One last stop, p.12
One Last Stop, page 12
(They almost never talk about 2020 and what it’s like above ground. Not yet. August can’t tell if she wants to know. Jane doesn’t ask.)
August sits next to her or across from her or, sometimes, on the seat beneath her, when Jane gets worked up and paces the car. They huddle by the map of the city posted near the subway doors and try to trace Jane’s old paths through Brooklyn.
Two weeks in, August has three notebooks filled with Jane’s stories, her memories. She takes them home at night and spreads them out on her air mattress and take notes of her notes, looking up every name Jane can recall, searching the city for old phone books. She takes the California postcard home and reads it over and over: Jane—Miss you. Catch me up? It’s signed only with the words Muscadine Dreams and a phone number with an Oakland area code, but none of the Jane Sus in 1970s San Francisco lead anywhere.
She buys two maps: one of the United States and one of New York, all five boroughs spread out in pastels. She tapes them on her bedroom wall and tucks her tongue between her teeth and presses push pins into every place Jane mentions.
They’re going to find Jane. She must have left things behind, places and people that remember her. August watches her light up over the steady shake of the train every day and can’t imagine how anyone could ever forget.
August asks her one afternoon, when she’s blowing off an exam review to make quiet jokes about the people who get on and off the train, “When did you realize you were stuck?”
“Honestly?” Jane says. She reaches over and gently swipes frosting from that morning’s donut off August’s bottom lip. The eye contact is so terribly close that August has to look down before her face says something she can’t take back. “The day I met you.”
“Really?”
“I mean, it wasn’t clear right away. But it was kind of … foggy before. That was the first time I was really aware of staying in one time and place for a few days. After a week or so, I realized I hadn’t moved. At first, I could only tell by counting when I saw you and when I didn’t. The week you didn’t come? Everything started getting blurry again. So…”
It drops quietly into the space between them: maybe it’s them. Maybe it’s August. Maybe she’s the reason.
* * *
Myla bribes August with a bag of Zapp’s from a bodega four blocks over to introduce her to Jane.
After Niko, she’s held off on introducing anyone. It’s not like Jane doesn’t have enough to deal with, recently being informed that she’s a scientific anomaly trapped forty-five years in the future with no memory of how she got there and all. She’s still getting used to the idea that she’s not going to get arrested for being gay in public, which was a whole three-day emotional roller coaster. August is trying to take it easy on her.
“You could just take the Q yourself,” August tells Myla, tucking the chips onto her shelf in the pantry. After a moment of consideration, she attaches a Post-it note that says TOUCH THESE AND DIE. “She’s always on it.”
“I tried,” Myla says. “I didn’t see her.”
August frowns, sliding a packet of strawberry Pop-Tarts out of the pantry. No time for a bagel. “Really? That’s weird.”
“Yeah, guess I don’t have the whole magical soul mate bond you have with her,” she says. It’s a rainy Friday afternoon, and she’s got a bright yellow rain jacket on like the Morton Salt girl with 4A hair.
“We do not have a magical soul mate bond. Why are you so invested in our relationship anyway?”
“August, I love you very much, and I want you to be happy, and I’m very confident that you and this girl are, like, fated by the universe to fingerblast each other until you both die,” she says. “But honestly? I am in this for the sci-fi of it all. I’m living a real life episode of The X-Files, okay? This is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me, and my life has not been boring. So, can we go, Scully?”
On the watery platform, Myla launches herself at the train so fast, she nearly shoves August into an old woman tottering out.
“Bye, Mrs. Caldera!” Jane calls after her. “Tell Paco I said hi and that he better study for his algebra test!” She sees August, and her smile shifts from friendly into something August still can’t name. “Oh, hey, August!”
Myla nudges ahead, extending a hand to Jane. “Hi, wow, I’m Myla, huge fan. Love your work.”
Jane bemusedly takes her hand, and August can see Myla making a whole catalog of scientific observations as they shake. She really should have pushed her onto the tracks when she had the chance.
“Can you please sit down?” August hisses, nudging her toward a seat. She pulls the Pop-Tarts out of her pocket and hands them over, and Jane immediately rips into them. “Um, Jane, this is one of my roommates I told you about.”
“I’ve been dying to meet you,” Myla says. “I had to bribe August with chips. Zapp’s. Sweet Creole Onion.”
Jane looks up from the Pop-Tarts wrapper she’s brutalizing. “Zapp’s?”
“It’s a Louisiana chip brand,” August tells her. “They’re amazing. I’ll bring you some.”
“Whoa,” Myla interjects, “you can eat?”
“Myla!”
“What? It’s a fair question!”
Jane laughs. “It’s okay. Yeah, I can eat. And drink, though I don’t think I can get drunk. I found a flask of whiskey once, and it didn’t really do anything.”
“Maybe your first mistake was drinking out of a flask you found on the subway,” August suggests.
Jane rolls her eyes, still grinning.
“Look,” she says through a mouthful, “if I turned my nose up at everything that’s left on the subway, I would have nothing to do.”
“Wait, so,” Myla says, leaning forward, elbows on her knees, “do you get hungry?”
