Free How to Get Into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak Page A

ticket. It said $8. I had to pay the woman stooped in the cubbyhole of a seat near the bakery counter. She had a sweater clipped around her shoulders and she was using a calculator and she was writing down the amount of each ticket and then she took mine and I got my carrot cake in its pink box and I was out of there.
    The carrot cake had large pieces of walnuts. That’s why I liked it. The crunch. It was salty against the sweet of the frosting, so good that it made me want to cry. I ate it all, one mouthful after another like someone was going to take it away from me, as I sat and watched the fires on television.
    They were coming closer. The acrid smell was faint, but already hitting this part of the city although the fires were still smoldering on the outskirts of the grid. The valley fires were moving to Angeles Crest. They said it might be a marijuana farm in the National Park. They said that they would probably never find out who did it.
     
    I shoveled the cake in my mouth and watched the reporter on TV with a yellow rain slicker talk to the people in the studio.
    “There’s ash positively everywhere, Chuck. Blinding.”
    She was right. It was coming down all around her like snow. It was getting stuck in her hair, her lip-gloss. As she tried to free herself from it all they cut away to a commercial. When I stuck my head out the sliding glass door I could smell the smoke and the sky was a deep orange. Nuclear-style. I looked down at the
cake and saw that it was gone. Just the outline of the frosting, like crime scene paint. I had to leave the house; I was feeling sick and anxious. I got into the car and started to drive east, toward the 5, the way to the mountains. In Hollywood, I realized I didn’t know how to get to Angeles Crest and so I pulled into the Hollywood Downtowner motel again to see if they had some local attraction maps with directions.
     
    It was still silent at the Downtowner. The pool lights were on and there was a shell of ash on the surface of the water. It wasn’t moving, just clinging. I brushed off a lawn chair and sat down and positioned myself to be facing the mountains. It was harder to breathe at the Downtowner. I hadn’t anticipated the choking and I wished that I had a gas mask or one of those surgical masks. An older couple rushed down the stairs. They were both wearing surgical masks. I wanted to ask them where they had gotten them but they ran past me too quickly.
    I saw them talking to the front desk attendant through the glass and the old man was waving his hands around. The woman was trying to hold them down. He wasn’t having it and the attendant ran into another room and disappeared. They waited a while. Tapped on the “ring this bell for the attendant” bell. The husband started doing it over and over again. I could hear it outside, by the pool. His wife pulled him away and he dragged their suitcases out of the office and down the street. The attendant came back. He put the “ring this bell for the attendant” bell back in its place and started cleaning up the pamphlets the old man had strewn around. I walked up and into the glass room. He looked startled when I came in, like I was going to throw something at him, like I was the old man.
    I walked over to the wooden case of Los Angeles attraction pamphlets and touched them all, slowly. I could feel him staring at me but he didn’t say anything. There were pamphlets for the
Griffith Park Zoo, the beautiful beaches of Malibu! Las Vegas, Sea World and the San Diego Zoo, Lake Havasu, and Reno.
    “Are there more Los Angeles attractions?”
    “They’re all there,” he said.
    I turned to look at him. He was trying to look extra official; he had interlocked his fingers and made his hands into a fist, smiled at me through thin lips. “There’s only two about Los Angeles. The rest are about Lake Havasu.”
    I picked up the pamphlet. It was covered in pictures of girls in bikinis and speedboats and personal