Love and Other Ways of Dying (25 page)

The longer you hung around in Terminal 1, the more mundane everything became. Had a herd of red oxen been unloaded from Jerba and wandered out of customs, it would not have been
such a surprise. Had a planeload of mimes come from Nuremberg, they would have registered only as part of the passing circus, hardly remembered afterward. In this context, a great deal made more sense here than elsewhere, including perhaps Sir Alfred.

A friend told me about Alfred a few years ago, having heard of him on the Internet. Initially, she believed him to be a work of fiction: the man who had waited at Charles de Gaulle Airport for fifteen years, on the longest layover in history. But then, the man was real. It was said he could be found in the basement, near the Paris Bye Bye bar. He’d be bald on top, with frizzes of wild hair on the sides and four teeth missing, smoking a gold pipe, writing in his journal or listening to the radio. It was said, too, that it really didn’t matter what time of day or night or which day of the week one visited, for Alfred was always there—and had been since 1988.

The truth was that no one knew the whole truth about Alfred, not even Alfred himself. He was born in either 1945 or 1947 or 1953 and claimed to be Iranian, British, or Swedish. In some ways, it was as if he’d been found in the bulrushes—or was still lost there. For years now, he’d lived mostly on the kindness of strangers, eating his meals at a nearby McDonald’s, wandering the terminal’s white-tile floor as if it were his own cathedral. Mostly, he passed time on the terminal’s first level, in gurulike meditation, on a red bench before a big, filmy plate-glass window near a shop selling CDs. He sat in a tight envelope of air that smelled faintly of regurgitation.

Alfred’s odyssey had begun when he was a young man from a well-to-do family living in Iran and had ended here on an airport bench in Paris, by mistake. Twenty years ago, while living in
Belgium, he’d simply wanted to go to England by boat. But having rid himself of his identification papers during the voyage, he’d fallen into a twilight limbo as a nationless, unidentifiable person no one wanted, bounced from Belgium to England to France, where, finally, he’d been left stranded at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

He’d lived there ever since.

My first visit to Alfred came on the night of the Air Gabon flight to Libreville. I was staying for a time in Paris during a two-month stretch of intense travel. Adding it up, I’d spent nights in no fewer than fifteen different hotels, making me the frenetic opposite of Alfred. For me, the sheer speed of life had begun to strip it of its meaning. I imagined him to be some sort of mystic, sitting still on his Himalayan mountaintop, the keeper of monastic truths.

It was late, and the airport was empty and gave an air of exhaustion, of an animal too tired to resist the thing crawling up its leg. Going down a flight of stairs from the second level to the first, I nearly bowled over a young, tan flight attendant in a powder-blue hat who seemed in a hurry to get upstairs. After her, there was no one but Alfred.

If all the dramas of farewell and hello unfolded on the floors above, Level 1 was a kind of wasteland. What shops there were—a good number had closed in the past years—were shut up for the night. I walked quickly, following the circle of the terminal itself. Where the exterior of the building was gray cement, its doughnut-hole interior was all glass, so that you could look up and see three floors above you. On the second floor were the airline counters as well as six preliminary boarding gates that led to moving sidewalks, called electric tubes, that crisscrossed in the air, carrying travelers up through the open center of the terminal
to the third floor, to more gates, called satellites, from which passengers disembarked for their flights. On the fourth level were the customs hall and arrival areas. I could see the electric tubes crisscrossing over my head, and in various windows all the way to the fourth floor, flashbulbs fired as travelers collected final photographic souvenirs of friends or family frozen in time.

And then there he was, laid out like a body in a sarcophagus, a snoring heap of human on a red bench, surrounded by a fortress of possessions. I counted several suitcases, six Lufthansa luggage boxes, two big FedEx containers—his life’s possessions. There were clothes hangers and a collection of plastic beverage lids. On the table before him was a pile of McDonald’s coupons. He was gaunt and angular. His skin was the sallow, almost purplish color of the white fluorescent light, except for the dark rings under his closed eyes. His sideburns and mustache were graying. The nail of his left pinkie was long and sharp, but the rest were neatly clipped. And despite the heat, he slept in a blue Izod windbreaker beneath a light airline blanket, a gift, it appeared, from a sympathetic flight attendant.

