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

The House That Jack Built

People who could be frightened, people who were insecure, people who admired us; these were our prey. We brought them to her house and invited them to play a game with us, a game they had never heard of. It was a game they could not win, a game they could not loose, a game they could not stop. It was The House That Jack Built.

It began sometime in 1990. I had only just become aware of the passage of time, that there were numbers assigned to years. I had found a newspaper in the garage and read a headline about the gulf war. A strange electrical sensation coursed through my body. War. I had heard of war. I changed schools that year and entered into the fifth grade in a program for gifted children. That was when I received my first phone call. That’s when it began.

Other children had called in the past to arrange play dates or invite me to birthday parties. But no one had ever called just to talk to me before. I sat on the dark steps leading into the rumpus room with the black rotary phone between my feet. Brow furrowed, I believe I asked her:
“What do you want?”
“Just to talk.”
“I should go now.” I said, wishing to return to my own inner world, to the sanctity of home and hood.
“Why?” she asked.
“My friend Sarah is coming over.” I told her.

Sarah lived across the street. Sarah and my sister and I had eaten and bathed and played and slept together since I was three years old. There was very little separation between myself and Sarah, myself and my sister, myself and my parents. Just as meals appeared three times a day and bath water ran once after dark, Sarah would appear before noon and we would all play dolls or house or ride bikes up and down the streets or run through the fields playing freeze tag or dance to a Paula Abdul cassette. Other children from the neighborhood might participate or not, but Sarah would be there like sunshine, or spring, or inhalation. It was pre-ordained, habitual, mechanical, natural. I had almost no sense of self. I was the accumulation of these many daily rituals, the appearance and disappearance of these other characters, the texture and variety of landscape, of house and hood.
“Sarah who?” she asked.
“Butler.” I told her.
“The earwig. Tell the little earwig I said hi.” And hearing that sentence uttered in that particular tone, nuanced as it was, changed everything. That phone call was the beginning, although at the time I didn’t know it. That was the beginning of my fall, my descent into the outer world.
Suddenly someone from outside had just created a conspiratorial connection with me. With that utterance, she plucked me from unity and bliss. Sarah was no longer a part of my self. Sarah was an earwig, and she and I could have a laugh at Sarah’s expense. Sarah’s presence in my life diminished. My interest in her as something other than an object of ridicule waned. When her mother remarried and they vanished from the neighborhood a year later, I stood in front of her house feeling the loss, realizing she had been gone for a long time, I had banished her, and now she could never be retrieved.

By 1993 my experience of self had become inverted. My family had moved. There was a new house, a new hood, new kids, a suburban landscape, all alien to me. My parents were strangers as well. Even my own body was unfamiliar. By then I was in middle school and she and I were no longer in the same class. Nonetheless I still received the phone calls, now via a cordless phone that I could carry to my room.
She came to my house to “hang out” or I visited hers. We invented a language composed of two words, “Giba” and “dumbass.” We would converse as if we understood one another perfectly, making observations about those around us, including my sister, most of which were concluded with the word “dumbass”. If my sister attempted to join the conversation and play along, we looked confounded, as though we could not understand her, but we could still communicate with one another, and we would discuss this creature making its attempts to establish contact with us, but we would never speak back to it.

The houses in the new neighborhood were identical. I would marvel over the fact that the boy three doors down was living in a structure of precisely the same shape. As I moved through my own house I was moving phantom-like through his. I would imagine going into his house, which corners I could duck into to go unnoticed as he passed, how I could give him a push down the stairs, his stairs which were identical to my stairs. Or how I might enter his room, identical to my own, while he slept and simply be there, uninvited.

1995. We were high school freshmen. We had some classes together. Sleepovers abounded. She was given the basement floor of her house as a bedroom. It had an exit into the backyard. Our fusion reached its peak. I was now distinctly “I”, a separate, confused, and lonely entity, but together there was a “we”, just “she” and “I” together, and we were ready to unleash our games upon the inferior masses.

We would invite them to her house and pull out a deck of cards.
“Have you ever played the house that Jack built?” we would ask. Invariably they answered “no” or “what’s that?”
Now came the fun. We would invite them to play with us, would shuffle the deck and deal out cards. Then we would play. The only rules in The House That Jack Built were that there were no rules other than those that she and I invented as we went along. Naturally, only she and I knew this, and we would confirm the validity of one another’s plays and confuse and shock those we were playing with.

