Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (11 page)

He could have heard his heartbeat, but were
it for the desert's white noise.

Susanna stepped down from the porch.

He, too, took a step, his arms open.

Cautiously, deliberatively, they
embraced.

He could feel Susanna shudder. All this was
strange enough for him; he could hardly imagine what she was
feeling.

Five years.
God, he must've seemed like the dead come back to
life.

Susanna tore herself away from him in a
flash.

"Where do you want to start?" she asked,
playing off a slight quiver in her voice. She crossed her arms.
Maybe it was to keep warm. Maybe, though, it meant something
else.

"You saw a light that night, didn't you?" he
began.

"Of course I did. It was hard to miss,
Jesse."

It was comforting just to hear her say his
name. "When you came out the other side of...whatever it was," he
continued, "Did you fell out the sky? Did you wake up in the
desert?"

Susanna looked down. "Yes."

"And Wayne—?"

Susanna shook her head. "I didn't see him for
another three weeks. I guess it took him a while longer to show up.
He made his way to town eventually." Susanna walked towards a
nearby oak tree and began running her fingertips along its rough
skin.

"He found me," she went on. "I was being kept
against my will. The doctor said it was 'acute hysteria.' Of course
there was nothing wrong with me. But I'm sure I sounded crazy. I'd
be in a straight jacket if Wayne hadn't saved me."

Jesse nodded. The threads of the story were
falling into place now. He took a few steps towards Susanna,
towards the oak tree. "Wayne was familiar," he intoned, "and safe,
and the only person who could believe you."

"That's right." There was a chill in her
voice now.

Still Jesse went on. "One thing led to
another," he said. "First he was your confidant, and then your hope
that I'd ever turn up began to fade. I bet you took comfort in the
little ways he reminded you of me."

Susanna held out a hand. "Jesse—"

"—Next thing you know, you're knocked up with
his kid. Am I getting this about right?"

Susanna's eyes went wide. "Don't you dare
judge me," she said. Her arms were at her side, now. "I didn't
choose this life. None of us did."

She puffed out her chest, broke eye contact
with him, and walked towards the balcony railing. She exhaled
through near-pursed lips.

Jesse's lungs felt
constricted.
This is so fucked.
He took a cigarette from his dwindling
pack—
four left
—and lit it with his Zippo, now a relic out of time. There
was an inscription on the swivel-lid, one he'd run his fingers over
in his pocket habitually for years. "V-E Day - 8 MAY 45." It was a
date that meant nothing here, in this place.

He gave the nicotine a chance to light up his
brain before saying another word. "I'm not judging you for
anything, Susanna," he said on the exhale. "I want you to know
that. Know that I'm happy for you. You have a beautiful son."

Susanna gave no visible reaction for a few
beats. Then she angled her head, deliberatively, towards him.
"Thank you. It means a lot to hear you—"

She couldn't quite finish. She cleared her
throat.

Jesse stared up at the night sky, more
brilliantly clear and rich with star-life than he'd ever seen it.
"Everything's changed, now," he said. "Hasn't it?"

Susanna returned to where he stood. She
embraced him again, and put her head against her chest. "Never
think I just gave up on you," she said. "I've spent every day for
the last five years wondering where you were. I knew you were out
there. I knew you were alive, somehow. I just—"

"—You did what you had to."

She nodded.

He ran his hand through her hair. "You're
different now," he said.

"In what way?"

"You walk different. You talk different.
Confident. Not looking for anyone's approval."

"I'm a foreman now, Jesse," she said. "And a
mother," she added, wry. "Others seek my approval, I don't seek
theirs."

He looked down at her with a wan smile. "Duly
noted."

This was nice. But Wayne was asleep. What
would happen when he awoke? When it became painfully clear to both
Wayne and Jesse that none of today was a strange dream? That it
couldn't be cast off and forgotten at the return of tomorrow's
grind?

"I'm worried," Jesse said, his eyes fixed on
the ranch house.

"I know. I don't think Bridgetown is big
enough for the both of you."

