The Long Road Home: The Journey of Alice & Jasper

The Long Road Home, Chapter 11: Merge

I closed my eyes for a moment and allowed myself to dream a little.

I saw the meeting of skin on skin, his and mine, so similar, but his marked with the silvery scars of his battles; I could almost feel them beneath my fingertips, under my lips, I imagined I could smell him, feel the hardness of his body against mine, the strength of his arms when he would hold me. My bones melted like butter in the scorching sun. My head spun with the fantasy of his teeth on my shoulder, the feathery touch of his fingertips down my spine...

If this was how it was before we'd even met, I wondered: how was it going to be, once we met? Was that how it would feel all the time? More?

Goodness, we would never be able to leave the room!

I shook my head to try to free it of the lingering images, knowing the humans passing me thought I looked a bit odd as I did it. If only they knew what I was thinking!

I went into a pharmacy and bought all kind of nice things. Fine soap and shampoo, sweet-smelling creams for the skin-our skin wasn't as permeable as that of humans, of course, but it was still nice to use. A back-scrubbing brush with stiff bristles. Combs and brushes, all the stuff to make one feel clean and beautiful. I saw that a bath would be in the future, and I wanted to be prepared. Prepared for him.

Once I'd amassed a mountain of clothing, toiletries and the various and sundry items that would complete our wardrobes, I went to the library, city hall, and a stationer's shop for my next project, returning to my room with my haul. That job would take quite a while, and was best done in private.

As I mentioned before, I'd had identity documents while living in New York, which helped me to keep control over my finances and do things like book passage on ships, register for hotels, hold bank and investment accounts, etc. In 1920, when I had become conscious, it hadn't been such a big deal, and it was simple to forge such documents. There was no such thing as a photographic identification card. But as the world got more and more modern, it was harder for a person to just slip anonymously through the cracks of society, and now that it was almost 1950, the need to be identified was extremely important, and the procedures had changed.

I had maintained my identity in various ways; according to my most recent birth certificate, I was the daughter of the woman I'd been in New York in 1929. Now, the new me, Alice the daughter, had been born in Paris in 1930. I could easily pass for eighteen, although I did look younger, since I was so small. The former Alice Smith (I didn't know my real last name, so I picked a generic one) had a forged death certificate from the coroner's office in Paris, supposedly having died of pneumonia in 1937, leaving an ironclad will declaring her daughter heir to all her assets. I had also thought ahead while in Paris: I had gotten a birth certificate forged for Jasper as well, but he needed other things besides that.

Over the course of the next couple of days, I forged a passport for each of us, lacking only the photographs, which I would have done once we had met. It took time because that was before the era of computers and advanced graphics, and I couldn't just look up anything I wanted on the internet.

I had to first steal a passport from a French tourist so I had a template to go by, then find the proper materials (special papers and stamps and such), then make the little booklet layer by layer, allowing each one to dry properly. It is good work for an immortal, requiring excellent coordination and attention to detail, as well as patience.

Then, I forged birth and death certificates for Jasper's "father" and "mother," Americans who had supposedly traveled to and also died in France (car accident, I decided). Those were necessary because if Jasper was to claim American citizenship and be issued a United States passport, he'd have to prove his parents had been born here. I tried to cover all the bases: I knew my American patriotic war hero would not want to be labeled as French. I doubted he even spoke French, actually.