Love and Other Ways of Dying (26 page)

After about a half hour of this kind of chat, his excitement began to peter out into that preordained moment, one that would repeat itself again and again, when, as I still sat across from him, he would simply raise a newspaper between us, like letting down a curtain, and begin reading. So this was goodbye? To let him gently off the hook, I announced that I was going to stretch my legs, and was answered by a single rustle of the paper. Then I walked a bit, figuring it probably didn’t matter when I returned
to him, as his sense of time must have been more like that of an animal who moves slowly, gauging the day by light and dark, or months by the weather.

On another evening, I asked how he’d spent his day, and he said he’d listened to the radio for five minutes and had brushed his teeth. That was all he’d managed in fourteen hours. He sat in a dull torpor, occasionally rubbing his head or working his jaw muscles, that blank stare taking in everything and nothing at once. Travelers streamed past, sometimes stealing a glance at him and his fortress. “People pass me by but don’t touch,” he said cryptically. When I asked what he’d learned about human nature here, in a place so transparently full of emotion, he said, “Everyone has their own function. They are mostly indifferent.” When I pressed him about what function he served, he said, “I am sitting here, waiting.”

At first I was intrigued by the mere logistics of a life spent waiting. No matter how little one accomplished in a day, Sir Alfred had accomplished less. His life rode no discernible narrative arc, and he had seemingly embraced the absurdity at the center of existence to the point where his sitting in place seemed like a political protest, seemed so meaningless it had to have meaning.

Yet Alfred clung to a few self-made purposes: waking, shaving, protecting his nest. He rose between six-thirty and eight in the morning. He would yawn, stretch, and sometimes pull out a hand mirror, check himself, and maybe shave with an electric razor, right there on his bench. He didn’t limit himself to shaving in the morning, though. He shaved after lunch or before bed; he shaved in midconversation or while spooning a McDonald’s sundae, a McFlurry, into his mouth.

He had his choice of two nearby bathrooms; he preferred the smaller and quieter of the two because it was closer to his bench and had a shower. Even though his belongings blocked the
red bench from intruders—and he used a table and chair to provide effective reinforcement—he still sometimes had to shoo people away, tired passengers looking to recline and, finding no comfort in the metal benches that had replaced the plush red ones three years before (all except Alfred’s), mistakenly choosing to brush aside his mess and sit or lie down, at which point Alfred appeared like an offended rooster, bristling and crowing and kicking up dust. “Okay, my place,” he said. “Out now, thank you.”

On occasion, there were other things that organized his waking hours. Someone had recently given him a carton of Thai cigarettes, for instance, and every day he gave me a progress report on how many he had smoked and how many were left. He said he normally smoked only a few a day, though a rough count over one afternoon suggested he smoked a few more than that. There were times when lighting up must have constituted his day’s greatest exertion.

Sometimes he made a trip to the bank upstairs, where he had his savings account. While he was gone, a shopkeeper would guard his belongings, though a number of his bags were merely stuffed with newspapers, some with articles related to his case. Still, he’d recently lost a collection, most valuable to him, of
Time
magazines, so there was an ongoing need to be vigilant. Stung by the loss, he told me he now limited his wandering. Even though the first level of Terminal 1 had spotty air-conditioning and though it was now sweltering, he hadn’t stepped outdoors to get a breath of fresh air in a month.

“I dream sometimes of going through the window and reaching the sky,” he said.

With an unimaginable amount of time on his hands—growing old, alone, and having to look only to himself for the answers to
life’s mysteries—Alfred created his own mythologies, a basic religious impulse. But Alfred’s view of the world had more to do with how McDonald’s had siphoned money from him when France converted from francs to euros in 2002, or how the French postal service conspired to no longer deliver mail to him from all over Europe—some of it containing money—sent by people who believed he was a symbol, one of courage, of bureaucratic bungling, of soulless modern life swallowing us whole, of our human existential dilemma writ large.

