Headlights(48)

Tillman takes a slow breath and shrugs his shoulders up and down, shaking his arms out. He then turns to me and says, “My dude. I respect you, and I know this has gotta be real unfun for ya. In a lot of ways probably. Like a lot of ways. I mean, I can really see how it really sucks. But I’ll tell ya one thing, and I hope you hear it because we’re gonna be doin’ this until we figure this whole thing out, and I think it could just be a whole lot more pleasant for us if maybe you get this through your head now.”

He pulls down the mirror and checks his teeth, runs his hands over his hair, puts the mirror back up. He slaps his palms down on his thighs and turns back to me again. “I didn’t get promoted for nothin’,” he says, and steps out of the car.

In the doorway of the house, Mona Brown, a small woman wearing a white linen dress, her hair pulled into a messy bun, greets Tillman, and then I hear him say, “You cooking something? Smells amazing!”

She eyes me over his shoulder, stares at me a long minute, then seems to hear what Tillman said. She gives him a small smile and shuts the door behind them.

I text Tillman: See if Mona knows any of the former victims or killers too.

Tillman replies almost right away.

My dude.

Out the car window, this strange bland development that Oliver Wright built, with all its beefed-up security. I open the map on my phone and find which direction to go for Sagebrush.

I step out of the car and walk. It’s cold. That strange Denver November light that’s simultaneously too bright and somehow also dark feeling. House after house, Everett Brown’s words repeating through my ears. No wonder he gets philosophical here. All these developments, growing, spreading, slowly taking over the prairie grasslands and even extending out toward the mountains. Being in this development, it almost feels as though it will keep going forever. As though in one blink, all of America will be brown and beige houses, brown and beige developments, brown and beige security gates and Starbucks and Jiffy Lubes and HomeGoods, and all of it will go on and on through the Great Plains and past them, until there’s no wild lands anymore. Until it feels like there never were any to begin with.

An airplane flies overhead, slowly lowers toward the airport in the far distance. Guarded by Blucifer. I haven’t thought of him in a while. Luis Jiménez was the artist who created the bucking blue bronco at the entrance to our city with the orange—really red—glowing eyes, to be the first welcome when someone touches down. The airport has a million secrets, people say. Secret tunnels, doomsday mosaics, two billion dollars unaccounted for publicly. Gargoyle sculptures, hidden corridors, lizard people. The internet’s gone so wild with it all, the airport marketing team has started to lean in and now decorates and advertises it with all sorts of paranormal and conspiracy things.

Marianne used to read biographies on artists of all kinds—writers, sculptors, painters, dancers, filmmakers—and she used to say, All great art has a cost. Blucifer fell on Jiménez as he finished it. The crown jewel of Denver, claiming its maker’s life. What about a place like this? What is the cost of erecting hundreds or even thousands of nearly identical homes? Of spreading this city deeper and wider and out in all directions? And who pays it?

Human dwellings, places to sleep, places to pay bills and watch television and exercise and cook and eat and fuck and bathe and read and dream and want and fear and scroll on our phones and hold loved ones and sit alone in the blue glow of a screen and clean and dirty and clean and dirty until we don’t anymore. Until we die, like everyone else. Like we always knew we would.

Everett Brown, walking these identical streets, looking into these identical houses, ruminating on the same shit I am now, and more. Everett Brown taking steps and breaths outside that he had no idea would be some of his last as a free man. I stop walking, my gut telling me to. I look around, see if I can sense anything. I don’t—

But then I glance down.

A chalk drawing on the sidewalk, right in front of my feet, of … what? Some kind of creature. Maybe an elk’s head on a human body, but longer, spindly almost. Long pronged horns. Maybe. It’s been smudged, blurred a little. Where have I seen this?

At the brewery. A kid was drawing this. Or something like it. Strange.

Above the creature, a zigzag that kind of looks like …

That pressure in the air.

Wizdumteller in the chat room. That thing they kept repeating.

What will the WW think of this? What will the WW do next?

Above the smudged creature are eight lines that almost seem to say “WW.”

I straighten, look around. A woman sits on the front porch of the house I stand in front of, scrolling on her phone. Her front door is open. I walk up her front walk, and she realizes I’m heading her way, and stands.

“Can I help you?” she asks. She looks to be about my age, in workout clothes, a puffer, gloves, and baseball hat. A bag sits beside her on the porch, and a kid’s bicycle is out front on the lawn. Waiting for a child to come out, go to school or sports practice or something.

“Hey,” I say. “Sorry if this is weird, but … there’s a chalk drawing here on the sidewalk. Do you know who did it?”

Her brow furrows, and she holds her hand above her eyes to see me better in the late fall sun. “Yeah.” She glances inside, closes her front door, then crosses the front walk to meet me. I introduce myself, tell her I’m just visiting.