Invisible man

Did Roger Williams freshman Bryan Nisenfeld deliberately disappear?

by Jody Ericson

Here in Rhode Island, Bryan Nisenfeld is everywhere. If he slips your mind for a moment as you rush to your next errand, he is staring at you from a telephone poll or bulletin board. Walk into the Red Carpet Smoke Shop in Providence or Mondo Music in Bristol, two of Bryan's former haunts, and his dark, shining eyes remind you that he is still vulnerable, still possibly in danger.

On Thursday, February 6, Bryan, a freshman at Roger Williams University in Bristol, joined the ranks of the missing -- a population inhabiting a space somewhere between life and death. Wearing a blue Roger Williams sweatshirt, blue jeans, and a brown corduroy jacket with a leather collar, Bryan attended a midday class that afternoon, and his friends and family say they haven't heard from him since.

Like the Greek myth of Persephone, Bryan seems to have vanished into the ground, to have been swallowed up by the underworld. When local police searched his dorm room on February 12, it offered no clues to the contrary. The door was unlocked, the stereo still on, and the college freshman had left behind his gloves, glasses, and treasured Walkman.

Today, those who know Bryan constantly try to bring him into focus by envisioning over and over the various scenarios in which he may have disappeared. In a way, they tell stories to explain what they cannot understand or accept, like the myth of Persephone and her grieving mother Demeter explained the changing seasons in ancient times.

In Bryan's case, his father Steven blames his son's disappearance on school and police officials, who waited too long to report Bryan missing and begin searching for him. The police, on the other hand, hint that Steven Nisenfeld, a social worker, is at fault for putting too much pressure on his son to stay in school.

But in suggesting that Bryan meant to disappear, the police may be covering their own frustration over not being able to solve the case. Indeed, although they have ruled out foul play, Bryan's mother Marianne Brown claims that prior to her son's disappearance, he was threatened by a friend who'd dropped out of school over winter break.

The two students had been locked in an intense relationship, says Brown, until Bryan had tried to break free. In January, when Bryan adamantly told her to stop sending him money at school, Brown wondered whether the friend had Bryan's ATM card, or whether he somehow was blackmailing her son, she says.

There is no doubt that a man named Bryan Nisenfeld existed. In fact, if he is alive, he turned 19 last week, the day after his father held a vigil for him outside Roger Williams. Bending in the breeze, the shrine of posters Steven planted ("RWU show Bryan you care," said one; "Happy birthday, Bryan. We love you," said another) gave the impression that when Bryan left, he took almost 20 years' worth of hopes and expectations with him.

Maybe those expectations were part of the problem. Maybe Bryan had grown tired of being Bryan.

The day after he went missing, the English major from Audubon, New Jersey, allegedly went to a salon in Woonsocket called Fantastic Sam's for a haircut. Bryan, who had long hair, asked a stylist there to shave the sides and back of his head. At the front desk, he'd signed his name as Michael.

When questioned later about her customer, the stylist, who would've been the last person to see Bryan, replied, "If it's not him [Bryan], it's his clone." Precisely.

"Do you know who you are?"

What we do know about Bryan's disappearance is that a few days prior to February 6, his world was turned upside-down and that this good-natured, seemingly easygoing teenager who'd been struggling all year to keep up his grades became distraught and frantic.

According to his mother, on Thursday, January 30, Bryan and a young woman from one of his classes had ordered out for Chinese food, and that same night, he and the friend who'd dropped out of Roger Williams argued over the phone. "It had something to do with a betrayal," says Brown.

The friend, whom Steven Nisenfeld describes as "obnoxious and pushy," threatened Bryan, telling him that "he'd get to him wherever he was," says Brown, who is divorced from Steven and remarried.

Asked what the fight was about, Bryan wouldn't say, but when Brown talked to him again on Sunday, February 2, "Bryan was frantic and didn't sound like himself."

The following day, he disconnected the ringer on his phone. On Wednesday, Brown received a poem Bryan had written and sent after their conversation on January 30. It was the last time she heard from her son. About a week later, on February 12, she discovered he was missing.

"Warm spot of fire/No person can hire/a replacement for a mom," the poem went. "Fight to stay alive/like bees in a hive/but I just want to come back."

The fact that the school waited several days -- from February 6 to February 12 -- to tell Bryan's parents he was missing is bewildering to Steven Nisenfeld, particularly since his son had reported his friend's threatening calls to campus security.

Maybe it was hard for university officials as well to believe that Bryan would do such a thing as disappear, or maybe it was as Karen Haskell, Roger Williams's dean of students, says -- Bryan, as an adult, had a right to take off for a long weekend without notifying school officials. He had a right to his privacy.