Gradually, our playmates might begin to suspect that they were the butt of some joke, but we would continue to play with such passion and sincerity that they would doubt their own perceptions. If, smiling, they accused us of making things up, we would assure them that we weren’t, that they’d get the hang of it soon enough, it was really quite simple…
Frequently a card play would be accompanied by a loud pronouncement:
“And this is the house that Jack built!” or “Gone fishing!”
At that point we would collect all the cards that had been “played” in the center, or take away the hand of the other player, or some equivocal gesture of triumph that would leave our victim with the sense of impending defeat. The game would go on endlessly, however, and we’d take pains to steer it away from any form of completion.

Eventually our victim would beg to end the game, insist that they had to stop and we would inform them that there could be no stopping until the game was finished. We would lean in on them, glare menacingly, grin sardonically. Something in the air would change. They could not win, they could not loose, and they could not stop. Desperately some would insist that they had just lost the game, trying to join us in the rule defining, referring back to some similar situation earlier in the game for which we would always have an exception,
“Yes, but you only give up your cards if you have no clubs in hand.” or “No, all the cards must be reshuffled and re-dealt when the eight of spades precedes the queen of hearts.”
Afternoon would turn to evening. Our victim would sweat, grow quarrelsome, or cry.

There were no adults left to monitor either of us at this point in our history. We would decide as school let out to take the bus to her house. On the bus we would select who we would or would not invite for our games.
One night as we walked home from the bus stop we asked a bony acne scarred girl from her neighborhood to come over. Nicole was the kind of innocent who hadn’t learned yet to conceal her emotions. Nicole told us in her high nasal voice, that she would go home and do her homework first, then tell her mother and finally come by around 4:00. She arrived at 3:45. That was the kind of girl Nicole was.

In the basement we sat atop the washer and dryer with Nicole between us taking turns playing with a small hunting knife I‘d coerced from a boy in my Math class. I would pass it to her and she would pass it to me, but we would never pass it to Nicole who watched the blade while talking in short nervous bursts and fingering the hem of her skirt.
Suddenly She grabbed Nicole by the hair and ran the dull edge of the blade along her throat. Nicole gave out a small startled cry. As she was released, Nicole touched her throat, finding it intact, and started to sob. We smiled mockingly. Without a word Nicole grabbed her sweater and pounded away up the stairs and out the front door.

People who could be frightened, people who were insecure, people who admired us; these were our prey. We brought them to her house and invited them to play a game with us, a game they had never heard of. It was a game they could not win, a game they could not loose, a game they could not stop. It was The House That Jack Built and it wore them down, made them loose their hopeful grins, their sycophantic giggles, their pathetic displays of wit or humor.
In the end, they usually begged, especially when we lay the dull edge of the knife against their throats. Most of them believed we would do it by then, after the hours of suspicion turned to self doubt returned again to suspicion. After we had whittled away their trust in us and any tidbits of faith that they had in themselves, they would see the knife, then feel steel sliding against their flesh, and they would believe for a moment that their throat had just been slit. They would sit there wide eyed, waiting for their lives to bleed out.
For some of them, this was the moment when they lost unity, bliss. For others it was just one more crippling blow. And for just a few, it was the first time in a long while that they had lost themselves, completely and utterly vanishing in the moment, only to re-emerge into singularity a moment later, blinking and breathing and staring into our houses, identical to their own.

