In this peculiar and humorous story, a complete stranger shows up at physicist Benjamin's door, with an imaginary tale of their childhood friendship, marriage to twin sisters, and his deed to certain property from before the war and Israeli statehood, and he asks Benjamin's help to locate it.

Confronted with reality, the imaginary takes a beating and the stranger becomes depressed, while Benjamin and his wife take greater and greater interest in the stanger's imaginary past. With a long historical and philosophical appeal to the mathematical and physical meaning of sqrt(-1), Benjamin convinces a clerk in the appropriate bureaucracy to use imaginary numbers to identify the stranger's imaginary deed, and so make everyone happy.

Everyone, that is, except the higher bureaucrats. Apparently, they have no imagination.