Karolina Waclawiak - How to Get into the Twin Palms

Lev’s wife looked at me; she had hung back, kept her petal-pink suit tidy and away from my flailing hands. We looked at each other then and I knew I had no right to attack her. She was everything I now realized I never wanted to become. A village girl with wired-in teeth, ruby-colored hair curled tight to her head. She couldn’t have been more than 35 but she looked 50. Smoke lines on her face and pink blush layered over loose skin. They were immigrants but they weren’t like my immigrant parents. They got married the Eastern European way, I figured. Pregnant while fucking. Then marriage. Then leaving the village.

The leopard lady hunted around the floor for her teeth, each porcelain nub, and I finally could leave. No one was in my way. Lev’s wife looked like she wanted to strike me but wouldn’t. The woman with the carrot-colored lips was wiping off and starting over, trying to clean up her face.

I pushed out of the bathroom. Lev was standing there, waiting for me. He looked fraught, scared for the first time. He was saying things like, Devochka, are you okay , things like that. He tried to pull me away from the door, with him, but I just pushed past him.

Out of the Twin Palms.

I broke my heel leaving, heading down the carpeted stairs with their thin fading flowers in red and pinkish hues on the green background. The spindle broke but I had a strong grip on the railing and only stuttered forward. People pushed past me and up the stairs, to where they belonged. I walked slowly down the sidewalk, away from the Twin Palms and on the ball of my right foot, balancing out the left.

I passed stores with neon sturgeons in the window and CAVIAR written in neon cursive inside the belly of the fish. Pawnshops with dirty, faded gold rings in the windows. The window said, “WE BUY GOLD.” Women’s rings lined the plush-holed display cases, everything looked worn out, faded down, and I didn’t want to look anymore.

Smoke was billowing behind the hills in front of me. And the light was fading against a line of palm trees, bright blue and then glowing orange in the distance. There were two places I could go to get a better look and I weighed my options. The top of the canyon had coyotes, homeless men in the bushes; that’s what I believed anyway. Griffith Park was the other. The observatory. I wasn’t sure what could be there. I had heard several things.

I stopped at home first, wiped my face off, and took my dress and my shoes off. Threw all of it into the garbage and I changed into things that needed to make sense to me again. Pants, sneakers, a t-shirt. I took any remnant of Lev that I could find, his clothing, a gold ring, a comb, and shoved them in another bag and took it with me. I looked up at the sky as I was leaving, at the power lines where the birds used to sit, gone and quiet now, and up past the palm trees to see the smoke creeping forward.

I had to park on the street because the gate was closed.

The park looked long and dark and I had begun to believe this was a bad idea but I needed a better look at the city. I had been trawling the boulevards and avenues, the flats , and I needed to see things. Bright things.

At the mouth of the park I could still hear cars. Honks, the whirring of motors, fits and starts of traffic on Los Feliz Boulevard. I walked into the darkness and wished I had thought of bringing a flashlight. I heard bird noises, rustling noises, noises that were unfamiliar and unsettling. I walked further, where the park lights stopped shining, on the road twisting up the hill. There were probably coyotes here too. I could smell jasmine and the fires made the city warm, but pockets of cool air slipped over me as I climbed up, deeper into the dark. When I heard unfamiliar sounds, park sounds, I stopped and listened, my skin tingling, my spine feeling tense.

Then things became quiet. I hadn’t heard this kind of quiet before, dark quiet, empty quiet. The only thing to do was to keep moving. It took a while and when I reached the top I had sweat through my shirt and my upper lip was wet with perspiration. My bag felt heavy on my shoulder and I thought I had been walking for an hour. The air had made my chest heave, my hair probably smelled like smoke.

When I reached the top of the spiral, I could see the parking lot of the observatory, and it was empty. Lit up and glowing, and from up here the ash was really coming down, a blizzard of it, whirring in circles. I couldn’t see the grid yet. The trees slouched toward the parking lot and obscured the view. I had to get closer. There was a dirt walkway on the side of the building and as I walked down, the city opened up beneath me. Blue squares lined the flat and intersected forever. I was sweating and breathing heavy and needed to collect myself. Here it was.

Los Angeles.

I didn’t know what to say or do so I just sat quietly on a rock, wiping the sweat from my face with the sleeve of Lev’s dress shirt, sticking out of my bag. There weren’t any fires in this direction but the glow of the sky was orange. The buildings jutted from the landscape and I just sat there, ash crinkling down around me. This city was cut up into neat squares. Avenues were dissected by boulevards which were dissected by streets and I wanted it all to mean something to me. I wanted to understand. I tried looking for my apartment. My alley. The Twin Palms. I sat there and studied the landscape, followed Los Feliz Boulevard to Sunset Boulevard to Fairfax Avenue and down. Down to where I was supposed to be and to where Lev might be.

IT WAS CLEAR TO ME THEN THAT THERE WASno way out. Greg was right. The neat and tidy squares couldn’t contain us anymore. The blur of blue and orange streetlights, the throb of cars snaking out of the city. They were crushing each other to get out. The highways were flooded with automobiles and I realized there was no way out. The glut was going to keep us in here forever. There was nothing to go to anyway. There was desert to the east of us, water to the west. North was the Grapevine and mountains that were burning. Los Angeles was trapped and I was trapped within it. And neither of us should have been here in the first place. The fires, the mudslides, earthquakes. Why didn’t anyone see that we didn’t belong here anymore, ever? I jumped up. I had parts of Lev that would help it along. We would help the purge.

The smell up here was of wood fires and smoke chimneys and cool pockets of air and hot waves of ash and I climbed away from the blinking and away from the observatory and the white glow on the hill and away into the woods. Away from Hollywood and Downtown and over to the valley. To the fires and the smoke and the hills and mountains. That’s where I belonged, closer to the ash and closer to the smoke, and fire lapping in the distance. I would add to it, make it bigger and more pronounced. I would finally make my mark. I hoped that Greg was somewhere up here. But he wasn’t. Yet.

The fires were closer now. No longer in Simi Valley or the outskirts of the city. I could see rows of red and orange, fire lines down the hills in Burbank and moving closer to us, along the ridges of the mountains. It was uncontainable and shrouded the valley with a thick cloud of smoke, dulling the grids on this side. There were helicopters dotting the sky up and around the fires. Channel 7 and Channel 4 were vying for a better view, trying to get closer to the action. They were circling up there in the sky, moving in zigzag motions, too far from where I was to get the story first. The dirt trail slid down under my weight and I saw the bright white letters floating up and over the ridges of the hill. H-O-L–L-Y-W-O-O-D, the LAND long gone. It looked vulgar here in the dark, it looked like a lie.

It didn’t matter anymore.