Regardless of the school's intentions, when Steven Nisenfeld arrived at Roger Williams on February 13, he was angry and lashing out. Frustrated by what he considered a slow response from local authorities, Steven eventually began his own investigation, talking to Bryan's friends, searching his dorm room, and following up on leads.

Staying on campus, Steven and his girlfriend also printed up hundreds of missing person fliers, as if the sheer number of images would transform into Bryan's actual person.

Later, at an impromptu press conference at Roger Williams, Steven criticized many of those involved in the case. Pointing to a group of university officials approaching from a distance, he told one television reporter, "See those gentlemen up there? This is the first time anyone [from Roger Williams] has come to see us."

But while Steven is quick to blame others for what happened, he has trouble talking about his own role in the events that unfolded in early February. Bryan called his father as well on January 30 -- at 12:30 in the morning.

According to Steven, Bryan was still upset about the argument and about the fact that he'd left the young woman alone in his room while he'd gone for money to pay for their food. "Did I do right?" asked Bryan, who worried that the woman might have stolen something.

Never specifying what exactly was wrong, Bryan asked his father to drive to Rhode Island right then, but Steven instead contacted campus security the next day. He wishes now that he'd come when his son had called.

Steven also received a letter from Bryan, which had been mailed on the same day as Brown's. According to Captain Joseph DaSilva of the Bristol Police, Bryan referred to a previous argument between father and son and said the two of them "would have to sit down and discuss the matter" of his staying at Roger Williams.

While the officer believes this argument was the final straw leading to Bryan's "taking a walk," Steven disagrees. He maintains that Bryan, in the letter, was actually referring to his late-night call to his dad on January 30, not to any argument. "He was apologizing for getting me upset by calling so late," says Steven. "Captain DaSilva is just trying to build a case that Bryan took off."

Whether that's true or not, the police captain is obviously annoyed with Bryan's father and with the criticism he has unleashed on the Bristol Police Department. "This is the most irrational person I have ever met," says DaSilva. "I don't know what Mr. Nisenfeld expects from me. I'm doing the best I can."

A defensive edge to his voice, DaSilva admits he doesn't have time to follow up on every lead -- like the time Steven asked him to search the dump in Bristol after a psychic suggested they do so. But DaSilva says he did interview Bryan's friend over the phone. And although Brown (whom DaSilva interviewed only once, she says, and has not called since) claims the young man threatened her son, driving Bryan out of his mind with worry, DaSilva ruled him out as a suspect. "That kid and Bryan weren't even close," he says.

As final proof of his devotion to the case, DaSilva mentions how he visited a gay bar in Providence after someone reported seeing Bryan there. While the lead turned out to be false, the gay establishment definitely had an impact on DaSilva. "For the first time in my life I went to a gay bar, and I was very uncomfortable," he says. "I'm not gay. I don't want to be around those people."

DaSilva says he doesn't know if Bryan was gay. But if he was, he says, it would in no way influence DaSilva's feelings toward the case.

Maybe not, but it would certainly influence certain notions people have about Bryan. "No way. Not Bryan," says Matt Sauls when asked whether his high school friend could be gay.

Bryan's parents, however, are begin-ning to think otherwise. Until her son

disappeared, Brown says she never considered the possibility that Bryan was gay. During high school, he was "extremely homophobic," she says, "and he was in love with a girl who was one and a half years older than he was. He was rebuffed."

In fact, on February 6, the day Bryan vanished, he called the young woman at 2 a.m. "I'm asleep," she told him. Bryan, however, was becoming more and more awake.

Indeed, reading his poems now, Brown wonders whether Bryan was starting to draw conclusions he wasn't ready to deal with. "It sounds like he was questioning his sexuality," she says. "I don't have a problem with that. He's still my son."

"I have friends who are lesbians and relatives who are gay," adds Steven Nisenfeld. "I just want Bryan to know that he's always welcome to come back."

"Be you he, be you she/Life is too much like the sea," begins a poem called "Life" that Bryan wrote last year. "Wave after wave/Emotional slave/Do you know who you are?"

"When nothing becomes something"

In many ways, Bryan was always invisible, slightly missing from everyday life. Described as a shy poet type and an intellectual (asked what he wanted for Christmas last year, he handed his mother the reading list of Howard Zinn, the radical author of The People's History of the United States), Bryan grew up in a town so small that directory assistance operators in New Jersey sometimes can't find it to look up a number. A blue-collar bedroom community to nearby Philadelphia, Audubon has an all-volunteer fire department and only one detective in its police department.

