But he wouldn’t be real.
And even if I could, magically, make him real, he wouldn’t want me. Not after the way I’ve acted with both of them.
I wish so many things could be different. I plug in the cable between the camera and my laptop and begin the slow process of transferring the files. While the devices work, I open YouTube and search “JDS.”
There’s footage of him on several red carpets. There’s an interview with Scorsese forDirectors on Directors. But every video I watch shows Jude being professional, polite, and more than a little bit guarded. Like he was when I first met him. Before we became friends. There’s no comparing this walled-off version of Jude to the smiling version of Sam I knoworthe longing version of Sam he’s showing in his video diary.
But then I remember a time when I saw Jude smile on camera. In the photograph Summer texted me from theZombie Hospitaldinner at Amy Reisenbach’s house.
I reach for my phone and scroll through my texts, stopping at Summer’s name. I open our conversation, then the photo. It’s one of those “live” iPhone shots, so when I tap and hold, I can see half a second of Jude and me in motion. This is the angle, the tip of the head, the smile. I AirDrop it to my laptop and, without thinking, overlay it so the clip of Sam telling me hefound my camera dissolves into the live photo of Jude telling me about his troubles bonding with Walter Matthau.
And when I watch the two men become one, I scream and slam my laptop closed.
“Fenny?” A groggyMasha pokes her head inside my open cabin door a few moments later. “Are you okay?”
“I need you to look at something and tell me my eyes are malfunctioning.”
Masha looks at the ladder and then the tiny crevice of space between the top bunk and the ceiling. She looks down at her beautiful orb of a belly and rubs it.
“This is friendship, baby,” she says to her bump and begins to climb. She sinks down next to me with a groan. “So what are we looking at? Scoot over, Gram Parsons.”
“Remember when I told you and Olivia about the first time I met Jude? How I mistook him for Sam?” I take Masha’s hand and press Play.
We watch it eighteen times. The whole time Masha is shaking her head.
“Holy doppelgänger,” she finally whispers. “Did you read that article inThe New York Times?”
“Yeah, but—”
“I know,” she says. “You’re right. This is more than that. Unless my eyes are malfunctioning, too. Which would make sight the final of my senses to fall prey to baby side effects.” Sherubs her eyes. “We need Olivia. She believes in crazy shit like this.” Masha sighs and watches the footage one more time. “Okay, it’s Occam’s razor: The simplest solution is the best one. Jude and Sam are the same person.”
“How is that simple?! What do I do with it?!”
“So at the Getty,” Masha says, “when we’re looking for counterfeits, we need multiple originals. Do you have any other footage we could look at for a side-by-side comparison?”
“There’s plenty of Sam on this camcorder, but finding footage of Jude we can use is trickier. All the clips I’ve found of him online show him looking so stiff that there’s no comparison to Sam.”
“I’ve got it,” Masha says, reaching for her own phone. “I have a shared photo stream with Eli. That picture of you two dancing at Liv and Jake’s wedding.”
She AirDrops it before I can respond. The Live Photo opens before I’m ready to see it, especially now that Jude’s probably sitting fireside at the Banning House, licking honey off some body part of Tania’s. But I can’t look away from the looped image of the two of us, all dressed up, dancing in each other’s arms, looking like we belong together. From Eli’s angle, you can’t see my expression, but I remember how it felt. The camera does pick up Jude’s expression, and that look in his eyes…
It’s longing.
I overlay it with the moment Sam started talking to the camera with the same expression, when he wondered what I was doing away from him.
Masha gasps as she watches me merge the two together, manipulating each one only slightly so they sync right up.
“It’s like ten years passed”—she snaps her fingers—“like that.”
“That’s it,” I breathe. I hadn’t known how to put it into words, but Masha’s right. Sam seems like Jude if I had met him ten years ago. Jude seems like Sam all grown up.
“What do I do about it?” I ask Masha.
“What I do when I don’t know what to do,” Masha says with her phone in her hand. She puts it on speaker. I hear it ringing. A moment later, someone picks up.
“You’ve got Lorena, but Lorena doesn’t have you.”
“Lorena,” Masha says. “I’ve got Fenny here. We need your help.”
