Dr. Gary Tracy wished he knew where his pants were.
“You’ve always said it was an open marriage.” He spoke loudly to compete with the bathroom fan.
“It was. I mean, it was open for me, you know, emotionally.” Nadya’s voice was strained from talking all night.
“What does that even mean?”
“Gar-, I went over this. We—I mean, Steven and me—had discussed widening the parameters of our relationship…” She poked her head and arms out from the bathroom to show him that she was making air quotes with her hands. “We thought we were so enlightened, so modern. He’d just read that book, you know, the one about how homo sapiens are not meant to be monogamous or whatever. But Steven never really committed to it, and now I just, I don’t know what, now I feel like I’m lying every day. It’s exhausting. What was it all for?”
“And here I thought we were just going to save the world together.” Gary stretched out a hand as she walked back into the dim room. But she leaned against the wall farthest from the bed. Her towel wrap pushed up the skin under her armpits.
“That was the plan.” Her smile was microscopic. “Now I’m just trying to make as much of a difference as I can in my little corner of it. What about you?”
He finally allowed himself to look out the window at the black, fire-choked sky blanketing her once-sunny city. “Is it even worth saving?”
“See what I mean? I miss the old Gary. He had an imagination.”
He stood up from the bed and unwound his pile of clothes on the floor from hers. His pants were flung over the nightstand. She joined him. A comfortable silence descended while they dressed.
He walked her to the door. The room smelled like stale food, almost covering the creeping tar of smoke edging from under the window seams.
“I have a great imagination, I’ll have you know.” If she looked up, he’d kiss her, but her chin stayed glued to her chest. “I can conjure you instantly, anytime, did you know? Poof! I just think of you and you appear.” He snapped his fingers.
“Stop kidding. I needed you to be the one constant in my crazy life. You’re supposed to be my good man who believes in the endless potential of goodness in others.” Nadya looked up at him at last, but her dark eyes were serious. She rested her free hand on his chest. “You should go too, Gar.” Her nose wrinkled. “It’s getting worse out there.”
He resisted following her to the elevator. Gary did a once over of the hotel room, instead, propping the door open with his roller bag. The whine of a distant vacuum grew louder and then cut out. On the side table, two metal covers hid the dregs of their last meal. Gary never ordered room service, but Nadya had insisted. She knew too many people in this town, she said. Hell, she was this town.
He slid his eyes over every socket and inspected the bathtub edge for toiletries. He even stooped to peer under the bed, groaning at the twinge in his lower back. Nadya had left a cloth napkin on the back of the chair. But the fabric looked too nice. Nothing in this hotel should be cashmere. They’d come here because it was near campus and far from anyone Nadya might know.
Gary flipped up the corner of the napkin and saw a label. Designer. It smelled like her; perfume and perspiration and shampoo that didn’t come free with this shitty room. He could still run after her. He might catch her in the lobby. A cream-colored flag to end their stalemate. But if he took the scarf, he’d have to figure out what to do with it. Somehow this will end up being his fault. Or maybe she’d left it so he’d have to run after her?
He thought about her dry eyes looking up at him. She’d told him to go. Gary draped the scarf back over the chair, attempting to hang it exactly as she’d left it.
Some of the guilt from leaving her scarf behind evaporated when Gary saw the room service on his hotel bill. Nadya had also charged her parking valet to his room. Doing his expense report next month was going to suck. Gary’s site visit to the West Coast office had been a pretense; he’d just wanted to see Nadya. He always wanted to see her, but it would be complicated for her if he actually moved here. ‘Complicated’ was her favorite word. He didn’t even get to attend last night’s fundraising dinner for the Somerhalder Center for Climate Change and Public Health at UCLA because she’d refused to be his date. Not in California, she’d said. After he’d flown 1,500 miles. Too complicated.
The app seemed to stall while locating a nearby driver, eventually pairing with one that was 33 minutes away. Confounded by the long wait, Gary almost stepped on an older, curly-haired woman surrounded by luggage. The zipper on her pink hoodie neatly cut between two block white words: “Long” and “Beach.” Gary apologized, sitting down hard on a too low, highlighter-yellow bench near the doors. This hotel had old bones. The pitiful water pressure and unusually heavy doors gave it away, though someone had clearly tried to cover up its age with aggressively modern art and neon furniture.
A cartoon car crawled across the map on his phone screen. Sam, 4.7 stars, was meandering through the UCLA campus. But the white Toyota Rav 4 disappeared from the app just as the corresponding text appeared: finding a new driver.
“Shit.” The AC stiffened Gary’s arm hair, but his lungs were safer behind the two sets of glass doors.