When a noticeable growth appeared on his head a few years ago, he blamed it on “coffee and fake cola products.” He showed me a photograph of his head from 1999 with the incontrovertible proof of a large, unsavory bump, “just there, jellifying,” he said. The airport doctor, a short, busy man with bad teeth whose office was less than fifty yards from where Alfred sat, had watched it grow. Finally, he intervened, taking Alfred from the airport—one of the few times he’d ever left—to a nearby hospital, where the growth was removed. Yet in Alfred’s retelling of the incident, he had performed the operation himself, in the bathroom, as a kind of medieval bloodletting.

In fact, the longer he sat there, the less Alfred seemed to remember, or the more fantasy merged with the few events of his life, casting out all other bit characters. Rejected by humanity, he now rejected humanity. The outside world was simply extraneous. His mind was panes of stained glass, rearranged in some self-satisfyingly inscrutable design.

When asked what he could recall of his boyhood in Iran, he could conjure only three distinct memories:

When pressed to fill in the details, he would only add, “A house like those in England” or “You have to ask them why they stab and stab” or “I jump and run.”

When I asked to see his collection of photographs, thinking they might catalyze his memory, most turned out to be of inanimate objects in the terminal: the revolving door in a wild snowstorm; an abandoned suitcase the bomb squad had exploded, leaving confettied paper everywhere; a counter in one of the nearby shops that had been dusted for fingerprints after a breakin. The rest of the photos were of him, either standing solo, staring straight into the lens, or posing with various passersby, none of whom he seemed to remember.

When I pressed him to identify someone, anyone, he spoke to in the airport, anyone with whom he had a human connection, he claimed to have known one of the employees at McDonald’s for four years. When I asked his name, Alfred said, “I have no idea.”

It’s possible that our most religious moments occur in airports rather than in churches. This is not blasphemy but a fact of modern life. Apprehension, longing, and the fear of complete disintegration—what palpably animates an airport full of passengers about to take to heaven at the speed of sound—is what drives us to our gods.

Over the course of a few weeks, I looked forward to seeing Alfred for perhaps no other reason than that he seemed glad to
see me, too. In some ways, I came to see his dilemma as a question of faith. After so many betrayals, he feared the world beyond his red bench. The red bench was his hovel, home, and haven—and yet occasionally he made the motions of wanting to break free. One day, for instance, I found him checking the classified ads in the paper, declaring that he was looking to buy a car. Perhaps it empowered him to say so, but it seemed impossible: Sir Alfred behind the wheel, on his way to who-knew-where. As he squinted at the classifieds, I was struck by the poignancy of his circumstance, the strength—if delusion—of his hope, an abnormal man living out of time, attempting to take on the mantle of a normal life.

I asked whether he was angry about having lost fifteen years of his life in this black hole at Terminal 1. “No angry,” he said. “I just want to know who my parents are.” Are you happy, then? I asked. “I used to be,” he said, “but now I’m stuck between heaven and hell.” When I asked if he believed in God, he nodded his head as if he were drawing the letter
U
with his nose; that was neither yes nor no. “Believe in soul,” he said. “Your soul is not separate from your function, but it is also more. Your soul is your dream, your dream life, your dream world, and it walks around with you, wherever you go.”

Then he gestured to his kingdom of stuff, his bags packed with newspapers and magazines, with his meager clothing and pictures of exploded suitcases, with endless pages from his journals relating the day’s radio news. “Nothing has changed for me except I have more baggage,” he said. He leaned back and rubbed his head, where the bump had once been, with a kind of superstitious care. “But I’m prepared,” he said. “Other people stay in this place for a couple of hours. They arrive and go to cars that are waiting, or buses. They come and go up the electric tubes to the satellites. When it’s my turn, when I am called, I’m ready to go to the satellite.”

Eventually I paid a visit to his lawyer, Christian Bourguet. During the reign of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Bourguet had been Iran’s lawyer, had been the man who arranged Khomeini’s Air France ticket from exile back to Tehran in 1979 and had secretly negotiated with the Carter administration for an end to the hostage crisis, an end he said that should have come about nine months before it did. On the wall was evidence of Bourguet’s work during that time: a couple of framed personal letters from Jimmy Carter.

