Love and Other Ways of Dying (40 page)

And now here he stood before me, reflected and refracted, hung among the lights and blackly aglow in the lobby at the Ritz. I happened to be passing through Lisbon on business, so our meeting was really just to be a dinner, a mutual tryout. We sat for a drink in the lobby bar.

His health was of utmost importance to him—“I want to look good someday in my coffin,” he said, grinning—and so he worked out at a local gym, ate well, and rarely consumed alcohol. He spoke in low guttural syllabics but swallowed every fifth or sixth word, as if he weren’t exactly sure of himself at first or, rather, was being intentionally obscure. Every once in a while, he got caught on a word, a near stutter that may have been nerves, because after this night it never appeared again.

For the sake of rarity, he ordered sake, and when they didn’t have it, he called for a fresh juice, asking after the ice, whether it was made from tap water or spring water. He seemed adversarial, especially with waitstaff—or a bit bullying, a civil kind of bullying—sometimes directing them to the point of exasperation. “Would you pour common tap water into any drink of quality?” he asked rhetorically. His being a vegan complicated our dinner plans, but he had a place with a patio in mind. He called ahead and while speaking to the maître d’ gave a mock-disparaging look at my jeans and short-sleeve shirt—the disparity in our uniforms being something for which I’d already apologized—and asked if a dinner jacket was required.

Later, on the dinner patio, he loosened a little. I listened closely to that low rumble, his voice in a timbre that found occasional disguise behind the clatter of silverware, the scrape of a chair across the patio. He was quoting from Shakespeare. “What’s in a name?” he said. “Hitler’s real last name was Schicklgruber.
Names are not famous in and of themselves. They become famous by propaganda.”

We paused to look at the menu. “There’s a bottle here,” he said, pointing to it on the wine list, “one that I shared once with a friend. It is a very good wine, and it would not disappoint you.” My eyes flitted to the price—over three hundred euros. Since I was buying, he wondered, how much did I have to spend?

My employers, themselves partial to the odd bottle of fine wine, probably wouldn’t have batted an eye. At the very least, I could have justified the importance of watching an amnesiac drink a bottle that held such memories for him, which in and of itself raised a question about his memory. Nevertheless, I felt manipulated. He’d made it oddly personal, a referendum about his own worth. I tried to ignore the question, but he pressed, testing
my
power now. “Not more than a hundred euros,” I finally said, feeling every bit the discomfort he’d forced on me.

In everything, I would soon find, he took control—wardrobe, restaurant choice, encounters with waiters, the ordering of food. “I’m a domineering personality,” he said. Knowing his history, though, I was paranoid about being played, in some complicated manner involving the potential emptying of my bank accounts by identity theft. He said he’d read everything he could find that I’d written, he’d found photographs of me online. “You’ve gone through three phases,” he said. “The shaggy you, the respectable author you, and the CNN you, in suit and tie.” He said he knew more about me “than you can imagine.” But he hardly hid one of his ulterior motives. He stated part of it bluntly in an e-mail. “You may help my cause,” he wrote, referring to his attempts now to become a Portuguese citizen, “as people here tend to be impressed by an American journalist.”

At the table, when I asked about his memory—and whether it had returned—he was evasive. Yet when the subject of those
“British chaps” came up, the ones who’d alleged his participation in pornography and possibly prostitution, instead of being defensive or forgetful, he seemed the opposite. “Everybody has a lot of sex,” he said, “unless you’re particularly ugly.” In his case, it apparently occurred in front of a camera, for which he had no regrets, sex being natural and nothing at all to be embarrassed about. “I’m a child of nature,” he said. “Those who watch it should be asked why
they’re
watching it—and why
they’re
embarrassed.” Anyway, he continued, pornography wasn’t a violation of the law. And when the tabloids got hold of the story, they turned it into theater: Can we embarrass the porn star? What will he do next?

I sat listening. So was this an admission? I took it as one, but later he emphatically insisted he’d put the whole business to me hypothetically: that, without confirming his participation, he had no problem with the
idea
of someone being paid to have sex in front of a camera. And later still, he claimed: “I suppose I spent time with those who were not of my own intellectual level and became a Pygmalion to them. The kernel is this: The life I lived could justify acts much worse than the ones attributed to me.”

