August settles a hand over Jane’s wrist, bringing the photo down into her lap. She’s never touched her like this before. She’s never had the nerve before. She’s never ruined somebody’s life before.

“Okay,” August says. “It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with you. But I think something happened to you. And I think you’ve been stuck on this train for a long time. Like, a really long time.”

“How long?”

“Um. About forty-five years.”

August waits for her to laugh, cry, cuss her out, have some kind of meltdown. Instead, she reaches for a pole and pulls herself to her feet, her balance practiced and sure even as the train takes a curve.

When she turns to August, her jaw is set, her gaze steady and dark. She’s heartbreakingly gorgeous, even now. Especially now: squared up to the universe.

“That’s a long fucking time, huh?” she says flatly.

“What, um,” August attempts. “What can you remember?”

“I remember…” she says. “I remember moments. Sometimes days, or only hours. I knew I was stuck here, somehow. I know I’ve tried to get off and blinked and opened my eyes in a different car. I remember some people I’ve met. That half the things in my bag are something I traded for, stole, or found. But it’s—it’s all fuzzy. You know when you drink too much and black out except for random pieces? It’s like that. If I had to guess, I would’ve said I’ve been on here for … maybe a few months.”

“And before? What do you remember before you were on the train?”

She fixes August with a flat gaze. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing but a flash of Billy’s.”

August bites down on her lip. “You remember your name.”

Jane looks at her like she feels sorry for her, one side of her mouth pulling into a joyless approximation of her smile. She takes her jacket off and flips it around, inside-out. The worn fabric tag sticks out from the inside of the collar, block letters embroidered in careful red thread.

JANE SU

“I know my name because this jacket says it’s my name,” she says. “I have no fucking idea who I am.”

6

Bunch of Punks

Jayne County, New York Dolls, and the teeming life inside Max’s Kansas City, a punk haven in Gramercy

 

* * *

 

“I left a bloodstain on that booth over there. I kissed that bartender. That one slept on my couch last week. Anybody who says punk isn’t queer doesn’t know what punk is.”

—Jane Su

“Okay, now!”

Jane jumps, and—

She’s gone, again.

August sighs and steps onto the train before the doors close, making a note on the miniature steno she’s started keeping in her jacket pocket. Bergen Ave.: nope.

“This is getting repetitive,” says Jane’s voice, her chin suddenly on August’s shoulder. August yelps and stumbles back into her.

“I know,” August says, letting Jane right her, “but what if one of these stops is the one you can get off at? We have to know what we’re dealing with.”

They try it at every stop, starting at the shiny Ninety-sixth Street Station on the Manhattan end. Every time the door opens, August steps out and says, “Now!” And Jane tries to get off.

It’s not like she sees Jane physically disappear or reappear. Jane will take a step or a hop or—once in a moment of delirious frustration—a running leap through the open doors, and nothing happens. She doesn’t smack into an invisible barrier or vanish with a pop. She’s just there, and then she’s not.

Sometimes she resets to the place where she was standing when she started. Sometimes August blinks and Jane’s on the other end of the same car. Sometimes she’s gone completely, and August has to wait for the next train to find her waiting against a pole. Not a single passenger notices her sudden presence; they continue their audiobooks and mascara applications like she was there all along. Like reality bends around her.

“So, you really can’t get off the train,” August finally admits under the glass and steel arches of Coney Island, the very last stop on the line. Jane can’t get off there either.

That’s the first step, figuring out how trapped Jane is. The answer is: very completely trapped. The next question is, how?

August has absolutely no fucking clue.

She’s only ever dealt with hard facts. Concrete and quantifiable evidence. She can reason her way through this right up to the point of understanding how it is happening, and then: dead end. A wall made of things that aren’t supposed to be possible.

Jane, ultimately, is a good sport. She’s adjusting remarkably well to being forty-five years from home and doomed to take the same subway ride every minute of every day—she grins and says, “Honestly, it’s nicer than my first apartment, according to the 0.5 seconds I remember of it.” She eyes August with some unreadable significance. “Better company too.”

But Jane still doesn’t know who she is, or why she is, or what happened to get her stuck.

August looks at her as the train reverses past Gravesend rooftops, this girl out of time, the same face and body and hair and smile that took August’s life by the shoulders in January and shook. And she can’t believe Jane had the nerve, the audacity, to become the one thing August can’t resist: a mystery.

“Okay,” August says. “Time to figure out who you are.”

The afternoon sun falls in Jane’s brown eyes, and August thinks she’s going to need more notebooks. It’ll take a million to hold this girl.

 

* * *

 

When August was eight, her mom took her to the levee.

It was right after the Fourth of July. She was turning nine soon and really into her age that year. She’d tell everyone that she wasn’t eight but eight and a half, eight and three-quarters. Going to the levee was one of the few things they ever did without a case file between them—just a gallon-size bag of watermelon slices and a beach towel and a perfect spot to sit.

She remembers her mother’s hair, how the coppery brown would glow under the summer sun like the wet planks of the docks. She always liked how it was the same as hers, how they shared so many things. It was in those moments that August sometimes pictured how her mom looked when she was younger, before she had August, and at the same time, she couldn’t begin to imagine a time when they didn’t have each other. August had her and she had August, and they had secret codes they spoke in, and that was it. That was enough.

She remembers her mom explaining what levees were for. They weren’t made for beach towel picnics, she said—they were made to protect them. To keep water out when storms came.

It wasn’t long afterward that a storm too big for the levees came. 2005. Their apartment in Belle Chasse, the Idlewild place, got eight feet of water. All the files, maps, photos, all the years of handwritten notes, a wet pulp shoveled out the window of a condemned building. August’s mom saved one tupperware tub of files on her brother and not a single one of August’s baby pictures. August lost everything and thought that maybe, if she could become someone who didn’t have anything to lose, she’d never have to feel that way again.