Jamaica Station on the Long Island Rail Road is a transit hub where Apollo Kagwa’s work as a rare-book dealer intersects with the histories and losses that shape his life. As he and Patrice Green wait for a train, the station becomes more than a place of passage: its changing architecture prompts Apollo to imagine successive versions of Jamaica, while a discovery on Patrice’s phone exposes how the grief surrounding Apollo’s son has become public.

Setting and Physical Transformation

The station’s present-day platforms bear the marks of a major renovation completed in 2006. New platforms, elevators from street level, and new escalators altered how passengers moved through the complex. A pedestrian bridge connected the station to the newly completed AirTrain to John F. Kennedy International Airport, and a steel-and-glass canopy sheltered passengers from bad weather without closing off the open air. The rebuilt station had, in Apollo’s perception, a distinctly European railway atmosphere.

That modern design makes the station’s remembered past newly visible. Apollo recalls the Jamaica station of the 1980s, and the contrast feels as drastic to him as Dresden after its bombing compared with Dresden in the present. Yet the older station does not simply disappear from his view: looking around, he can still picture the old platforms and the earlier street-level Jamaica. The setting holds renovation and memory together, so that the current station is also a place where earlier versions remain imaginable.

A Landscape of Successive Histories

At the station, Apollo considers how many Jamaicas might coexist in memory. He wonders whether his mother, had she been with him, would have seen the Jamaica she first encountered as a young immigrant to the United States. He then extends the thought further back: a thousand-year-old observer might remember the area as marshland, before Jamaica Avenue became the Old Rockaway Trail used by the Rockaway and Canarsie Indians.

The local past reaches beyond human settlement. In the 1800s, city workers dredging nearby Baisley Pond found the remains of an American mastodon, and a mastodon sculpture was later raised in Sutphin Playground. These details make the station’s surroundings a record not of one settled story but of successive accounts, discoveries, and revisions. Apollo’s reflection culminates in the possibility that witches might once have belonged to this landscape too. The thought grows from the station’s layered history rather than from any proof offered there: the past leaves room for stories that have not been settled or erased.

The Book Delivery

The station is also a practical stop in Apollo’s rare-book business. He and Patrice stand together on a platform at the Long Island Rail Road’s Jamaica station, waiting for a train to Long Beach, New York, in Nassau County. It is due in six minutes. Apollo explains that the prospective buyer has asked them to bring the book and that the agreed price is seventy thousand dollars; the sum, he insists, makes the train ride worthwhile for both of them.

Their exchange briefly gives the commercial errand the shape of a domestic comedy. Patrice, though the larger man, moves his head in a way that makes him seem smaller and younger, and from a distance the pair resemble a parent and a scolded child. Apollo considers a prank involving the wrapped book: he could wave it in the air while calling out Patrice’s full name and address. But he imagines the book slipping from his hands and falling onto the tracks, where an arriving train would crush it. He puts the book back in the bag instead. The valuable object, momentarily exposed to the hazards of the platform, pulls his attention back to the material risks of the journey.

Public Memory and Personal Loss

The wait also connects the station to Apollo’s obligations after his release from prison. He plans to attend that evening’s meeting of the Survivors, partly because he misses the group and partly because his parole officer’s suspicious look at a sign-in sheet bearing Alice’s signature has made him wary of risking another questionable record. Apollo has checked in on the group’s Facebook page, intending to leave a trace that would confirm his attendance if the officer searched his online activity.

Instead, Patrice finds the public tribute page dedicated to Brian Kagwa. When Apollo asks whether Patrice is a member, his surprise is so great that the bag slips from his lap to the floor; he does not notice it. Patrice explains that Apollo’s check-in appeared on the tribute page and hands him the phone. The page has sixteen thousand fans and uses the same photograph of Brian that appeared in news coverage—the picture Apollo himself took in the basement of the home in Riverdale. Apollo wonders who first took the image from his personal page and which news outlet circulated it. His fingertips feel hot against the phone, as if it were burning him.

The station thus gathers two kinds of movement into one scene: the ordinary passage of trains and passengers, and the onward circulation of a personal image beyond Apollo’s control. Its rebuilt infrastructure links Jamaica to the airport, while its accumulated histories link the present to earlier landscapes and lives. For Apollo, waiting there means attending at once to a costly book that must be carried safely, a past that cannot be reduced to a single version, and a public memorial whose reach he has only just discovered.