After leaving Slater’s, Kyle began walking south towards Florida. He made it only a few miles before he was stopped by two Georgia sheriff’s deputies, who recognized him from Bo Preston’s training on the FBI database. They offered to give him a ride to the Florida border. When they arrived, Kyle got out and continued to walk.

When he got to Jacksonville, Kyle tried to enter a homeless shelter. But lacking a driver’s license or Social Security number, he was turned away and wound up sleeping in a field behind the sheriff’s office. Desperate, he called John Wikstrom, a 21-year-old film student from Florida State University who had contacted him about making a documentary about his case. Kyle told Wikstrom that he had moved to Jacksonville because Slater needed to take care of her sick parents. Wikstrom, seeking to help, called a local TV news station, which ran a short segment on Kyle. Josh Schrutt, the owner of Crazy Fish, a restaurant on the water, saw the report and, feeling sorry for Kyle, offered him a job washing dishes.

Kyle, it turned out, had an encyclopedic knowledge of restaurant equipment—how to work the grill, calibrate the deep fryer, store the pans, clean the equipment. He quickly became Schrutt’s best employee, always working past his shift, never turning down a task. Kyle also had a penchant for dry one-liners, heavy on word play. “We have no coleslaw today,” he would quip. “The cole miners are on strike.”

“I’m a very suspicious person,” Schrutt said. “I have an alarm on my house, a gun next to my bed, and a Doberman Pinscher for a pet. I’m extremely paranoid. And I trust the guy.”

Crazy Fish sat on a thin spit of land that juts out into the Intercoastal Waterway. It was housed in a rickety wooden shack, previously used by the regional office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a holding cell for poachers—space it now shared with a colony of 40 semi-feral cats. When I arrived to meet Kyle for the first time, in 2014, I found him sitting on the restaurant’s front deck, smoking a Clipper mini-cigar and reading a tattered science fiction novel. He was wearing a baseball cap, camouflage pajama bottoms, and prescription glasses from Walgreens with a +2.00 sticker on the frame. His bushy mustache was stained orange from nicotine. A bicycle—his primary means of transportation—was chained up next to him.

“I appreciate you coming down here,” he said. “But every journalist promises that their story is going to be the one to solve my case. And none of them do.”

Ten years on, Kyle told me, he had all but given up on the idea that his real identity would ever be found. He reeled off his media appearances—CNN, the BBC, ABC, NPR, CBS, Fox News, The Guardian, Dr. Phil. Indeed, Kyle had the friendly, well-rehearsed manner of someone who has given a lot of interviews. He spoke of catastrophic amnesia in the nonchalant way another person might speak of seasonal allergies. He still received emails from people offering tips, but none of them had ever come to anything. A last-ditch visit to a psychic had yielded nothing useful. He had more or less resigned himself to remaining Benjaman Kyle.

“I’m not pounding my head against the wall,” he said. “I mostly avoid thinking about it. It doesn’t really do very good to keep thinking about a problem you can’t solve.”

Fictionalized depictions of amnesia usually portray the condition as inherently terrifying, an existential nightmare of the highest order. Kyle, though, didn’t seem distressed. Despite his memory loss, he explained, he retained an implicit sense of himself as a person. The personality he had before the amnesia—the likes and dislikes, habits, emotional architecture—remained intact. He didn’t know who he was, but he knew who he was. Politically, he was a die-hard liberal. Spiritually, he was a lapsed Catholic. He suspected he had long worn a mustache, and had almost always smoked—“I’m pretty sure I stopped smoking once, about 30 years ago, then I took it up again last year and haven’t been able to shake it.” He abhorred physical contact, and had a deep-seated love of movie theaters, tools, and science fiction novels. Sometimes he’d begin reading one, only to realize he’d already read it.

“I always had a sense of myself,” he said. “You can’t lose that. You’d have to be brain dead or in a coma.”

Did he ever miss his family?

“I’m not sure how I’d miss them, because I don’t remember them,” he said. “I don’t need too many people. I’m not antisocial, but I’m not super social either.”

I asked him if he ever wondered what his old life was like. He winced.

