Running Out Of Time

“Usually Jessie could find some answer to any question at school, even when she wasn’t entirely sure. But she couldn’t figure out anything now. In the sunny yard, Jessie almost wondered if she’d imagined going to the King of the Mountain rock. Had she dreamed it?”

This scene highlights the tension between fact and fiction in Jessie’s world. Jessie’s reality has been 1840s Clifton, but her mother’s request is beginning to shift that reality. Anything that defies what she has grown up believing must be fiction until she sees proof of it. Jessie’s belief that the meeting with her mother must be a dream characterizes childhood; as children, imagination is so powerful that it becomes a truth itself.

“‘Okay’ was a bad word no one was supposed to say, but Jessie liked it. Sometimes she wondered if it was forbidden because it had a secret power to make things okay. If that was true, Jessie wanted that power now.”

Without knowing why the word is forbidden, Jessie senses its significance, showing that she understands language’s power. As her sister and the other children become sick, she feels powerless and seeks to reclaim control. One way she does this is by defying the adults’ rules about modern words. This small rebellion illustrates Jessie’s determination and courage.

“Jessie stopped listening. She was thinking about all the things she’d done that she wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to see. Once when she was really little, she’d stolen a piece of barley candy from Mr. Seward’s counter. But she felt so horrible, she took it back when no one was looking. And when Andrew was still too young to talk, she’d slapped him while Ma’s back was turned, because Jessie hated everyone cooing over what a cute baby he was. And then there’d been other times, when she’d been alone or just with Mary, and they’d done dumb things like making faces at trees or doing imitations of all the adults in Clifton—Mr. Smythe as a bear, Mrs. Seward as a peacock. No one else was supposed to see those things.”

When Jessie learns that she has been under surveillance, she feels violated and ashamed of things that should have been private. Her trust and faith in her lived reality begins to shatter with the thought of strangers watching her. Small moments of normal childish behavior have become even more shameful for Jessie. Although these memories are perhaps meant to be humorous for the reader, they reveal a darker undercurrent to Jessie’s growing self-consciousness.

“She wanted to go back to their cabin and look closely at the mirror on their back wall, to see how it was attached and how it divided her life and that other world of—what had Ma called them?—‘tourists.’ She wanted to climb the haunted tree and finally examine the glass Ma said was a camera. She wanted to watch Pa and Mr. Smythe and the Ruddles and all the other adults in Clifton to see what they were hiding.”

In an imagined reversal of the surveillance, she has become victim to, Jessie wants to be the one with power. She wants to know, to understand how the mirrors work and what secrets the adults are keeping. Jessie knows that there are both figurative and physical barriers between her known life and the mysteries of the outside.

“She wished she’d stayed by the stagecoach. She wished Ma had picked someone else to leave Clifton. Andrew, maybe. She wished Katie and the others had never gotten sick. She wished she’d never heard of the world outside Clifton. She wished Ma and Pa had never moved to Clifton, but stuck with whatever happened in the twentieth century.”

For all her bravery and determination, this moment shows that Jessie is also a frightened young girl. She indulges in thoughts of alternate realities in which she could have been safe. Most of these wishes are about things that are out of her control, highlighting the serious responsibility thrust upon her. Young adult readers may feel similarly about their own growing responsibilities.

“Half fearing this might be another mirror people watched through, Jessie still stared in fascination. Her dark hair, unbraided, swirled around her head like a cloud. Digging through the bag Ma had given her, Jessie pulled out a wooden comb and began yanking it through her tangles. She went slowly, preoccupied with gazing in the mirror. Her eyes, she saw for the first time, were exactly the same color as Pa’s in sunlight: greenish with flecks of hazel. But hers were impatient, curious, and she had never seen his look that way.”

In this moment, the mirror is not just a symbol of betrayal and lies, but empowers her sense of self. She literally sees herself more clearly, and she notices the physical traits that tie her to her parents. If a person’s appearance is a window into their identity, here Jessie sees herself free from the restraints of Clifton but still haunted by the choices of her parents.

“Inside was a room with about fifty chairs, more than could fit in Pa’s shop. But against one wall, full-length, was a clear image of Pa bent over a horseshoe glowing red. Jessie could hear the crackle of the fire behind him and see the sweat flowing down his face. For a minute, Jessie forgot she wasn’t standing in the shop herself, perhaps having stopped in after school to see Pa. But she couldn’t feel the heat of the fire, and all these strangely dressed future children surrounded her.”

