Ear to the Ground

by David L. Ulin

  Then the phone rang, and Caruthers picked it up. “Victoria M. from William Morris,” his secretary told him. Probably wants a commission from the Warner thing, he thought. Tough luck, sweetie.

  Caruthers wondered if what he was doing was legal, making a deal to sell information to a movie studio twenty-four hours before it went to the media. Then again, if William Morris didn’t seem bothered by it, how bad could it be? He let Victoria M. dangle on hold for several minutes, then proceeded to beat her up over the commission. The little bitch wouldn’t yield. “At the William Morris Agency,” she told him, “we’re not in the practice of representing half-clients.” By the time they hung up, he’d made a verbal agreement for across-the-board representation. Then Caruthers called Charlie Richter to see if there was any information on which he could trade.

  Charlie sat across from Ian in the dining room of Chaya Brasserie, eating a bowl of spicy shrimp soup. Ian had called him, hoping to pick his brain on a point of science. Ear to the Ground, whose script was now on its ninth draft, was scheduled to go before the cameras in two weeks, at a Current Estimated Cost (CEC) of $135 million. Industrywide chants of “Quake Gate” increased in volume and fervor whenever the studio announced a budget increase. Sour grapes, Ian knew. But now Ian knew a lot of things. He knew enough about fault lines and plate tectonics and soil samples, but he still did not know the simple scientific principle by which earthquakes could be predicted.

  “That can’t really be easily explained,” Charlie told him.

  “Try me.”

  Charlie felt a twinge of discomfort ripple through him, and he put his soup spoon down. In a certain way, he felt guilty for having been the catalyst in Grace and Ian’s breakup. It was funny how things worked, he thought: A rift in a relationship could go undetected for months, just something between two people that they both ignored, like a dormant seismic fault. Then, all of a sudden, it was like there was too much alkaline in the soil.

  Charlie wasn’t proud of it, but he knew Grace had placed Ian and him side-by-side like suspects in a police lineup. She had released Ian on his own recognizance but had held Charlie for further questioning.

  Perhaps that was why he’d agreed to come to lunch, to talk about Grace. But soon he felt guilty and realized how inappropriate that would be. Besides, the earth was moving underneath them right now; it would move differently in sixty-three days. Nauseated, he pushed his bowl away. Then he took out a mechanical pencil and proceeded to give Ian his first lesson in the logic of numbers.

  PARALLEL LIVES

  WHEN GRACE GONGLEWSKI GOT HOME FROM WORK ON Thursday, it was already Friday morning: two-twenty-three, according to her Honda’s dashboard digital clock, its little colon blinking on and off like a pair of knowing eyes. Upstairs, her answering machine also flickered, but Grace ignored it. What she wanted most was to take off her cowboy boots and fall into a deep sleep.

  Not that such a thing was likely. Not at all. Grace realized this when she went into the bedroom and fiddled with the alarm. She would be back at work in five hours. She hated her life just then, and kicked her right boot into the corner, where it ricocheted like a stray bullet before coming to rest, right side up, at the foot of her bed. Her left boot, however, went straight in the air and landed on her dresser, scattering coins and keys and assorted odds and ends.

  The perfect cap to the perfect day, she thought. One endless stream of disappointments, from the moment Ethan told her she wouldn’t be picking up Bridge Bridges from the airport.

  “Why?” Grace said.

  “I need you to collate scripts.”

  “How many scripts?” Grace’s heart clenched.

  “Five hundred. With three stages of rewrites.”

  “Come on, Ethan, that’s an assistant’s job.”

  “Oh?” Ethan countered. “So it’s an ego thing.”

  Ever since Bridge Bridges had been cast in Ear to the Ground, she’d looked forward to meeting him. He was a star, a real movie star, and she loved the way, in films like The First TV Show and Hairless, his sleepy grin and piercing blue eyes lit up the screen. Grace’s anticipation had increased considerably when a friend at New Line confided that Bridge was as nice as he looked. It was for moments like these, Grace thought, that she’d gotten into the movies.

  But no, Grace would be collating scripts instead. And not just any script; Ian’s script, the script he had written in this very living room while she was at Tailspin Pictures all day. I’m surrounded by assholes, she thought. The air around her thinned, and she almost couldn’t breathe. She had a vision of a porch swing, a place where the wind rippled the leaves of trees. But the vision had no face. She was watching the scene from here, from this apartment, from this job, from this life. She answered to Ethan, always answered to Ethan, instead of telling him to take his sorry job and shove it up his ass.

