in what might be england’s greatest unsolved mystery since the glory days of holmes and watson, an unidentified man has turned up in the county of kent, washed up on an isolated city beach, dressed in a full suit and matching tie, soaked clear through to the bone, and he hasn’t spoken a single word since his “discovery” almost 6 weeks ago.
what little we actually know about him comes from a series of fairly detailed sketches, first used to help determine if kent’s newest visitor could communicate at all, then encouraged after social workers saw what he was drawning. on the small notepad, in surprisingly fine detail, he had reproduced several impressive pictures of a grand piano, and a flag that observers said most closely resembled the colours of nearby sweden.
to add even more substance to this amazing social drama, when orderlies brought the mystery man before a piano in the medway maritime hospital’s tiny christian chapel, he began to play some of the most exquisite classical music that anyone in the room had ever heard. what’s more,in the days and weeks that followed, he began to write out his own musical masterpieces, since confirmed by experts as authentic classical fare.
which begs a few obvious questions: who the hell is this guy?? and how did he manage to turn up in kent, in a suit, soaking wet, on a beach, without speaking a single word? and how on earth can he play the piano so well?!
the answers, however, might not be so obvious. speculation and conjecture are running wild in kentian circles these days, and imagining all of the many possibilities has become a near-obsession within the national press. some have suggested (with no tangible proof, of course) that he was an “itinerant french busker”. others have come forward after seeing his picture in the news and insisted that the man is an autistic savant from the middlesex area, who once performed as a concert pianist in germany.
still others have pointed to recent news of a swedish student who went missing in australia after joining a strange “cult”. one portuguese reader of the times wrote in to the national daily insisting that piano man was “the spitting image of a shy bulgarian he picked up hitchhiking last december, a man who annoyed the patrons at a bar he took him to by playing the piano while the television was showing a uefa cup tie between benfica and estugarda. he pulled up his chair and began to play – lizst, then mozart, then a rhapsody of tunes from aznavour, brel, elton john, armstrong and gershwin, until the waiter brought along a jug of wine and a glass.”
despite all of the many sensational possibilities, one somber reality exists: there’s a good chance this young celebrity is actually the victim of what psychologists now call “asperger syndrome“. a rare neurological disease most often linked to autism, it was originally named after the viennese physician who first catalogued its atypical behavioural expression in a study of several young children during the 1940s. specifically, it describes individuals with high intellectual capacities but diminished social capacities (including trouble using basic forms of communication).
piano man fits the bill on both counts, and that makes tracking down his past increasingly more difficult. not only is he unable to interact socially within his environment, the disorder also calls into question why he may have left his past behind in the first place. was there some acute emotional trauma that encouraged the disease’s expression in his otherwise neurotypical state? did this “diminished social capacity” drive him away from his home and off into world, in search of answers to the questions of his unique and truly mystifying mental state?
moreover, if piano man really does suffer from asperger syndrome, is there not even a single person from his past that remembers him, or misses him, or is searching desperately to find him? and if so, in this age of almost boundless digital “search and rescue” (a.k.a. “the internet”), is he really all that hard to find? and even then, does he really want to be found?
regardless of the outcome, there’s no disputing piano man’s obvious social appeal. papers everywhere have had a field day with the story, and the public has rallied around the cause with an almost startling intensity. people everywhere are looking for clues to solve the mystery of this quiet musical savant, embracing his novelty and sharing in his quest to find out more about himself.
in the process (perhaps intentionally, but most likely as a fortunate twist of fate) , he is actually overcoming this usually debilitating social condition and reaching out to more people than most of us ever will. and in the end, maybe that’s all he really wanted — a chance to finally fit in.