For the first time, Jessie is on the outside looking in. She plays the role of a tourist to assimilate, but this only makes her feel like more of an outsider. Other tourists visit Clifton to feel a connection to history, but here Jessie feels far away from who she thought she was.

“Jesse realized the pictures were hints about what had happened in the one hundred and fifty years she thought of as the future. It might have been good to study them, but they made no sense to her. What was a telephone? One picture’s caption said, ‘First airplane flight, 1903,’ and showed a man in a strange contraption apparently soaring through the sky. It had to be fake. People couldn’t fly. Or could they? Jessie’s ignorance scared her. What if she couldn’t make sense of anything in the outside world?”

The past, present, and future collide for Jessie, disrupting her reality. Even photographic proof is hard for her to believe. Jessie’s confusion and fear of her expanding world represents the way many children feel as they learn about their environment.

“Now a new thought struck Jessie. Could Pa and Mr. Wittingham have said those things just to play a role for the tourists? What if they didn’t believe their own words? What did they really think?”

After witnessing tour guides and guards dressing up to perform their roles, Jessie wonders if the people she trusts the most could also be performing. Her desire for the truth reflects her growing distrust of every adult. It also highlights the unreliable nature of surveillance: people sometimes behave differently when they know they are being watched.

“In spite of her awe at the mysterious voice, Jessie almost giggled. The bread man sounded as whiny as Chester Seward when Mr. Smythe scolded him for forgetting his books: ‘It’s not my fault. My sister’s supposed to carry them.’”

In this humorous moment, Jessie bridges her past to the present. She is coping and making sense of her new surroundings by connecting them to memories of Clifton. She does not know the bread man or his situation, but she is able to recognize his behavior; even though she is unfamiliar with much of modern life, she is not completely unequipped for understanding it.

“Jessie touched the sign for good luck, amazed once again by the smoothness of the outside world’s metal. She’d lost time escaping from Clifton and then the bread truck, but she was going in the right direction and she was bound to find one of those phone things soon. No one seemed to be looking for her. Surely the most frightening part of her journey was over.”

These lines include ironic foreshadowing: Jessie’s journey will continue its suspenseful and challenging trajectory. This tongue-in-cheek nod to the reader—who is only halfway through the novel and understands there must be more difficulties ahead—undermines Jessie’s good luck touch. It almost reverses it into an act of bad luck.

“All her life until today, if someone had asked Jessie who she was, she’d have had an easy answer: ‘I’m Jessie Keyser. My pa’s the blacksmith here in Clifton, and I’ve lived here as long as I can remember. We came out from Pennsylvania…’ But there had been no need for Jessie to tell anyone that because everyone in Clifton knew her. Now that Jessie knew Clifton wasn’t a normal village, and it wasn’t really 1840, did she know who she was? Could she go back to Clifton after this and live as she always had?”

Jessie’s identity is in crisis as she struggles to navigate the modern world outside of Clifton. Her sense of self is tied to where she’s from and who she came from, but those markers are no longer certain or trustworthy. Besides the physical obstacles she must face on the outside, this is the key mental battle she must overcome.

“She wondered if all conversations with strangers were so strange. Until leaving Clifton, she’d never talked to anyone she hadn’t known for a long time. And now she had trouble making sense of everyone […] Was Jessie stupid, or was everyone outside Clifton crazy?”

Jessie starts to question her instincts on how to interact with people. Her questioning of self is a metaphor for how teenagers feel as they socialize and navigate the world.

“To distract herself, Jessie tried to remember everything she knew about the state’s capitol. Reverend Holloway had been there, and sometimes talked about what a sinful place it was. It was founded on a lie, he said.”

In describing Indianapolis, Reverend Holloway ironically described Clifton. Clifton was founded on a lie that Jessie discovers later: its purpose was not to preserve history but to strengthen the immunity of the villagers by introducing diseases.

“She found herself in a large room full of tables and chairs and the tantalizing smell of cooked chicken. It was some sort of restaurant—Jessie had heard of such things, but she thought they were only in cities. Evidently she was wrong about something else. Once, she would have been fascinated—and hungry—but now she was too scared to care.”

Despite the serious task she has undertaken, Jessie’s fear reminds us of her young age. She is still a child, alone, afraid of strangers, and frustrated with her lack of knowledge. 

“Secretly, though, she was trying to figure out why Mr. Neeley’s apartment didn’t feel very friendly. It felt, Jessie thought, like no one really lived there.”