I made a lap, returned, and he remained absolutely still. The third time, believing he was really out, lost in some Giza of a dream, I paused before him, and as soon as I did, his eyes flipped open. He bore no expression, but then his face twisted as if he were in great pain or perhaps about to lash out; and yet before he could, before some unholy utterance issued from his mouth, his lids fluttered shut and he fell back to sleep—back, it seemed, to his own mysterious crater in an obliterated landscape.

Once upon a time, before facts were eroded by dreams, before the man destroyed and re-created himself, he had been a boy named Mehran Karimi Nasseri, happily living with five siblings in
the oil-rich south of Iran. His father, a doctor, worked for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, while his mother assumed the duties of the household. By the standards of their country, they were rich and thriving in an area of Iran that was rich and thriving.

Mehran went to school, then college, where he took a psychology degree. But then, when he was twenty-three, his father died of cancer. While he grieved, his mother notified him that she was not his real mother, that he was, in fact, the bastard son of an affair between his father and a Scottish woman, perhaps from Glasgow, who had worked as a nurse for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In order to protect her husband, who would have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, she had pretended the boy was hers. Now, in one blow, she sought to undo a life of lies. She banished him from the family. Mehran was still only a young man, smart and able, with a promising future. He was a person in forward motion who, until that moment, had known exactly who he was and where he was going.

Mehran argued with his mother, claiming that she
had
to be his mother. Wrapped into this argument may have been his father’s estate and the inheritance that he felt was his due. Mehran threatened to take her to court, and her rebuttal was simple: with whose money? In the end, they worked out an agreement. Mehran would leave Iran to study abroad in England, where he would receive a monthly stipend.

In Bradford, England, he enrolled in a Yugoslav-studies program, happily toiling for three years, until one day, without warning, his stipend ceased. He tried to reach his family in Iran, calling and writing, but received no answer. With what money he had, he flew to Tehran, where he was detained, arrested, and imprisoned. He was informed that Iranian agents in England had photographed him marching in a protest against the Shah, which
made him a traitor. It was the first of what would be three prison stays.

When his mother, now not his mother, found out about his incarceration, she paid the proper bribes to the proper authorities to secure his release, but again with a stipulation: He would be given an immigration passport, allowing him to leave Iran, never to return. Which is just what he did. Though he needed another country that would receive him, one that would grant him refugee status, his eventual plan was to travel to Glasgow in hopes of finding his real birth mother, who he believed lived there under some variation of the name Simon.

So he left. It’s not known or remembered what ran through his mind as he boarded the plane that took him from Tehran to London, leaving his homeland and family behind. It’s impossible to know whether he’d been struck so hard by these events that he’d already lapsed into dementia or amnesia, whether he felt betrayed and reeling in space.

Over the next several years, starting with England, Mehran appealed to at least seven countries for asylum, until Belgium granted him refugee status in October 1981. He settled in Brussels, working in a library, studying, receiving social aid. After saving some money, he approached the British embassy to make sure he could visit Glasgow with his refugee papers and was told there would be no problem. He purchased a ticket to England by boat, and once aboard, believing that he now occupied British soil because he was standing on the deck of a British ship, he placed his papers in an envelope and then in a mailbox on the ship, dispensing with them, sending them back to the Brussels office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

This, of course, was an act of self-perdition that can’t be explained and that immediately became the genesis of Mehran’s woes. When he arrived in England and could show no papers
proving his identity, he was sent back to Belgium, where, in turn, he was returned to England. To be rid of him once and for all, and playing a game of transnational hot potato with his fate, England then randomly sent him by boat to Boulogne, France, where he was arrested and sentenced and served four months in prison for trying to enter the country illegally. After his release, he was given eighty-four hours to leave France and, without a decent plan, went to Charles de Gaulle Airport to see if by flying to England he might have better luck.

