Tandem

by Anna Jarzab

  “Just breathe,” he advised, his own breath growing shallow as he sat there watching me. I gripped my knees, riding out wave after wave of nausea. What is wrong with me? I thought.

  “Grant, I swear to you, if you just take me home I won’t tell anybody what happened,” I begged. It was the only offer I could think to make, though it was a lie. My knuckles had turned a ghostly white color. “My grandfather has incredibly high blood pressure—if I don’t show up, like, yesterday, he could have a heart attack!”

  My own heart buckled at the thought of what Granddad must be going through. I imagined him waking up at dawn and going to check on me, only to find me missing. In my mind’s eye he was picking up the phone, dialing my cell—once, twice, fifteen times before giving up—then Gina’s house, then Grant’s if he could find the number, and then, finally, with a heaviness he almost couldn’t bear, the police.

  Grant fixed me with a hard look. “I’m going to say something that won’t make very much sense to you at first, but I need you to listen. I need you to hear me say it.”

  “There’s nothing you can say that will make me understand.”

  He took a deep breath, bracing himself. “I’m not Grant Davis.”

  Of all the lies in the world, that was the one I was least prepared to hear.

  “My name isn’t Grant,” he continued. “It’s Thomas. Thomas Mayhew.”

  “You must think I’m a real idiot,” I snapped.

  He shook his head somberly. “I don’t think you’re an idiot, and I’m not lying to you. I’m not Grant Davis. You don’t know me. My name is Thomas Mayhew. I need you to understand that.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Fillmore barked. “Who cares if she understands? It’s not going to change anything. She’ll do what you tell her to do because if she doesn’t you’ll shoot her and leave her here. If there’s two, then there’s more, am I right?”

  What the hell did that mean? This was nonsense, all of it. I wanted to grab Fillmore and throw him to the ground. Grant, at least, looked about as sick of him as I was.

  “Fillmore, shut up!” he growled. He turned to me. “Don’t listen to him. He talks a big game, but he won’t do anything without my permission, and I’m not going to let him touch you, all right? I’m not the guy you thought I was back … back there, but I have no intention of harming you.”

  He looked away at the oblique mention of Oak Street Beach, the prom, the living room of Granddad’s Hyde Park Victorian, the quiet caverns of 57th Street Books—all those things that signified back there.

  “If you’re not Grant, then who are you?”

  “I already told you,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “You told me your name is Thomas Mayhew,” I said. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  “If it did, I’d be surprised.” He lifted his eyes to mine. It was shocking, how familiar they were, and yet how foreign, like I’d never seen them before in my whole life.

  A horrifying suspicion tugged at me: what if Grant was crazy? I’d been operating this whole time on the assumption that he was a reasonable, rational being—I’d even considered the possibility that this was all a misunderstanding, although that seemed like too much to hope for. But what if he was insane?

  Because what he was proposing was ludicrous. Was he saying that Grant Davis had never existed, that since infancy he’d been someone else, this “Thomas Mayhew” that he claimed to be? Or was he telling me that he—whoever he thought he was—had replaced Grant, pretended to be him? Of the two options, I wasn’t sure which was the hardest to swallow, but the idea that there could be two unrelated people who looked exactly the same was so unlikely that it made my head hurt.

  “So you’re … what? Grant’s evil twin?” That was the only possible explanation, if he was telling the truth, although it was very telenovela, and in no way easy to believe.

  A short, harsh laugh escaped his throat. “Not exactly.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “Sasha,” he said deliberately, “what do you know about parallel universes?”

  Seven

  Now I laughed. “Parallel universes? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?”

  “Your grandfather is a theoretical physicist,” Grant said. “You must have heard him talk about them at some point.”

  “You’re not trying to tell me that you’re from a parallel universe!” I considered again my hypothesis about his mental stability. Parallel universes? That sealed it: Grant was officially bonkers.

