Ear to the Ground

by David L. Ulin

  The double incidence was nothing in itself, Charlie knew, but when he applied this particular integer as a static coefficient, he arrived at a value equidistant from the perimetary, or “bookend,” members of the matrix. Charlie was suddenly able to ascertain the epicenter of a major seismic event. He felt flush then, and began to sweat. Soon the massive logarithm was entirely solvable, like a crossword puzzle, when one nagging four-letter word leads to ten others: Moments after he’d locked down the epicenter (E), Charlie had solved for the quake’s occurrence date (OD) and magnitude (M).

  Months and months of struggle and discontinuity came together in a matter of seconds. He had suspected a sizable earthquake was coming, but now he knew exactly what to expect. He took a deep breath and looked over at the map of Southern California. Then, on the back of a tattered envelope, he wrote carefully:

  San Andreas, D-55 8.9 December 29th, 1995

  Sterling Caruthers arrived at the Center for Earthquake Studies and went to his office to pick up some e-mail from his newest mistress. When he found none, he got up and ambled through the empty building, having learned to stay atop of his underlings by rifling through their drawers at night. Much to his surprise, he discovered Charlie Richter still tinkering away at this late hour. Noticing the envelope propped against Charlie’s monitor, he picked it up, and looked at it closely. “What’s this?” Caruthers wanted to know.

  “Sterling, I …”

  It dawned on him. “Eight-point-nine?! My God!” Caruthers was suddenly buoyant.

  “Listen,” Charlie implored, “before we do anything, I need to double-check every single value in this enormous matrix. That’ll take time, okay?”

  “How much time?”

  “A week, at least. Maybe ten days …”

  “Of course,” Sterling said gently.

  “Thank you,” Charlie said.

  There was a pause. Charlie hadn’t expected Caruthers to be so understanding, and it disarmed him. “I’m scared,” Charlie blurted out. “I don’t know what’s worse: the quake, or what’s gonna happen …” He didn’t finish. He meant, of course, what might happen after the announcement was made. When the people found out, and panicked. When they considered that the city they’d been building on the edges of mountainsides would tumble into the sea.

  When we’re slow and our minds are slow, we wallow in a pool of time, and tread the stagnant water. I am a lily, Ian thought, browning at the edges. What about law school? There’s still time. Thirty-one isn’t old. He closed his eyes with disgust, and decided he would trade his life for virtually anyone’s. Then he felt almost cheerful, having lost all hope, because hope was the drug that had driven him down. Ian picked up Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen and flung it across the room.

  An hour later he lay in bed, alone in his Silver Lake apartment, but he couldn’t fall asleep. He picked up the phone, woke his parents in Philadelphia, and told his father he’d decided to go to law school. The sleepy response was: “We’ll talk tomorrow.” Ian came to the sad conclusion that he couldn’t confide in anyone about the sorry state of his life. To call a friend in the industry would be admitting defeat. By morning it would be all over town that Ian Marcus’s career was in the toilet. What career? he thought. Who cares?

  Charlie tried unsuccessfully to reach Kenwood by phone. Then he got in his car, drove east on Olympic, and took La Brea north toward the hills. He’d passed the Lava Lounge dozens of times—seen it plunked unceremoniously in that mini-mall—and in a detached sort of way was curious to see it from inside. Anyway, he needed a drink. It was ten o’clock, the place was packed, and some Sinatra imitator was crooning. With scientific exactitude, Charlie sat at the bar, consuming a brandy sidecar every twenty minutes. At 1:15, when there was no way he could drive, he called for a taxi.

  Grace was getting ready for bed when she heard a car come down Spaulding and stop in front of the building. The night was woolly and otherwise silent, but for the drone of air conditioners. Grace heard the car door open and slam, and then the clack of footsteps coming up the path. “Please don’t let it be Ian,” she whispered to herself, and crept to the front window to see. Outside, a taxi pulled away from the curb, and Charlie walked drunkenly toward the building’s entryway, his steps exaggerated and overly precise. A low droning sound accompanied his passage; as she listened, Grace realized he was talking to himself. My God, she thought, and without a second’s hesitation she headed downstairs.

