Chapter 9
Marlowe
The buzzing overhead lights make my skin crawl like there are bugs beneath it.
Who knows if I’m hot or cold, because the school has the AC pumping hard to beat the muggy May heat, but sweat is pooling in my armpits and sliding down between my boobs.
Inside Dallas’s office, wearing a different sweater-vest and a pair of glasses I’ve never once owned, I sit behind the desk, rifling through papers.
I know it’s me, even though I’m me, and I’m standing in the doorway.
There is just no one else it can be. Even the way she mutters to herself—it’s the same need I have to express my frustration out loud, speaking like a character doing an aside in a play, letting the audience in on the intricacies of her inner life.
“Where did I put my coffee?” she asks, so flustered with herself she hasn’t heard the office door open.
“Backstage,” Cilla tells her. “Beside the Memory Machine.”
The other me screams as a stack of papers confettis in the air around her. She shoots up from her chair, backing into the wall with her hands raised.
My own body won’t let me faint, which I find cruel.
It would be easier to black out. Or maybe wake up in a hospital bed and learn I’ve been in a nearly fatal accident and I’m on heavy drugs.
That would make more sense than this current situation does, where I’m looking at myself backed against the opposite wall from where I’m standing.
Cilla decides to laugh. “Two Marlowes. Is this my fantasy or my nightmare?”
Come on. Faint, faint, faint.
“P-P-Priscilla?” the other me stammers out. She’s making a great effort to ignore me, which I understand. It isn’t easy to confront myself in a mirror some days. It’s significantly harder to confront an actual three-dimensional version of myself walking around outside my body.
“Hello, Other Marlowe!” Cilla says with a wave. “Nice to see you. You look good.”
“W-w-what are you doing here?” Other Marlowe asks Cilla. She clears her throat, fighting to stop tripping over her words. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Utah?”
I decide to hold off on forcing the faint. Vomiting isn’t off the table, though. Or maybe screaming incoherently? Anything to release the gnawing dread crowding all the available breathing room in my chest.
Cilla places a hand over her heart. “The mountains there are so beautiful,” she says. “But I think you’re ignoring the bigger issue, which is that there are two of you.” She squints at Other Marlowe. “God, she even has your same empty stare,” she tells me.
“What’s going on?” Other Marlowe whispers.
“Dallas figured out how to use his Memory Machine, and it somehow transported us to an alternate universe,” Cilla tells her.
“We don’t know that,” I say, sharp. She can’t keep laying it out like it’s a foregone conclusion.
“Oh, we don’t?” Cilla asks. “You have a twin I’ve never met who wears the same sweater-vests as you and also goes by Marlowe? Surely your parents could’ve pulled from a different well for the name. Maybe Margaret? Marlena? Marston could’ve been cool.”
“I don’t have a vest that looks like that,” I say, at the exact time Other Marlowe says the same thing of mine. Our voices blend into one sound.
“When I mention Sinbad, what do you think of?” Cilla asks Other Marlowe.
“The movie Shazam!” Other Marlowe responds.
“How do you spell Berenstain Bears?”
“B-E-R-E-N-S-T-E-I-N.”
“Did Nelson Mandela die in prison?”
“No?”
Cilla smiles. “Two out of three. Pretty solid proof that we’re in an alternate reality.”
“Or maybe she just knows all the same Mandela Effect theories we know,” I say. “They are very popular internet fodder.”
“Oh, your twin with the exact same name, face, and job as you believes she saw Sinbad’s Shazam!?”
“I loved that movie as a kid,” Other Marlowe interjects. “I think I still have it on VHS at my parents’ house.”
Cilla shifts to serious for the first time. “Can you go and get it? You could change the world for me. For all of us.”
Other Marlowe ignores the request, throwing up her hands as she says, “Wait, wait. Hold on. We need to back up. Dallas let you know the passcode to the Memory Machine?”
There’s a jealous quirk to Other Marlowe’s mouth as she asks this.
It’s unsettling how it leaves me feeling exposed.
Her envy is not at all disguised by her face or her words or her body language.
It reminds me of how often I used to get told by my college acting professors that my emotions were too obvious.
It didn’t matter how well I interpreted the text or all the layers I attempted to imbue into it; they always wanted me to find somewhere deeper to go.
It used to piss me off. I studied. I practiced.
I gave and gave and gave. How could they say there was no nuance to my performances?
But now I can see it—under unforgiving fluorescent lights, no less.
I wear my feelings like billboard signs, visible from miles away.