According to friends, Bryan didn't feel stifled by this small-town environment, however. As teenagers, he and his younger brother Liam did what most suburban kids did to pass the time -- listened to music, watched movies, etc.

What's odd, though, is that neither Sauls nor Matt Thomas, another boyhood friend, can say what they had in common with Bryan -- what made them friends in the first place. "We hung out," says Sauls.

"Bryan went everywhere with me," adds Thomas, who joined the Navy in January.

Bernadette, Matt Thomas's mother, is also at a loss to explain her son's friendship with Bryan. A shy and serious boy in high school, "Bryan never cursed," she says. "He was never disrespectful." As for his poems, "I thought, `God, he's awful young to be thinking like that.' "

Indeed, while Bryan participated in many of the typical extracurricular activities in high school -- the tennis and soccer teams, the student newspaper -- his poems reflected a more morose and contemplative side: "A great and wise man once asked, `How does it feel? To be like an unknown?' " says one. "I'll tell you how it feels. It feels like nothing. Everything you've learned. Everything you thought you knew is nothing. Everything you love and all that you hate is nothing . . . If you love nothing, care for nothing, nothing turns into something."

In his senior year, when Bryan was accepted to Roger Williams's architecture program, his father Steven told him to go for it -- the school had a good reputation, and it had offered Bryan a decent financial aid package. But almost from the moment Bryan arrived on campus, he knew he'd made a mistake.

"Feeling what it's like to be alive"

Roger Williams University is set on one of the most beautiful pieces of property in Bristol, and many of the students here admit its idyllic setting is what first attracted them to the school. With a view of the Mount Hope Bridge in the distance, wood-shingled dorms cling to grassy knolls that tumble down to the water's edge. Each "town house," as the dorms are called, is named after a type of tree. There's Maple Hall, Cedar Hall, and Willow Hall, where Bryan lived.

In late May, as students packed up the last of their belongings, the campus had a strange quality to it -- part Melrose Place, part summer camp. Down a path leading from Bryan's dorm, remnants of a party littered a rocky beach, refusing to be washed out to sea. Festive plates, an ice cream box scooped clean, yellow forks, and empty bottles. In the nearby dining hall, a recreation room blazed with the lights of video games, while an air hockey table hissed in anticipation of the next match.

At first, Bryan had tried to fit in here, says one student who lived in his dorm. Finding his major extremely demanding, Bryan sometimes worked in the lab until 5 in the morning, rising three hours later for his first class, says his mother. But when he had the time, Bryan participated in a competition between dorms called "Superstars."

There were cook-offs that first semester, a scavenger hunt, and basketball games. Bryan was accepted at these events, says the fellow dorm dweller who wishes to remain anonymous, and once in a while he'd even venture to Providence to check out the record stores and his favorite smoke shop, which sold all-natural cigarettes.

Over winter break, however, Bryan told friends he wanted to transfer out of Roger Williams. "Bryan didn't like the people," says Sauls. "He said they were snotty and upper-class."

Trying to head off a possible crisis, Bryan's parents decided to sit him down at a local diner and discuss the matter. Eventually, they managed to convince Bryan to tough it out for one more semester. To lighten his load, they agreed Bryan had made the right decision to switch his major to English.

After the school year was over, they said, they would talk again. Maybe Bryan wanted to go to college on the West Coast, suggested Steven, who had family there. Brown, however, disagreed -- if Bryan was homesick just five hours away in Rhode Island, how would he fare halfway across the country?

But in the end, it didn't matter where his parents thought Bryan should go, because Bryan ended up going anyway. That day at the diner, Brown recalls how mature her son seemed. He'd left Audubon only months before as a teenager and had returned as a man.

But isn't that the way all myths go? Bryan endured real hardship those first few months at Roger Williams, and in order to throw off others' expectations of him, perhaps he had to leave this time on his own terms, to disappear on his own odyssey.

Indeed, on the surface the myth of Persephone seems like a story about an innocent goddess being kidnapped by Hades, but there's more to it than that. In her journey to the underworld, Persephone came of age and severed the ties, at least temporarily, with her parents as all adults must.

In that sense, then, the myth is not about an abduction but a collusion. Persephone, after all, ate the forbidden pomegranate seed her husband Hades offered, while her mother Demeter continued to search for her daughter on Earth, believing she wanted to be found.

"Be you he, be you she," concludes Bryan's poem "Life." "You may be diligent/You may strive/But do you feel what it's like to be alive?"

To reach Marianne Brown, call her collect at (609) 546-4751; Steven Nisenfeld's toll-free number is (888) 846-0868.

Jody Ericson can be reached at jericson[a]phx.com