After the Apocalypse

THE LOST BOY: A REPORTER AT LARGE

On June 13, 2014, Simon Weiss came into the mechanic’s shop where he worked in Brookneal, Virginia. He was a quiet kid in Carhartts overalls. He had started working at Brookneal Goodyear two years before, at sixteen. He was enrolled at the vocational school and living with a foster family. His auto mechanics teacher had found him the job after school. In the aftermath of the Baltimore attack, Brookneal had taken in more than its share of Baltimore homeless. Jim Dwyer, who owns Brookneal Goodyear, said that some of those people were problems. “A lot of those people were not used to working for a living,” Dwyer says. “They expected to go on in Brookneal pretty much the way they had in Baltimore. I guess a lot of them had drug problems and such.” But not Simon. He never missed work. He was always on time. Dwyer thought that work was the place Simon felt most comfortable. On Saturdays while he was still in high school, Simon arrived early in his lovingly maintained ’08 Honda Civic. He made coffee and read the funnies while waiting for everyone else to arrive. He looked up to Dwyer and had asked Dwyer advice about a girl. The girl hadn’t lasted. His foster parents were, in Dwyer’s words, “decent people” but they had two other foster kids, one of whom had leukemia from the effects of the dirty bomb.

On this hot summer Friday morning, two weeks after Simon’s graduation from high school, a couple came in at about 9:30 and asked to see Simon. There was something about them that made Dwyer watch closely when Simon came in from the back where he was doing an oil change. “When he came through that door,” Dwyer said, “his expression never changed. He thought it was something about a car, someone complaining or asking a question or something, you could tell. He had a kind of polite expression on his face. But there wasn’t a flash of recognition or anything. There was nothing.”

When the woman saw him, she started sobbing. She called him William. He looked at Dwyer and then at her and said, “Okay.” She was his mother, and she had been looking for him for five years.

“Why didn’t you try to find us?” she asked.

“I don’t remember,” Simon said. And then he walked back into the garage, to the Lexus he was doing the oil change on. Dwyer followed him back. Simon did not respond when Dwyer spoke to him. He stood there for a moment, and then he started to cry. “I’m crazy,” he told Dwyer.

When I met Simon, I asked him what he wanted me to call him. He shrugged and said most people called him Simon.

“Is that your name, now?” I asked.

“I guess,” he said.

He was tired of talking about himself, he said. Tired of talking about his family and Baltimore. He was a quiet, passive kid, dressed in an oversized shirt. He answered my questions but didn’t volunteer anything. We were meeting in a park, sitting at a picnic table. His car, a gold Civic, was parked not far away. It was impeccably maintained and had a handsome set of aftermarket wheels and some “mods.” I admired it and said that I had a Civic in the ’90s.

Simon murmered something polite.

I said it was the first car I ever bought with my own money. I lived in New York, I explained, and didn’t own a car until I was thirty. But I had moved, and I loved that car.

He looked at me, nodding. I said I liked his wheels, which was true. They were in keeping with the car, not too flashy, I said.

In minutes I had learned the history of the car. Hands waving, he talked about how he saved for the wheels. We talked about the joys of spending a couple of hours really cleaning a car and the relative merits of different ways to clean interiors. I had assumed that the diffident young man was Simon. That this was the affect of someone with a problem. Instead, what I had found was a shy but normal boy who was not comfortable talking to a journalist. I am accustomed to people being wary of being interviewed, but I had forgotten that with Simon.

I had done research on memory loss like Simon’s. It’s called Dissociative fugue. Like most psychological diagnosis, it probably says as much about our culture as it does about Simon. I had expected someone in a mental fog and had projected that onto him.

Amnesia is a relatively common phenomenon, but mostly it’s transient. Anyone who has ever been in a car wreck and can’t remember the moment of the accident has experienced amnesia. But contrary to its popularity in movies and television, it is rare for a person to forget who they are.

Dissociative fugue is a condition where a person leaves home for hours, sometimes months. They have no memory of who they are and sometimes adopts another identity.

