Medical transport

For three blocks the car worked.

Not well, but sufficiently, which in Los Angeles at that hour felt almost like grace. It moved under its own power. It kept its lights on. It followed the wet road down from the hill and did not yet ask to be praised for doing so. Virgil drove with both hands, shoulders high, his jacket drying badly against his back. The fax paper pressed against his ribs. The smoke from the island had entered his hair and would not leave.

Beside him, Dante did not sit like a passenger.

He sat as if occupying a function. Papers open on his lap. One hand braced on the dashboard when the car shook. Eyes moving from street to mirror to glove compartment to sky, never resting long enough to be mistaken for contemplation. His order was not serenity. It was arithmetic under fire. He had the look of a man who believed disaster was manageable only if named before it got sentimental.

At the first intersection below the hill, Virgil looked left, right, then straight ahead.

“Which way?”

Dante folded one paper behind another.

“Not home yet.”

“I didn’t ask that.”

“You did.”

A helicopter moved somewhere above the fog. Its blades pressed the low air into sections. Virgil could not see it, only feel it in the roof of the car and in the water trembling on the windshield.

“I need to go home,” Virgil said.

Dante looked at him then, briefly.

“Yes.”

No consolation. No irony. A factual yes, as though home were a jurisdiction with poor roads.

The light changed. Virgil drove.

The city at first seemed to permit them.

They passed a florist still dark behind its bars, buckets of unsold lilies sweating in the window. A dry cleaner with a torn awning. A synagogue whose parking lot was flooded from a broken irrigation line. A billboard advertising a woman’s face twenty feet high, one eye peeled away by damp so that she appeared to be winking at her own ruin. The rain was light, but everything was wet. The gutters ran with hillside water, ash, bougainvillea petals, cigarette butts, and the gray foam that gathered wherever the city had washed itself without becoming clean.

Virgil watched the lanes open in front of him.

For a minute, less than a minute, he believed in direction.

The car coughed, recovered, descended through a canyon of stucco apartment buildings and black palms. In the rearview mirror, the hill had vanished. Nelly’s island was no longer visible. The absence of it made his body lighter and more terrified. He had lived so long inside a sealed climate that the ordinary morning entered him as assault: exhaust, damp wool, hot wiring, rot from dumpsters, coffee from a drive-through window, rain on old dust, the faint mineral stink of concrete channels coming awake.

He had forgotten that the world smelled of many things at once.

At Sunset, or what he thought was Sunset, the first roadblock appeared.

Three police cars angled across the intersection. Orange cones lay on their sides in the water. A fire truck idled under a dead traffic light, its red lamps turning the rain into blood-colored thread. Men in yellow coats moved through smoke that had come down from the hills and pooled in the street. A city worker with a flashlight pointed cars away from the closure with the irritation of a minor god assigned to drainage.

Virgil slowed.

Dante’s hand moved at once to the papers.

“Don’t use your name.”

“What name should I use?”

“None, if you can manage it.”

The city worker approached the window. His face was wet and unamused. Behind him, smoke dragged low across the road. In it, shapes moved: people with bags, a woman carrying a birdcage, a boy in pajamas holding a cereal box against his chest. Evacuees, or dreamers, or extras from a disaster that had wandered into morning without permission.

Virgil rolled the window down. It stuck halfway.

The city worker bent, saw Dante, saw Virgil, saw the old car with its scraped side and smoking hill-dust, saw enough to decide he did not want the whole story.

“Road’s closed.”

Dante leaned across Virgil, holding out a folded document.

“Medical transport,” he said.

The city worker did not take the paper.

“For who?”

Dante looked at Virgil.

“For the gentleman in transition.”

Virgil turned his head slowly.

The city worker looked at Virgil again. Something passed through his face: recognition, uncertainty, dismissal. The beautiful horror of the island had trained Virgil to expect recognition as climate. Out here recognition had to compete with rain, overtime, evacuation orders, burned hillsides, and a man in a cereal-box crisis. The worker pointed with his flashlight.

“Take Fountain to Western, if it’s open. Stay out of the canyon. Fire jumped a line.”

Dante nodded once.

The window would not roll back up.

As they turned, cold rain entered through the gap and struck Virgil’s left hand.

For the second minute, the car worked.

Then Poseidon noticed.

