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"He blames Iran for many of his problems," Dr. Philippe Bargain, chief medical officer for the airport told one newspaper in 1999. "We have to convince him to sign his legal papers with his original name. It is a ridiculous situation." It's not only ridiculous but scandalous, says airport chaplain Père Fournier, who calls Nasseri a "bel escroc" (a pretty swindler). Fournier believes he "not only has his passport, but he has plenty of money…from the films and from what people give him." Dr. Bargain, who sees Alfred more often than the other principals in the saga, finds him a pleasant man, but admits, "He is a bit mad… He has all the papers he needs, but he won't leave."
"There's nothing I can do for him anymore," adds Bourget, who hasn't seen him in more than two years. "Now he cannot face the possibility of leaving because he has a nest there. And he feels that if he goes out he will not be a media star anymore. His story is finished." While the French police have no legal right to remove him, they probably wouldn't risk even a diplomatic effort to get him to go. "They don't want to try anything because immediately dozens of reporters would be there to tell the story," says Bourget.
So Alfred sits and waits for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. But when I called their Paris office to get an update on his case, I was told, "It's pure folly," by a spokesperson. "No, we are not trying to locate his mother and father and give him his identity." While the UNHCR does work in the airports, largely in the zone d'attente helping foreign nationals seeking asylum, Alfred has all the papers he needs. There are no other papers for him. The refugee no longer needs asylum.
The airport is a city of speed, maximizing the commodification of modern life: ATMs, fast-food restaurants, people-movers, hotel services, rent-a-car desks, rental carts for moving your life's belongings, all com-pressed in an environment dedicated to getting you in and out as fast as possible. There is little "present tense" in the airport— few dawdle there for their own pleasure, although in-flight magazines would have you believe otherwise with their promotions of duty-free shopping and upscale first class lounges. Gilded with promising ads of blue skies, white beaches and filled with roaming armed police, airports are the ideal places to live out the future if you had no home and wanted people to come to you.
Alfred lived within throwing distance of the McDonald's for most of the booming 1990s. He celebrated Christmas and the new mil-lennium at the little round table he's acquired and positioned at the center of his universe of carts and objects. He doesn't speak French and says he does not dream. He has no friends and little contact with the airport employees although everyone knows him. Certainly Alfred is an observer of change as well as stasis, although what it means to him is a mystery. He regards the world through daily newspapers (his sub-scription to Time magazine was stopped by the airport post office a few years ago). But he has also observed the world change around him—the McDonald's used to be a Burger King; the CD vendor moved into the push-scooter market.
To keep himself occupied, Alfred keeps a longhand journal that details whom he has met and things he remembers about his case. "Some points each day," he says. But he doesn't have a mobile phone and it isn't clear he'd know how to use one; he's never seen the Internet although he knows he can be found on it (he showed me an article on him printed out from the New York Times web site). Alfred does, however, know how to survive, and without paying rent or taxes.
But maybe the slim balding man with the trim mustache has found his place after all—as a celebrity homeless person. Indeed, Alfred, whose closest "neighbors" are a photo booth and a copy machine, is eerily Warholian. And this in effect might explain why, even after receiving in 1999 a special European travel visa (which permits him to voyage and live anywhere in Europe, even the US), he refuses to leave. If he did leave, it would mean tacit acceptance of an identity.
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