The Numbers on the Gate

the streets are cracked sun flares bouncing off the silver car the red one bleeding against the driveway like a wound still fresh the palm trees whisper in some dry electric code above the suburb that thinks it’s safe the mailboxes like tiny black obelisks transmitting coordinates to some god that is not god jehova is real but not the thing you prayed to when you were seven on your knees with the bedroom door shut he’s a parasite on the signal a swollen insect lodged in the skull of the world the quiet cul de sacs are just the holding pens until he calls in the harvest and you can feel it in the sunlight the air’s wrong the sky too clean it hides something sharp and the hills roll away gold and brittle like the skin of an old reptile I keep walking past the road barrier with the spray paint 277 or 2 or maybe it’s a key code from the other side of the membrane and there’s the shadow of me long and insectile stretching down the cracked asphalt like I’ve already been eaten and replaced by something else the paint is flaking off the metal gate and the rust is bleeding out the joints and in my head the heat is telling me that the people in those houses aren’t really people anymore maybe they never were maybe they are shells filled with him with jehova the demon the architect who has been here since before the roads were laid and a group of them found out and they woke up one night with the static roaring in their heads and the dream of an open desert with no sun they met in garages and drained swimming pools whispering in code about his weaknesses about how his body is stitched into the telephone wires and the taste of him in tap water the strategy was to cut him out piece by piece like a tumor so they tagged the gates and the asphalt with numbers the numbers mean where to cut the artery the silver car the red car are just vehicles left as markers this driveway is an altar disguised as middle class safety the palm tree a green knife pointing up into the glare and I can feel the shadow of him over the hills even as the suburbs cluster in the valley like a swarm the chain link fence rattles though there is no wind my own shadow wavers like a bad projection and I keep thinking about the road that curves out of sight maybe it doesn’t go anywhere maybe it just loops back into the same scene with the same cars the same palm tree the same mailbox only every time I pass it something is slightly wrong an extra window on the house a number flipped backward on the curb maybe the grass growing darker because he’s closer the road surface splitting like dried skin and the hills are silent but I swear I see them breathing a ripple passes through the grassless slopes and it’s like a lung under a ribcage made of sky and all the while the demon is feeding and feeding on their prayers because the prayers are contracts binding them to him the group that fights him knows not to pray they burn the words before they leave their mouths they walk these roads under the noon sun so the heat can strip the last signals out of their skin I pass the same barrier again the numbers look different this time black paint dripping like coagulated blood maybe it’s not numbers maybe it’s the face of something in profile the hook of a jaw the coil of an ear but the shadow grows longer even though the sun is straight overhead and I know the cars are watching the silver one with its empty mirror eyes the red one with a door slightly ajar like a mouth that’s been whispering instructions for centuries the garage doors like eyelids that will never close the group hides in plain sight walking among them smiling but never touching the palms of the infected they keep moving from cul de sac to cul de sac from cracked asphalt to cracked asphalt because he can’t catch what doesn’t stop the hills turn gold to white in the glare and the valley tilts as if the whole place is a dish sliding toward a drain and I keep walking I keep walking because to stop is to be seen and to be seen is to be filled and finished