“You promise you’ll be there,” Mr. Chen said.
“I will,” said Fan Ping.
“Unless you try to jump off the bridge between now and then,” Mr. Chen deadpanned. It wasn’t quite a joke, but Fan Ping laughed, as did several in the crowd looking for some sort of release—and then Mr. Chen made it all okay by laughing, too.
Meanwhile, the student reporter from Shanghai grabbed me, tottering on high heels, and asked if she might conduct an interview. Not waiting for an answer, she began peppering me with questions, compensating for my lack of Chinese with her almost-English: “Do American engage in this so-called suicide event?”… “From bridges is always the favorite, no?”… “Does American—you—have fixes for problem?”… “Do you also enjoy Sex and the City?”
I couldn’t even pretend. My hands, which rarely shake, were shaking. And I floated from my body, watching Mr. Chen and Fan Ping walk ahead, watched—from some high, hovering angle—as Mr. Chen placed the man on a bus and Fan Ping squished down the aisle in his disintegrating shoes and took his place by the window, looking straight ahead. The bus gurgled, backfired, then lurched forward, gone in a plume of gray smoke. That’s when some part of me came tumbling back down to myself. I turned and strode back out on the bridge to the spot where Fan Ping had readied to die. I came to the railing, peered down once more to the dark, roiling waters, and felt as if I might regurgitate my lunch noodles.
There would have been no way to survive that fall. And for some reason, standing there, I felt a sharp pang of loss, though no one had been lost. I felt I’d been a step too late, though I’d been one step ahead. It wasn’t Fan Ping I was thinking about; it was all the other lives—within me and disparate from me—that had been lost. Yanking Fan Ping from the railing hadn’t offered a stay of any kind; instead, it brought death nearer. Mr. Chen wasn’t a caricature but a bearer of so much imminent grief. I was bound to him by a feeling Mr. Chen had elucidated for me earlier, a feeling of standing in a spot like this on the bridge, after an incident like this, hovering between heaven and earth, “heart hanging in air.”
Back at home, the months passed, and so the day-to-day reasserted itself. And yet sometimes, randomly, Mr. Chen appeared in my mind, standing guard at his station at the South Tower, scanning the crowd. And on those few occasions when I found myself describing what had happened on the bridge to friends, I could hear my voice retelling the story of Fan Ping, and it sounded preposterous, even delusional. It sounded as if I might be a man of comical self-importance or full of conspiracies, the sort who wears a hat that reads They spy on you. Soon I stopped mentioning it altogether. After Fan Ping pulled away on the bus that day, I had joked with Mr. Chen about catching up to him on the big scoreboard of lives saved.
“It’s 174 to 1,” I told him. “Watch your back.”
He smirked dismissively and said: “You’re only given a half point for that one.”
As it turned out he was right again. He already knew what I’d later find out. That is, if I’d ever imagined saving someone from a bridge, it probably would have been a fantasy bathed in altruistic light, in which I … SAVE … A … HUMAN … LIFE! But then it slowly dawned on me: I’d tried to stop Fan Ping merely so I wouldn’t have to live with the memory of having watched him fall. My worry now was that he would somehow succeed in trying again.
So I contact Mr. Chen. He tells me that on the Monday morning after Fan Ping tried to kill himself—the morning that the two men were supposed to meet at his office—Mr. Chen arrived at work and his boss promptly fired him. He then left the office building and went to his station at the bridge, not so much because he was despondent but because that was where he felt he belonged. All the while, he dialed Fan Ping’s number over and over again, but the phone was out of order. And remained that way, all these months later.
There’s nothing to do now, says Mr. Chen, but wait for him to come back. Rest assured, he’ll stop Fan Ping. Even as he’s recently saved a father, and a few students, and a woman with a psychiatric problem. He knows what Fan Ping looks like. In broiling heat and blowing monsoon, he’s out there, ever vigilant, waiting in his double duck-bill, scanning the crowd for Fan Ping—and all the others, too, who might possess thoughts of a glorious demise. He assures me he’ll be waiting for them all—and you and me as well—binoculars trained on our murky faces, our eyes sucked downward, trying to read strange words off the surface of the murky river below.
The only question remains: Can he reach us in time?
