Brawley

Brawley is a recurring place in the lives of Ricky and Dan Davis: first the town where Ricky’s grandmother lived and where Dan searches for Ricky after her disappearance, then a stop on the couple’s journey after her awakening. Its modest scale, old records, and surviving stored belongings make it a point of connection between Ricky’s past and the future she chooses with Dan.

Setting and Ricky’s Family

When Dan reaches Brawley in pursuit of Ricky, he learns that Ricky and her grandmother had both lived there. The town is described as having only a hundred thousand residents, a sharp contrast with the seven million of Greater Los Angeles. Its smaller size makes the older records comparatively easy to locate, although that does not solve Dan’s immediate problem: the trail from the preceding week proves much harder to follow.

Ricky’s connection to the town also rests on her grandmother, who had died twenty years before Dan’s search. Later, when Ricky is living with Miles, she tells Dan that her grandmother is coming from Brawley to take her in. Ricky explains that she wrote to her grandmother because she no longer wanted to live with her father, and that her grandmother replied she could leave because Miles had never adopted her and she remained her grandmother’s guardian of record. Brawley is thus not just a former home but the origin of the family bond that offers Ricky a way out.

Dan’s Search

Dan learns that Ricky had taken the Long Sleep, but finding out where she had lived is only the beginning. He has trouble tracing the recent part of her history because she is not traveling alone, contrary to his expectation that he would be looking for a young woman by herself. Remembering Dr. Bernstein’s warning that newly awakened Sleepers could be targeted by confidence men, Dan grows more urgent in his pursuit.

His search proceeds by reversals rather than a direct route. A false lead takes him to Calexico; he returns to Brawley, starts again, and eventually picks up the trail toward Yuma. The town’s role in the search is therefore both practical and narrative: its older records establish Ricky’s link to her grandmother, while the elusive recent trail carries Dan onward toward the people he is trying to find.

Return After the Long Sleep

After Ricky awakens, Dan takes her to Brawley despite Dr. Rumsey’s wish that she remain overnight. Her grandmother has died, and the social connections Ricky once had there have disappeared through attrition. Some of her belongings remain in storage, mostly books, which Dan arranges to have shipped to Aladdin, care of John Sutton.

Ricky is dazzled by the changes in her old hometown and holds tightly to Dan’s arm, but she does not succumb to the homesickness that Dan identifies as a serious hazard of the Long Sleep. Instead, she wants to leave Brawley quickly. Dan hires another cab, and they travel on to Yuma, where they marry. Brawley’s final significance is therefore deliberately mixed: it preserves tangible traces of Ricky’s former life, but it is not where she chooses to resume that life. The stored books go forward with her; the town itself becomes a brief passage between awakening and marriage.