But mistakenly or not, in the infrared of that moment I thought I picked something off of him, something that might sound naïve: Beneath his self-constructions, there was a flicker of bravery. And something else: Behind the bluster and the slightly absurd power plays, inside this human being skimming from country to country, “riding energies,” as he put it, there was another person—the oversensitive boy, the confused melancholic, the isolated dreamer—a figure I spotted out at sea, as the poem said, not waving but drowning.

When I returned again to Lisbon and the Ritz—this time in late October—the lobby was still under occupation by the same thin-lapeled
brokers of influence, but this time our Mr. Skeid greeted me much more casually, in cargo pants and a short-sleeve Polo shirt with a turned-up collar. Gone for the moment was any adversarial posturing, any reason to suspect his intentions. In fact, he had summoned me back to tell his story, no holds barred, to play to his audience of one, me, by chatting, lecturing, cajoling, and mining the dramatic moments.

“The truth is my best disguise,” he said. “I can remember places, energies, pictures, smells, but I can’t sit at a table and say, ‘I remember this, I remember that.’ ”

He was relaxed, smiling, welcoming me to the country of Skeid with notes he’d made on tablet pages, an agenda of his thoughts, of what he wanted me to know about him, of those figures with whom he most identified. He said this might be one of the best ways to understand him, by understanding these other people with whom he most intensely identified: the directors Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier, the billionaire reactionary writer Taki Theodoracopulos, the politicians Boris Johnson and Christoph Blocher, the exiled English poet Shelley, and the unnamed protagonist of Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger.
(“One of my great accomplishments,” he said, “is that I’ve lived that protagonist’s life in a way only a few people in this world can understand.”)

At one point, when he opened his date book, I saw that he had neatly written: the elsewhere.

What did it mean?

“I know who I am,” he declared. “I know the true color of my blood.”

The story that followed came in a rush that seemed to last three very rainy days. He’d show up at the hotel in the morning, having walked I assumed, and his love of tea (“It has its own inner life, as opposed to the sadness of coffee”) was what then guided our path through the seven hills of the city, traveling by taxi from
teahouse to vegan restaurant to the Ritz. He forbade me to tape our interviews, so I wrote everything in my own notebook until my hand cramped. Never once in the telling did he show an emotion—and at the end of every night, he walked out through the automatic doors, past the besuited men coming from meetings and dinners, some with women on their arms, and headed back to his spare studio apartment in downtown Lisbon.

“People think I’m crazy or a liar or both,” he said as we drank from our first pot of rose tea that morning at the Ritz. “They can’t believe that someone who speaks well can be in a position of fragility, which is a pity.”

He claimed that he’d suffered a very real breakdown in Toronto, that he still didn’t know how he’d come to be in Canada in the first place, nor the hospital, but that he’d been terrified. He gave up his fingerprints to the detective and waited to be revealed as “a murderer or secret agent or felon.” He remembered the nurses saying, “He can’t be a street kid—look at his fingernails!”

He said that his recent past had returned to him in shards, but the chapters of his early story seemed linear and detailed. “I came from Romania,” he told me, “a place I loathe. My family had nothing, but I was picked up for my musical talents in kindergarten. I played the violin, and I lived among the Communist elite in a special school that I attended, but I was poor. I had one dress shirt that I cleaned and ironed every night. I was never free among these people, though they had no culture whatsoever. I never felt poor or inferior or that I needed help, but people disliked me—perhaps because I spoke my mind.

“I have a memory: this evil apparition, a teacher, and everyone is running, and the only one left is me. I remember this teacher approaching me at school. I was maybe ten. I remember him looking up and down the hallway to make sure no one was
about, and then he hit me as hard as he could in the stomach, just because he could.

“After seven or eight years, it came time for a big test to see who would move on. There was dictation and theory, on which I scored ten of ten; a part where we were graded for group singing, for which we all received the same score; and finally I had to play the violin. It was only me and the Communist nincompoops, my teachers, in a room. I was given a low score and wasn’t allowed to progress. And that’s how they ruined my life the first time.”

