As soon as RedBrian climbed into the driver’s seat, his car smelled the alcohol on his breath and switched to automatic control.
“Would You Like To Go Home?” the computer asked in the staccato tones of piecemeal voice recordings.
“No,” Red muttered. “Take us to the Slide Station first.”
The car rumbled to life and began maneuvering out of the parking garage, while Red leaned his seat back until he hit YellowBrian’s knees behind him. After a few minutes, they’d escaped downtown and were cruising down the highway toward the next city over. Janice turned around in her seat up front and wrinkled her forehead at YellowBrian.
“Are you still working on that client you went to lunch with the other day? The Brazilian company, right?”
“Yeah, I’ve just gotta work out-”
Headlights. Spinning. Flying. Glass rained on the left side of Red’s face, and Janice’s hair swung in a circle as the car rolled once and thudded back down onto the wheels. Something hissed in the hood, and hot blood coated Red’s left arm. He groaned and turned his head. Janice and YellowPat were only scratched up, but unconscious from the impact. He kicked open his door, crushed by the collision with the other car, and stumbled to the backseat to check on YellowBrian. His stomach twisted when he looked in the broken-out window. A fist-sized shard of glass protruded from Yellow’s throat, and more blood flowed over his pale, motionless body.
Red stood dumbfounded for a moment. He remembered that the car’s computer would have already called for an ambulance. There were only a few minutes before emergency services would arrive, but YellowBrian was already long gone. Still slightly dazed from shock, blood loss, and alcohol, he pried open the back door, dragged Yellow out, and started taking off both of their clothes and armbands.
Brian woke up, his arms and legs aching, with the dull glow of fluorescent lights above him in an antiseptic white ceiling. Someone off to his side squeezed his hand.
“Sweetie?” Pat’s face leaned down over his and gave him a weak smile. “How are you feeling?”
Brian’s eyes darted down to Pat’s wristband. Yellow.
“I hurt like hell,” Brian said. “What happened?”
“There was an accident on the highway,” Pat said. “Do you remember anything?”
“I... I think I remember getting hit, spinning. Was I driving?”
“No, sweetie, Red was driving, but it wasn’t his fault. He was on automatic, and another car jumped the median.”
Brian glanced down at his own wrist, pulling his hand out from under the hospital blanket. Yellow. But he was RedBrian, wasn’t he? “Was anyone else hurt?”
“Janice and I are fine,” Pat answered. “But Red... They found him in the front seat; he was dead when the paramedics got there.”
Brian remembered vague images of looking at one of his doubles in the back seat, covered with blood. He glanced down at his wrist again. If he was Yellow, why did he remember being Red? The haze started to lift in his mind, and he remembered the feeling of wrapping a blood-soaked shirt around himself on the highway, the warmth of the fluid shielding him from the chill of the night. He remembered pulling off his wristband... oh, God.
Pat brushed aside his hair, and he smiled. It felt so natural, like this was how it was meant to be. While he’d been drunk, he must have done something he never would have done sober, but he was thankful for it. All these years, he’d had to watch all of his doubles with their Pats. Now here she was doting on him.
Outside his vision, the door latch clicked, and Pat turned to look. “Janice, he’s awake,” she said.
Janice walked into the room and onto Brian’s left side. Her face was covered with scratches, some of them bandaged. They didn’t seem to detract from her prettiness nearly as much as her red, swollen eyes. She crossed her arms tightly across her chest, sniffed back some tears, and squeaked out a cursory “Hi, Brian.”
“Hi, Janice.” Brian scratched carefully around the stitches on his arm. “Look... I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Brian didn’t answer.
A few days later, the rubber tip of Brian’s crutch dug into the false grass under the collapsible pavilion as he plodded down the center aisle toward the coffin. He wasn’t sure where to sit, but then he spotted the rest of his doubles lined up in the front row, and he followed their lead. He took a seat next to YellowPat. His Pat. Rain pattered on the tarp above them, and the folding chairs sat slightly off-kilter on the uneven ground beneath the green carpet. Everyone sat in a cocoon of plastic, while nature shuddered and cried around them. Brian set his crutches down next to his chair, and caught Janice’s eye across the aisle.
Part of Brian wanted to run up to her, take her into his arms, and tell her that he was still alive, and it was someone else in that coffin. But it was too late for that. A man got up and spoke, a preacher that Brian barely remembered from his days in elementary school. After a few opening remarks and a reading from the Psalms, he stepped aside to let Brian’s brother Pete give the eulogy. Brian chuckled at each story of their childhood exploits, but his heart seized at each one, wondering if YellowBrian had the same stories. Did he even have a brother? He wasn’t sure.
Pat reached over and took Brian’s hand. He twitched, almost pulling back on reflex.But no, she meant to take his hand – he was her husband. He closed his eyes and repeated that fact to himself silently, over and over. I am YellowBrian. I am YellowBrian. I am YellowBrian. He rubbed his hands together to ward off the cold of the rain around them, and was reminded of the plain gold wedding band he wore now. ‘Til death do us part.’
As YellowBrian’s—his—brother stepped away from the microphone, the mourners lined up to pay their last respects. Brian looked down into the casket as he passed, looked at his own face lying silently on velvet, and he wasn’t sure who was dead and who was alive. Soon the undertaker lowered the body into the grave, and began piling dirt on top of it. Each thud of wet earth resonated in Brian’s chest like a shotgun blast, and he wanted to run to the grave, crying that he’d dropped his keys inside, anything that would make them stop. As long as he was above ground, Brian could tell everyone what had happened, swap the wristbands back, and crawl into the casket where he belonged. But Pat tugged at his hand and led him away to the car. She drove them to the luncheon, where they served three different kinds of casserole.
A week later, Brian stared at the invoices on his computer screen. He wished he could ask one of his doubles what to do. Even though he had the same job as all the others, their account numbers and names were different. But he couldn’t concentrate on it anyway. All he could think about was the barely audible sound of muffled tears from Janice’s desk two cubicles down. He remembered wishing before that they lived in the same universe, and he didn’t have to pay for a Slide every time he wanted to see her. Now she was working just a few feet away, and he didn’t know what to say, or if he wanted to say anything.
After a few more hours of staring blankly at paperwork he didn’t recognize, Brian counted the seconds on the clock until it reached closing time, then shut down his computer, grabbed his jacket, walked down the hall and into the parking garage. As he trudged through the dimly-lit concrete path, he passed Janice’s car, where she leaned listlessly against the door, her forehead pressed against the window with lethargic apathy.
“How are you doing?” Brian asked. It was the first thing he’d said to her all day.
“Bad,” she said with a harsh sniffle. “I just don’t know where to go from here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought we were meant for each other. His was the only Pat that died in that car wreck as a girl, but I was the only Janice that survived mine. It had symmetry, you know?”
“And now... he died in a car wreck,” Brian said flatly.
“I guess that’s symmetrical too,” Janice growled.