11:20
BEFORE IT WALKED THE PARKING LOT, its crippled feet scraping the silence of that seventy-in-April spring day, before it lurched past the saplings bent once in the breeze, and before the sun flooded the wide, emerald windows of the library in a featureless building as featureless as the instant Colorado landscape in which it rose. Before the glass front doors were drawn back, reflecting nothing—no face, no figure—and the low, reassuring, underwater sound of voices, students at lunch or in choir or suiting up for gym, was met by the voice of something else, something pitiless and blank. Before Patrick Ireland, a real boy, was shot in the head and lay paralyzed on the right side of his body under a table in the library, playing dead though he half was. Before Lance Kirklin, a real boy, had his jaw blown off and had to communicate by squeezing hands, and before Daniel Rohrbough, a real boy, lay sprawled on the stone walk among the saplings as students leaped over him like cows fleeing from some medieval abattoir. Before the glass doors of that featureless building shattered and the pipes burst and alarms sounded and the sprinkler system went haywire, before freaked students packed oxygenless closets or scurried up into ceilings or hid in lockers. Before all the shirtless, hairless boys were herded out of Columbine High School, hands over their heads, looking pale and stricken and, well, like little boys streaked with blood, their shirts having been used as wraps and tourniquets on the bodies left inside. Before all the stunned, gasping girls huddled in trembling circles, holding each other, well, like little girls suddenly with no mother left in the world.
Before night fell and the dead still lay inside that booby-trapped high school as a final affront, lay like the pinions of a star around the killers—and what could the scene of that terrible midnight have looked like?—before the media horde arrived with its Aggreko generators and deep-space satellite dishes. Before the blame and the signed caskets and the psychedelic mountains of flowers, and before the angry, indignant promises for gun control, for safer schools, for policing the Internet, for really caring about our kids, there was 11:20 on a Tuesday morning. Eleven-twenty in Columbine valley, what used to be farmland rising to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in a place where the American Dream lives in strip malls and stucco-and-drywall housing developments. Eleven-twenty on a day when the season makes a turn: Columbine High School, its windows like microchips, its saplings showing first leaves. The wide baseball fields bursting green. A dog barking, a plane passing lazily overhead, leaving a contrail trace of its progress. And for one last time, at 11:20, everything in its place: goofy, pimply, smart, beautiful, heartbreaking, not-yet-grown kids writing papers on Thoreau.
Afterward the snow fell—for three days. It blew into the backstops like huge, broken moths. Two hundred investigators combed the high school sarcophagus while dozens of media cameras like more guns were trained on a hugging boy and girl, the uncle of a dead girl in a leather coat and combed hair searching out any journalist he could find for an interview. “Death by mayhem,” he kept repeating into microphones. Afterward, in a local diner, two older patrons argued about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday—who the better gunfighter had been. At a convenience store, a boy in a green bib sat behind the counter, bawling.
I myself stood for a while at the memorial, stood before the stuffed animals and flowers and purple Magic Markered messages—all of them trying to call back 11:20—and walked the police line that surrounded Columbine High, walked out over the baseball fields, snow up to my shins, until I was a good peg from the fron
t door. It was silent but for the whine of generators. The shattered emerald windows to the library had plywood sheets fixed over them. And hundreds of cars sat in the lot: pickup trucks and Acuras, a motorcycle and someone’s mom’s old Dodge.
Inside that building, everything was exactly as it had been just hours before: computers and lights still on, lunches half eaten, books turned to the last page read, the college application of a girl who was shot, its final check mark made, the pencil lying next to it. That’s what’s most hard to imagine: how, in midsentence, in the throes of some idea, in the beginning of some meaningful life, that girl was entered by some dark, crippled thing and became a memory.
It was sometime after eleven, and, standing there, gazing out over the parking lot and beyond the school to the new houses with their new cars and the new living rooms with their new rugs, you could have actually imagined this as any other school day. Everything seemingly in its place. A dog barked and a plane passed overhead, but this time it sounded like the roar of a monster.
MR. NOBODY
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, you might have perceived 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 whole. I would find that he spoke with a pure English accent, echoes of Yorkshire. It was only when he 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 emails 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 magazine’s 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 than 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 now?
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 was a vegan and a lover of tea. I knew a great deal of confusion surrounded 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 muttered the name Philip Staufen to the attending nurses. When the vintage of that moniker 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 informality,” he’d told me. So I began by calling him Mr. Skeid.
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. If one had tried to determine the line of his 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 a sort of oblivion.…
I will say this about our mysterious Mr. Skeid: Despite the gust of froid he emanated, I, along with an entire nation, had been immediately drawn to him. Not to the man by the piano in the lobby of the expensive hotel, but the one we’d met five years earlier. While connecting through Toronto on a business trip in June 2001, I fanned open that day’s Globe and Mail, and there, occupying the upper fold of page 3, 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 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.”
Love and Other Ways of Dying Page 29
