scrutiny of the media and to see if Mr. Skeid could lawfully establish citizenship there, again as the spouse of a national. Nathalie traveled ahead to prepare for her husband’s arrival; Mr. Skeid stayed behind to secure the proper papers for his own travel but ended up stranded. Finally, after a year, in March 2006, he left, as
he said, “on a laissez-passer travel document with another name than Sywald Skeid.”