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, he seemed to have 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 e-mails 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 name 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 shimmer of froid he emanated, I, along with an entire nation, had been immediately drawn to him. Not to the man by the piano, but the one we'd met five years earlier. While connecting through Toronto on a business trip in June of 2001, I fanned open that day's Globe and Mail and there, occupying the upper fold of page three, 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 a little beaten down, 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 mumbled 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?