The Meeting

She pulled up to the café and saw that the lights inside were on still. It was past nine and all the other small cafes along the street were dark. The corner café was spilling its yellowness onto the sidewalk and into the dark night. Even though the lights were on, she could tell it was closed. It had that feeling, something that was finished, but still lingering. She pulled her car alongside the plate glass windows that acted as a wall. She shut the engine off and looked inside. There were two people inside behind the counter, both of them almost blocked from view by the large industrial coffee grinders and stacks of cups.
She put her purse in the trunk, put her cell phone and car keys in her pocket and then got out of the car. She shoved three twenties into her corduroy jacket pocket. She looked again through the café windows and saw Ronnie inside. The barista, now she could tell it was a young woman with long dark hair, was handing him two white paper cups of coffee over the cappuccino maker.
Suza walked away from the front glass door and strolled the length of the café, the entire front wall was made of plate glass windows. With her hands in her jacket pockets, she looked into the empty seating area at the far end of the narrow building. There were wooden tables and chairs and wooden bench seating built into the walls. On the wall above the bench seating were framed pieces of art arranged in a single row.
She turned to the left, towards the registers and the coffee grinders and equipment and saw Ronni standing in front of a narrow table against the window by the front door, fixing his coffee with cream and sugar. He looked up and they made eye contact. He smiled at her in recognition. She looked again towards the paintings on the wall, semi- abstract mountain scenes painted in a neutral orange and red palette. There was a small cork bulletin board just a few feet from her on the wall. It was crowded with so many paper signs, ads and posters that it seemed more like an interactive collage layered with old announcements and flyers.
She heard the sound of the glass door fifteen feet away and she looked towards it, towards Ronnie coming out of the door with two coffee cups in his hands. She walked towards him and he handed her a cup. “They’re closed but they still had some decaf,” he said.
“That was sweet of you,” she brought the cup to her chest, a source of warmth in the cold misty night. “I can’t even drink decaf, I still feel jittery when I drink it, but that was nice of you.”
She felt a mixture of sadness and harshness inside as she rejected his offering, his thoughtful token of affection.
He walked slightly ahead of her, walking towards a row of tables along the wall of the café perpendicular to the front and the street she had parked along. They sat for less than a minute. A wild gust of wind picked up and she felt the wind go inside her jacket, torturing her chest with an icy touch.
“It’s cold,” she said, grimacing slightly. “Maybe there’s somewhere else we can go.”
She looked around at the darkened neighborhood.
“We can go to my car.”
He led her back around the block to the front of the café. His car was parked about ten feet behind hers, leaving a space between them just big enough for another car to fit in. As they were walking he turned around towards her.
“You look really good,” he said with a smile.
She smiled, “You look skinnier.”
“Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of weight.”
It had been a year since they last met at the same café. He was the same, but different.
He opened the passenger door to his tan Volvo and she slipped inside. Inside was the dog she remembered from the time before, a pug with slightly glazed eyes and stinky fur. She avoided touching it. The last time she pet the dog, over a year ago, the smell had not come off her hands for hours. She had washed her hand with soap, poured Listerine and rubbing alcohol on it, nothing worked immediately. This time she avoided touching him, though he leaned his head towards her, practically begging for affection.
The dog kept his skinny hind legs on the back seat and reached towards the front seats by putting his two front legs on the console between the driver and passenger seat.
Ronnie walked around to the driver’s side and got in. Once inside he handed her a small, folded-up piece of aluminum foil.
“There are two five-strips in there, you’ll need to cut them yourself.”
“Oh, they’re not all cut up?”
“No, it looks like this.”
He opened the glove compartment, pulled out a ziplock bag and procured another small folded-up piece of aluminum. He opened the folds of foil and then moved it towards her. There were three strips of paper inside, each about an inch long and an eighth of an inch thick. Ronnie and Suza both peered in, as though they were looking into a doorway or a flashing tv set.
“Shit,” Ronnie muttered as he lost his grip on the feather-light foil and a little strip fell into the nether-region by the car’s gear shift. She let out a little chuckle, wondering to herself how many illicit substances were lost in the caves of his car. Ronnie pulled up the fake walnut veneer that housed the gear shift and found the white little strip (it looked like cardstock or paper used for watercolors) and put it back into the foil.
“Don’t do what I just did,” he said with a smile, “when you’re cutting them, put on some gloves, you’d be surprised how fast it gets absorbed into your skin.”
She nodded. She was a little surprised by how small the strips were. How could such a small thing produce such profound changes in the person that puts it in their mouth?
“So, cut those into five equal strips…”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“How many do you usually take?”
“I take one.”