A wind came down the street against them. It arrived without buildup, shouldering trash out of alleys, driving palm fronds horizontal, lifting ash from the gutters and throwing it against the windshield in gray sheets. The wipers smeared rather than cleared. Smoke thickened between buildings. The car’s headlights became useless white wounds in the fog. From somewhere ahead came the pop of a transformer, a blue flash, then a row of storefronts going dark in sequence: liquor, nails, checks cashed, psychic, donuts.

Virgil braked.

Traffic condensed around them like water hitting rock. Cars nosed from side streets, reversed, stalled, honked, angled wrong. A bus blocked two lanes with its hazard lights flashing. Its passengers stood in the aisle, faces lit by the red pulses, all of them looking forward as if the windshield were a television showing the end of something.

Dante was gone.

Not physically at first. Virgil looked right and saw the seat empty.

The folder remained on the floor.

The passenger door was half-open, rain blowing across the papers. Dante was already outside, moving between cars toward the bus, one hand lifted not in farewell but command. A policeman shouted at him. Dante did not answer. He entered the smoke and was absorbed by order: uniforms, flashlights, signals, blocked lanes, impossible routes.

Virgil called after him once.

The wind took the name apart.

The sedan idled. The heater began blowing cold. The windshield fogged from inside. The fax paper under Virgil’s jacket softened with sweat. He sat alone in the raft and understood that Dante came and went the way laws came and went: absolute at the moment of enforcement, absent at the moment of fear.

Warm drinks from weather

A tap sounded at the rear window.

Virgil turned.

A young woman stood in the rain beside the car.

She wore a white vinyl coat with the hood up. Under the hood her face was smooth, damp, almost luminous in the dirty weather. Too young, or young in a way that no longer told him anything. In one hand she held a paper cup. In the other, a folded towel. Behind her, two men in pale jackets stood under the awning of a closed pharmacy, watching. One of them had the relaxed posture of a valet; the other held an umbrella though the wind made it useless.

The woman smiled through the glass.

Virgil did not lower the window.

She came to his side instead, leaned toward the half-open driver’s window, and held the cup near the gap. Steam came from it. Coffee, or tea, or something sweetened enough to smell through rain and smoke.

“She said you’d be cold.”

Virgil stared at her.

The woman’s beauty was not Nelly’s. No beauty was Nelly’s. But it had learned her grammar: softness as instruction, calm as trespass, care as leash. The white coat was wet at the shoulders. Her hand holding the towel was small and steady. On her wrist was a thin bracelet of red string, the kind Nelly tied around bottles, keys, men, promises, anything she wanted returned.

“Who?”

The woman’s smile barely changed.

“You know who.”

The cup trembled under the rain. Virgil smelled cinnamon. Orange peel. Something from the island kitchen.

In the pharmacy window behind her, an old poster for flu shots had curled brown at the edges. Through the poster’s peeled gap, Virgil saw one of the pale-jacketed men lift a car phone to his mouth.

“She said you can still come back before they write anything down,” the woman said.

The traffic around him began to move.

Not forward. Sideways, in fragments, as if the road had become a tide pool and all its metal creatures had received different instructions. A horn blared. A truck backed up. Someone shouted. The bus exhaled air and lurched, revealing Dante across the intersection, talking to a fire captain with his hand on the captain’s clipboard.

Dante pointed suddenly at Virgil.

Not at the woman. At Virgil.

Go.

Virgil dropped the car into drive.

The young woman’s hand came through the window gap and caught his sleeve. Her fingers were cold and surprisingly strong.

The coffee spilled over the door.

“She’ll come herself next time,” the woman said.

Virgil pulled his arm free. The sedan lurched forward, clipping a cone, then a plastic road sign. In the mirror he saw the woman standing in the intersection with the towel still folded over her arm, rain running down her face, smiling no longer.

He turned where Dante had pointed.

The street narrowed under jacaranda trees. Purple flowers, loosened by wind, plastered themselves across the hood like bruises. For several blocks he did not know whether he had escaped the acolyte or obeyed her by continuing to flee. That was Nelly’s genius: return and forward motion could both be made to feel like her design.

Dante reappeared at the next light.

The door opened. He got in without explanation, soaked through the shoulders, carrying not the folder but three pages torn from it and a parking citation under his thumb.