  She got to the bottom of the stairwell just as Charlie began trying to fit his key into the lock. His eyes were red and bleary, and Grace could smell booze on him from ten feet away. He was still mumbling and was oblivious to her presence. “Hey,” she said as quietly as she could manage. When he turned, she smiled. “Are you all right?” “Yeah,” he said. “Fine.” He kept trying to work the lock, but no matter what he did, the cylinder’s logic eluded him.

  Grace was on the verge of opening the door for him, when all of a sudden he hurled the keys to the ground. “Goddammit!” he yelled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” Across the street a light switched on, and Grace could see a curtain drawn back to make room for a pair of eyes. From Navaro’s apartment came the creak of floorboards. “Maybe we should get you inside.” She tried to work her hand under Charlie’s elbow but he twisted away. He seemed about to protest further, but then his shoulders deflated and his head sunk down on his neck, and it was all he could do to remain upright. “I just …” he mumbled, his voice softer than a whisper, his body limp at Grace’s touch. “Shhh,” she said. “Don’t worry.” His keys glittered where he had thrown them, and Grace picked them up as they started up the stairs.

  Grace sat Charlie on her couch and went into the kitchen, where she started brewing coffee and spread some store-bought cookies on a plate. With Ian spending less time here, the place was neater and better stocked; she’d grown used to finding things where she’d left them, of being able to enjoy what she’d bought. There were nights, of course, when her empty living room seemed as expansive and lonely as Siberia. But on this night, all that seemed part of someone else’s life.

  Grace set the coffee and cookies on a tray, and carried the whole arrangement into the living room. She couldn’t help laughing at herself. All her life, she’d strived for distance from her mother’s domesticity. Yet here she was, entertaining. Still, Charlie needed something, and this was all she could think to do. He was sitting in the center of the sofa, head tilted all the way back, brow furrowed like a freshly plowed field. “Coffee?” Grace asked, and Charlie lowered his head slowly.

  “Sorry,” he said. Then, by way of explanation: “My grandfather. Grandfather.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “D’y’know my grandfather was a seismologist? D’veloped the Richter Scale. Pasadena. Pasadena. Said the earth could tell us things, if we knew how to listen.”

  Grace didn’t know how to respond. “My grandfather’s a doctor,” she said. “He lives in New York.”

  “They have fault lines in New York.”

  Five minutes later he was heaving into her toilet, as she stroked his back self-consciously.

  Grace awoke to the chatter of birds, and stripes of sunlight fell across the living room floor. She wasn’t sure where she was. Her legs felt heavy and her neck was stiff, and she had difficulty moving. Then she realized she was still on the couch, and that Charlie was snoring lightly, with his head nuzzled into her lap. Looking at him, she felt a pleasant tingle in her loins, and wiggled a little deeper into the cushions. Soon her pleasure turned to apprehension, though, and she quickly inched out from underneath him. Way to go, Grace, she thought. Way to keep complicating your life.

  Out of habit, she clicked on Good Day L.A., but seconds later it was interrupted by a live newscast carrying some kind of breaking story. We finally bombed Bosnia, she thought, or maybe the president got shot. Grace rubbed her eyes, and on the screen she could make out a graphic: two numerals and a decimal point, carved out of stone: “8.9.” She
looked more closely. Dan Rather looked rather grim. “… cannot say whether California will be declared an a priori emergency zone. Dr. Richter is the grandson of the man responsible for the scale with which we measure the force …”

  Grace looked over at Charlie, and called his name. When he didn’t stir, she looked back at the TV and stood motionless. Suddenly aware of her surroundings, she heard a sound from the street like bees buzzing, and went over to the window. There, Grace saw about a dozen reporters—some on the landing, others standing along the stairway and on the lawn. The one closest to her front window talked on a cellular phone and scribbled something onto a back-pocket pad. From the television Grace heard the name “Richter” come twice in succession and she turned to find Charlie’s picture emblazoned on the screen. “Charlie!” she yelled, and he stirred. The first thing her next-door neighbor saw that morning was himself, on television. He looked up at her like a child, eyes wide and red. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  At 8:45 that morning, Michael Lipman called Ian’s Silver Lake apartment and screamed into his ear. “Seven calls I’ve had in a half-an-hour, buddy boy. Seven calls. You better get fucking ready to be rich.”

