Joe nodded. “The same guy.”
“You,” I said, pointing, “are both Joe and Dr. Addison?”
Joe nodded again.
“How is that possible that you’re only one person?”
“How is it possible that you thought I was two people?”
I frowned. Good question.
Joe gave me a minute to try to puzzle it out.
“This isn’t the first time this has happened,” I said, thinking of Hazels One and Two. “Apparently, the brain is an ecosystem. If one part isn’t doing its job, it can throw other things off, too.”
But this much? Really?
We tried to take in the impossibility of it all.
“But … Joe has glasses and floppy hair.” I mimed with my hand the way Joe’s hair flopped over his forehead, even while suddenly noticing that the Joe I was talking to was not wearing glasses and did not have floppy hair. In fact, he had … Dr. Addison’s hair. “And Dr. Addison has”—I reached up to touch it—“this hair.”
Very gently, at my touch, Joe nodded some more. “No glasses at work. Just contacts. But they make my eyes tired, so I take them out before I go home.”
I was trying so hard to make it make sense. “And you slick your hair back for work, but you don’t bother with it at home?”
“It doesn’t stay neat very long,” Joe said.
I was vacillating between struggle and acceptance. “But aren’t you”—and I felt how goofy the words were, even as I said them—“a freelance snake sitter?”
“You think that I’m a snake sitter, and that’s all I do?”
I tried to picture Joe in a white vet coat. “So you’re a veterinarian who … does snake-sitting as a side hustle and also … rescues homeless bulldogs?”
“Broadly speaking, sure—that works.”
“But you don’t look like a veterinarian.”
“I get that a lot. Hence the lab coat.”
I shook my head, like, What does that mean?
“Most vets just wear scrubs. But when I started, nobody ever thought I was the vet. So I decided to cultivate a more professional look. I committed to the coat. And the contacts. And the hair.”
“You sure did.”
“There’s a psychological component to health care. People need to feel like you’re qualified before they’ll do what you tell them to. People need a lot more bossing around than you’d think.”
“So…” I said. “I only ever saw Dr. Addison in his lab coat, and I only ever saw Joe in his bowling jacket.”
“I wore other jackets sometimes,” Joe said.
But I shook my head. “Almost never. It’s how I recognized you.”
“That’s why you called me Joe?” Joe asked.
“Why else would I call you Joe?”
“I thought you were kidding. I thought you were making fun of the jacket.”
“I was making fun of the jacket. But I also thought you were a guy named Joe. Who really, really liked bowling. Enough to buy a reproduction vintage bowling jacket and have his name embroidered on it.”
“Okay,” Joe said, like now we’d gone too far, “that’s a lot of mental leaps.”
There wasn’t much to say to that.
Joe and I took a minute to stare at each other in disbelief.
How was this happening?
“You never dumped me,” Joe said in amazement as it sank in. Then, correcting: “I mean, you did dump me. But you dumped me … for me.”
“And you never ghosted me. Or—you did, but only after I had broken up with you … without realizing it was you.”
Joe nodded. “It’s like an M.C. Escher drawing.”
I nodded, too. “It’s like a Rubik’s Cube.” Then after a pause, I added, “You must have thought I was nuts to keep calling and texting you like that.”
“I really, really wanted to respond,” Joe said, his voice more tender now. “I had to lock my phone out on the balcony.”
“I guess I should call you Oliver now,” I said, looking up into his face and trying out his name for real.
“I’ll be Joe for you, if you want.”
And then I couldn’t resist. I reached up to touch that face that had caused all this trouble, and my palm cupped his jaw. Then I ran the pads of my fingers up to touch all the pieces of it—cheekbones, nose bridge, brow—so neatly put together now, satisfying like a finished jigsaw puzzle.
He held his breath at the touch.