“You spoke to them?”

“To enough of them.”

“Who was she?”

Dante looked out the windshield.

“Don’t take warm drinks from weather.”

“She knew me.”

“They all know you where she sends them.”

Virgil gripped the wheel harder.

The rain thickened. The city lowered.

They took an underpass. Halfway through it, traffic stopped again. Water pooled along the curb, black and shining with oil. On the wall, graffiti names ran into one another under fresh runoff. A man with a shopping cart stood on the median wrapped in a plastic tarp. He watched the cars without appeal.

Then the ground moved.

Not much.

Enough.

A deep animal rumble passed under the underpass. The columns trembled. Water shook off the ceiling in sudden hard drops. Brake lights flared red through the tunnel. Somewhere above, a car alarm began and multiplied into others. The sedan’s engine faltered. Virgil felt the steering wheel shiver in his hands as if something beneath the asphalt had turned over in sleep.

The whole city waited for the next movement.

It did not come.

People began honking, because people mistook survival for delay.

Dante closed his eyes for one second, then opened them.

“Out of the underpass.”

“I can’t move.”

“Make them want you to.”

Virgil looked at him.

Dante leaned over and pressed the horn.

The sedan’s horn did not honk. It emitted a long, dying maritime bellow, a sound so low and mournful that the nearest drivers turned in their seats. Dante pressed it again. The sound filled the underpass like a ferry departing through fog. The man with the shopping cart laughed once, delighted. A compact car ahead inched sideways. A delivery truck gave them space. Virgil eased the sedan through a gap that did not exist until entered.

When they emerged, the rain had become ash.

Or the ash had become rain.

Gray flakes fell through the wet air and stuck to the windshield, the hood, Virgil’s sleeves where water had come through the window. The car climbed an on-ramp toward the freeway, following a line of vehicles under a sky the color of dirty plaster. Above the ramp, a green sign announced directions with official optimism: Pasadena, San Bernardino, Las Vegas.

Vegas appeared in white letters through smoke.

Virgil saw it and, for one sick second, felt the old inland temptation: another island, another climate, another place where time could be translated into neon and forgiven by strangers paid to forget. He could vanish there, not beautifully like Nelly’s island, but commercially, in rooms without windows, among men who had already lost track of their wives and names.

Dante reached over and struck the dashboard once.

“Don’t look at that.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were.”

The ramp narrowed. A police cruiser blocked the left shoulder. Ahead, traffic slowed, then stopped. Beyond the stopped cars, orange light flickered against the smoke.

A fire had jumped the freeway.

Not large enough to be a wall, but alive, crawling through the dry brush of the median, eating paper cups, weeds, blown trash, palm litter, plastic bags, anything Los Angeles had shed and failed to bury. Firefighters moved in the distance. Helicopters beat overhead. Water fell from the sky in sudden red-lit sheets, not rain now but aerial dumping, blunt and enormous. The freeway steamed where it struck.

The sedan’s temperature gauge climbed.

Dante watched it.

“No.”

The needle rose.

“Not yet,” he said.

The engine answered with a knock from deep inside its chest.

Virgil switched lanes. A truck cut him off. He braked. The sedan shuddered. Steam lifted from under the hood, at first lightly, then with confidence.

Dante opened the glove compartment, took out a folded map, then another, then a woman’s scarf.

He held it without comment.

Virgil saw it and knew it at once.

Nelly’s.

Not the one she had worn that morning. Older. Silk, sea-green once, now creased from years in the dark. It smelled faintly, impossibly, of her room: orange oil, smoke from thin foreign cigarettes, the mineral damp of bath steam, skin after sleep. He had put it there himself or she had; the raft had been prepared over so many false departures that ownership had dissolved.

Dante passed it to him.

“No.”

“Put it over your mouth.”

“No.”

“Then choke sentimentally.”

The engine knocked again. Smoke from the freeway fire entered the broken window gap, mixed with the steam from the hood and the ash falling through the rain. Virgil coughed once, hard. His eyes watered. The smell of burning brush became burning rubber became hot metal became something sweet and chemical from a car ahead.

He took the scarf.

The silk was cool, then warm from his hand. He tied it over his mouth and nose. For one moment Nelly was on his face. Her softness, her prison, her mercy, her claim. He breathed through her and hated that it saved him.