“Everyone asks me ‘What if you did this? What if you did that?’ I don’t do the what-ifs. It’s just a way of driving you nuts. Every once in a while, I’ll get on the internet, two or three days in a row, I’ll start looking at pictures of Denver on Google Maps, the street view. After I while, I get fed up, leave it alone. Just frustrating, I guess.”

I pointed out how strange it would be, if he did figure out who he was, to be told what his life had been like, but not recognize it.

“It would be like reading a book,” he said. “When it happens—if it happens—I don’t think it’s going to be a fun process. I don’t see how it could be anything but difficult. I’ve got two separate lives that have to merge into one. As far as personality-wise, I don’t think they’re going to figure out I’m an ax murderer.”

Figuring out who he was, Kyle said, “would be like reading a book. I don’t think it’s going to be a fun process.”

As we talked, I found myself searching for a sign that Kyle was lying: an unconscious tell of some sort, an indication that would prove his story was a fiction. That, or a clear demonstration of the opposite, some evidence in his affect that would let me conclude he was being sincere. Neither sign appeared. Instead, he offered fulsome answers to all my questions. He never tried to convince me that he was telling the truth. When I expressed doubts about his claims, he didn’t seem to care. He clearly didn’t need me to believe him. After a while, I got the sense that he was humoring me.

The next day, Kyle had the morning off from work, so we visited the local flea market. As he made his way through tables of off-brand perfume, plastic flip-flops, and holographic Jesus prints, the abundance of junk seemed to make him boyishly happy. With the vendors, he drove a hard bargain—“What kind of guarantees do you have on your used batteries?” Two hours later, when we left, he emerged, beaming, with a butter scoop, a tomato corer, a box of aluminum oxide sandpaper, a kitchen strainer, an electric outlet tester, four two-for-a-dollar bottles of cologne, and 15 used DVDs, all for less than $25.

I asked Kyle why he still kept up the search for his real identity.

“The only reason I keep going is Social Security,” he said. He was deep into his sixties, he guessed, and soon he wouldn’t be able to work. His retirement plan was six Lotto tickets a week—all Powerball, no scratch-offs. “Tomorrow, if I won the lottery, managed to get a trust, I’d say the hell with it and stop looking.”

“Wouldn’t you still be curious about your family?”

“Well,” he said, “for one thing, when word gets out that I won the lottery, I think I’d suddenly have a couple hundred new relatives.” He laughed.

John Wikstrom, the documentarian, helped Kyle set up a web site and a Facebook page, which quickly filled up with supportive messages. He also arranged for Kyle to appear on two “Ask Me Anything” interviews on Reddit, which received enough up-votes to land on the site’s popular front page. The online community tried to crowd-source an answer to his identity, but like everyone else, they fell short. Though still anonymous, Kyle had become rather famous.

Kyle was, in many ways, a perfect object of compassion. Even nameless, he retained some of the advantages that society allocates to a white American male. It’s hard to imagine that he would have been trusted to the degree he was, or extended the same aid, if he had been a woman or an immigrant or a person of color. As it was, his absence of a past allowed his supporters to superimpose their own narratives on him. A few years ago, a woman wrote saying that Kyle was her father. To satisfy her, Kyle agreed to take a DNA test; when the paternity test was negative, the woman explained that her dad’s brain had been transplanted into Kyle’s body. I once asked Josh Schrutt why, of all the needy people on TV, he offered a hand to Kyle. He told me that his own father had been murdered when he was just 21. Kyle happened to bear a close physical resemblance to Schrutt’s dad—same age, same build, same hair color.

“Sometimes, I see him from behind and I’m like, wow,” Schrutt told me. “Same guy.”

The unidentified have long been a blank screen on which to project the anxieties of their time. The historian Jean-Yves Le Naour has written about the case of “Anthelme Mangin,” a French soldier who returned from the trenches of World War I with total amnesia. Mangin quickly became the object of a national obsession. After the horror of the Great War, from which 1.5 million Frenchmen did not come home, Mangin was held up as a symbol of all the missing and dead. Most felt pity, but others looked on him with envy, seeing him, Le Naour writes, as “the only truly free man … without past, without memory, without hatred.” Today, in an age of national fracture, it’s perhaps unsurprising that so many people should feel an intense affinity with a wayward American suffering identity issues.