"I wish I could just take you away from here,
go back to Pasadena. Back to your roof. Play songs and have you
listen to me, like we did last week."

Last week.

"That's impossible."

"Yesterday, I would have said all of this was
impossible."

"That's not what I mean. I have a son, Jesse.
I have a life here now." She began to pull away.

"I know, I know. Of course." He brought her
back in close to his chest. "I'm sorry, I won't say anything about
it again. It's just—it's going to take me time. Give me time."

"Okay."

They were quiet, then. Better not to say
anything.

Susanna could feel his breath on her neck.
She closed her eyes. The smell he still wore on his neck was the
smell of home. Of Pasadena. Of gas stations, and radios, of music
and beer.

"You remember what it was like?" Jesse
hushed. "Our summer?"

She nodded. "Mmm-hmm."

She closed her eyes, and felt little his
kisses up and down her neck.

He took her head in his hands and looked her
in the eyes. "Do you love him?"

She didn't answer, for a long moment. She
tried to remember the answer. She'd been asking herself that for
nearly half a decade.

"Yes," she permitted herself.

Jesse swallowed, then nodded. "Okay." He
pulled away from her, his expression as she'd expect. "I think I
want to go into town tonight. Would that be fine?"

"What are you going to do?"

"I need to face this place. Or I'm never
gonna get any sleep. I dunno, maybe I'll get a drink."

Susanna almost offered to drive Jesse into
town, but thought better of it. "Let me get you some money first,"
she offered as a consolation. "And some different clothes." She
scanned him up and down once more. "Yeah, some different clothes
for sure. Um, just follow me."

She turned back towards the ranch house and
began walking. She could feel his sad presence behind her. For a
moment, she entertained that he was a ghost, now doomed to haunt
her and her home.

"Stay here just a minute," she said. "I'll be
right out."

Taking great care not to make a sound, she
creeped along the halls and up the staircase, to the bedroom she
shared with Wayne. His full-bodied snoring reassured her that he
was still asleep.

His closet was stuffed full of nearly
identical plain button-up shirts. She pulled one from the back of
the row, and paired it with suspender-clad trousers she knew Wayne
rarely chose to wear. Then she grabbed a warm old coat and a pair
of dark leather boots, and made her way back towards the door,
closing it quietly behind her.

She came downstairs with these in her arms
and set them down on the floor. Jesse began to disrobe right there
and change into the new clothes; this made her just a little
uncomfortable.

The slacks were too big in the middle by
several inches, but the suspenders kept them up. The shirt, too,
felt loose. The sight reminded Susanna of a middle-school Abe
Lincoln, loose-fitting hand-me-down pants threatening to cause the
president to drop trou mid-performance.

Jesse threw the jacket on over the rest of
the ensemble in an attempt to tie the whole thing together. It did,
mostly—well enough, at any rate.

"Oh, knew something was missing," Jesse said.
He grabbed his wallet from his jeans and put it in his jacket
pocket, as the slacks had none. "It makes me feel grounded," he
explained. "It'll make me remember I'm not crazy."

Susanna made a lukewarm face. "Just don't let
anyone see what's in it." She went into the kitchen and rifled
around one of the drawers, returning with a fistful of coins in her
hands, a lone key on an otherwise-empty keyring dangling from
between her teeth. She finished counting the coins and handed them
to him. Then she took the key out of her mouth with her free hand
and slapped it into his right palm. "The key's for the side
entrance to the house. Don't make a lot of noise when you come
in."

She pointed at the coins he was attempting to
stuff into his wallet. "You gotta keep in mind inflation. A
dollar's worth about five times as much here as you're used to, in
case you need to do the math."

"I'll keep it in mind," he said.

"Alright, get out of here then. Don't get
into any trouble. And I don't need to tell you to stick to our
story."

Jesse nearly leaned in under the door way,
reflexively, to give her a kiss. She flinched, and he caught
himself. He turned from her under the yellow light of the porch and
walked away, towards Bridgetown.