I do like Other Marlowe’s glasses, though. Maybe she can give me a link to where she bought them.
“I’m not a real doctor,” Cilla says, ignoring the passcode question. “I only play one on TV. Although, wait, who has my part on Heartbeats?”
“What’s Heartbeats?” Other Marlowe asks.
“No surprise. They couldn’t do that show without me,” Cilla says. “The supporting cast is what made the whole thing work.”
“You’d never know you were only a pretend doctor the way you were throwing out medical jargon while examining Billy Larsen’s broken foot,” I say.
“I suspect ligament damage over a break, but that’s just me.”
“Do you really think Billy’s foot is seriously hurt?” Other Marlowe asks. “That’s going to be absolute hell for the musical. His understudy isn’t ready.”
“Is the understudy Connor?” I ask Other Marlowe.
“It’s Connor,” she confirms. And she’s right. When we look directly at each other, it feels like staring into the sun.
This is pure madness. This is a hallucination. This cannot be real.
There’s another knock on the door.
Cilla claps her hands together. “Ooh, who’s here now? I really hope it’s me. I have to see what Utah Priscilla wears. I bet I have a ritualistic soda order. I think I’d do something very interesting in that space.”
From the other side of the door, we hear, “Marlowe, can we please talk?”
If possible, it might be the only person worse than another Cilla—Alice.
“It’s my girlfriend,” Other Marlowe says.
“She’s mine, too,” I say, even though Alice is technically my ex.
My very recent ex. My ex I hope to make not my ex anymore, I think.
It doesn’t seem like the time or place to get into that, since apparently, I don’t even know what time or place it is.
At this point, I’m not even positive I’m alive.
“Dallas told me you’re in here. Please let me in,” Other Alice pleads. “Let’s just talk about it.”
Cilla has taken to leaning against the edge of the desk again, the same way she did when she entered Dallas’s office an hour ago. Or another life ago. Whenever that was.
“You didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend,” she says to me.
“Why would I need to share that with you?” I ask.
“Trouble in paradise?” she asks Other Marlowe.
Other Marlowe gives me a desperate look. “Can you talk to her for me?”
“What? No!” I protest in a frantic whisper.
“Please.”
“But I don’t know you,” I say, even though she is me. Who could know her better? Then again, do we ever really know ourselves?
“Come on! Weren’t you an actor once?” Cilla teases, enjoying this way too much.
“Never as good as you,” I say.
“I’m coming in,” Other Alice announces.
Other Marlowe shoves herself inside Dallas’s coat closet right as Other Alice enters the office.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” Other Alice says, rushing forward to kiss me.
My Alice has never once called me baby. And when I last saw her, she wasn’t wearing a green shirt.
Bile rises in my throat. I am forced to accept that Cilla Cove is right. This is really, truly, an alternate version of reality.
And this? This is an alternate version of Alice.
I back up just in time to dodge her lips. It doesn’t seem right to kiss her. There are moral complications to work through. Layers it will take years to understand, if ever.
“You’re dating Alice Yeung?” Cilla laughs again, only this time it’s a harsh sound, more judgmental than amused.
Other Alice whips around, newly aware the office holds another person. If only she opened the closet, she’d really be in for a surprise.
“Priscilla?” Other Alice asks.
Cilla saunters toward the wall of wigs, plucking one down to brush out the bangs with her fingers, then positioning herself in front of the mirror Dallas has hung on the wall.
“Please. Call me Dr. Covington-French. Saving lives in Utah one day at a time. It’s not easy work, but it’s my passion.
And no, for the record, I’m not Mormon. I’m too bisexual for that.
I do have a soda order, though. I put coconut cream in Diet Coke, with a squeeze of lime and three pumps of raspberry syrup.
It’s very good. I can make it for you sometime. ”
My wish to faint has finally started to manifest. I rock on my feet, woozy. This is all too much.
Other Alice grabs hold of my arm. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I tell her.
Cilla puts a short blond wig on her head, turning side to side to see it from all angles.
None of this bothers her even a quarter as much as it does me.
In fact, it doesn’t seem to bother her at all.
If this is a competition of maintaining composure—and it is, because everything between us is a competition—she’s coming out the clear winner.
She also looks good with that very obviously synthetic hair on her head. Is there any indignity, in any world, that Cilla Cove will ever have to face?
“Pardon me for butting in, but what do you guys have to talk about?” she asks Other Alice. “Is it juicy? I love gossip.”