“No,” Jane says. She thinks for a second. “I can eat, but I don’t think I have to.”
“And … digestion?”
“Myla, I swear to God—”
“Nothing happens,” Jane says with a shrug. “It’s like…”
“Suspended animation,” Myla supplies.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Wow, that is fascinating!” Myla says, and August is mortified, but she can’t pretend she’s not taking mental notes to be recorded later. “And you really don’t remember anything?”
Jane frowns thoughtfully around another bite. “I remember more now. It’s sort of like … muscle memory? Pop culture stuff is easier than personal stuff for some reason. And for a lot of stuff, I have a sense that I’ve done it before, even if I can’t remember it specifically. Like, I know how to speak Cantonese and English, even though I can’t remember learning either. More stuff comes back every day.”
“Wow. And—”
“Myla,” August says, “can we maybe not treat her like a creature of the week?”
“Ah, sorry,” Myla says with a wince. “Sorry! I’m just—this is so cool. I mean, obviously, it’s not cool for you, but it’s fascinating. I’ve never heard of anything like you.”
“Is that a compliment?” Jane asks.
“It can be.”
“Anyway,” August says. “Myla’s a genius and very into science fiction and multiverse theory and, like, smart-people stuff, so she’s gonna help figure out what exactly happened to you and how we can fix it.”
Jane, who has moved on to the second Pop-Tart and is plowing through it like she’s trying to beat a land speed record, squints at August and says, “Are you assembling a task force, Landry?”
“Not a task force,” August says, heart skipping at the sound of her last name in Jane’s mouth. “Just a … ragtag band of misfits.”
The corners of Jane’s mouth press in a sly grin. “Love it.”
“Very Goonies,” Myla chimes in.
“What’re goonies?” Jane asks.
“Only one of the greatest adventure movies of 1985,” Myla says. “Wait, oh man, you missed Spielberg completely, didn’t you?”
“She would have caught Jaws in ’75,” August automatically supplies.
“Thank you, Encyclopedia Brown,” Myla says. She leans in and tells Jane, “August knows everything about everything. It’s her superpower. She should be teaching you all the ’80s movies.”
“I do not know everything.”
“That’s true, you didn’t know about ’70s punk. I had to teach you that.”
Jane looks at her, smirking slightly. August swallows.
“You’re the one who taught her that?”
“Oh yeah,” Myla chirps happily, “I think she wanted something to talk to y—”
“Anyway!” August interrupts. They’re pulling into a station, and she yanks Myla up by her sleeve. “Billy’s isn’t far from this stop, and I’m hungry. Aren’t you hungry? Let’s go, bye, Jane!”
Myla and Jane both seem visibly put out, but August is one embarrassing non sequitur away from throwing herself out the emergency exit. Those two are a dangerous combination.
“Wait, what’s your sign?” Myla shouts over August’s shoulder.
Jane scrunches her face up like she’s trying to remember where she left her keys, not her own birthday. “Don’t remember. Summer, though? I’m pretty sure I was born in the summer.”
“I can work with that!” Myla says, and August is smiling apologetically back at Jane and whisking Myla away, and Jane is lost in the crowd of commuters.
“I’m gonna kill you,” August says as they pick their way toward the stairs.
“The most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me!” Myla yells over her shoulder.
“What did you think of her?”
Myla hops up on the landing, tugging her miniskirt down. “I mean, honestly? That’s wife material. Like, three kids and a dog material. If she looked at me the way she looks at you, my IUD would have shot out like a party popper.”
“Jesus Christ,” August says. And, involuntarily, “How do you think she looks at me?”
“Like you’re her Pop-Tart angel. Like you shit sunshine. Like you invented love as a concept.”
August stares at her, trying to take that in, then turns on her heel and heads off toward the exit. “No, she doesn’t.”
“Like she wants to eat you alive,” Myla adds, jogging to catch up.
“You don’t have to lie to make me feel better,” August says.
“I’m not lying! She—oh, fuck.”
Myla has screeched to a halt—literally, the rubber of her boots squeaking on the damp tile floor—in front of a sign posted on the station wall. August backtracks to read it.
SERVICE ALERT, the sign declares.
Below, there’s the yellow bubble of the Q. Commuters keep walking right past it, just another inconvenience in their day, but August freezes and stares and feels all her rides on the Q spin out around her in a film reel until a breaker flips and they all go black.
“They’re shutting the line down for maintenance at the end of the summer,” Myla reads.
“Shutting it down?” The dates indicate September 1 through October 31. “Two months? I won’t be able to see her for two months?”
Myla turns to her, eyes wide. “Didn’t you say—if she doesn’t see you—?”
“Yeah,” August says. “When I stopped riding the Q, everything got blurry again for her. Do you … do you think she would…?”
August pictures Jane trapped for months, alone and confused and staticky and forgetting, or worse—tripping back out of this precise moment in time just like she tripped into it, lost again, gone further than August’s research could ever uncover. They have no idea how firmly she’s planted here and now.
August just found her. It’s too soon to lose her.
At Billy’s, Lucie does not look happy to see August, considering she’s been faking mono for weeks. But she shoves two menus and two rolls of silverware at her and wordlessly seats them at the bar.
