Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  Three decades’ worth of teenagers have since been released from that high school, from that town, and taken their place in the world. Or not. It feels like yesterday, and at the same time one of those dark fairy tales from very long ago. After the trial, we spoke less and less about the accident, and then for many years dropped it altogether except for Jax’s occasional quips about seeing one of the two others around town. Or a passing mention of having visited Seger’s grave.

  For years Jax seemed twitchy, on guard and alert, and, underneath it all, inconsolable. Sometimes when visiting home, I might drop in on him on a Sunday to find him hungover, on the couch beneath a blanket watching old horror films. Eventually, some time after the rest of us, he married. A few years back, when I told him I wanted to write something about the accident, he said, “Write the truth, then.”

  It took a long while, because, as I found, the magnetic field around the dead really does repel memory at first. It even went against my own inclinations, violating both the privacy of our friendship and the larger cultural prohibitions of digging up the past. But I couldn’t shake Seger, the one who couldn’t speak at all, the one who kept coming back. One newspaper article from the time of the civil trial detailed the courtroom testimony of a financial expert, who was asked to assess the amount of money Seger might have generated in his life. The expert said $1.3 million was a fair guess, which would amount to about $2.6 million today, but it seemed all the more tragic to reduce his life to a number like that. Give us any other number: YouTube videos sent or dogs owned, favors for neighbors or baby pictures emailed. Before the rock closed over the vault, I wish someone had speculated about what he’d found that night, when he passed through the tree.

  I’m a father with three children, the eldest of whom has recently entered high school. Jax also has three kids, in the same configuration: two boys and a girl, the eldest a dead ringer for his dad. Over the years, as I moved west and farther from home, and then back within the same time zone, I’ve watched Jax move within a five-mile radius of where we grew up, from living with our buddies in a small house near the water, to a bigger house with fewer buddies closer to the water, to his own bachelor bungalow, to a comfortable, white clapboard home with a pond out back, which is about a mile from the site of the accident.

  Perhaps we really are surrounded by the past, made prisoners of it. No matter how far we travel, how hard we try to forget, the scarred tree forever stands by the side of the road, if only in our minds. The only way to drive by is to set the past straight, once and for all, by remembering.

  Talking to my brother, a lawyer now with kids of his own, I ask what he recalls about that night, and he says two things: (1) that the EMT from our ambulance service had told him something he couldn’t ever forget: that Seger had been found with a shard of glass in his eye, and (2) that I had originally planned to join Jax and the rest of them on that evening, prior to the party.

  And maybe if I had, I would have missed the opportunity to write this down, as I have, which is the only way I can make sense of anything, or realize ultimately that there’s no sense to be made of it: that once upon a time in a faraway town, we grew up—and some of us lived. And some of us tried to turn away, but never quite could.

  But most of all, if I’d been there that night, I couldn’t tell you now that Jax, my old friend, can still be a beautiful pain in the ass and the truest person I’ll know. If I were never to see him again, this would be my memory of him, of that year: the bucket full of blues, the encyclopedia without God, the energy of his wiry body flying, bowed in the sun, trying to remember why he ever wanted to leave this earth in the first place.

  THE FIFTEEN-YEAR LAYOVER

  MANCHESTER AND LONDON WERE DELAYED ON account of weather, and Tel Aviv was a faulty wing flap. Tenerife, Johannesburg, Málaga, and Marrakech had been canceled for various reasons, and stragglers from those flights were trying to figure out their next move on this humid, thunder-stricken night at the end of May. Some were arguing with the airlines; some were studying the ever-shuffling flight board; some were headed off to nearby hotels, parched and ready for cold gin and tonics to ease the dull throb of their long day. A few scanned the terminal mournfully, searching for the right bench or piece of floor to camp on for the night. Later it would make a good story: the purgatorial night spent in Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

  Meanwhile, the flight to Libreville, which was to leave in two hours, had brought a raucous horde to the Air Gabon counter, the women dressed in colorful gowns, a cacophony of clipped tribal dialects punching holes in the fabric of the terminal’s white noise. The group, maybe two hundred in all, had materialized suddenly, as if by incantation, and would just as quickly vanish, in the silver gut of a 747 roaring southward over the desert for home. Like everyone in this place, they were apparitions, part of the incessant tide that rushed, then ebbed, that filled and emptied, filled and emptied—at moments leaving the airport a lonely beachhead, one that bore no trace of those who had just been there.

  As the hour grew late, the terminal took on a nocturnal malevolence. To be inside this place was not unlike being inside the belly of a dying thing. Upon its completion in 1974, Terminal 1 had been hailed as a triumph, an architectural breakthrough built by Paul Andreu, who had proclaimed that he wanted the airport “to project the image of Paris and France as one of equality, and prowess in engineering and commerce.” It appeared as a gray doughnut-shaped flying saucer—outer space brought to earth—with a burbling fountain at its open-air center. But over the years the fountain had fallen into disrepair and the water was shut off, revealing, behind its vapory curtain, a wreckage of rusted pipes and a cement shed, the inevitable artifacts of the future disintegrating, then becoming the past.

  The whole world passed through this place, on the way to Paris, or from Paris, or simply using Paris to leapfrog to the next time zone. Disembodied voices called passengers to their gates, where they were delivered heavenward. Soccer teams and school bands tromped through, as did groups of old people wearing the same fluorescent T-shirts or church groups wearing the same baseball caps. They sat reading or photographing each other. They went for coffee or hamburgers. They wheeled by in wheelchairs. And then they were gone.

  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 airpo
rt 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.