Running Out Of Time

Jessie’s parents lived in Pennsylvania in the 1980s. When Hannah and Jessie were babies, they volunteered to live in the Clifton historical preserve. They originally wanted their children to live a simpler life free from the dangers of modern society. They longed to be part of a safer community where everyone knew each other, and their children could trust their neighbors.

Ma recognizes that this puts Jessie at a disadvantage when venturing out into the world; she worries Jessie may be too trusting of strangers. Pa had been a blacksmith frustrated with his lack of success in the modern world, and Ma was a nurse who chose to follow him to Clifton out of love. Pa is extremely devoted to playing the role of an 1840s Jacksonian democrat. He enjoys the small-town, old-fashioned life of a blacksmith, while Ma is more skeptical, especially with the founders’ recent enforcement of censorship and withholding of modern medicine. Ma has saved mementos of the past like her wallet, driver’s license, and 1980s clothing; these all help Jessie fit in when she escapes.

Eventually, Ma admits to feeling guilty for raising their children in Clifton and lying to them. She readjusts to 1996, as we see when she visits Jessie in the hospital. She wears modern clothes and apologizes to Jessie for the choices she has made. However, Pa is more reluctant to reacclimate to modern times. Jessie reveals that he sees a psychiatrist and has to be “cajoled to wear modern clothes or talk about anything that happened after August 1840” (183). The psychiatrist recommends the family live in Clifton for a short time to help Pa transition to modernity and confront the guilt he must feel at putting his family in danger.

Ultimately, Ma and Pa help the novel achieve a more realistic ending. Instead of everyone living happily ever after when Jessie saves the day, Ma and Pa must cope with the consequences of their choices, deal with social workers until they are deemed competent parents, and work to overcome the trauma of Clifton to re-earn Jessie’s trust.

Miles Clifton is a millionaire who founded Clifton Village in the 1980s. The story given to tourists, settlers, and the media is that he wanted an “authentic” historical preserve. Unlike Colonial Williamsburg where role-players clock out at the end of the day, Clifton wanted the players to live in the past at all times and have tourists spy on them via hidden cameras and two-sided mirrors. According to Ma, volunteers for Clifton Village were eccentrics disillusioned with modern society who wanted a simpler life. Although the reader does not meet him until the very end, Miles Clifton looms as a shadowy, larger-than-life villain and a symbol of the village’s corruption. Ma has warned her that he is a powerful and influential man; Jessie imagines Clifton’s men following her at every turn and suspects the strangers she meets of working for him.

However, as we learn in the end, Miles Clifton is not the evil mastermind Ma and Jessie believe him to be; he is merely a millionaire investor who funds Frank Lyle. The first time Jessie hears him speak, he sounds panicked and afraid. Later, she sees him being interviewed on television where he claims: “’I’m not a scientist. I have no scientific training. I only wanted to help humanity by funding their work. They said the human race would be eternally indebted…I’m so sorry. I never knew they were running their experiment’” (170). Like Ma, Lyle has manipulated him and he feels guilty for his part in it.

That Miles Clifton is not the villain of the story is a significant plot twist. It also proves that people are not always who they seem to be.

Like the twist with Clifton, Jessie is surprised that Isaac Neeley is actually a scientist named Frank Lyle who planned to purposely infect the villagers. She is suspicious of Neeley’s questions and his apartment but is distraught to find that he wants to kill her. She later learns that the original Isaac Neeley was a fervent opponent of Clifton Village, just like Ma said, but that he died in a car accident years before. Frank Lyle claimed Neeley’s old apartment and phone number to catch Jessie and prevent her from reporting his medical experiment to the public.

Lyle believes he is saving humanity from the evolution of supergerms by developing immunity in a controlled gene pool at Clifton. He “claims the experiment was scientifically valid and plans to sue the state of Indiana for interfering” (169). He believes he is morally superior and that allowing children to die is good for humanity. This illustrates a philosophical and ethical conundrum: is it acceptable to sacrifice a few to save the many? If killing dozens of villagers would save humanity from disease, does that make it okay? The novel clearly suggests not; Lyle is the villain.