  “Actually,” he said, standing up, “I’m trying to tell you that you are.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He’d hit it on the head when he said that Granddad was a theoretical physicist, because that’s what parallel universes were—theoretical. No one had ever proven that they existed.

  He shook his head. “I know it’s a shock. But you know that it’s not impossible.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” I said, folding my arms obstinately across my chest.

  He rubbed the back of his neck; he was trying not to get frustrated, a battle he was clearly losing. “I don’t have time for this to sink in gradually, so I’m going to be very frank with you. You’re from one universe and I’m from another. This one. We’re not in your world anymore—we’re in mine.”

  “And what world would that be?” I struggled to suppress the wave of hysterical laughter that was rising up. “Oz?”

  He was right about one thing: Granddad had told me about parallel universes. When I was young, inventing worlds was part of my nighttime ritual. I would climb into my bed while Granddad took a seat in a nearby chair and we’d spin all kinds of crazy stories about universes inhabited entirely by sentient Popsicle sticks, or talking flowers that ate cotton candy, or wizards who could only use their magic to conjure pancakes. But never this. Never universes so similar to ours that they contained doubles of people we actually knew. Because the implication of such worlds only made us remember, with sharp pangs of grief, what was missing in our own.

  “That’s not an easy question to answer, but I guess you could call it Aurora,” he said. I took a few seconds to assess him as if I was just looking at him for the first time. There was nothing about him to suggest that he was crazy. He wasn’t acting shifty or unhinged. It was precisely the opposite, in fact; he seemed alarmingly serious.

  “Grant—”

  “My name’s not Grant,” he insisted, his voice tight and agitated. “It’s—”

  “Thomas?” He nodded. “You want me to call you Thomas? Fine. That’s fine. I’ll call you whatever you want. I’ll call you Rumpelstiltskin if it means you’ll let me go.”

  “I liked her better when she was unconscious,” Fillmore said.

  “Fillmore!” Thomas snapped, throwing a glare over his shoulder at the older man. His jaw tensed as he gritted his teeth. He turned back to me with barely contained exasperation.

  “My name is Thomas,” he said. “I know I look like Grant. I know I sound like Grant. I know that, briefly, I pretended to be Grant, but I’m not him. Grant is from your world. Earth. I’m not. I’m from here.”

  “Aurora.”

  “That’s right.”

  I shook my head, drowning in disbelief. The insanity of this conversation had even managed to distract me from how badly I still wanted to throw up.

  “Okay, well, if we’re in some parallel universe, Thomas, then how exactly did we get here? Even if parallel universes exist, there’s no way to move between them.”

  “We found a way.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “You’re wearing it.” He pointed at the bracelet on my wrist. “It’s called an anchor; it helped transport you to Aurora and, as long as you have it on, it’ll keep you here.”

  I stared at the bracelet. That awful, stomach-turning sense of doom I’d felt earlier came rushing in again. I put my hand to my forehead. I still felt faint, and was glad to be sitting.

 
“Are you okay?” Thomas asked.

  “I feel sick,” I said softly, finding it difficult to draw breath. My chest was tight and my heart was racing; the sound of blood pumping through my temples exacerbated the pain that flashed behind my eyes. All my muscles had tightened to the point where I almost felt frozen, like I’d smash into pieces if I fell to the floor.

  “That’s the tandem,” Thomas said by way of explanation, as if I had any idea what that meant. He hovered near me, even going so far as to reach out to steady my shoulders, which were shaking. I stiffened. “Going through is difficult the first few times. It puts a lot of stress on the body. You need to relax.”

  “How am I supposed to relax?” I demanded. “I’m being held against my will in a dark basement by my prom date. What about this situation is supposed to be relaxing?”

  Thomas had nothing to say to that. “Just keep breathing.”

  “What the hell is the tandem?” I massaged my temples, but the headache just kept getting worse.

  “It’s the veil that separates the universes.” I stared at him blankly. “Like a membrane, sort of, that you can pass through.” Thomas sighed. “It’s difficult to explain.”

