JIMLA is a word Jake first hears when he meets the Yellow Card Man a second time. It means nothing to him at that point. However, Jake hears the word again during a football game in Jodie when the cheerleaders lead the crowd in a cry of support for the quarterback, Jim LaDue. Later, Jake dreams of a monster who appears to be named JIMLA. The expression is also part of a billboard in support of Jim LaDue.

Jake is unnerved by the word JIMLA and feels as though it is some kind of warning. At the end of the novel, the reader realizes that it is a warning. There are guardians of the timeline who receives snippets of sound or action that allows them to become aware of changes to the timeline. Because they do not get the entirety of the episode, they do not understand everything they see and hear. To them, JIMLA is simply a warning that something is changing on the timeline. It is a memory Jake has that he should not, and a warning that he is changing time and putting the whole time continuum in danger. As the guardian tells Jake at the end in regard to his frequent travels through time, “It gums up the machine.