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

thought he had—the sentences he spoke to himself, in
his mind—seemed constructed of preformed bits of semantic data. A
globe of letter-adorned puzzle pieces appeared before his mind's
eye. It clicked and clacked as the pieces slid into different
configurations, each time forming another word out and appending it
to the sentence being constructed in his head as he thought the
words, in real-time.
    His cognitive processes, pulled back and
revealed to be what they were. All of his perception, all of his
thoughts, the product of a machine. A biological clockwork. And
like all machines, his mind was subject to periodic
malfunction.
    Again, Jesse considered the possibility of
hallucination. That's all this whole time travel thing was, right?
A bad dream. A delusion, a hiccup of insanity in an otherwise sane
individual. And as these thoughts were constructed by the
letter-globe, he calmed. He'd survive this trip, and all would
return to normal. Soon, he'd awaken in the desert of 1970,
surrounded by his acolytes, and Susanna, and Wayne. Not the rich,
powerful Wayne who owned this land and pumped the oil from its
veins and planted his seed in Jesse's lover, but the mewling,
pathetic Wayne who lived in Jesse's shadow, as he always had.
    No! No, that couldn't be. Jesse had never
tripped like this before. It was too real, too literal. This was
reality.
    His foot caught on a rock. He landed
face-first in the dry soil. The supersonic air wave was gone.
    Silence.
    Jesse's face throbbed. He
got to his feet and was nearly blinded by the light of Bridgetown's
Main Street. Surely there was no reason for this place to be so lit
up at this late hour. But it was a gesture, wasn't it? That
Bridgetown, under the dazzling genius and unyielding vision of
Wayne Cole, had created daylight where there was none. A
halogen-powered, chest-out defiant middle finger towards God
himself. The light bulb.
    Jesse wondered what Thomas Edison was doing
at the moment, and if he had any dark intuition in the pit of his
stomach that told him forces of fate larger than himself had
replaced him.
    A commotion broke out several storefronts
down the street, kitty-corner from the general store that Jesse had
entered hours earlier. Two strongarms threw a drunkard out the
front of the building. The man sloppily tossed insults at the pair,
who dismissed him with a wave and went back into the warm light of
the building. The drunk stumbled away, punctuating the moment with
a toe-kick in the dirt road.
    Jesse gave it a moment, waiting for the man
to leave the scene, then made his way towards the saloon. The amber
tones of an old piano, and the rowdy laughter of patrons, drifted
out past the doorway. He was a bit disappointed to note that there
weren't any swinging double-doors, just a regular, and fairly
narrow, brass-knobbed door coated in a deep red.
    A painted wooden panel hung on a leather
strap next to the doorway. Jesse squinted under the bare porch
light's wavering glow to read what it said:
    On the eighteenth of November, one year
before,
Los Angeles cried, "Sabbath's dry, evermore!"
So at Bridgetown rendezvous,
Raise a glass and put up yer shoe,
For here ye may pay penance with a whore.
    Issuing a snort, Jesse entered the warm light
and warmer air of the saloon. It was a long, narrow, stuffy brick
oven of an establishment. The bar ran lengthwise along the left
side. A bartender with a thoroughly impressive waxed mustache and a
rather dapper vest busily served up a line of patrons in bowler
hats and three-piece suits. For a bunch of rowdy drunks, these guys
sure weren't cutting any sartorial corners.
    The floor was covered in spent peanut shells,
and the air hung thick with smoke that wafted up from around the
five card tables packed with men playing games. A staircase of
treacherously tall steps drew Jesse's eyes upwards, to the sensuous
mysteries of the second floor, from which a brilliant red light
emanated.
    Jesse noticed, too, that there was something
of a culture