Susanna felt a sense of ease come over her,
like a ship righting itself on the rocky seas. She shut the front
door, and decided to go to bed.

Jesse began the walk to the lights of the
town at the foot of the hills. It was a long, lonely road from the
ranch to Bridgetown. But Jesse was in no rush. He placed one foot
in front of the other, toe to heel, toe to heel. He could focus on
the act of balancing. It kept his eyes on his shoes, on the ground.
Simple, practical. Reasonable.

A buzzing sense of virtuality was coming into
focus for him. It radiated from his brain down to his extremities,
where it manifested into a kind of physical numbness. With each
passing moment, Jesse was becoming more certain that, in fact, he
must have been experiencing a very detailed and very bad trip on
some kind of wicked substance.

On the horizon, enveloping Bridgetown in its
silhouette, Devil's Peak stood tall. Silent. Jesse pictured it in
cross-section: its hollow interior laid bare for all to see, its
strange crystal cavern glowing, like a massive geode sliced
through. Did anyone else alive in this time know about its secrets?
Could he, perhaps, discover how his crew came to land in this
world? Maybe there was a mystical Tongva shaman for whom the
mysteries of the mountaintop were as mundane as coach-class travel
on Pan Am was for Jesse.

Damn, it's chilly.

The night cold could cut through flesh, and
Jesse saw his breath under the moonlight. He rubbed his hands
together and put them in the jacket pockets, where his right hand
found his wallet. He examined it. His driver's license felt, at
that moment, as if it were some kind of magical talisman. A relic
from a sunken continent. He leafed through the wallet's contents,
and discovered a single tab of LSD, on a square of blotter paper
that bore a Warholesque, miniature Marilyn Monroe.

Someone had handed him the
blotter the night before, while his would-be revelers celebrated
the community they had been laboring to create. He'd put it in his
pocket, hoping to take the hit with Susanna in the caves.
But
that
little
episode didn't go how he'd pictured it, and he'd forgotten entirely
about the LSD.

He debated whether now was the time to drop
acid. Out in the middle of the midnight desert, nearly a century
away from home.

Actually, that sort of sounded like the
perfect time.

He placed the tab under his tongue, and let
it begin to dissolve.

Toe, heel. Toe, heel. Toe, heel.

And so it went for a long time before the
acid began to take hold.

Tall shoots of untrimmed brush, here since
before Coronado, before Columbus, before even the first native set
foot on this land, danced and parted before him. The grass
surrounded him, spoke to him. He stopped advancing along his path
and to stand perfectly still, so he could focus on the way the
grass seemed to breathe.

He sat down, Indian-style, and looked ahead
towards the electric lights of Bridgetown. They were still distant
on the horizon. They barely seemed any closer than they had when
he'd left the ranch. How long ago had that been? Twenty minutes? An
hour?

Flopping onto his back, he allowed his eyes
to again be drawn to the stars. It was a cloudless night, and
without any light pollution, he felt he could stare into the
infinite corners of space. He contemplated the fact that he was
looking into the past. How many light-years away did the waves of
distant stars travel, just to bounce off his photoreceptors at this
very moment? In a way, he was not so different from those
lightwaves—a traveler of time and space, hurtling towards an alien
world unknown to him.

Languid, he sat up and faced the horizon.
Something pulled his attention away, to the right side of his
periphery:

It was a shape, the silhouette of a human
form. Maybe sixty or seventy feet away.

The person wore a dark cloak, or duster of
some sort, draped over their shoulders.

He was familiar, albeit in
an implacable way. It seemed iconic, even.
Sandeman
! That was it. It was the
splitting image of the faceless persona that graced every label on
every bottle of Sandeman port and sherry, down to the wide-brimmed
hat that ran parallel to the stranger's shoulders. The only thing
missing was a glass of red wine for the dark persona to hold high
in examination.

Jesse wasn't sure what to do. Should he call
out to the stranger, announce himself? What if the stranger had a
gun? Didn't everyone in this place walk around loaded? Or was that
just in the movies? Maybe it was a highway robber. But why would he
be out here all by himself?