Winfield drops off a plate of fries, and once he’s gone, August leans over and asks, “What the hell do we do?”
“Okay,” Myla says. “I have a theory.”
August opens her mouth before snapping it shut when Winfield drops off the ketchup. As soon as he’s gone, she asks, “What?”
Myla leans in. “Do you know anything about time slips?”
August blinks. “No.”
“Okay,” Myla says. She seizes the ketchup, dumping it over the fries. August pulls a face, and Myla waves it off. “It’s this sci-fi trope where somebody gets lost in time. So, like, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Mark Twain book. Guy gets hit in the head and wakes up in Camelot. Maybe something happened to her on the train that threw her out of time.”
August frowns. “Like, she time traveled?”
“Sort of,” Myla says thoughtfully. “But you found proof she was around in the ’80s and ’90s, right?” August nods. “So it’s not only then to now. Maybe she’s been, like … flickering through time. Maybe she’s stuck on the subway because some big event, some big anomaly, tethered her there. She’s, like, trapped in the in-between.”
“In between what?”
“Dead and alive, maybe,” she says. “Real and not real.”
“So the train is like … purgatory?” How very Catholic.
“Yeah, but … not. Like, okay. You and me, we’re real. We’re stuck to reality, in this timeline. Linear. We started at point A, and we move forward through points B, C, D, et cetera. This is because nothing has ever interfered with our reality. There’s never been an event that could have disrupted our timeline. So our points A, B, C, D, correspond to the same order of points in linear time. But say there was an event like—like on Lost, when they detonate the H bomb and get thrown forward in time. Something just big enough to make a crack that one person could slip through, and it knocked her loose from the timeline of reality. Her point B could be our point D, her point E could be our point C. It’s not linear for her. She can be in 1980 one moment and 2005 the next and 1996 after that, because she came unstuck.”
August scrunches her hands up in her hair, trying to wrap her brain around it.
“Okay, so like … like music on the radio,” she attempts. “Like, the radio waves start in one place and they’re picked up by whatever receiver catches them. She’s the transmission, and her receivers are—”
“All at different moments in time, right,” Myla says. “So, if we look at it that way, she’s the music, and we’re the receiver picking her up.”
“And the other people that have seen her and interacted with her on the train over the years, those were—”
“Like antennas on cars catching a radio station as they pass through town. She’s—she’s always broadcasting out of the same tower.”
August feels like her brain is going to melt out of her nose. “The Q. She’s broadcasting out of the line.”
“Right. So … whatever it was must have happened while she was on the train,” Myla says slowly. The fries are going soggy. “We just need to figure what.”
“How do we do that?”
“No idea.”
August straightens, shoving her glasses up her nose. She can do this. Her brain is wired to solve things. “I mean, a big enough event to throw a person out of time—there would be a record of that, right?”
Myla looks at her. “Girl, I don’t know. This is all hypothetical.” She must see the frustration flash across August’s face, because she picks up a fry and points it at her. It flops over pathetically, dripping ketchup onto the table. “Look, you might be right. But it could have been totally localized. People could have missed it completely.”
August sighs. Props her elbows up on the table. Tries to avoid the ketchup. “What about her memories? Why are those gone?”
“Like I said, I don’t know. Could be because she’s not rooted to anything. She’s not fully real, so her memories aren’t either. The important thing is, they’re not gone for good.”
“So…” August says, “so we have to get her to remember what happened. And…”
“And then maybe we can find a way to fix it before the end of summer.”
August lets that settle in the air between them: the idea that they could get Jane out. She’s been so focused on helping Jane figure out her past, she hasn’t thought about what comes after.
“And then wh-what?” August asks, wincing at the way her voice goes shaky. “If we figure out what happened and how to fix it, what happens when we do? She goes back to the ’70s? She stays here? She … she’s gone?”
“I don’t know. But…”
August puts down her French fry. She’s lost her appetite. “But what?”
“Well, she said it’s only felt like a few months for her, until now? I think she’s gotten anchored here and now. And from what you’ve told me, this is the first time that’s happened.”
“So, we might be her only chance? Okay,” August says. She folds her arms across her chest and tucks her chin down, jaw set. “No matter what, we try.”
* * *
So, that’s it. August kind of knew, but now she knows. She can’t do this and have a crush on Jane at the same time.
It’s fine. It’s only that August used to love Say Anything before life intervened to make her hate everything, and Jane is the first person to ever make her feel all John-Cusack-and-Ione-Skye. It’s not a big deal that Jane’s hand is the perfect size to brace against August’s waist, or that when Jane looks at her, she can’t look back because her heart starts doing things so big and loud that the rest of her can barely hold the size and sound. She’ll live.
The bottom line: there’s no chance. Even if somehow Jane feels the same, August has a deadline. She has to help Jane figure out who she is, how she got stuck, and how to get her out.
And if she manages to pull that off, Jane’s not exactly here permanently. She’s not exactly here at all. And, well, August has never truly had her heart broken before, but she’s pretty sure that falling in love with someone only to send them back to the 1970s would, as first heartbreaks go, win the Fuck You Up Olympics.
