GQ Magazine: Issue June 2007
Mr. Nobody written by Michael Paterniti
HE COULD HAVE BEEN ANYONE, standing in that Lisbon hotel lobby. He wore a black suit and black tie with black shoes. His hair was jet-black. His eyes from a distance seemed black, too, but perhaps it was merely the reflection off the glossy grand piano near which he stood. He could have easily passed as a financier or a diplomat waiting to take an important meeting, to report back to a man in a glass office in one of the other European capitals, someone of equal breeding and power, who might then direct this man here to enjoy a night in Lisbon and carry on in the morning to Brussels, Berlin, or Geneva, to the next high-level meeting for whatever concern they mutually held at stake.
Just by looking at him, he seemed to have the meticulous if anonymous tailorings of a person from whom a certain power flows. And that lobby - with its well-appointed sterility- flowed with others of the very same disposition. It was impossible to know his country of origin or who he might be. The nails were manicured; the tie held a perfect dimple. His image reflected off the windows, off the Lisbon night outside, parts of him, angles of him hovering there that gave no sense of the whoe. I would find that he spoke with a pure English accent, echoes of Yorkshire. It was only when I smiled as I crossed the room, both our hands outstretched, that I saw he was wearing braces.
It was July in Lisbon, when the heat was absolutely "beastly," as he put it. Our meeting had involved a tenuous exchange of e-mails played out over several months. "My story is very complex, I would also think very interesting," he had written. "I can vouch for it not being in any way banal. I would even venture to say that it is much more than you can imagine considering the social and philosophical implications. The fact is that I don't feel the need to tell it. There is something about me that upsets people."
If he didn't need to tell it, I wondered, why then was he writing any of this in the first place? And what could be so upsetting? "If your magazines deontology allows you to arrange for a 'representation' fee package for me," he wrote, "I would be ready to meet with you. I don't want to meet anyone of consequence while I am penny counting and I can't even afford the taxi fare. It would not be an obscene sum, and it would not be paying for an interview, so you would not have to struggle with your journalistic conscience." When I had refused - it was paying for an interview- and wished him luck, he wrote back, "I would have been surprised and very suspicious had you given me an immediate and positive answer to my enquiries regarding certain financial matters." He told me others had been more willing to pay, but he assured me that they were not the kind with whom he wished to consort.
So with whom did he wish to consort?
I knew he was a man who had lived under at least five aliases. I knew he had allegedly traveled under false documents and been jailed. I knew that he wa a vegan and a lover of tea. I knew a great deal of confusion surrounding his circumstance and that his amnesia had supposedly left him with no clue as to where he came from. He was a man either running from or trying to recover his past. It all depended on what you wanted to believe.
Seven years earlier, he had landed in a Toronto hospital, badly beaten, with those manicured fingernails. By then he'd already borne several other names, but in that hospital he supposedly had muttured the name Philip Staufen to the attending nurses. When the vintage of that name came due, he turned himself into Keith Ryan. His e-mail address read Mike Jones. And I knew him now by yet another name: Sywald Skeid (pronounced zie-wald sky'd)
"I don't go in for all that American informailty," he'd told me. So I began by calling him Mr. Skeid.
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SO HERE WAS MR. SKEID, A MAN WHO had claimed to know virtually nothing about his own past, aground in Lisbon - "a dreary place," as he put it - as he'd formerly found himself aground in Toronto ("the dregs") and Vancouver ("beautiful but for my life there") and Nova Scotia, where he'd lasted out a ten-day hunger strike at a county jail. I found had tried to determine his line of perambulations - of his true history - before the moment of his beating and subsequent memory loss, one's finger might have fluttered back across the ocean, tracing dots from London to Paris to Rome. One's finger might have flitted up to Germany, floated across the border to Hungary, and - trailing back in time and over the flatlands - passed another border into sort of oblivion....
I will say this about our mysterious Mr. Skeid: Despite the shimmer of froid he emanated, I, along with an entire nation, had been immediately drawn to him. Not to the man by the piano, but the one we'd met five years earlier. While connecting through Toronto on a business trip in June of 2001, I fanned open that day's Globe and Mail and there, occupying the upper fold of page three, was his face, or rather the face of Philip Staufen, under the headline BIZARRE AMNESIA PUZZLE TRAPS MAN.
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 beleagured and a little beaten down, 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 mumbled the name Staufen, but police officials failed in trying to match it, or his fingerprints, to anyone at 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 celebre, 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 indentity 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 Fifty-second Division of 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 the 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 were circulated in the United States, where, it was said, Philip Staufen hoped to one day hitch hike coast-to-coast
After living in Toronto or a year - moving from shelter to shelter, bieng 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 bearde 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 wil 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 of the attention brought upon our man during those first years of his Canadian incarnation - or as he might out it, incarceration- and despite all the hopeful mothers calling to claim this Staufen as their little run away 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" moniker 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."
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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 email before my arrival in Lisbon, he urged me to bring my bathing trunks, becuase there was a quite a nice spa at the hotel. "I might want to swim," he wrote. His was a priggish kind of self hyphenated obsession. It was inconsequential if I might have wanted to swim--or could swim at all. I would merely facilitate his desire.
But arrogance alone didn't consitute danger. And as far as I can 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 corpereal beings, the cipher he presumed 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-- that we'd lost the strands of our period.
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 once swift blow from all the back matter from one's own life?
Mr. Skeid's story fulfilled a central escape fantasy for those that indulge such fantasies; that a life could be exited through a series of cloding 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 from one side of the world and arrive in a hospital bed in Canada, with manicured fingernails and dyed blond hair, not knowing who you have ever been-- and perhaps not caring to remember.
But even then, it wasn't quite so easy to be Mr. Nobody. As the weeks past after his hunger strike, a curiosities and suspicions began to accrue. Even if his memory lost 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, 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 sowering 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 Sumaritans as an insult, and he didn't hesitate to let people know. It became a repeating patern; He would push until he had reached a cul-de-sac, though he claimed he only wanted what was his "by right of law."
In the summer of 2001, a call came Detecive Bone from England. It wasn't exactly an 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 new that Philip Staufen went by a different name, the one on another passport he carried at that time; Georges Lecuit. It was aleeged 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 bath house in London called the Pleasuredrome.
The photographer produced for Bone a waiver that this Georges Lecuit had signed by which he was paid three-hundred dollars for test photographs. To cap it off, one of Britain's leading forensic- face-construction experts said that there were striking similarities, suggesting that Mr. Nobody and Lecuit were one and the same.
These revelations came roughly the month before Mr. Nobody was to marry. And yet another twist, he had proposed to his lawyer's daughter. She was thin, short-haired 22-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 its much easier to obtain citizenship as a 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 I could be a friend to someone, something that hadn't been able to do before. There are so many oppurtunities to be 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 bruit 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, but 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 a man that 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 Hurv, one of those in the best position to compare, stated for the record that this porn star wasn't her husband.
As for the husband--the one who would have known for certain--he simply couldn't remember.
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