Most of the compassion for Kyle, though, centered around his loss of memories and family—the things he seemed to miss least. The political implications of his situation—namely, his inability to get government assistance—aroused far less concern. Wikstrom’s short film about Kyle, which focused on his struggle to survive without an ID, played at the Tribeca Film Festival and screened out of competition at Cannes. Wikstrom found the contrast in reactions from the two audiences telling.

“At Tribeca, the response was all about how resilient Benjaman was, how strong and amazing he was,” Wikstrom recalled. “The foreign response was all about how screwed up the American system is.” If Kyle seemed uninterested in solving the mystery of his identity, Wikstrom added, it was because he had more immediate concerns. “A lot of people are surprised that he’s not more obsessive, that he’s not this TV character who’s scouring the globe,” Wikstrom said. “But he’s not worried about that. He’s worried about eating.”

After the film came out, Wikstrom started an online petition to get Kyle a new Social Security card. It needed 25,000 signatures to receive a response from the White House. It ended up with less than half.

In February 2015, Colleen Fitzpatrick, the genetic genealogist, told a TV station in Atlanta that she wasn’t sure Kyle actually wanted to figure out who he was. It was the first time she had spoken publicly about the case since Kyle cut off contact with her. “If the mystery is ever solved, I think the story will go away and he won’t get the time and attention from people,” she said. “And he’ll probably have some angry people that devoted a lot of effort to helping him when in the end he’s not a big executive, he’s just a regular person. Or probably just a street person.”

Later, on her web site, Fitzpatrick asked why Kyle’s supporters assumed he was trustworthy, when, really, he could be anyone. While he might indeed be a loving husband and father, he might also be a drug dealer, or a child molester, or a member of the Mafia. “Of all the possibilities,” she wrote, “should we assume the benign without ruling out the sinister?”

A month later, Kyle posted a response on his Facebook page. In it, he claimed that he had stopped speaking to Fitzpatrick because she had denied him access to his own genealogical data, and had refused to share information with other researchers. “For years, I felt that Colleen was exploiting me, the vulnerable nature of my memory loss, my lack of resources, and poverty,” Kyle wrote. “However, I felt helpless to respond. I now have found my voice.”

Fitzpatrick denied the accusation, but Kyle’s supporters posted messages of encouragement to his Facebook wall, applauding his bravery. Among those who came to his defense was CeCe Moore, another genealogist who had volunteered to work on Kyle’s case. I met Moore in the spring of 2015, when I visited her in her big, light-filled house an hour north of San Diego. A bubbly woman with corkscrew blond hair and giant blue eyes, Moore had come to genetic genealogy as a hobby, after a career as an actress and a swimsuit model. The field does not require a deep knowledge of science, but it does require a love of puzzles. Before Moore took up genealogy, she used to have several jigsaw puzzles in various stages of completion throughout her house.

With the aid of volunteers she calls “search angels,” Moore often works on a dozen or so cases at one time. Like Fitzpatrick, Moore looks at genes on the Y chromosome, which travel down with each male generation. But she has also developed an expertise in autosomal DNA, which is inherited equally from both parents. Whereas Y testing shows only a single, outermost branch of the family tree, autosomal DNA fills in branches from all over. Once you have enough branches, you can begin to reverse-engineer a tree.

When Moore was starting out in genealogy, Fitzpatrick had been a colleague. Both women live in Southern California, and they know each other from genealogical conferences. But they had a bitter falling out over Kyle. Moore said she was “shell-shocked” that Fitzpatrick refused to share genealogical information with Kyle—a move she denounced as “unethical.” Fitzpatrick, for her part, was dismissive of Moore’s efforts. “She’s an actress,” Fitzpatrick said. “She’s not comfortable with her own accomplishments, so she has to steal mine.”

Kyle’s case had gone on longer than any case Moore had ever worked on. Several DNA matches seemed to be closely related to a man named Abraham Lovely Powell, who had lived in the nineteenth century. Almost all of Kyle’s ancestors came from northern Europe, Moore concluded, and his paternal grandparents and great-grandparents probably came from the American South. The more she learned, the more confident she grew that she would find the missing puzzle pieces. “It’s only a matter of time,” Moore insisted. “It might be tomorrow or it might be next year or it might be five years, but it’ll happen.”

