Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival by Giovanni Iacobucci Page A

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?
    Maybe he wasn't even really there. Maybe he
was a figment of Jesse's imagination. Maybe Jesse, fueled by the
acid he'd just dropped, had simply plucked the enigmatic drawing
from all those bottles of port and dropped it out here in the
desert. Maybe all that was really standing there was a cactus.
    No. No chance the acid had worked its way
into his system enough to produce full-blown hallucinations like
that. Not that quick. Whoever was standing out there, was really
standing out there.
    Jesse couldn't shake the feeling that the
stranger was staring right at him. Studying him.
    Without apparent cause, the stranger turned
away and receded down a hill, seeming to Jesse to sink into the
earth. A few moments later, Jesse heard the sound of hoofsteps on
the desert floor, and the whinnie of the stranger's steed. A dust
cloud kicked up over the hill, as though the Sandeman figure had
disappeared into the mist.
    Jesse's heart pounded. He took off in a
full-bore sprint towards the lights of Bridgetown, motivated by a
primal anxiety.
    Who was that?
    Jesse made a promise to himself right then
and there: no more late-night wanderings through the desert.
    Main Street grew nearer,
and he grew more winded. Wind .
    The wind cupped him, pushed him on a wave of
supersonic air. He no longer felt agency over his own body. Time
blurred. Every