  “What?”

  “Earthquake, baby, earthquake! Got the newspaper?”

  “Hold on.” Ian pulled his blanket around him, opened the front door, checked to his left and his right, and stole the Los Angeles Times from the lady across the hall. “EARTHQUAKE COMING, SOURCES SAY” read the headline. Ian ran back to the phone. “Jesus.”

  “Is that fucking awesome?”

  Ian experienced the nausea of happiness as he scanned the article.

  “Charlie Richter …” he mumbled.

  “Is that fucking incredible? That fucking script’ll be sold by the end of the day.”

  All Ian could muster was, “My God.”

  “Don’t answer the phone, and I want you to get the fuck out of your house. Do you understand me? …”

  “But … why?”

  “Because if Jeffrey Katzenberg comes to your doorstep and offers you a hundred grand in cash and says, “Welcome to Dreamworks,” you’re gonna take his money. And you shouldn’t. That’s why.”

  When Grace and Charlie had recovered their senses, Grace began to plan. “Stay here till you’re ready,” she told him. “Stay all day if you like.” Charlie seemed thoroughly upset, and phenomenally hungover. Still, he smiled his thanks to Grace, and, for an instant, he seemed to forget the tremendous pounding in his head.

  Ian stood for a long time in his room, looking at the tattered Van Gogh print on his wall. His heart pounded so quickly that at first he thought it would seize. He was without a thought in his head, but never had he felt so alive. When his vital signs approached normal, he made coffee from yesterday’s grounds and spread some peanut butter over stale bread. Sometime later he called Philadelphia, to McClintock & Marcus, attorneys, and told his father’s secretary to pass along word that he wouldn’t be going to law school after all.

  EYES OF THE WORLD

  THE EYES OF THE WORLD WERE UPON LOS ANGELES, AND no longer did it have anything to do with O. J. After the CES prediction—and after Caltech agreed “a major seismic event” seemed likely for the end of the year—Orenthal James Simpson was yesterday’s news. The skittish were moving out of Southern California at a rate of twelve families a day, packing their station wagons and minivans and heading north to Portland or east to Phoenix and Tucson. AM radio was abuzz with the subject and wouldn’t leave Charlie Richter alone. He’d stopped reading the papers and watching television, tired of seeing his face staring back at him.

  The mayor, too, was feeling the heat. Publicly, he proclaimed Los Angeles “a safe and beautiful place to live.” Privately, though, he watched the exodus with a mixture of desolation and fear. Eventually, he began making calls, looking for the kind of help only the federal government could give. And so it came to pass, on the morning of August 9, that the president’s motorcade stopped traffic on Highland Avenue, creating a nightmare for anyone trying to hop into Burbank on the 101.

  The president was in a peculiar mood. He had been shaken by the news that morning of Jerry Garcia’s death. Because he had inhaled. The Grateful Dead’s concert at the Avalon Ballroom in 1968 had made an impression on him he would always have to repudiate for political reasons. Riding in his limousine, he remembered that night’s second set, when he had peaked during the drums and had been frightened by Mickey Hart’s primal pounding of the tom-toms. But “Morning Dew” came and calmed the future president’s heart. He’d abandoned his shoes and made his way toward the stage, where a freckle-faced girl with flowers in her hair danced next to him. Seized with presidential confidence, he had grabbed her by the waist and spent the following week with her.

  As the president’s limousine moved down Highland and he sat listening to “China Cat Sunflower,” he decided to cancel his dinner with the mayor and stop by the candlelight vigil in Griffith Park.

  The president had lunch at the Center for Earthquake Studies with Charlie Richter, but their seismological discussion lasted only three minutes. Preoccupied, the president asked quietly if Charlie had ever seen the Grateful Dead. Charlie perked up. “I took a leave of absence my junior year of college to follow them.”