Before long, no one will be beyond human identification. When that day comes, it will mean the end of anonymity.

Moore was inarguably doing valuable work. But as I drove away, the implications of the technology bothered me. Her enterprise—connecting people with their roots, restoring to them a pedigree from which they had become separated—was always phrased optimistically. Yet, as DNA pools get bigger and the puzzles become easier to solve, we will soon be able to quickly identify anyone, to figure exactly who they are and where they’re from. Before long, it seems, no one will be outside the matrix of human identification. When that day comes, it will mean—more than Bertillonage, more than fingerprints, more than the internet—the end of anonymity.

In May 2015, I returned to Jacksonville to see Kyle. The Crazy Fish restaurant had closed, and Kyle was living with Josh Schrutt. The arrangement didn’t seem to suit either of them. When I arrived, Schrutt was sitting in a La-Z-Boy in his living room, smoking a cigarette and drinking a highball. He leaned forward conspiratorially. “So, you think he’s full of shit?”

When I last saw Schrutt, he hadn’t found any reason to doubt Kyle’s story. Now, though, he seemed to be growing suspicious. “He’s very exact on a lot of stuff, very analytical,” Schrutt explained. “Boy, you ask him a question about building something or electrical or historical, he’s really precise. But when it comes to his own story, he gets … vague.”

While Kyle worked in the front of the house, lowering the basket on his bike, Schrutt and I sat on his lanai. A short, strong, audaciously tan man, Schrutt was now running another business, selling rides on the Intercoastal Waterway in a 40-foot pontoon boat which he claimed to have painted a special color that attracts dolphins. As we spoke, he tipped his cigarette in a half-filled water bottle. He seemed torn about what to do with Kyle now that the restaurant was shuttered.

“I’m wondering what the hell is going to happen. Is he going to have to live with me forever? He’s getting older. His knees are bad. There’s part of me that can’t just say, ‘Look, leave.’ And he’s so strong-willed, if you told him to leave, he’d leave. But he’d be sleeping in the woods again.”

Schrutt dropped his cigarette in the water, staining it yellow. “What do you think?”

I said I didn’t know.

“Neither do I. There’s nothing I can really call him on. He never really defends himself. He walks away. When it comes down to sweaty, hot conversations, he walks away.”

As we spoke, Kyle walked past the porch.

“Benjaman,” Schrutt said. “What’s your story with Katherine? Why’d you leave?”

“She had to take care of her parents,” Kyle said.

“You left amicably?”

“We left amicably.”

“So, she’d say that?”

“I don’t know what she’d say.” Kyle walked away.

“You see?” Schrutt said, flashing me a pregnant glance over his sunglasses. “Sometimes I wonder if he’s smarter than all of us.”

The restaurant’s closing had robbed Kyle of a way to spend his days. His responses to interviewers, once hopeful, had gradually grown more despondent. Once a week, he biked three hours to a food pantry on the other side of Jacksonville. Otherwise, he ate oatmeal, which he mixed with a textured vegetable protein he bought from a health food store downtown. He said that he’d lost 30 pounds in three months.

“Do you fear death more because you’re old and no longer remember having lived a life?” a Redditor asked him during an AMA.

“I am beginning to think that death may well be a friend,” he replied. “Sooner or later, I am going to be unable to work and then what? I have made some tentative plans for that eventuality.”

When I asked him what he meant by that, he shrugged.

“Living at someone else’s sufferance is difficult for me,” he said. “I’ve cooperated with everyone—even if I thought it was bullshit, the psychics and all that—for the simple reason that people wouldn’t be able to say I was faking it. As much as I need money now, I should just claim that I was kidnapped by aliens or brainwashed by the CIA—the money I could make off that.”

We were eating lunch at a Mexican restaurant, where we sat looking into the kitchen. Kyle appraised the setup. “Nice grill,” he said. “Chrome-plated Star Ultra Max.” He frowned. “They’ve got two Continental reach-in fridges. They’re never going to be able to maintain temp with those. The compressor’s just not heavy enough.”