Near the entrance, the woman in the pink hoodie hugged a tall man. He patted her hair. They stood too close to the automatic door, so it opened for them. They stepped away, still locked in tandem. Warm, smoky air crept into the lobby.
“Smell that? I think the fires are getting closer.” The woman in the pink hoodie tipped her head back to frown up at her companion.
“I know. But I can’t get a real person to talk to me from the airline. The guy here, the uh, valet, he’s calling taxi companies, he said. I don’t see him though.”
The hotel clerk had also disappeared. Gary felt a sneeze creeping up the back of his nose. He held one sleeve over his face while he walked over to the napkin dispenser on the counter next to an ancient waffle iron. The coffee urn was cold to the touch.
His pocket buzzed; Linda in a black Prius was a mere 17 minutes away. The app said she was dropping someone else off, but why would anyone want to be let out around here during a fire? Unless firefighters were using rideshares now. Gary imagined a scenario where city budget cuts led to EMTs ordering app-based rides with extra big trunk space for gurneys. Anything to occupy his thoughts while he watched Linda’s car avatar sit at a light. Until he saw the Prius-shaped smudge through the haze outside, he didn’t really believe Linda would make it. What if he offered the couple a ride? It seemed like the right thing to do.
“Pardon me.” He imagined himself doing a Cary Grant impression; not quite American, not quite anywhere. A voice reminiscent of deep chin dimples and uninhibited courtesy. “If you’re headed to the airport, you can share my ride. It’s just arrived.”
The couple accepted, of course. They were desperate. Here was a hero, offering safe passage.
“Shall we?” Gary jutted his chin toward the door, while clapping one hand to his clavicle. “Dr. Gary Tracy. From New York.” Their replies echoed through the empty lobby, eerily silent since the music had stopped. These three were here at the end, the reverb seemed to say: Ingrid and Ian, and Dr. Gary Tracy, from New York.
The outside air was mucus. It slapped into Gary’s chest as the second set of doors flung open automatically. While his lungs protested, he assisted Ingrid and the driver to fit the luggage into the trunk. Ian stood apart, all shoulders and squinty eyes, his feet and chin pointed north. The thump of doors closing, doors opening, jostling bodies and metal, woke him. Gary had ushered the others into the back, so he waited while Linda moved trash from the front seat down to the footwell. Smoky air followed him inside the vehicle. He breathed into the fabric of his shirt, the part near his elbow.
“LAX. Alright!” Linda made a meal out of the ‘x.’ “The 405 is a mess. We’re going to have to get creative. Air okay?”
“You mean the A/C? Yeah, sure, it’s fine.” Gary answered without bothering to check in with his traveling companion. What would happen to them if he forgot they were there? “Can’t say the same for the air outside.”
“Getting worse all the time!” Linda ably launched the car onto Church Lane. She had two phones mounted on the dashboard, each tuned to different navigation apps. One showed the fire spreading, yellow and orange and red and purple blotches. She ignored the voice directing them to the highway, which was maroon on the fire map. Instead, she turned on Wilshire, then Westwood. Each of the main roads were clogged. At a dark crimson spot, Linda seemed to waffle, then her arms circled and pulled the steering wheel with effort.
“When is your flight?” Ian was asking from the backseat. He’d forgotten they existed. As he turned around to answer, his stomach lurched. Gary’s backward glance passed through Ian’s red face like the other man wasn’t there. The rear window showed a sea of anxious vehicles fleeing layers of ochre smoke.
“Uh, sorry, I gotta look ahead. Motion sickness.” Gary searched for the horizon to cure his vertigo. “Not until one. I thought I’d get lunch at the airport or something, but now I’m just glad to have the time.” He didn’t feel like borrowing their worry, but Ian volunteered.
“Our flight is actually tomorrow. I’m hoping we can get something, anything earlier.”
Linda piloted them through dust and smoke and into the muted sunlight bathing Sepulveda Drive. The hybrid edged up beside a tall pickup, coughing with diesel. Linda nudged them forward optimistically. In the distance, Gary spotted a green light, mocking them. They inched ahead of the truck. It inched ahead of them. He imagined that the truck and the Prius were vehicular versions of him and Nadya, never quite in sync, stopping, then starting, always wanting more than the other was willing to give.
“Are you out here visiting a patient?
“I beg your pardon?” So deep in his daydream, Gary wasn’t sure if he’d also imagined Ingrid’s question.
Ian joined in. “That would be one hell of a house call from New York City!”
“Oh, I see. No, I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a doctor of public health.”
In the rearview mirror, Gary thought he saw Ingrid and Ian trade looks.