Two months after the Reverend Ansel Bourne disappeared from his home in Providence in January 1887, his nephew got a telegram telling him that a man in Norristown, PA, was acting strangely and claiming to be Ansel Bourne. Six weeks before, a man calling himself A. Brown had opened a fruit and candy store. He was normal, rather quiet. He cooked his meals in the back of his shop. One day Ansel Bourne “woke up” and found himself in a strange town. He had no memory of A. Brown and no idea where he was.

William James hypnotized Ansel Bourne and was able to call forth “A. Brown.” A. Brown had never heard of Ansel Bourne. He complained that he felt “hedged in at both ends” because he could remember nothing before opening his shop and nothing from the time Ansel Bourne had woken up. Why had he come to Norristown? He said “there was trouble back there” and “he wanted rest.”

Ansel Bourne’s case perfectly fit the psychoanalytic category of hysteria, a diagnosis that was prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century but which has largely disappeared. He was a very intellectual man with high standards for behavior, who had disassociated himself from a life that exhausted him and picked up a different life. Bourne, it was said, had a strong aversion to trade. The personality of Brown was a shrunken version of Bourne.

Today we can surmise that starting a store from scratch, traveling to Philadelphia to establish suppliers, joining a new community, and learning a new town may not be ‘simpler’ than the intellectual life of a well-off, comfortable reverend. Like my assumptions about Simon, William James’s analysis of Ansel Bourne includes unexamined assumptions about class and personality.

Simon took me for a ride in his Civic (which was far better maintained than mine ever had been). He was a good driver. He was interested in autocross and was saving money to take a class. I’m no judge of drivers, but I would say he had a natural feel for driving. While we were driving around the park, I asked him if he felt as if William was a different person.

“No,” he said. “I’m William, too.”

“Does it make you feel odd to be called William?” I asked.

He nodded, concentrating as he took a turn. “If people are calling me William, then Brookneal feels, you know, kind of not real. But if people are calling me Simon, then I can not worry about that.”

“Do you ever think about Pikesville?” I asked.

“I don’t like to,” he said. And then the conversation turned back to cars.

Dissociative fugue is most common after some sort of trauma. It is mostly likely to occur after combat or natural disaster. It is assumed that the events in Baltimore triggered William/Simon’s fugue. It is just not known exactly what happened to him. Or why, unlike most people, after a few hours or a few days, or, at most, a few weeks, he didn’t tell someone his real name or seek his family out.

Luz Anitas Weil, William’s mother, was at work when two dirty bombs exploded in Baltimore. A divorced mother of three, she lived in Pikesville, a suburb north and west of Baltimore. The Weils were not the typical Pikesville family. Hispanics make up about one percent of the student population. They’re outnumbered by whites, blacks, and Asians. Luz had hung on in Pikesville after her divorce because she thought that her kids would get a better education there. More important, she thought they would grow up thinking middle class. Luz grew up in Belton, Texas. Her father runs a landscaping company. She met Nick Weil when he was stationed at Fort Hood. They were engaged in six weeks, married in nine months. Luz says, “We partied pretty hard. I was a wild child. We drank too much. We had big fights. I gave as good as I got.” After two and a half more years, Nick Weil was discharged and they returned to Maryland. Soon after, Luz got pregnant and had William. She shrugs. “After William was born, I stopped partying. I stopped drinking. Nick didn’t. That’s when I realized his hitting me, that wasn’t us fighting, that was abuse.” They tried going to counseling. A second boy, Robert, was born two years after William. After that, they were separated for two years and got back together instead of divorcing, and seven years after William, Inez was born. But by then Luz says she knew it was over, and they were divorced soon after.

