If August’s life were a movie, the soundtrack would be the low sounds of her mom, the clickity-clacking of her keyboard, or quiet mumbling as she searches for a document. Even when August quit helping with the case, when she moved out and mostly heard it over the phone, it was constant. A couple of thousand miles away, it’s like someone finally cut the score.
The backstory of the book’s main protagonist, August Landry, is that her mother launched into an obsessive quest to locate her daughter’s mysterious mission Uncle Augie, whom she was named after, obviously. The private investigation which consumed much of her mother’s adult life by choice also consumed most of August’s childhood, not by choice. Another way of framing this backstory is that August has been for most of her life to live in the past characterized by Uncle Augie being a living, breathing entity. The parallel is drawn between August and the other primary protagonist, Jane, in that both are, in quite different ways, out-of-sync when it comes to time and place.
“We know Jane was on the tracks during the citywide power surge that caused the 1977 blackout. So, my theory: the burst of power on the already super-powerful electrified rail created some kind of … crack in time that she slipped through, and now she’s tethered to the electricity of the rails.”
Jane is at first referred to simply as Subway Girl because she is like some phantom who seems half-unreal. And this turns out to be somewhat true. August soon learns the mysterious punk rocker is named Jane and she is stuck on the subway out-of-sync with her own time. She can’t go take the subway back to the Me Decade nor can she simply exist through the sliding doors into the modern world. Romance blossoms, but so does the effort to learn just what in the heck is going. The summer of ’77 was a busy one for New York. It was unusually hot, the Yankees were on the headed to their first World Series championships since the days of Mantle and Maris, an unknown killer called Son of Sam was on the loose and on top of all that the city experienced a boroughs-wide blackout that was quite unlike the previous one in the late sixties which had brought the city together. Instead, this blackout produced riots, looting, and fear. And, if August is right, a weird hiccup in the time-space continuum that trapped Jane on a subway for decades.
“He’s an action movie character, a secret agent who had his memories erased and finds out he’s a badass because he knows how to, like, shoot people and do computer stuff he can’t remember learning…Hang on. Maybe you are Jason Bourne.”
Jane can’t find her way back to 1977, but she doesn’t really fit into the present either. She can’t leave the train so even though she is existing in the modern world, she is not part of it. Being part of it meaning shared information about everyday things that are a natural part of everyday discourse without our even having to think about it. At one point, August surprises a contemplatively oblivious Jane on the train which causes the jittery Jane to turn and instinctively unleash a fist which lands with a punch to August’s nose. She makes a comment to the effect of asking who Jane thinks she is, Jason Bourne, which receives a blank reply of total ignorance. This is what means to belong be out of sync with time, belonging neither fully to one’s past nor fully connecting to the surroundings of the present. And one need not be stuck on a train for this to be a temporary condition.
