Lost in New York

[Batgirl]

By Olga Craig
(Filed: 23/10/2005)

Doug Bruce leans forward, engrossed in the flickering images on the video screen on the desk before him. He nibbles his fingernails, his eyes following the film in which three figures are waving and smiling: all young men in their twenties, larking around as they run towards the camera.

"That's you," the young woman by his side tells him, pointing to one of the men on the video before turning to scan Bruce's face for any semblance of recognition. Bruce continues to gaze at the screen, his expression a mixture of concentration and wonder. "Oh, wow," is all he says. "Can I see it again?"

Later, in reflective mood, he says: "It makes me feel sad, it's like watching an old film and seeing something you like about it and wishing you lived at that time. It's odd, because I am there in the picture but I don't feel any connection to that character and I don't know anyone else in it."

Bruce, wealthy and handsome, is a highly articulate and intelligent 37-year-old Briton who has lived in New York on-and-off for two decades. The video he is watching is of him and his closest friends taken some years before - a time he no longer recalls. It was filmed before Bruce woke up one day on a Subway train in the city without a single memory.

His story is both bizarre and extraordinary. It is also, for some, difficult to believe. On July 2, 2003, Bruce, then 35, found himself on a train bound for Coney Island. He did not know who he was, he did not know where he lived, he did not know where he was going and he did not know where he had come from. "I was scared," he says. "I had no bearings. I did not know anything. It was frightening, it was like being in the darkness." Bruce had bumps on his skull and a throbbing headache but, otherwise, no physical injuries.

He had suffered an almost total memory loss. When he was admitted to hospital, a nurse, Lily Frost, with no idea of his identity, taped a white band to his wrist on which she wrote: "Unknown white male." Bruce had entered what neurologists diagnosed as a fugue state, in which he had no knowledge of his life up until that moment.

Since then, despite a battery of medical tests at Coney Island Hospital, his memory has not returned. He has had to be "reintroduced" to his family and friends, people who seemed to him like strangers. He has tasted chocolate mousse and strawberries for what he believes is the first time. He has seen snow fall, witnessed a sunset, watched fireworks explode and cheered at cricket "for the first time". Life, for Bruce, has become a blank canvas.

While medical experts say his condition is rare, it is not unknown. What makes Bruce's story unique, however, is that much of it has been captured on film. A student of photography before his memory loss, Bruce began a video diary six days after he woke up on the train. When the film director Rupert Murray, a close friend from Bruce's former life, heard of his plight he suggested making a feature documentary using the diary footage, older home video films and interviewing Bruce's "first" meetings with family and friends. The resulting documentary, Unknown White Male, is a fascinating, at times emotional and uncomfortable, journey in which Bruce rediscovers his old life and faces decisions about which elements to embrace and which to jettison.

The film, which had its British premiere last week and will open here next year, is a story of Bruce's mixed desire to recapture his past coupled with his fears and apprehensions about not just what he might find, but how to incorporate his past life into the new one he has forged since the summer of 2003.

When Bruce "awoke" on board the train, dressed in flip-flops, a T-shirt and shorts, and carrying a backpack, he headed for a police station. He had, he says, nowhere else to go. At the 60th precinct of the New York Police Department, Lt Pete Pena was dumbfounded. Bruce was not the customary type of itinerant, usually drunk or high on drugs, who wandered in claiming to have suffered amnesia. "In his backpack was some medicine, a Latin American phrase book, some keys and a map of New York," says Lt Pena. "We'd never had anything like this before."

Inside the phrase book, officers found a pink slip of paper on which was written a telephone number of a woman called Eva. When the police description of Bruce meant nothing to her, Bruce was sent to the emergency room of the hospital. Blood tests showed no trace of drugs or alcohol, the medicine in his pack was for a dog and the only unusual finding on his scans was a small tumour on his pituitary gland. With nothing else to go on, Bruce was transferred to the psychiatric ward.

When Bruce arrived he was asked to sign a form to acknowledge his meagre belongings, which were stored in a locker. "The moment I picked up a pen, I said: 'I am somebody, I have a signature," Bruce recalls in his video diary. It was a scrawl but he could make out the initial letters D and B. Up until then the staff, at a loss as to what to call him, had named him Johnny. That and "unknown white male" was all he had to go on.