She got a job working in the kitchen at the Woodholme Country Club. Fancy dinners for fancy people. It was the first place in Maryland where she was around people speaking Spanish. Like a lot of restaurants and kitchens, most of the help was from Central America. But they were men and they didn’t have much patience with a Texas-born Latina. “Every day I had to prove myself again,” Luz said. Which she did, moving up until she was catering. “You know, thirty-thousand-dollar weddings, where everything has to be just right.” She liked the work, except for the hours, which, she felt, kept her away from her kids too much. When someone came into the kitchen that Friday afternoon and said, “There’s been a bomb,” she says she didn’t understand. “I thought they meant that there had been a bomb at Woodholme. The first thing I thought was that I didn’t hear anything, you know? I thought it couldn’t be that big a deal.” Normally, William, then 13, would have been home with his brother and sister—Robert, 11 and Inez, 6. William was the oldest and had just that year turned old enough to babysit. Child care was expensive, and having a child old enough to watch the other two was making a huge difference. But William was at the Maryland Science Museum in the IMAX Theater with his seventh-grade class. They were watching Andean Condors, Lords of the High Reaches when the first bomb exploded across the harbor in Patterson Park. The wind from the northwest pushed the plume south and east across Dundalk, away from Harborplace and the museums.

William’s classmates say he was there at the IMAX, but no one knows what happened next. William says he doesn’t remember. For the famous fifty-one minutes when no one knew the bomb was a dirty bomb and that radioactive materials were being dispersed in the plume, William’s class continued to enjoy the museum. Several boys got in trouble for getting each other wet with an exhibit and then a drinking fountain. The first indication that there was any trouble was when the museum announced that they would be closing. It was 2:35. Cell phones started ringing with parents checking on their children. At 2:42, the second bomb exploded near the Baltimore Washington International Airport. By the time the buses were rolling for Pikesville, roads were already congested.

William wasn’t on his bus.

No one knows what happened or how he got separated. Teachers did counts and called attendance, but it was pretty chaotic. Kids were on cell phones and not paying attention. Children were crying. Teachers were trying to check on their own families. The cell phone system was completely overloaded, and people couldn’t get anything beyond the “circuits are busy” message. Luz was trying to call William and getting no answer.

Luz was at the school with Robert and Inez in the car when the buses got to Pikesville Middle School. The car was packed with clothes, photo albums, and the cat, Splinter. Luz says she waited with growing dread as the buses emptied and left, one by one. When William didn’t get off with his classmates, she told herself he was on another bus. But eventually, all the busses were emptied. She went and found the assistant principal and told him that William hadn’t gotten off. The assistant principal assumed that she had just missed him in the crowd, and they searched inside the school.

But he had children, and he was desperate to get home and maybe get them out of the city. Luz tried to drive downtown and was turned back by police. “I told them that I had to find my boy,” she says, and the tears well up. “They told me that I couldn’t go any farther, that the city was contaminated. They said people were helping anyone left behind.” She tried to insist, but a policeman finally said to her that she had more than one child to think about, and did she want to expose the other two?

She turned the car around and drove north, joining the slow crawl of vehicles out of Baltimore. Her plan was to find a safe place for the other two kids and then turn back. She ran out of gas in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. A passing motorist stopped and called police for advice, and she and the two children were taken to a school gymnasium that had been turned into a shelter. There, a volunteer (a member of the VFW) passed a Geiger counter over her and the two children, gave them sheets and blankets, and directed them toward cots. It was two more days before she could find someone to give her a ride to a gas station and then back to her car. She drove back to Baltimore but was again turned away, this time with instructions to contact the Red Cross. She did contact the Red Cross, but they had no mention of William. For the next week she made the hour-and-a-half trip to Baltimore every day, only to be turned away.

Finally, there was simply no more money for gas.

There is something compelling about the idea of someone who has lost their memory. It taps into an almost universal desire to wipe the slate clean, to start over. In fiction and in film, it is often a chance for a person to redeem themselves.

Doug Bruce walked into a Coney Island police station on July 3, 2003, and said that he didn’t know who he was or where he lived. He had woken up on the subway without wallet or identification. He could speak, he had skills—since he knew how to swim before he lost his memory, he still knew how. But he could not remember ever having seen the ocean. He couldn’t remember family or friends. Police found a phone number in a knapsack that Bruce was wearing, and a friend came and picked him up. He was a stockbroker with a loft, cockatoos, and a dog. He became a cause célèbre, in no small part because he was so charmed by the world. Everything was new. It was his first rain, his first snow, his first exposure to the Rolling Stones, his first shop window. Friends said that before he lost his memory, he was somewhat arrogant, and that afterward he was much more … delightful.