Dante had wrapped a map around his own mouth.

“Off the freeway,” he said.

“There is no off.”

“There is always off. It just costs more.”

The sedan died before the next exit.

It did not explode. It did not dramatize itself. The engine simply lost faith. Power steering vanished. The wheel went heavy. The dash lights came on all at once in useless celebration. Virgil wrestled the car toward the shoulder as traffic groaned around him. A minivan clipped the rear bumper and kept going. The sedan struck the guardrail, scraped along it, and stopped under the green sign where Vegas still offered itself in white letters above the smoke.

For a moment neither man moved.

Rain ticked on the roof.

Ash gathered on the hood.

The car that had carried ten years of plans sat dead among freeway trash, steam pouring from its seams, dignified now only because it had failed completely.

Dante opened his door.

“We walk.”

Virgil looked at the dead dashboard.

“I need the papers.”

“You need lungs first.”

“The papers—”

Dante reached across him, took the fax from inside his jacket, took the remaining pages from the floor, shoved them into the leather satchel, and pushed the satchel into Virgil’s arms.

“Now.”

They got out into the freeway storm.

The river mouth

It was worse outside the car. Heat from the median fire came in pulses. Rain from the helicopters fell hard enough to sting. Ash turned to gray paste on the pavement. People stood beside stalled cars with towels over their heads. A woman in a business suit carried a cat carrier and one red shoe. A shirtless man directed traffic with a golf umbrella. Two boys pushed a motorcycle between lanes, laughing wildly. Emergency lights turned everyone red, blue, red, blue, mortal, theatrical, accused.

Dante moved ahead.

Not consistently. He disappeared behind trucks, reappeared by a concrete barrier, vanished into smoke, came back with a path. Each time he returned he brought order in fragments: this way, not there, wait, now, under, over, leave that, bring this. He was not comforting. He was correct often enough to become necessary.

They climbed over the guardrail.

Below the freeway was a slope of ice plant, wet dirt, bottles, shredded plastic, and black mud. Virgil slid almost immediately. One foot went out; his knee struck the ground; the satchel slammed into his ribs. The scarf slipped. Smoke entered his mouth. He coughed until he retched. Above him the dead sedan steamed on the shoulder, already being absorbed into traffic mythology: another disabled vehicle, another incident, another obstruction named on the radio and forgotten by noon.

Dante took his arm, then let go as soon as Virgil had balance.

“Don’t lean unless you’re falling.”

“I am falling.”

“Then do it downhill.”

They descended.

The slope ended at a chain-link fence. Beyond it lay the concrete river.

At first Virgil did not recognize it as water. It was a wide gray wound cut through the city, flanked by slanted concrete walls tagged with names and crowned with weeds. Down the center moved a shallow brown current carrying ash, leaves, cups, oil rainbows, a pink child’s ball, palm bark, a dead rat, three lemons, and a long strip of white curtain that twisted and untwisted like a thing trying to remember its room. The rain fed it through drains along the sides. From each pipe came another version of the city: gutter water, hillside mud, sprinkler runoff, fire ash, garden soil, gasoline, pool chemicals, melted paper, all of it entering and becoming one dirty mercy.

A gate in the fence was locked.

Dante was no longer beside him.

Virgil turned.

Freeway above. Smoke behind. Sirens everywhere. Rain falling through ash. People moving along the shoulder like figures escaping a painting. No Dante.

For the first time since the garage, Virgil was entirely unguided.

He held the satchel. He held Nelly’s scarf to his face. He stood before the locked fence and looked down at the city’s river, which was not a river in any pastoral sense, not a blessing, not a home, not even nature except by stubbornness. It was infrastructure that had accidentally remembered flow.

Behind him someone called his name.

Not Dante.

A soft voice. Female. Young.

He did not turn.

The voice came again, closer.

“Virgil.”

He saw, in the fence wire, the reflection of a white vinyl coat.

The acolyte had followed.

Or another had come.

In the reflection she was broken into diamonds. Her hood was up. Her face behind the wire was calm, damp, patient. In one hand she held the folded towel she had offered before. In the other, something small and dark — a phone, perhaps, or a key, or a message from the hill.

