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August digs through library archives until she finds copies of pamphlets, zines, flyers, anything that might have been pinned up or pasted or crammed under a door into a seedy bar when Jane was stomping through the streets of New York. She digs up an issue of I Wor Kuen’s newspaper, pages in Chinese and English on Marxism and self-determination and escaping the draft. She finds a flyer for a Redstockings street theater performance about abortion rights. She prints out an entire issue of the Gay Liberation Front’s magazine and brings it to Jane, a bright pink sticky tab marking an essay by Martha Shelley titled “Gay Is Good.”
“‘Your friendly smile of acceptance—from the safe position of heterosexuality,’” Jane reads aloud, “‘isn’t enough. As long as you cherish that secret belief that you are a little bit better because you sleep with the opposite sex, you are still asleep in your cradle… and we will be the nightmare that awakens you.’”
She folds the page down and licks her bottom lip.
“Yeah,” she says, smirking. “Yeah, I remember this one.”
To say that the papers unlock new parts of Jane would be a lie, because they’ve always been there. They don’t reveal anything not already spelled out by the set of her chin and the way she plants her feet in the space she takes up. But they color in the lines, pin down the edges—she thumbs through and remembers protests, riots, curls her hands into fists and talks about what made the muscle memory in her knuckles, hand-painted signs and black eyes and a bandana tied over her mouth and nose.
August takes note after note and finds it almost funny—that all the fighting only conspired to make Jane gentle. Fearsome and flirty and full of bad jokes, an incorrigible sweet tooth and a steel-toe boot as a last resort. That, August is learning, is Jane.
It would be easier, August thinks, if the real Jane weren’t someone August liked so much. In fact, it’d be extremely convenient if Jane was boring or selfish or an asshole. She’d love to do one piece of casework without the whole halfway-in-love-with-her-subject thing getting in the way.
In between, when Jane needs a break, August does the thing she’s done her best to avoid most of her life: she talks.
“I don’t understand,” August says when Jane asks about her mom, “what does that have to do with your memories?”
Jane shrugs, touching the toes of her sneakers together. “I just want to know.”
Jane asks about school, and August tells her about her transfers and extra semesters and her freshman roommate from Texas who loved Takis Fuego, and it reminds Jane of this student she dated when she was twenty and couch-surfing through the Midwest (tally mark number eight). She asks about August’s apartment, and August tells her about Myla’s sculptures and Noodles barrelling through the halls, and it brings back Jane’s neighbor’s dog in her Brooklyn apartment, one door down from the Polish lady.
(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.