As he talked, I again wondered if it was all a put-on. His memory was detailed enough to seem real, but so vague as to make it impossible to find him. But if he was faking, his motives were elusive. Perhaps he was ambivalent because he was afraid of what he would return to. His current situation was untenable, but some part of him might know that whatever awaits him from his past is worse. What if Kyle’s old life was a hell from which his own brain had, graciously, saved him?

It also struck me that the motivation to return Kyle to his former life might be driven by something deeper and less flattering than simple charity. Today, the old norms are once again shifting. Almost every form of identity—race, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, religion, class—has become a cultural and political battleground. Kyle’s story satisfies a fantasy about belonging, a faith that, somewhere in the world, our proper place awaits us. But it can also feed a desire to send people back to where they came from. How can the existing order be preserved, in a time of societal upheaval, if a man is allowed to become someone else?

A decade on, as Kyle’s story grew stale and the media’s attention receded, the odds of his being identified seemed to dim. It was now possible, even likely, that Kyle would die before his identity was discovered. I didn’t know whether anyone would continue investigating the case when Kyle was dead. After speaking with him for a year and a half, I began, slowly, to make peace with the idea that the puzzle would go unsolved, that his real name would stay a mystery.

Then, one morning last June, I got a call from CeCe Moore. When I answered, she said, “We found him.”

It took me several moments to process this. Even when it dawned on me what she meant, I couldn’t fully take it in. “Oh,” was all I managed. “That’s good.”

Moore was worried. When she had called Kyle and told him the news, he had hung up quickly. Now he wasn’t answering his phone.

“I don’t know how he’s taking it,” she said.

I called Kyle and left a message telling him to let me know he was OK. An hour later, he finally called back. He was breathing hard and his voice had climbed an octave. “I guess I’m in shock,” he said. “I have so many thoughts running through my head, about how I’m going to handle this. I don’t know. I seem to be having a hard time focusing.”

Moore had given Kyle a quick sketch of his life, what little she had been able to find of it in a few hours of Googling. I tried—and failed—to imagine what it would be like to have someone narrate to you the unremembered story of your own existence.

“She says he’s from Indiana,” Kyle said.

“He?” I asked.

“Shit,” Kyle said. “I mean me. He, him, me—I don’t know. After eleven years, I never thought they’d get it.” He laughed a woozy little laugh. “Then I just came out of the blue.”

The final clue surfaced as a result of CeCe Moore’s feud with Colleen Fitzpatrick. A genealogist in South Carolina, a member of the Powell family, had seen a post about the fracas on Facebook and reached out to Moore. She happened to be on her way to a family reunion, where, at Moore’s request, she took several DNA samples from distant cousins. The samples helped Moore fill in several missing branches in Kyle’s genetic family tree.

“I’m so relieved,” he said. I heard his breath catch on the phone. It sounded like he was crying.

That still left a lot of possible Powells. But one of Moore’s volunteers noticed a mistake on the family tree: One of the great-grandsons in the Powell family had been misidentified. When they tracked down the correct relative, it turned out he had died in Indiana. And while most Powells were Protestant, this family was Catholic. Moore finally found a photo in the 1967 yearbook from Jefferson High School, in Lafayette, Indiana, of a teenager who is hidden behind big, black, plastic-rimmed glasses. His crinkle-eyed smile and lantern jaw were unmistakable. His name was William Burgess Powell.

Kyle, it appeared, had been right about almost everything, other than his name. William was the second son of Furman and Marjorie Powell. He had been born in Lafayette, an hour north of Indianapolis. As a child, he had attended Catholic school. His father had died in a boating accident in 1969, his mother from cancer in 1996. And he had three brothers: Furman Jr., Thomas, and Robert. Thomas had died young, but Furman Jr. and Robert were still alive. Robert, the youngest, lived in Florida, while Furman, the oldest, still lived in the family’s house in Lafayette.

It appeared that Kyle had also been wrong about his birthday. Moore hadn’t yet been able to track down a birth certificate, but two genealogy web sites showed a William B. Powell born in 1951, not 1948.

Kyle and I talked several times over the day, as more information about his life came in. He remembered nothing new, but he was clearly excited. He sounded more animated than I’d ever heard him. When I mentioned his birthday, however, he got sad.

“If she says she’s sure I’m William, I believe her,” he said. “But I really can’t believe I wasn’t born on the day I thought I was.”