Throughout her journey, Jessie has many “gut instincts” like this one where she feels something is wrong. These moments foreshadow and clue the reader in on what will occur later. They also demonstrate Jessie’s capability and aptitude for survival. Despite her ignorance of the modern world, her natural instincts save her life multiple times, even if she tries to ignore them.

“She dashed back to the room where Mr. Neeley thought she was sleeping, and silently closed the door. Just in case he checked on her again, she lay back down on the bed and closed her eyes. It was all she could do to keep her body still and peaceful looking when she felt so frantic. What was she going to do? What? What? What? In spite of herself, Jessie’s whole body began to shake with fear.”

Just like her parents and all the Clifton villagers must perform their roles or risk violent punishment, Jessie must pretend to be sleeping to save her life. However, unlike the others, she has trouble hiding her fear. She is not as skilled at performance. While her body betrays her, she must resort to using her mind to outsmart those who want to hurt her.

“She remembered bragging to Ma—had it only been the night before last?—about how brave she was. Now Jessie knew she wasn’t. It had been easy to pretend when all she faced was little old Crooked Creek or some silly half-trained horse. That ‘bravery’—bravado, really—had just been to impress the other Clifton children. Now she was in real danger, and all she wanted was for Ma to come hold her on her lap and stroke her hair, as though Jessie were still Katie’s age. And, oh, Jessie had failed Katie and the others.”

Jessie has always been certain of her own bravery, to the point of bragging and being glad she is not like her more cautious sister, Hannah. However, her faith in her most valued trait is shaken. If she is not brave, who is she? She does not see what the reader sees clearly: her courage to continue in the face of fear and doubt never fails.

“The strangeness of the sight scared Jessie, but she made a sudden decision. Nothing was going to make sense to her, so she’d just have to find a phone and do the best she could calling the board of health and the news conference.”

This is a turning point in Jessie’s experience. Most of the narrative is filled with rhetorical questions that show Jessie trying to make sense of modern society. Here she finally accepts that fear and misunderstanding are a given, that she must let go of trying to understand everything immediately. Her priority is helping the sick children, and she can figure out the rest of the world later. This is a significantly adult realization and decision.

“The reporters looked at Jessie like they expected her to answer the questions. She couldn’t think of anything to say. The lights on the cameras blinded her.”

In this moment of symbolic reversal, Jessie wants and needs to be on camera to tell her story. Whereas the hidden cameras in Clifton were invasive, this time cameras are necessary to prove that the danger is real. Jessie becomes a wise Clifton expert who the reporters look to for information, instead of what the world views her as: a simple child they cannot trust.

“‘So what was that like, your trip?’ Andrew asked. Jessie wanted to brag about her own bravery, but something stopped her. ‘Scary,’ she said. In fact, though she didn’t tell Andrew and Hannah, she still felt scared even now.”

Jessie almost falls back into her habit of pretending not to be afraid. However, she has grown significantly since venturing out into the world. She has faced real danger and is starting to realize that being brave means accepting that you are afraid and acting anyway. This is also another moment of foreshadowing; although Jessie got help for the children, the danger is not over.

“You see, with our modern medicine, more and more people survive diseases that humans used to die from. That’s good—in the short term. But in the long term, the human race is weakened by all the weaker specimens surviving and passing on their weak genes. We wanted to create a strong gene pool that would endure even if the rest of humanity were wiped out.”

Mr. Neeley, or Frank Lyle, explains his cruelty to the people of Clifton. According to the story fed to the tourists, Clifton was created to honor and preserve the past, but Neeley/Lyle’s goal was to preserve the future. Although Jessie does not understand the scientific rationale behind Neeley/Lyle’s plan, she begins to realize it was founded on a disregard for the lives of her family and neighbors.

“Bob was a stranger, even though he had friendly blue eyes with his wiry beard and mustache. ‘Can I trust you?’ Bob laughed. ‘I’m in a profession most people don’t trust, and my ex-wives would probably tell you not to trust me as far as you could throw me. But I give you my word, for what it’s worth, I’ll tell you the truth as I know it.’”

This is the second time Jessie has had to trust a stranger. The first was when Mr. Neeley lied, so Jessie has every reason to be wary of Bob. However, perhaps because his promise is different—to tell what he understands to be the truth—Jessie gives him a chance. Neeley told her she had to trust him, but Bob leaves the choice to her. Bob helps Jessie learn that sometimes adults can be trustworthy.