He told me that when he’d first met Alfred, the man had been quite lucid in the telling of his story, but that over time he had become “free of logic,” and so his story kept changing. After Alfred suddenly asserted he was Swedish, Bourguet asked how he then had traveled from Sweden to Iran. “Submarine,” Alfred said. Perhaps he was crazy now, but, Bourguet argued, he’d arrived there by increments. “Assume that you are twenty-three,” he said, working a piece of clay in his fingers while chomping on the stem of his pipe. “You’ve finished your studies in psychology, your father dies, and at that exact moment, your mother says, ‘I’m not your mother.’ You have brothers and sisters, but not anymore. And because you’re illegitimate, you’re a nobody in your country. You have no rights. And so you ask, ‘Who is my mother, then?’ You leave your country, only to return to be imprisoned, and then leave with nowhere to go, whereupon you are imprisoned again—and then once more.

“In your mind, you have renounced this person and this name that was formerly you, but when, years later, you go to get what you think is your freedom, the papers identify you as that person. How strong does a man have to be to resist so many big shocks?”

But then, I wondered aloud, why not suck it up and simply sign the documents, then legally change your name forever? “Let me tell you something,” said the lawyer, rocking back in his chair,
a ball of flame from his lighter disappearing into a nest of newly packed tobacco. “He’s not leaving the airport. He’s no one outside the airport. He’s become a star there. Or he feels like a star—and acts like one. If you come with a camera, he knows his best side. Otherwise, his personality has broken into pieces.”

He sucked deeply on the pipe, placed the clay on his desk, and looked up, shaking his head in pity. “I’m afraid the sad fact is that he’s now completely destroyed.”

The last time I went to see Alfred, it was evening, and another storm had blown over Paris, the wind moving the leaves like so many small fluttering wings, lights falling in slick, watery dabs over pavement, over the Seine itself. Cool air came rushing to replace the humid day, but when I entered the terminal, the remnant of that hot day was still trapped inside. I proceeded with my routine, making laps on the floors above before seeing Alfred. I stood for over an hour in arrivals near an expectant group waiting for a delayed flight from New York City. I meant to leave after five minutes, but with each passing second I found myself further embroiled in the small dramas of each party—the little girl with a sign that read
YOU ARE HOME
,
PAPA
; the three hippie amigos playing guitar and bongos badly to everyone’s annoyance; the woman, so prettily dressed in white, who already couldn’t hold back tears.

Later I found Alfred sitting on his red bench, shaving. Behind him, through the plate-glass window, lay the wreckage of rusted pipes, a reminder that at one time something spectacular had occurred out there. It was late and empty again. The white-tile floor seemed to sweat; the scent of regurgitation hung in the air; and here was my guru, my holy man, my ayatollah, opening and closing his mouth, exercising his jaw muscle. Then he started
to speak. “I don’t smoke for three days,” he said somewhat bitterly. That was it. That was all he could muster.

If anything, with each day Alfred was becoming another inanimate object in this airport, devoid of the things that make us human, including memories. Soon, I imagined, he would forget the stone house or being stabbed or the car crash that had never taken place. He would forget that there’d ever been a guy at McDonald’s he once remotely knew or maybe even the exact reason that he still sat here.

Shortly, his newspaper came up between us and rustled once. Goodbye. People washed past on their way upstairs for flights to Hamburg, Dublin, Oslo. Instead of leaving him entirely, I walked over to the bar, bought a beer, and settled in a window a third of the way around the circle. I drank my beer and then another. From where I sat I could look up into the windows on each floor of Terminal 1. I could see through twenty-four different panes, and in each of them, twenty-four different scenes played out: people saying goodbye, sobbing, laughing, lost in meditation, confused, in focused transit. To have heard their thoughts would have been to let loose all the joys and woes of the world.

Across the way, Alfred readied himself for bed, then lay down and, despite the heat, zipped up his windbreaker and pulled his thin blanket over his body. After twenty minutes or so, he seemed as if he were lost in a dream: His legs rose up and his knees lightly bumped each other; then his legs went down again. He was someone out of a fairy tale, someone shipwrecked or lost or trapped forever in an unsolvable nightmare. And yet, stripped of everything, he was his own god.