  “Clearly,” I managed to choke out. My mouth filled with bitter saliva, and I knew what was going to happen next. I leaned forward and vomited all over the cement floor, barely missing Thomas’s shiny black boots.

  “Okay,” Thomas said, lifting me to my feet by my arm as if I weighed nothing. “Up.”

  “If you think I’m cleaning that, Mayhew, you’re out of your mind,” Fillmore said from his corner. “I’m not a janitor!”

  Thomas towed me to the bathroom; I tried to resist him, but I didn’t have the strength. I fell to my knees in front of the toilet and threw up again, wiping my face afterward with a towel he handed me. My skin was hot and clammy, but I was shivering all over; it felt like I had the flu. When I was ready, he helped me to stand again, stepping aside as I washed my mouth out with handfuls of tap water and handing me another towel that I wet and pressed against my face. He bent to retrieve something, but I didn’t see what it was; he slipped it into his pocket with a carnival magician’s deft sleight of hand.

  I hunched over the sink, gripping the porcelain rim as the nausea ebbed. Thomas stood behind me, and I stared at his reflection in the mirror. I was starting to see the ways in which he wasn’t like the Grant I remembered. The way he carried his body, for one thing. Grant was a sloucher, an ambler, but this boy—Thomas—stood tall and walked with purpose. Did that mean I was actually starting to believe that he was a totally different person than Grant? I still couldn’t bring myself to accept that possibility.

  “Come on,” he urged. “We have to go.”

  “Prove it,” I said, pushing a few wet strands of hair back from my face.

  “Prove … that we have to go?” Confusion passed over his face, but only for a brief second before it was replaced by the inscrutable expression I was coming to think of as his perpetual look.

  “No,” I said. “Prove that you are who you say you are.” He hesitated, and I kept talking, the words spilling out of my mouth before my brain had any time to filter them. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but you obviously need me or you wouldn’t have gone through so much trouble to bring me here—wherever here is. I get that you’re a big tough guy, and you can threaten me all you want, but you’re not going to hurt me—if you were, you already would’ve done it. I don’t have to make things easy, and I don’t plan on it, unless I get some answers.”

  Thomas pressed his lips together and drew a deep breath in through his nose. He appeared to be considering my proposal. Finally, I thought. I was starting to feel a little bit better, too, which was an encouraging sign. If I was sick, I couldn’t run.

  Wordlessly, Thomas turned and left the bathroom. I followed him out on wobbly legs and leaned against a wall while he dug in the pockets of a jacket that hung on the back of a chair.

  “Here.” He thrust a piece of hard, folded leather into my hands.

  At first I thought it was a wallet, but when I flipped it open I saw that it was a badge—gold, shaped like a shield and crested with a golden sun. The badge read:

  KING’S ELITE SERVICE

  SECURITY DEPARTMENT

  DIVISION OF DEFENSE

  I was about to hand it back and tell him that some little prop badge wasn’t going to convince me of anything when I noticed that the other half of the fold held a small, rectangular certificate sheathed in plastic.

  UNITED COMMONWEALTH OF COLUMBIA

  KING’S ELITE SERVICE

  AGENT: THOMAS W. MAYHEW

  AGENT CLASS: SECURITY (S)

  AGENT ID: UCC-KES-1321345589

  The picture in the upper left-hand corner was Grant’s.

  I handed the credentials back, trying not to betray how unsettled they made me. “Fake.”

  “They’re not fake,” he insisted. “Look here, at the holographic imprint. You can’t counterfeit that.”

  “The United Commonwealth of Columbia? The King’s Elite Service? Those things don’t even exist, Grant!”

  “Not in your world, they don’t. But I told you—we’re not in your world anymore. In this one the UCC and the KES are very, very real.” He stepped forward. “Now, for the last time: my name is Thomas Mayhew. You can call me Agent Mayhew, or you can call me Thomas, but I really don’t care whether or not you believe me. We’re leaving. Now.”

