"This will be held completely confidential," I assured him.
     "OK, you guys are like duly appointed police officers, right?"
     "Yes. Trust me, no one will ever know that you spoke to us." Unless, of course, they were watching. Which they probably were, damn them anyway. "So four years ago you were working on a complicated project," I prompted, feeling myself relax a little now that information was coming and I could concentrate on getting it.
     "Well, there were a lot of actors in L.A. and not a lot of jobs, and this thing came up. Yeah, it was weird, the blood samples were a little uncomfortable, but it paid well and there were residuals for several months after that."
     "Blood samples? Why don't you tell me the whole story," I suggested after a moment in which he looked slightly exasperated, undoubtedly still bewildered by my appearance.
     "OK. Sarah and I were both doing a shoot for, believe it or not, a pharmaceutical company. They were working on what was supposed to be the next big media thing, and I figured, hey, get in on the ground floor and everything, the script wasn't great but they were just throwing it together 'cause they were testing the materials. I mean, the thing that was first filmed was someone sneezing, so it can't be that important."
     Now I was confused. Pharmaceutical company? "These are commercials?"
     "No, it was this little drama thing, the medium was synthetic memory."
     Synthetic memory. That cleared up a lot right there. "Go on," I managed to say.
     "You'd take a pill and it would be fed directly into your mind, you'd see what the person who saw it saw, if that makes any sense. Two years of this complicated slice of life drama thing, I was playing a scientist. It was really weird, 'cause they were obviously making this up as they went, this little on-again, off-again relationship, do-we, don't-we thing, it had its cute bits and serious bits. I think someone was writing all out like two days before, but hey, Casablanca was written hours before they started it."
     "Real life can be like that." Oh, god, was all I could think.
     "We had monitors, here, I had longer hair then." He touched the back of his neck. "And of course so did y—"
     "She."
     "Yeah. Looking a lot like that, actually. And the blood samples, 'cause they had to get the chemistry right, and so OK, it was freaky, but what if it caught on? And the pay was good and I needed the money. I've had worse jobs. And I have to say that Sarah was—I've never seen as effective a character portrayal. I met her before the shoot, and she was already straight into the character that she was supposed to be."
     "Yes, I imagine she was." It's possible that she's never been anyone else. I'll have to ask him about that.
     "And there was—we spent a lot of time together. I mean I tried to have my own life, but it just kept eating up more and more time, and...." He trailed off with a vague gesture, looking a little uncomfortable.
     "Chemistry?" I prompted. I knew perfectly well what had happened, scripted or not. How I managed to keep from blushing I'll never know. Every piece of the puzzle just makes the entire picture look stranger.
     "Yeah. You know... where was the harm, and we got paid by the hour, and even if we were just making up our own stuff if we were still in character... I'm not going any further with that," he decided uncomfortably.
     "I understand. What was the company?"
     He frowned in thought. "I can't—the problem is, I had all the contracts everything, but I lost all of it when my apartment burned down."
     "When was that?"
     "Just after the last check, about two years ago now. It was the weirdest thing, I got a phone call from an old friend in the middle of the night, and—"
     "And you got out just in time?" I don't know why I expected that, to tell the truth. It just seemed to fit.
     "Yeah, I was off at a bar a block away."
     "Lucky."
     "I thought so. But then after that, like I said, L.A—big town, lotta actors looking for jobs, nothing came up for a while."
     "So you decided to move out here?"
     "Actually I got a job offer up here."
     "Really." Coincidence? I didn't trust it.
     "Small stuff, theater work. I swear it was almost like a curse, I couldn't get on television. I couldn't get commercials. I couldn't get anything."
     "Television is overrated." No national media. Nothing that might have gotten his face to the East Coast. I felt very calm now, I noted, able to think again.
     "Yeah, but a year—television's where the money is. Television, movies, I mean you do the small theater work and that's great, but... in any case, small theater work up here, so I picked up and was about to come out, had everything packed up, and—" He laughed, shook his head. "I swear, sometimes I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I was all set to get on the plane and then the people who hired me sent me out a train ticket and I said what the hell, so I took that instead. You hear about the crash?"

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