He said his name had been Ciprian and that he’d grown up in the Romanian city of Timişoara (pronounced Timi
-shwara
)—under the repressive Communist regime of the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, himself the architect of grand delusions—where he lived until the age of nineteen. He was born to parents who worked as common laborers. He said his father was a drunk. “I have a memory of not existing,” he said, “of having no room to call my own. I remember waking with people lying around me. I remember windows shattering—and sleeping outdoors, counting stars.… My mother didn’t have the courage to leave the crazy man who ruined my life.” He said his father also beat him. He said he might have had a sister.

According to him, the only affinities left to him in Romania were nature and music. He claimed the happiest day of his life was the moment he heard the strains of Richard Wagner, by mistake. “When I heard his music—it must have been on the soundtrack of a movie or something—I knew that this wasn’t me, the boy living this life, that there was someone else inside me and a place beyond this place, where I might belong.”

His other recollection of joy, the only one conjured from the landscape of his home country, included no image of other people: It was a memory of standing by a rushing river in the
mountain village of his grandmother, the peaks looming beyond. Just the boy and the river and the mountains, for that one moment: pure.

Somewhere around the age of eighteen, Ciprian was conscripted into the army, and without being able to specify anything in particular about the experience, he said it was a year of hell that “broke” him. That’s how they ruined his life a second time. When he came out, he fled the country in the months before Ceauşescu’s fall, traveling to Germany to visit a friend there. He returned to Romania after a year, stayed for several months, and then left for good, never to be heard from again. “I had no one,” he said. “The easiest thing was to leave the country. There was no betrayal.”

When I pressed him for a specific memory of leaving Romania—the country he now referred to only as “R.”—he was typically vague. I thought he might have felt relief, happiness, or perhaps a moment’s regret. But all he remembered was crossing in a car to Hungary, on the way to Germany. There were other people there. He claimed he felt nothing. I expressed disbelief. Finally, he looked at me calmly, from across the wreckage of empty teacups and skewed crockery adrift on the table between us, and said, “What do you want me to say: I had an orgasm and saw a rainbow?”

Mr. Skeid came in dichotomies. He could be funny, controlling, fascinating, and monotonous. He could be principled, dubious, evasive, Zen, and exhausting—sometimes all within the same sixty seconds. I’m quite sure I’d never met anyone like him. Some nights I’d go back to my room with my head spinning from all the philosophizing, with a sense that he’d been patronizing or insulting. (“You remind me of Adriano Celentano,” he told me. “You
have that same forced smirk, though you’re much, much less ugly than he is.”) And then some nights I went back wondering what must have happened to him as a boy, feeling half sorry for him—only half—before stopping myself with the thought that he would have hated even that much pity.

Within the constellated mind of our Mr. Skeid, there may have been the underpinnings of a good old-fashioned narcissist, but he wasn’t without a conscience: He professed to wanting to be good, to trying to live in a pure way. He’d even retrofitted Mr. Ripley’s famous motto—“I’d rather be a fake somebody than a real nobody”—to suit his predicament. “I’d rather be a fake nobody than the real me,” he said.

In order to transcend his station, he believed he needed to free himself of his Romanian past. He needed straight teeth and a better nose, which he’d submitted to two operations since it had been broken—what the press had called his “nose jobs.” (“It’s a decent nose, but it’s not Hollywood,” Mr. Skeid told me.) He wanted a piece of paper that declared him a citizen of some other nation, with a name other than Ciprian, a worthless coin chosen, he said, “by those who mistreated me.”

“I lived twenty years in a repressive regime, and when I got away I was still trapped,” he said. “People would have liked me if I were that chap from R. trying to make good: ‘Oh, he speaks so well. See the monkey play the piano.’ But I’ve too much pride for that.”

His pride was what made Mr. Skeid’s isolation seem insoluble. No one was better than he; very few were worth letting in. His most ardent friend was himself, and he spent days roaming the interior hallways of his person. He cited his greatest accomplishment as having eradicated the Romanian language—“an ugly thing”—from his mind and having made English the internal foundation of his linguistic-spiritual world. He could switch between
six or so languages with varying fluency but simply couldn’t remember his mother tongue. When he heard it, he claimed to be struck by a pounding headache.