The robotic voice of the navigation system ordered Linda to turn right at each opportunity. As she continued to ignore its instructions, the voice sounded increasingly plaintive. In contrast, the obstinately cheerful radio seemed to grow louder. Tina Turner was asking why one would need a heart if a heart can be broken. Gary wondered why a woman would need a scarf in Los Angeles. Had she left it for him to find?
For the next eleven miles and 75 minutes, Gary thought about Nadya’s body.
Her time had always been more valuable than his; he’d known that from the night they’d met in a windowless conference room of the Miami Civic Center. She was a keynote speaker while he was just a lowly panel moderator. At the speakers’ cocktail reception, they’d read each other’s name tags aloud in unison: Commissioner Nadya Aronson-Sharf! Dr. Gary Tracy! He never intended to get involved with a married woman, but he was happier having her part-time than he’d ever been with anyone else full-time. Becoming the undercover lover of an ambitious county commissioner was a remarkably low-effort, high-stress combination. He answered her calls at any hour. They couldn’t text or email, unless the messages were coded with professional jargon. “FYI,” Gary forwarded his article about the dangers of gas stoves for pre-existing respiratory conditions. “Sounds good” she replied to his scheduling requests, while copying her assistant. He’d donated to her reelection campaign—not because she asked him to, she would never do that—just so she’d have to see, ‘Dr. Gary Tracy’ on her list of donors.
Gary ripped off a thick callus of skin between his pinkie and ring finger on his left hand. Blood welled and then started to gush. He squeezed his hand into a fist, letting the viscous liquid pool and eddy in his palm. As something plucked against his left sleeve, Gary kicked some of Linda’s car trash in surprise. Ingrid was offering him a tissue from her purse. It smelled like old caramel candies, the kind his Nana used to carry.
By the time the sticks and flags of LAX reared up ahead, it was well past noon. He closed his eyes to wish for a short security line. A wall of orange cones and matching, orange-vested men deterred Linda from driving to the departures entrance. Gary suggested walking the rest of the way. Before closing his door, he leaned down to give Linda a hokey salute that he immediately regretted.
“You okay getting out of here?” He didn’t know why he was now acting interested in her life, after they’d spent three hours together in near silence. Linda gave him a thumbs up and gestured for him to close the door. He was letting bad air inside.
Ian and Ingrid appeared to wait for him on the ramp. Through the haze, they were blurry, pixelated. They had waited because they were all a team now, apparently. Gary wondered how to ditch them.
It was tricky to roll his suitcase to the terminal while also covering his mouth, squinting through haze, and fiddling with his phone to pay Linda. Dozens of other suitcase pullers join his herd. A chorus of wheels clattered on the gritty asphalt. Once inside the glass cathedral, Gary told Ingrid, “Good luck!” A man who looked like Ian was already in a queue. Gary waved to him, but the tall man gazed through him like they were strangers.
The length of the security line staggered him for a moment. He squeezed Ingrid’s tissue hard in his bleeding fist. After twenty minutes of clenching and unclenching his left fist, silently raging against every passenger ahead of him, Gary finally made it to the bins. His sweater clung to his t-shirt as he took it off, inadvertently exposing one if not both his nipples to the TSA agent, but he was just glad to have made it through, and without bleeding on anything.
His flight was already boarding. Gary weaved, springing and looping around slow families, oblivious seniors, slumped teens dragging roller bags nearly parallel to the floor. He imagined a crowd of well-wishers lining the halls, chanting his name, flinging out their hands for fives. He sprinted up to his gate just in time and the crowd went wild.
On board, his assigned seat was already occupied by a man in a Dodgers hat.
“Sorry, I’m on the window, my man.” Immediately horrified by the ‘my man.’ Gary silently blamed baseball culture and knee jerk masculinity. With the slowness of a water buffalo exiting a pond, Dodgers Hat moved over. Gary cringed at the warmth of the cushion; heat stolen from a stranger’s butt.
His pocket vibrated a specific buzz and for a moment, he wondered if he should answer. She had been wrapped up in annoyance all last night, holding on to her grim veneer even while they tumbled over each other, cheap sheets choking their ankles. Nadya had the softest elbows of any woman he’d known well enough to touch elbows with.
“Are you on the plane?” His sexy reverie was interrupted by her in real life. “I’m on break; we’re in an emergency council session. This fire is out of control, worse than any before. Please tell me that you’re okay.”
“You left your scarf.”
“Pardon?” Her voice echoed. She was in a hallway; each syllable pinged off the marble walls of City Hall.
“I didn’t know what to do, so I just left it there. Sorry. I’m sure they’ll hold it for you.”