  “No kidding?” The president put down his fork.

  “How ‘bout you?”

  “About thirty shows,” the president said. “I have like a hundred tapes. Most aren’t soundboards. Twentieth generation or something. But I like the crackle.”

  “I can’t believe it’s over.”

  “When was your first show?” the president asked.

  “Telluride, ′78.”

  “Friday night or Saturday?”

  “Saturday, I think.”

  “Saturday.” The president leaned back and concentrated. “‘Franklin’s Tower,’ ‘Tennessee Jed,’ ‘Scarlet/Fire’ …?”

  “That’s the one …”

  Ian Marcus was a millionaire. Just after the prediction, with every studio in town bidding on Ear to the Ground, pressure mounted for Grace to track Ian down. Ethan jumped down her throat the minute she arrived at the office. “It’s your fucking boyfriend’s script,” he’d told her. “Why haven’t I seen it?”

  You can’t buy luck in this town, she thought. Like William Goldman says: “Nobody knows anything …”

  The deal had closed a few minutes before midnight, in a booth at Jones. What a nightmare. Michael Lipman, one of the world’s great assholes, was having the time of his life. And, Grace knew, there’s nothing worse than an ecstatic asshole. Ian didn’t say a single word, just sipped champagne and performed calculations on a legal pad. Once, he leaned over and French-kissed her. How could she refuse?

  Grace made one last call to business affairs, asking if they’d go as high as seven figures. She was told the president of the studio was reading the script, or skimming it anyway, and it was almost an hour before he consented to spend a million dollars to buy Ear to the Ground for Ethan Carson.

  By midday on August 9, several FM stations were playing nothing but Grateful Dead, but the AM talk shows continued to feature earthquake commentary. At CES, the mayor and the president made a joint statement, separated by a beaming Caruthers. Then the president disappeared into the Prediction Lab, where he sat telling Charlie funny stories about the Europe ′72 tour. Soon they were nearly friends, and Charlie was invited to accompany him to Griffith Park.

  As the president’s motorcade cut through traffic and turned left into the park, Deadheads gawked at the sleek black limos, wondering what industry bigwigs had decided to make the scene. Around the carousel, thousands of people had gathered: gauze-draped girls whirring among bare-chested boy-men who wailed and beat bongo drums.

  The president watched quietly for a few minutes, and signaled to his driver that it was time to move on. Charlie laid a hand on his arm.

  “I think I’m going to stay,” he said.

  The president smiled and sh
ook his hand. “Of course.”

  Charlie watched the motorcade pull away. He took off his jacket and loosened his tie, and hiked over the rise of grass toward the carousel. Halfway down the slope, a girl about twenty looked up. She wore a tie-dyed dress and had a long braid down her back.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Charlie stopped.

  “I know who you are. But you don’t have to talk about it.”

  He smiled.

  “You should take off your shoes,” she said, then turned up the music on a tape deck next to her. From the speaker, Jerry’s voice rose, strained, struggling to reach the high notes:

  “Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings.

  But the heart has its seasons, its evening, and thoughts of its own.”

  REASONABLE DOUBT

  THE GOVERNOR SAT, FEET UP, LOOKING AT HIS DESK DIARY and counting weeks until the New Hampshire primary. He hated the word “gubernatorial.” It reminded him of “goober,” a term his adolescent son had used to describe a moron or geek. More important, the governor was concerned with ends, and “gubernatorial” stank of means. Humming a few bars of “Hail to the Chief,” he called in his speechwriter and demanded the fruits of that morning’s labor.

  Fresh out of Yale, the kid never shaved. But the cunning little bastard would cut his own grandmother’s throat if she stood in the way of something he wanted. The governor loved that, happy to have someone so ruthless on his team.

  “We go with a neg,” the kid said.

  “That’s what I was thinking.” The governor nodded.

  “We crush the earthquake. We crush the president and all the liberals. We support the mayor and the citizens. And we offer prayer as an answer, but only in closing.”