Doctors were baffled by his condition. It was, says Dr Daniel Schacter, a psychologist, "the rarest of all kinds of amnesias". His colleague at the hospital, Dr Leonid Vorobyev, concluded that he had never seen such profound memory loss other than "in the movies or in textbooks".

In desperation, Bruce tried the telephone number found in his backpack, speaking to Eva herself. Eva, it transpired, was the mother of Nadine, a young woman Bruce had dated. "This young man kept saying he was so scared," she recalls in the documentary. "I knew I had heard his voice before, but not who he was." She asked her daughter to call Bruce. When Nadine heard his voice, she recognised it immediately. "I said: 'Is that you, Doug?' and he said: 'I don't know'."

It was to be the first of many frightening and disorientating moments for Bruce. "All I could cling to was that this person had identified me and was coming. There had been nothing to connect me to the outside world." His relief was profound. "I can't describe that sense of relief, that sense of belonging," he recalls.

The following days were revelatory. Bruce had been a wealthy stockbroker who had retired at 30 and was two years into a photography course. He owned a smart loft apartment on Manhattan's East Side and had lived with a woman called Magda for eight years before having a brief courtship with Nadine, which had also ended.

One of Bruce's first questions was, perhaps, the toughest. Where was his mother, he wanted to know. She had died from cancer some years before in Paris. Bruce had been with her at the end of her life. He did, Nadine told him, have a father, Ivan, who lived in Spain, and two sisters, Marina and Christina.

A meeting was arranged, which Bruce filmed. "When he came out at the airport I thought, do we hug him or is that an invasion of his personal space?" Marina recalls.

As the siblings greet Ivan, Bruce's father, stands awkwardly in the background. He later confides: "There I was, playing the loving father and he looked at me with his usual big grin and said: 'Well, it's nice to meet you'." It was, Ivan confesses, "one of the few times in my life when I was frightened". His son, he discovered, had changed in subtle ways. "He had always been an outgoing character, fairly sure of himself. But now he had become reflective." Marina, too, finds Bruce more open. "He shows his emotions. He has lost a little of his spark, maybe his edge, but he is more relaxed."

When Bruce meets his other sister, Christina, she expresses surprise that he is not more curious about their past life. He was, she tells Bruce, very close to their mother and her death was very difficult for him.

Though the meetings are stilted initially, the siblings bond and it is clear from the film that Bruce is deeply affected by the talk of his mother. On his return to New York, he reflects: "It's possible there was a traumatic experience in my past life and I didn't deal with it, blocked it out. I am apprehensive that I will remember things that are worrying or traumatic, things I don't know are out there."

It is when Bruce returns to England, where he grew up, that his discomfort with uncovering the past is perhaps most obvious. In a London pub, having visited Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street ("Who lives there?", he asks his friend) he is met by Pete, Charlie and Jim, his oldest friends. For all, it is a salutary experience. At first, conversation is stilted but, slowly, the men begin to bond. Afterwards, clearly emotional, Bruce records: "I was moved. I could see they loved me a lot. I like them, they are good people." He acknowledges, however, that the old friendship has been lost and a new one must be established.

"After the amnesia I felt more comfortable with people who did not know me," he confides. "It was the idea that someone expects me to be the person they knew. But for me, it is a new start. The longer it goes on, the less I care if it comes back."

Just over a year after his memory loss the small swelling on Bruce's pituitary gland that doctors had noticed on his admission to hospital, burst. It could, doctors believe, have something to do with his amnesia but it is not a common reason for such extensive memory loss.

In April this year, in his final video diary for the film, Bruce, who now lives with a new girlfriend, Narelle, is pragmatic about his condition. Doctors have told him that there is a 95 per cent chance his memory will return, but they cannot say when. His deepest regret, he says, is that he cannot remember his mother.

For Narelle, her partner's past, which he cannot remember and she has never known, can be unsettling. "I hope he gets his memory back," she says. "But it is a bit scary to think about. Will he be the same person? Will he still love me?"

Telegraph