“What are you saying? My scarf? My… oh shit, Gar, my scarf. You just left it? I love that scarf. It goes perfectly with those shoes I was wearing yesterday, the champagne pumps. FUCK. Fuck me, Gary. Why didn’t you grab it?”
“You know, I thought about it. I thought about stuffing it in my bag and bringing it with me to New York. It smells like you. But then I’d have to send it back, right? And where am I going to do that? To your husband’s house? To your office? I know they go through all your mail. A package with a handwritten address? That’s got to be a red flag. To the beautiful county commissioner from a psycho. Please enjoy this anthrax wrapped in Burberry. I took it from the last politician to break my heart. She’s dead now.” His voice crumbled towards the end of the rant, though he would have kept talking just to delay her response. He dreaded her cool candidate’s voice.
He could feel Dodgers Hat’s impassive gaze.
“Are you finished?” That damn voice. Long Rs and clipped Ds strong and crisp enough to scoop up guacamole. “Gary, I can’t go to the hotel to get the scarf.”
“Okay, then send your assistant or something. Make something up. It just didn’t seem like something I could deal with this morning, so I just left it.” He softened. “I’m sorry.”
“Gary.” He wondered where she was at this moment, where it was okay to say his name so much. “I can’t get it from that hotel because it’s gone. The hotel is gone. It started burning an hour ago, along with hundreds of homes and half of UCLA. That’s why I’m calling, to see that you made it out okay.”
“Oh shit. Really? Shit. No, I mean, I’m on the plane now, but we haven’t left the gate.”
“Okay. Good. I’m sorry I snapped at you. It’s been a morning. Please message me when you land. Just send a text. It’s okay. It’s okay today.” He’s moved by the surge of emotion in her voice.
“Nadya, I love you.”
“I know. I gotta go, the chair is gaveling us in. Gar, please be good.”
He twisted to put the phone back in his pocket. Boarding had ended a while ago but the plane was still at the gate. How long had they been sitting here with the cabin lights dimmed?
“Sorry, folks. There’s going to be another delay here.” The vocal fry of the pilot was probably routed through a box to make it seem crisper and clearer. Gary groaned along with several of his neighbors. “The delay is, uh, well, it’s us. We’ve got too many people on board. A customer service representative is coming down to help us get things sorted. So just, uh, hang tight, folks.”
Over the sound of the steady blast of cool air to keep the cabin inhabitable, the murmuring took on a hint of fear.
“They’ll have to drag me off.” Dodgers Hat growled. Gary took comfort from his neighbor’s menacing words. Together they’d be the row of defiance.
“Okay, it’s uh, it’s going to be a few more moments while we wait for customer service representatives to come down. If anyone wants to volunteer, we just need one seat. We have one too many people booked on this flight. So, uh, if anyone can wait for the next flight, we can get out of here much quicker.”
What next flight? The question hung in a hundred thought bubbles. In the time that it would take to choose the sacrificial passenger, the whole plane might be grounded indefinitely. Nadya missed the old Gary. The guy who believed in a world worth saving. The kind of person who would do something to make the lives of others better even if it made his life worse.
A ride to the airport would have cost him nothing. He was already going that way.
His neck spasmed as he twisted his head down to peer out the window. The glass was cool and hard against his forehead. Out on the tarmac, he spotted a white cloth hanging off the back of a luggage car. Off-white, almost cream, like Nadya’s scarf on the chair in their hotel room.
Did “Ingrid and Ian” make it out okay?
He’d named them to enrich the daydream. “Ingrid” looked like one of his mom’s friends. And the man was clearly an “Ian.” Another “i” name for a matched set. And Gary had opened his mouth in the hotel lobby to offer them a ride, but instead, he’d just walked past them.
“Well, folks, this is your captain, again. I’ve got to say it to you straight. Customer service is dealing with, uh, other things, and if we don’t get a volunteer in the next five minutes, we’re not going to be taking off today. They’re limiting the flights out due to the heavy smoke. We’re going to have some visibility issues shortly.”
Please be good, Nadya had said. Be good.
He looked down at his fingers. Instead of a wrinkled purse tissue, he’d staunched the flow of blood with a paper napkin. His hand was no longer bleeding. Dr. Gary Tracy stood up, stepped over Dodgers Hat, and squeezed into the aisle.
About the Author:
D.S.G. Burke (she/her) lives, writes, and aggressively composts in New York City with her fiancé and a cat named Android. Her writing has appeared in The Seattle Times, Opiate Magazine, Altered Reality Magazine, The Fabulist, Thereafter Magazine, and 3Elements Literary Review. Find out more at www.dsgburke.com.
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