“She says the roads are closed now,” the girl said. “She says you can still be warm.”

Virgil looked at the locked gate.

He could not climb it. Not with his knee, not with the satchel, not with his lungs full of smoke. The fence rose high and leaned inward at the top. The river moved below, shallow but moving. Across the channel, under an overpass, there was a strip of dry concrete scattered with leaves. Not safety. An interval.

The girl’s reflection shifted closer.

“You don’t have to keep making it worse.”

Virgil almost laughed, but coughing took it.

The scarf was wet against his mouth. Nelly’s scent had changed under smoke and rain. It had become less beautiful, more human, and therefore more dangerous.

Dante’s voice came from below.

“Throw the bag.”

Virgil looked down.

Dante stood inside the channel on a narrow maintenance ledge, one hand wrapped around the bars of a lower service gate that Virgil had not seen from above. His suit was torn at one sleeve. His hair was plastered to his head. He looked furious in the impersonal way of men whose instructions have been ignored by weather.

“How did you—”

“Bag.”

Virgil threw the satchel.

Dante caught it badly, dropped it, cursed, retrieved it before the water could take it.

The girl behind him said, “He won’t get you home.”

Virgil turned then.

She stood three yards away, rain shining on her white hood. Her face was sweet with borrowed pity.

“No,” Virgil said through the scarf.

It was not an answer to her. Or it was not only that.

He pulled at the locked gate. It held. He kicked it. Pain shot through his knee. The girl flinched, then smiled sadly, as if watching an old animal refuse the path to the barn.

Below, Dante was doing something to the lower service gate with a piece of metal. Order, again, from below. Not salvation. Mechanism.

The gate at Virgil’s level would not open.

So he went over the side.

Not bravely. Badly.

He climbed the fence halfway, tore his trousers, lost one shoe, caught his jacket on the top wire, hung there for a ridiculous second with the scarf over his face and the city burning behind him, then fell down the concrete slope toward the river.

He struck hard, rolled, slid through ash mud and oily water, and came to rest on his back with rain falling into his eyes.

The sky above the channel was a narrow strip of gray between freeway and smoke.

The river moved beside his ear.

For several moments he could not breathe.

Then air entered.

It hurt, so he believed it.

Dante crouched over him, holding the satchel against his chest to keep it out of the water.

“You alive?”

Virgil closed his eyes.

The question was suddenly very funny.

He laughed once, which became a cough, which became something like sobbing but shorter and less useful.

Above them, beyond the fence, the girl in the white coat watched. She did not climb down. She did not call again. She stood under the rain at the lip of the channel, a pale emissary from the island, and then the smoke folded around her until she became weather.

Dante moved away to the edge of the current.

He dipped one hand in the brown water, as if testing whether it belonged to any law he understood.

Virgil turned his head.

The channel ran east and west through the city’s underbody. It carried everything downward: ash from Nelly’s hill, rain from dead streets, runoff from lawns, oil from garages, pool water from houses like the one he had burned, and perhaps, somewhere dissolved beyond recognition, the first black trace of ink from the fax paper that had summoned him.

He crawled toward it.

The concrete scraped his palms. His missing shoe had left one foot in a wet sock. His knee shook. The scarf hung loose around his neck now, ruined, streaked with soot and gutter water. He reached the lip of the channel where the shallow current moved over a bed of grit and broken glass.

He put both hands in.

The water was cold.

Not clean. Not kind. But cold.

For the first time since leaving the island, nothing asked him to go back. Nothing asked him to speak. Nothing offered him beauty. Nothing knew his name in capitals or otherwise. The river accepted runoff, ash, trash, blood, paper, and men without ranking them.

Virgil lowered his face and washed smoke from his mouth.

Above, the freeway continued. Sirens passed. Helicopters moved toward the hills. Somewhere behind them the raft-car was being hooked to a tow truck or ticketed or burned or simply abandoned into the morning’s ledger of failures.

Dante sat on the concrete ledge with the satchel between his feet.

He did not speak.

Order had brought Virgil this far and then withdrawn into silence.

Virgil remained on his knees at the river mouth, wet, ashed, one-shoed, smelling of smoke, Nelly’s silk, gasoline, and city water. He was not home. He was not free. He was not even clean.

But the first storm had passed over him without killing him.

The river carried the ash away.