Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival by Giovanni Iacobucci

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,