He has never had MRIs, which would go a long way toward verifying whether or not he has amnesia (recall of memories cause certain kinds of visible brain activity), and there is considerable doubt as to whether or not he is lying. Complete retrograde amnesia, the kind of amnesia Doug Bruce claims to have, is extraordinarily rare. It rarely persists for more than a few months. In 2005, Bruce was the subject of a documentary called Unknown White Male. After it was released, he stopped giving interviews.

A boy with no identification but who said his name was Simon Weiss was found on the streets of downtown Baltimore five days after the bombs exploded. He was hungry and mildly dehydrated, but he had obviously eaten and drunk during the five days. He was brought to a Red Cross relief center, where his name was entered in a data bank for missing persons. When he was asked where his family was, he said he didn’t know. He was asked his mother’s name and said he didn’t know. Area hospitals were still overwhelmed with people who had been, or thought they had been, exposed to radioactive waste from the bombs. His file was marked for follow-up with a psychologist and he was transported to the refugee center outside Richmond, Virginia.

A number of refugees were moved to the Virginia National Guard station at Fort Pickett and put in barracks-style housing. The boy who called himself Simon was there for five months.

“Yeah, I remember it,” he said. “It wasn’t so bad. Boring. I watched a lot of television. I had never seen Lost, so I watched the whole thing from beginning to end in reruns. They were showing two episodes a day from 9:00 to 11:00. I remember that. And then one night I saw the Simpsons where they did the last episode about Lost, where they all get rescued, and they mixed Gilligan’s Island in with it, and Homer Simpson was the old guy, the Skipper.” His face crinkled with laughter. He was animated. He was present in the memory. Asked about what he remembered from before Fort Pickett, he described the Red Cross worker who asked him questions—a somewhat scary lady with gray hair, he said. Asked about before that and his face changed, went oddly slack.

“Do you remember going to school in Pikesville?”

“Yeah,” he said. Pressed for what he remembers. he said, “The monkey bars.” He shrugged. Looked away.

Eventually, when no one came forward to claim him, Simon Weiss was placed in the foster-care system and ended up with a family in Brookneal. (The family did not want to be identified in this article.)

Jim Dwyer, the mechanic whom the boy eventually came to work for, believes that there is a reason that he doesn’t remember. “I don’t know exactly what happened,” Dwyer says, “but something obviously wasn’t right with the family.” He won’t be pinned down, but the implication is he suspects abuse or at least neglect. He believes that the boy separated mentally and emotionally.

Luz, Robert (now 16), and Inez (now 11) deny that there was abuse. “We were never abused,” Robert says. “I don’t know who said that, but it’s not true.”

Robert is a soft-spoken boy who remembers William as “a great kid. A great older brother.” He remembers that William was the one whom their mother left in charge sometimes, but until that last year, he says, they always had a babysitter. Inez has memories, but they are more vague. What she remembers better is the home after Baltimore. “We were always hearing about William,” she says. “About where he might be. Mom was always calling someone because of something on the internet or on television.”

No one but Luz and the children believed that William was alive. There are about a hundred people who have never been accounted for, and it was assumed that William had either been killed during the bombing or had died in the day after. Luz moved them back to Pikesville as soon as they were able, in case William was looking for them. In the year before the Woodholme Country Club took her back, she worked a series of jobs. The kids remember going to a school that was mostly empty, so few people came back. There is no doubt that William’s disappearance affected the family both financially and emotionally. Robert had nightmares, and Inez wet the bed. Both were afraid that things were contaminated. Inez got food poisoning from a hot dog and refused to eat for days. Even now, she is in therapy once a week because she is afraid to eat.