  I swallowed hard. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Where you need to be,” he said, flipping up the hood of his sweatshirt. “Fillmore, get rid of that.” He gestured to my dress, which was dangerously close to the puddle of vomit. “And clean up. We’re going.”

  “She needs to cover her face,” Fillmore warned. “People will recognize her.”

  “Put your hood up,” Thomas instructed.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, following orders. I slipped my arms through the straps of the backpack and walked toward Thomas and the door. “Why would people recognize me? I thought you said we weren’t in my world anymore.”

  “In Aurora, your face is a little bit more … familiar to the average person,” Thomas said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Exactly what he said,” Fillmore responded. Thomas shook his head and Fillmore backed down, once again in deference to Thomas’s rank. “Good luck, my boy.” Fillmore offered his hand for Thomas to shake, and Thomas took it. In spite of all their bickering, there seemed to be some genuine affection—or, at the very least, respect—deep down.

  It sank in then, as I watched the two of them part ways. Thomas wasn’t lying, and he wasn’t insane. Everything he had told me was true as far as he knew it. I was trapped in another world with no idea how to get back home.

  Eight

  It was too hot outside for all the clothes I was wearing. I started to unzip the hoodie, but Thomas stopped me.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Taking off some of these layers. I’m baking.”

  “Keep it on,” he said. He glanced up and down the street, which was mostly empty except for a few people wandering by. What is he so worried about? I wondered. The street was practically deserted, and anyway I was dressed like the Unabomber—surely that was much more noticeable than just showing my face.

  Since he was looking around, I did, too. It was difficult to describe the Chicago of Aurora. If someone had insisted that I was standing in the city I’d grown up in, it would have been hard to point to anything definitive that would prove them wrong, but I knew instinctively that this wasn’t my home.

  There were some things, though, that were obviously unusual. I squinted to read a nearby street sign: West Eugenie Street. We were in Lincoln Park—or we would’ve been, if we were on Earth—but the neighborhood, which I knew, was unrecognizable. The surrounding buildings were taller than I would’ve expected, given that we weren’t downtown; there should’ve been houses and apartments no ta
ller than four stories, but there were towering high-rises in their place, as far as the eye could see. The basement we’d emerged from belonged to one of three side-by-side redbrick row houses that sat in the center of the block, overshadowed by their larger neighbors, remnants of a bygone era. I wondered at their even being there; it was as if someone had forgotten about them, or they were being protected, although they were so run-down that it seemed unlikely.

  The rest of the buildings were more modern-looking than they would’ve been in my Chicago, as if they’d just been built. They were mostly glass, with elegantly curved edges and tinted windows that reflected the light from the sun in a rainbow of colors like pools of oil. But they were more dilapidated, too, as if they’d been around for ages and not well kept up. The awning that protruded from the entrance of a nearby condominium was torn, the shreds of what remained fluttering half-heartedly in the breeze. There were no trees—I looked up and down the street for blocks without seeing one—and more trash in the gutters. It was as if I’d been transported to a slightly distant future where nobody took care of anything. Cars lined the edges of the street, but they were models I didn’t quite recognize. They were sleeker, and more compact, all except a large, intimidating, black SUV parked a few doors down. Thomas headed in that direction and motioned for me to follow him.

  “Stay close,” he said in a low tone. “If anyone passes by, don’t look at them.” Who is this person that I look like? I asked myself. She had to be someone important, otherwise Thomas wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.

  When we reached the SUV, Thomas went around to the trunk and pressed his thumb against a small LCD pad the size of a Post-it note near the handle.

  “Yeah, this vehicle isn’t at all conspicuous,” I said.

  Thomas didn’t rise to the bait. He simply opened the cargo door and said, “Climb in.”

  “Absolutely not.” I stared at him in disbelief. “I’m not getting into the trunk, are you serious?”

  “I’m serious. I don’t want anybody to see you, even through the window. You don’t know how recognizable your face is here. If someone sees you and reports it, it’ll be all over the press boards in fifteen minutes and we’ll never get out of here undetected.”