He said it with such finality and seriousness, looking into her eyes directly with a slightly tilted head, as though he had to make the point and underline it. She was surprised. He had told her stories of taking 5-10 hits of whatever substance he could find, it made her a little nervous that he limited himself to one tab, how strong were they?
“I haven’t tried these ones, but I took some that looked like this a few weeks ago and within an hour, an hour and a half, I was on the floor. I was glad I only took one because I wouldn’t have been able to handle any more."
They’re strong, she thought. She felt a little nervous, her stomach started to turn, her body finding something to worry about.
“I met someone that is interested in DMT, can I give him your number?” she asked.
“I don’t really want to deal with people I don’t know. I would probably deal with him through you, but I’ve never seen DMT commercially available. I’ve made it, synthesizing it from plants, but I’ve never seen it out there in big quantities.”
He leaned over her and reached into the glove compartment again, it was still open. He got a small bit of folded foil and opened it. He turned on the overhead light, which illuminated the substance in his hand, a small crystal, it was smaller than a grain of rice.
“You do speed?” he asked.
She laughed, “No, do you?”
“Yeah," he said.
Now she understood why he was so skinny. She thought she heard him say something about smoking.
“If you are going to smoke that, I should probably go,” she said looking at the door handle by her left knee.
“No, I’m not going to smoke it now,” he said laughing.
She started to feel a slight sense of nausa.
“Speed is something, I mean, if you can’t just do it once or twice a month, you really shouldn’t do it. It can really mess with you.”
She looked at him moving around all jittery. He kept on looking in his rear view mirror and then looking at her and then looking ahead out through the car’s windshield. There was a stoplight twenty feet away, green light beamed towards them. She started to feel paranoid, like at any moment, a car could pull up next to them and turn on its sirens. They were just sitting there talking, but the glove compartment was full of different baggies and any cop would have been following his right instincts to stop and search them.
Avoiding the dog, she sat slightly tilted in her seat.
“Right now,” he said, “the doors are open. We can get coke, heroin, crack, which is just a few blocks from here. There’s molly. Whatever you want. But not DMT. I’m looking to get a big mimosa tree, the bark has DMT in it. Then I can synthesize my own.”
“I’m sure they have one at the nursery on Water Street.”
“Yeah, I’m sure they do, I just don’t want to attract too much attention, you know? I’ve got a garden full of psychedelic plants already. Did you know that the moment you die, your body releases dmt?”
Through an unlit cigarette in his mouth he said, “I think that’s very interesting.”
He pulled a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit his cigarette.
“I think I am going to step outside,” she said.
“Oh. Does this bother you? I can put it out.”
“Really, you sure?”
“Yeah, I can wait.”
"I think Valaris has DMT in it. I’ve been looking to find that plant.”
“We have valaris. The variegated kind.”
“Which kind is it, there are lots of varieties.”
“You know,” she said, “I’m not sure, it’s variegated. It’s in my friend’s yard, he planted it, not me.”
“The other day I found some really pure molly. See, me and my girl took some hits, they were ok, but they didn’t quite take us there, and once you start, you really want to get there, so we went down to the Falcon Bar and I started asking different people if they had seen my friend mollie. Some girl said, ‘yeah, I know mollie.’ It was this candy raver girl. You know the Falcon Bar? It’s a raver bar. It was such a clean roll. It was exactly what I’d been looking for. I found her later and asked if she could get some more, she had major quantity. We had a big old-fashioned ecstasy orgy at my house a few days later.”
She started to feel something in her stomach. A general sense of ill ease, like something bad would be drawn towards them. Maybe it was the memories of an old life in Santa Barbara, but sitting with Ronnie in the car, his glove compartment full of enough evidence to warrant years of jail time, it just reminded her of a particular level of existence where you were always scared of the cops, or at least looking for them at every moment.
She wondered if it was just her that was paranoid. He had not been paranoid several weeks before when he was comfortable arranging the substance and payment for it over the phone. No code words, no disguise. ‘It’s white on white, 5 bucks a hit.’
She was the one that was worried about the cops, she who remembered so viscerally her life ten years before. As she sat there, her body tilted avoiding not just the dog, but the situation, she realized she was pulling in, not pushing out. She tried to imitate him a little. She realized she was getting fearful. She reminded herself not to pull in or else she would absorb his atmosphere into herself.
She pushed out. She tried to imitate him a little, but she forgot her intent soon after.
He said “You know, I’m not a drug dealer, I’m not trying to make money off this, I just want people to get high and have a good time. When I do LSD, I do it spiritually. I go into the woods and take it. I don’t fuck around."
“Ronnie, I need to go now, I need to go pick up my goddaughters.”
He looked at her very sweetly, he stared at her like he liked looking at her face. She smiled at him and got out of the car. She checked her pocket to make sure the foil was there, then drove her car around the darkened lake, back to her house.