Luz was haunted by the fear that William had been exposed to radiation and was sick. The amount of radiation in the bombs was small, and it dispersed in plumes that trailed south and east, nowhere near Pikesville. She obsessively tracked down as much information as she could about the dispersal of the contaminants. She knew that William’s school trip should not have exposed him (and it didn’t), but she wondered if he had left the museum for some reason. She couldn’t understand, if he wasn’t sick, why he hadn’t shown up on a list of displaced persons, somewhere.

But she couldn’t give up. Finally, a relief worker found a list of children who had been placed in foster homes and gave Luz the number of the social worker who had Simon’s case. The social worker wasn’t sure that Simon and William were the same person, but she gave Luz the phone number of the foster parents. That was on Friday. I asked Luz if she called right away.

“I couldn’t,” she admits. “I started thinking, ‘Why didn’t he call us? What’s wrong?’ I thought that it couldn’t be him. I thought a thousand things. I thought he was angry because I hadn’t come and gotten him.” The next morning she put the kids in the car, and they drove to Brookneal where she rang the doorbell of the foster parents. They sent her to Simon’s job.

“I did it all wrong,” she says. “I should have called him. I didn’t know about the memory thing. I thought maybe something had happened to him, that he had been hurt or abused or … I didn’t know.”

But she had to make the trip. Had to see him. She didn’t know what she would do if it was William and he didn’t want to see them. “When we in Pennsylvania and I kept driving back, trying to get into Baltimore to look for him, every time I got to a barricade and they turned me around, I felt as if William thought I was abandoning him. I wasn’t going to abandon him. I promised him every night, lying in bed, I would not give up. I would find him.” She looks fierce. “And I did.”

Finally in therapy, Simon/William was unable to talk much about either his life in Brookneal or his life in Pikesville. In the presence of his family, he became almost mute. It was too much. Something triggered the creation of Simon, but Stein Testchloff, an authority on Dissociative disorder at Cornell University Medical, says it didn’t have to be either abuse or some terrible event in Baltimore—or, at least, nothing more terrible than getting separated from his class. It appears that some people are predisposed to disassociation. “When someone goes missing for weeks,” he explains, “it usually turns out that they have experienced fugue states before, usually for only a couple of hours.” Luz says that as far as she knows, William never forgot who he was and left home, but as Testchloff points out, William was young and may not have had a fugue experience before. But if he did have a predisposition toward fugue, then the fear and chaos of his experience in Baltimore could certainly have brought it on.

Usually the treatment for someone with dissociative fugue is to bring them out of the fugue state, but William Weir/Simon Weiss doesn’t appear to be in a fugue. Testchloff says appearance can be deceiving. “We think of this as a dramatic thing, a kind of on/off switch. He was William, now he is Simon. But the brain can be much more fuzzy. I think after he’s spent five years of living as Simon Weiss, it is going to be very difficult for him to bring those two histories together.”

Testchloff feels that what has happened to William is close to Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID), which used to be called Multiple Personality. He is reluctant to make that statement, because there is so much misinformation about DID. “Everybody thinks Sybil,” he says. But there is a lot of doubt about Sybil, and, again, everyone assumes it is like the movies—that the separate personalities don’t leak over into each other—when in many cases, some personalities know all about other personalities, and there can be a kind of fluidity in which personalities merge and break apart. Again, popular literature and movies have given an impression that is perhaps less complicated than reality. Testchloff has not seen William and has only reviewed his chart (with the permission of William, his therapist, and his family). He says it seems that Simon now has memories of growing up in Pikesville, but there is some sense in which he has assigned all that to William and holds it at arm’s length.

When asked what he wants, Simon says he wants to keep working for Jim Dwyer. Does he want to continue to see his family?

He does, although he expresses no enthusiasm.

What does he think of his family?

He looks shy. “They’re nice,” he says, almost too soft to hear. “I like them okay.” Then, after a moment, “I always wished I would have a family.”

(Shortly after this piece was written, Simon disappeared for seventy-two hours. He called Jim Dwyer from Norfolk, Virginia, saying he didn’t know how he had gotten there. Dwyer drove to Norfolk and picked him up. Luz and Robert and Inez are still living in Pikesville, but they see William almost every weekend. He has plans to spend Thanksgiving with them.)