The next day, Kyle called and told me, triumphantly, that CeCe Moore had been wrong: She had gone deeper into the records, and William Brent Powell was born in 1951. William Burgess Powell was, in fact, born on August 29, 1948.

“I’m so relieved,” Kyle said. “That was one of the things I clung on to, to keep my sanity.” I heard his breath catch on the phone. He was quiet for a while, and it sounded like he was crying. “These little facts that I knew were right.”

The Powell house, in Lafayette, is a sturdy, two-story Queen Anne, built in 1880, that has fallen into spectacular decline. When I knocked on the door last fall, much of the structure was immured in bright green ivy, and the front gable and the porch roof sagged precariously. When Furman came out, he politely refused to let me in—“It’s bad in there,” he said—but invited me to join him at a diner downtown for breakfast.

Furman is a plausible sibling for William. He is smaller and his hair is grayer, but they both have the narrow nose and push-broom mustache, and their voices—the thin timbre, the accent, even the monotone—are uncannily similar. Furman walked with a cane. A training accident in the military had caused him to fracture two vertebrae, which left him in near-constant pain and impaired his memory. His speech was relentlessly discursive but oddly hypnotic. He moved from an account of his military service to the technical details of a navy radar array to a physical description of the Serbian countryside to a difficult double-time march he had once endured, all within the space of about three minutes. It seemed that William, who lacked any long-term memories, would be going home to a brother whose short-term memory was shot.

As the diner filled up with Purdue fans awaiting the Virginia Tech game, Furman—after much interruption and narrative repositioning—began filling me in on the details of the Powell family. His father, Furman Sr., was from Honea Path, South Carolina, and had served as a flight engineer on B-24s in the Second World War. His mother, Marjorie, had been employed by the Navy Air Corps as a photographer. They had met when both were stationed in Boise, Ohio, and decided to move to Lafayette, where she had family.

The Powell household had been fractious and frightening. Marjorie’s mother had a hoarding problem, filling closets with unworn clothes and porcelain angels. Furman Sr. was a quiet, angry man who drank a lot. He seldom spoke of his military service, but Furman Jr. suspected that today he would be diagnosed with ptsd. Beginning in early adolescence, William—his mother’s favorite—became the target of his father’s wrath. Furman declined to describe the specifics of the abuse, other than to say that it was regular and brutal. “Let the dead bury the dead,” he told me. It seemed possible, though, that such sustained abuse—one traumatized person visiting trauma on another—could have primed William for dissociative amnesia. When William turned 16, he left home to live with another family across town.

For several years, William held odd jobs in Lafayette—janitor at a strip club, loader in the warehouse of a factory, handyman at a movie theater. In 1973, when he was 25, he moved into a mobile home a few miles north of Lafayette, on property owned by a family named Richardson. Powell ate dinner with the family every night, but otherwise he spent most of his time alone, reading and listening to music. When he first arrived, he’d been worried that he was too tall for the mobile home, so he took the roof off, with the intention of raising it. He framed up the sides, but never finished the project.

Then, in 1976, Powell disappeared. After he missed dinner one night, one of the Richardson children checked his trailer. In it, he found all of Powell’s things—stereo, tools, books—but not Powell. A few days later, Powell’s car, a red ’66 Rambler station wagon, was discovered abandoned several miles upriver, near the Oakdale Dam. Powell’s family feared the worst. Furman filed a missing persons report with the state police.

The police, however, quickly located Powell. He was living in Boulder, Colorado, working as a cook at a family restaurant called Azar’s. (Azar’s was the restaurant Powell had remembered as having bad service. He was a bit disappointed to learn he’d been a cook there. “That food wasn’t very good,” he told me.) Puzzled, Furman sent him letters, but William never responded. For years, no one heard from him.

Their mother, Furman said, never got over the loss of her favorite son. After she died, in 1996, Furman and Robert settled her estate, and Furman asked a friend in Army intelligence to run a background check on his brother, to see if he could be contacted. To his surprise, there appeared to be no record of William Powell—no phone number, no address, no mortgage. It was as if he had never existed. When Furman had last seen William, he had been a heavy smoker and a heavy drinker. Furman slowly resigned himself to the idea that his brother was dead.

