Susanna flicked the projector on. A four-by-three field of halogen white light sprang to life and framed Jesse onstage like a flickering spotlight. As he launched into an electric rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, his film began to play over him:
He'd cut together found footage. Newsreels, ephemera of the commercial world, television, and nightly newscasts alike. Bombs were dropped over Hanoi, atomic tests disappeared empty homes filled with dummy souls. Rock Hudson sold you a car, while negroes were fire-hosed in the name of civil order. It was a mashup of provocation and placating. In retrospect, was it anything earth-shattering or truly revelatory? Maybe not. Maybe it was just middle-class navel gazing. But it felt like something more.
And Susanna was infatuated.
Susanna, in fact, might've been falling in love.
The attendees were enraptured by the display, their unexpectant faces glazed over with the harrowing display of violence and violent cross-cutting. Over the din of Jesse's music and the chatter of the crowd, Susanna caught Jesse's eye contact and shouted at him:
"It's fucking amazing! This is great!"
But he only shrugged while he continued to wail on the guitar, and mouthed the words, "I. Can't. Hear. You."
Susanna laughed, and took the opportunity to have some fun. "Guess what? I was there for Kevin's stupid movie!"
He shrugged again.
"And I'm still in high school!"
She was getting nothing from him.
"I'm seventeen!"
Jesse continued to play, and just gave her a cursory smile, completely ignorant of anything she'd just said. He turned back to the crowd. Susanna glanced to either side to see if anyone had heard her. Nobody was paying attention. She downed the rest of her drink and rested her chin on her hand, satisfied in just how fucking cool she felt.
Then, the performance turned on its head. Jesse's band abandoned their rendition of the patriotic song in favor of a droning, dissonant, psychedelic piece that may or may not have been improvised on the spot. Strobing frames of white were spliced between images that became less abstractly violent and more explicitly graphic. The bodies of soldiers lying in muddy fields. Burnt children, crying in the smoldering ruins of their villages. And all of this, collision-cut against hypersaturated footage of sensual, fleshy bodies pressed against one another. Porno shots.
The crowd was silenced quickly. They weren't sure how to react to any of this now.
Susanna was fascinated. Enthralled, even, the brazen display turning up the hairs on her neck.
Then the projector abruptly cut out.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Susanna muttered to herself. She checked the projector, flicked it on and off. Nothing. "Sorry! Sorry."
She followed the trail of the power cord back to the bar, all the way to the hand of a man in a black uniform. The man was standing next to another stern-faced intruder.
They were LAPD.
Susanna gave a nervous smile.
The officer did not return the smile. "Don't go anywhere," he told Susanna.
"That's enough," the second officer announced to the whole room. "Clear out, everyone, show's over. Except for the band, and the staff."
As it turned out, public display of illicit pornography was frowned upon by the LAPD, and they didn't much want to hear about First Amendment repurposing for the sake of social commentary. Jesse and the band members were booked on obscenity charges and sent to jail for the night. The owner of the bar let Jesse know he wouldn't have his car towed—but also that, in no uncertain terms, he couldn't have Jesse playing the Hard Rock in the future.
Susanna explained to the cops that she hadn't seen the film before and didn't know what it contained, and thankfully, the officers believed her. She convinced them she'd call a cab to take her "back to the dorms" at UCLA, and they let her go with only a stern admonishment. Then she bailed Jesse and his bandmates out with the previous week's coffee shop paycheck; her spending money was in tips, anyway.
She led them back to her dad's car in the vacant parking lot in front of the jailhouse. "Just cram in the back," she said. "I'll take you back to Jesse's Jeep."
Before getting into the car, Jesse tugged on Susanna's arm to get her attention. She looked up at him, and realized she could soon find herself counting on having those strangely intense gray eyes around. She cupped his head with her hands, and gave him a kiss. A long, deep kiss. He tugged on her lower lip with his teeth, playfully, and pulled away, smiling.
"Thanks," he said.
"No problem."
* * * *
Seventy years away, a version of Susanna five years less naive stood on the back porch of her ranch house and stared at Jesse as he watched the stars glimmer overhead.
"Hey."
Jesse turned to face her voice.
Standing on the porch, she could make out only his silhouette. What expression was he wearing?
She realized she'd opened her mouth to speak, but a gremlin had siphoned the statement from her lips and her mind. Radio silence.
Were it not for the desert's muted cry, she'd have heard the creaks and pops of tiny muscle movements as her body fought off the crosswinds.
Instead, she heard only the howling.
She took one step forward, then another, towards Jesse.
Jesse's eyes were on her open her mouth. But she did not speak.
The moonlight bounced off her silk nightgown and gave her a faint, otherworldly glow.
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. Ther
e 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 Mar
ilyn 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.
Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Page 8
