Yes, but she's different

Since I knew she could see through my eyes, I didn’t bother narrating what I was doing as I looked her up on the computer. It turned out that Elizabeth Rosenblum did exist here, but she was evidently an artist, not a physicist.

“Wow … pottery? I never even thought…. Well, you can try talking to her … um … me.”

“But what would I say?” I asked. “I mean: it’s not like you can feed me personal details that I could tell her to convince her that I’m telling the truth. Obviously her life’s been completely different from yours.”

“True. Still, it’s someplace to start, right? Who knows, maybe she’ll … I’ll … she’ll help,” the professor suggested, struggling a little with the pronouns as she decided which one felt better to her when referring to her counterpart.

“Why would she?” I asked. “To her, I’m just some strange guy she’s never met. If I tell her the truth, I’ll just sound like a lunatic.”

“I don’t know,” Professor Rosenblum said. “Maybe she’ll believe you.” She sounded almost petulant about it.

I realized what was making her fixate on the idea. She wanted to believe that she herself would believe my wild story, if it was her in her counterpart’s place. We all like to believe that if it was us in the typical “Stranger in a Strange Land” story, we’d believe the protagonist’s outrageous story when no one else would, even though that’s probably bullshit—and if it’s not then we’re likely lunatics or idiots to be so gullible.

I didn’t want to alienate the professor—after all, I had no way to turn off her voice in my head, so I didn’t want an angry woman yelling in my ear for the rest of my life—but I wanted to be smart about this, too, so I tried to think of a compromise.

“Well, how’s this?” I suggested after a moment’s thought. “Why don’t we come up with a decent cover story to explain who I am and why I need help, then I can go to your double and see what she says? If it turns out she can help me, and seems like she’d believe me, maybe I can tell her the truth one day.”

“Well, that sounds … prudent,” the professor admitted.

“So she’s not you, and judging by her career choice, she’s probably nothing like you,” I started, “but if she was anything like you, what do you think would be a good story to explain why I’m homeless, jobless, and have no I.D. except a ‘fake’ driver’s license? ‘Illegal immigrant’ doesn’t sound very believable without an accent, unless I try saying I’m Canadian, and whoever heard of an illegal alien from Canada?”

“Didn’t you ever see that Sandra Bullock movie?” the professor asked me.

“Uh … no, I guess not. What Sandra Bullock movie?” I asked.

“I forget the name. She was a Canadian businesswoman living in the U.S. whose visa ran out because she was too busy to get around to renewing it, and she ended up almost getting deported, so she **** some guy who worked for her—Hugh Grant—to marry her.”

“How romantic,” I said wryly.

“Oh, no, it was,” the professor assured me. “Well, sort of. It ended up romantic, anyway.”

“I’ll take your word for it. So, she wasn’t actually illegal in that scenario, but I get the idea. So that’ll be my cover story? I’m Canadian born, living in the U.S., my visa ran out but I didn’t go back, and I need help getting fake papers so I can stay? You know, to be honest, I still don’t think it’ll be believable enough. I mean, how hard can it be for a Canadian to get a renewed visa, or become a U.S. citizen, or just go back to Canada for a while to straighten it out? This is Canada we’re talking about, not Iran. Besides, why would I ask a potter for help getting fake papers?”

“Okay, maybe not the best plan. But I didn’t come up with it in the first place, remember: you did. I just remembered the movie.”

“Right, right,” I admitted. “Okay, so … I can’t be looking for help with fake papers from a potter. But maybe the cover story could work, a little. How about I’m Canadian born, but moved to the U.S. with my folks as a kid? We lived in the boonies in … say, Nebraska—”

“Why Nebraska?” the professor asked curiously.

“I stayed in Omaha for a few weeks on business once, so I know my way around a little. That’ll help with details to make the story believable if I need to talk about my past at all. And Nebraska’s far enough from California that most people I meet probably won’t be able to catch me in a lie if I have to B.S. a bit about my childhood when people make small talk.”

“Fair enough. So why don’t you have papers?”

“I was getting to that. We lived in the boonies in Nebraska, so they let things like keeping up with visas slip through the cracks. They died when I was a teenager, I got an off-the-books job driving a truck, ended up in California and decided to stay. I worked off the books doing odd jobs—”

“What do you really do?” the professor interrupted to ask me.

“I’m a technical writer for an engineering company. Basically, I write briefs and product pitches in plain language based on diagrams, schematics, and manuals the engineers churn out so my company can actually sell the stuff they make.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, sounding both unsure as to what I really did, and utterly uninterested in finding out. That was the usual response I got, so I wasn’t surprised.

“Boring work, I’ll admit,” I said, “but it’s pretty easy when you know what you’re doing, it pays well, and the hours are very flexible.”

“Sounds good. Why not say that’s what you do, then, instead of odd jobs off the books?” she asked.

“Because I had to go to school. Get degrees. Get work experience. All things which there are records of, and require I.D. and credentials and background checks to do. None of which exist here. Even if I could convince someone that I used to do that, and they didn’t check into it and catch me in the ‘lie,’ I couldn’t get another job like it without that stuff. Then people would ask why I didn’t try to get another job like I used to have, if it was so good….”

“I get the idea.”

“Okay, so … I worked odd jobs, off the books….”

“Right. And then?”

“I did all right for myself, and I never bothered getting my paperwork straightened out because I knew I’d probably get deported and I don’t know anyone in Canada. A few weeks ago my place in L.A. got robbed and I lost just about everything, so I had to leave town.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, my neighbors saw the place was broken into, so they called the cops. If the cops started asking me questions and checking me out because of the robbery, they’d have found out I was an illegal and using a fake I.D., so I needed to get out of Dodge. They probably won’t be looking for me because I didn’t try to claim any insurance or anything, so now that there’s no robbery complaint to look into with the resident gone, there’s no reason to go digging into my case. I don’t really need a new I.D. since nobody’s looking for me, but I do need a job off the books, and a decent place to stay that won’t ask questions.”

“Okay, sounds good to me,” the professor said.

“Well, that’s my cover story. But why am I looking up some random potter, and what could I possibly need from her? And how am I going to find a job or a place? My cover story makes me sound like a world-wise, hard-nosed drifter, but I have no idea how to even begin to do any of that without sticking out like a sore thumb.”

“Good point. Well, am I … I mean, is she looking for an assistant, maybe? Or renting a room? Maybe you’re looking for her to get a job, or a place?”

“What are the odds of that?” I asked dubiously, but I started checking the local want ads. “Nothing about pottery assistants needed,” I said unnecessarily. But then I spotted something else.

The professor did, too, obviously, since she was watching through my eyes. When she noticed the listing, she stammered, “O–oh, my,” a bit nervously.

Evidently, her counterpart had placed a personal ad on this universe’s equivalent of a local, Craigslist-type website, in the personals section. It advertised that she was a single white female, 35–45, seeking a single male or female, 18–50, to be a live-in lover. She explained that she was looking for a replacement for her last roommate-with-benefits who had recently moved out, and also that she would only hear offers from a “free spirit” who was comfortable with an open relationship, and preferably open to occasional threesomes with both men and women.

“Well…” I said slowly. “I suppose this would be a valid reason for looking her up,” I said tentatively. “Of course, I would understand completely if you aren’t comfortable with…”