He didn’t. Arriving in London, he was detained and returned to France, where, out of money and ideas, he settled into life at Terminal 1. At first he was simply one of those stranded travelers, waylaid for a night on his way elsewhere—then another night, and another. But he didn’t give up. He began soliciting fellow travelers for money—five francs here, a pound there—enough finally to buy a ticket. Two years later, he again went up the electric tube to the satellite, again he boarded the plane, again he landed in London, and again he was expelled.

Returning to Charles de Gaulle, he was arrested once more for illegally entering the country and sentenced to six months in prison. After his release in 1988, he returned to Terminal 1, perhaps out of sheer habit now, packed and ready but with nowhere to go.

So much had happened since his arrival, if not to him, then to the world at large. Reagan, Thatcher, and Mitterrand had given way to Bush II, Blair, and Chirac. Communism had fallen; Rabin had been assassinated, Manhattan had been attacked. As the years passed—through war and famine, AIDS and SARS—he sat near the Paris Bye Bye bar, gleaning bits from the radio, occasionally watching the television set that hung in one of the restaurants. He renamed himself Sir Alfred. He was motherless, fatherless, homeless, moneyless, sitting still in a place where humanity moved
frantically. Alongside a river of tinkling cell phones and half-drunk coffees hastily disposed of, he chose to live his life—most of which was packed into Lufthansa boxes. He now insisted that he’d been born in Sweden and renounced all connections to Iran. He refused to speak Farsi. He refused to answer to his original name at all, even when his freedom was at stake.

For seven years, Alfred’s lawyer, a bearded public advocate named Christian Bourguet, tried tracking down Alfred’s identification papers in Brussels, the ones Alfred had mailed from the boat. Once he had those in hand, he in turn was able to procure from the French government a visa and a
titre de voyage
, a kind of passport that would have finally allowed Alfred to go to England. But when Alfred saw that the documents were issued for the Iranian national Mehran Karimi Nasseri, he became churlish, refusing to sign.

“Belong to someone else,” he said in his Farsi-accented English, and so sealed his fate. On the temporary identification papers he held, both parents were simply marked by an
X
.

“I am an
X
, too,” he said.

After watching him sleep, I went to see Alfred again the following day, about midmorning. The sun beamed in bright forms through the windows that looked out on the wrecked fountain and lit the shadowy corners. The first level was bustling with Monday travelers and, for a moment, seemed much less sinister, much more like your standard sterile airport, with bodies flowing past Alfred’s table or up the electric tubes to the satellites. For his part, Alfred was pleased to have a visitor, probably would have been pleased to meet anyone who stepped out of the moving crowd long enough to say hello. He cleared a small table in front of him and commandeered a nearby chair. For a man who’d made a life of sitting still, he looked relatively fit, with strong-seeming arms.

When he spoke, however, his voice was weak, and he claimed he hadn’t uttered a word in two months. Mumbling more to himself than to me, his words swam three-quarters of the way across the table, then back again. Occasionally, a cluster reached my ear. Everything he said cloverleafed back into his “case,” though it was nearly impossible to determine what that case was—after all, his lawyer had solved his immediate dilemma by securing the papers that set him free. He vehemently claimed that Mehran Karimi Nasseri was free to go but that Sir Alfred wasn’t. Soon I came to regard any mention of his “case” as shorthand for everything he had forgotten or chosen to forget, as code for a mysterious process of healing that called for the complete exorcism of the past.

He said he believed his real mother was still alive in Glasgow and that he would find her. “I hope not to be here by Christmas,” he said with the pained smile and resignation of a man who’d most certainly be here by Christmas or who was simply talking about some Christmas in the far future, after a nuclear winter.

When I asked whether, after fifteen years of this isolation, he felt he’d be lost in the world if he left the airport today, he said in his clipped English, “No, why? Same world.” When I insisted that, if anything, these past fifteen years had in some ways drastically altered our daily existence—citing the rise of computers, cell phones, and the nearly instantaneous changes in everything from food to fashion—he said, “Not worried.”