Sunland:

In the mornings, I liked to sit in front of the TV and watch police pursuits with the curtains drawn. That is what I was doing on the sofa, eating a mug of milk-soaked cheerios, when Cheyenne came in and threw my purse at me. “We’re going,” she said. She stood in the doorway staring at me with her aviators on, her eyebrows heavy and identical above them.

I sat with my knees up in the passenger seat of her old black Chevy which smelled of acrid leather and patchouli. A rosary swung back and forth on the front mirror as she sped down the road, and the station was tuned to AM radio. They were taking calls about a potential bigfoot sighting. The two men on the call gleefully anticipated the attention of reporters and the stir it would cause. Government shutdown. Ecological collapse. Free money and nuclear warfare. “Everyone will finally know the truth,” they said. I told Cheyenne to turn that shit off. “What if they were right, you know? What do you think would change?” she asked.

I told her that we’d still have to pay for parking, doctors’ appointments, food, toilet paper, tampons and inhalers. We’d still have to work or die.
“Don’t be such a bitch,” she said, staring at the wrong traffic lights with such attention that she ran a red, “at least we’d have something to talk about.”

As we drove further northeast, the colours began to change. They grew orange and sinister, dusty. We entered the miasma of yellow smog that laid across the little valley of Tujunga as we slipped through a mountain pass and came to a big open street. Cheyenne drew down all her tinted windows to let the smoke drift out and the sudden visibility made me feel embarrassed. We passed a small white house with a chain and lock around its front door. Across its face there was blue spray paint that said things like ‘die Satan’ and ‘the holy Son will return’. An ugly grey pitbull was sleeping on its porch step.

Cheyenne made a hard turn down an arterial road and the car climbed into rocky yellow hills. The houses grew sparse as we ascended until we approached a small red bungalow. She pulled into the driveway and parked the car. The lawn was peppered with yellow grass, grey dirt, and fragments of green bottle glass, which gave it a supernatural glimmer in the hot sun. There was a decrepit wooden structure sitting atop a rock, a sort of tree- or boulder-house, that had the sharp ends of nails sticking out in every direction. “That was where I used to hide,” Cheyenne said. Inspecting the ground, I picked up a cone-like rock and slipped it into the pocket of my jeans. She asked if I wanted to knock on the door. I knew this was as far as I was willing to go, and my face probably said as much, so she grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me to the front step. I gave the steel security doors an imperceptible rattle which she told me was ridiculous, and then she rang the doorbell.

We waited a minute before ringing again, but before we could an older man crept up behind the steel doors and undid the lock. He didn’t say anything initially, just looked us up and down with his sagging cornflower eyes. He took a sideways drag of his cigarette with leathery hands and looked at me. “Who are you?” he asked with a voice clearer than I had expected. 

Cheyenne took off her sunglasses. “I used to live here,” she said, though he remained looking at me. He invited us in for a drink and Cheyenne agreed on our behalf. We were led through a hallway and into a small living room where we sunk into a brown leather couch. Its armrests were scratched down to the wooden frame by a long-dead cat. The man placed two glasses in front of us and poured in some cherry flavoured whiskey. It had strings of congealed sugar swimming in it, which I assumed meant that it was either exclusively reserved for unwanted guests, or teenagers who couldn’t tell the difference between good booze and mouthwash. Perhaps it was both, because, within five minutes of us entering the house, Cheyenne had already taken down the drink with all the fervour and determination of the teenage alcoholic she was. The man, descending with his motorised armchair via some noisy mechanics, asked about Cheyenne’s life at the house when she was living there. She responded with a genuine interest and a mild flirtation, because she saw some value in conversing with old men that I was not attuned to seeing. He asked if she ever saw the aliens. She told him that she did once, and then he asked her to elaborate and she didn’t. He turned on the television behind us, which felt like an indication that we had overstayed our welcome, so we left and returned to the car before driving off into smoggy Tujunga.

That same night we got high in the living room while we watched an Ancient Aliens rerun on the History Channel. For that hour we entertained the existence of the Anunaki race, who supposedly built the Aztec pyramids and invented gunpowder and had been continuously visiting North American cornfields in an apparent effort to keep tabs on their contributions. An extraterrestrial specialist with a slick grey ponytail explained that it was the Anunaki who had made the executive decision to bring humanity closer to its industrial future, something we could not have possibly conceived of doing on our own, which I felt was a very compelling point. All of a sudden, Cheyenne paused the TV and looked at me very seriously. I noticed her knees were all scratched up. She asked if she had ever told me about the time her brother had tried to kill her, to which I responded that she had not. She rearranged herself on the couch to face me.

She told me she started shaving at twelve. She remembered being so deeply disturbed by the black hairs that had spouted from her legs, as though they were invading legions of wiry-black insects, that she would spend hours in the bathroom individually plucking every last one till her legs would turn red (something I had also done in moments of particularly pre-pubescent bodily disgust). This was a source of continuous irritation for all those that lived with her, that being her mother, step-father and brother, who was about two years older and the type to dissect lost neighborhood pets and show the giblets to the family. He had come into her room in the middle of the night and hit her over the head with a glass paperweight in the shape of a rubber duck. He held her down and kept hitting her till the dogs came in and jumped on him. The duck’s beak had drawn blood. Holding the back of her head, for fear her skull would come tumbling out, she ran outside into the darkness and clambered up a boulder across the road.

Cheyenne remembered laying down on her back, drinking in the desert night air, which had a crispness to it unlike the air anywhere else. The ground was dusty and dirty, not sandy. The universe opened above her with gaseous purple space clouds swirling above, a sky littered with fire and rock. She grabbed the weeds that grew either side of her as though they’d tether her to the earth. Then she saw something in the corner of her eye, something that flew so quickly it left a red streak across the sky as though it had cut it open. She was certain that it had been a UFO. Part of her wished that they would abduct her brother and perform terrible experiments on him. Mostly, she hoped to be abducted herself and taken somewhere faraway, where nobody spat in her beans or stopped her from shaving away all the things wrong with her.

Cheyenne spent her earliest years there in Tujunga, the place with the aliens where everything was wrong. Tujunga where the sun bled and tried to kill you; where it was so dry your skin started flaking off like dried glue and people stared at you hard and you knew they were carrying death on their elbows like shopping bags. A place to see the stars. A place where people came to see aliens because it was the sort of place you would expect aliens to visit.