  That was the last thought Grace had before she went to sleep, and the first thing she thought about when the alarm went off at six-thirty. At seven-oh-five, the phone rang. She decided to let the machine pick it up.

  “Hey, Grace,” came Ian’s voice. “Sorry so early, but my e-mail’s down, and these pages need to go in. I’m faxing them over. Could you please input them for me?”

  Grace stared gape-mouthed as the phone rang again. A moment later, a monumental length of fax paper spewed onto her floor.

  Charlie got up and made coffee, then sat down at his computer and accessed the CES network. Reporters had been around the office like a swarm of bees, so he had begun to spend a lot of time at home. As he’d explained to Caruthers, it didn’t matter where he did his work. And, besides, he had a new idea that, until it was better formed, he wanted to keep out of the public eye.

  Charlie had begun to think about epicenters. After China Lake, he studied points of impact, tracing the ways they appeared up and down a fault. He knew there was a pattern to epicenters, and that the location of each temblor would affect other local temblors.

  Charlie had tried to explain this to Caruthers at their weekly meeting. “I have an idea about epicenters that might enable us to head this thing off,” he’d said.

  “Head it off?” Caruthers looked confused. “You mean so the earthquake wouldn’t happen?”

  “It would still happen, but we might be able to deflect the shock, and the city could be spared.”

  Caruthers knitted his brow and folded his hands in front of his face. “How?”

  Charlie explained his notion of a retroshock, a kind of counter-quake, explosively induced, that could neutralize the Big One.

  “You want to create an explosion of nine-point magnitude?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you crazy? Stop wasting your time.”

  Charlie knew it wasn’t a waste of time. It was just that bureaucrats like Caruthers never had an ounce of vision. But with only fifty-six days left …

  His thoughts were interrupted by the chiming of his doorbell. Who would bother him so early in the day? When he opened the door, he discovered Grace, her eyes sparkling like two diamonds in a pool. She carried orange juice, champagne, and a bag of pastries.

  “On your way to work?” Charlie asked.

  “I was,” she said, walking inside as the screen slammed shut behind her. “But then I quit my fucking job.”

  COLLABORATION THERAPY

  MOVIES ARE LIKE RAILROAD TRAINS: HEAVY, BULKY, AND difficult to get started. Their locomotives are powered by hundred-dollar bills shoveled into furnaces by worsted-wool work a days at business affairs. A switchmaster sits at every junction, a production executive waiting to pull a lever, to affect the train’s course.

  Like the worst cinematic catastrophes, train wrecks are the result of missed communication. Switchmaster error can cause two trains to collide, or send one of them over a cliff. Sometimes the only way to avoid this is to apply the emergency brakes, scraping steel against steel, rods against cylinders, sending sparks into the air. Hence the expression “grinding to a halt.”

  G
race Gonglewski quit her job at seven-fifteen on Friday morning, and by seven-thirty, Ear to the Ground had begun to shut down. The process started with Ian, whose pages could not be input, and thus were not turned in. It moved from him to Henny who, without the pages, could not run his actors through the new scenes. Ethan heard about the problem early but, unable to reach Grace, could do nothing about it. Instead, he spent much of the day reassuring Bob Semel, chairman of Warner Brothers, that everything was fine.

  There were other difficulties as well: When it came to the train called Ear to the Ground, Grace, more than anyone, had been the driver. Among the engineers, she alone understood the machine. She knew the chain of command because she had created it. And by leaving, she threatened to destroy it.

  Ehrich Weiss came from Mannheim to Hollywood in 1977, freshly Ph.D’d in psychology. He was handsome and blond, and possessed a raucous but genuine laugh. Soon, wealthy humorists were diving onto his couch, trying out new material as they investigated their pasts. In front of Ehrich they fell hilariously to pieces, so they invited him to their parties. They gave him small roles in their films. He dated actresses. By 1981, Weiss was known as a hack.

  Then he fell ill with cancer, a rare form that targeted his blood without localizing its attack. His chances were slim, the doctors said. “It would be wise,” they advised, “if you’d let us experiment.” So he submitted to a painful process called hydrative therapy. His blood was thickened and thinned, its volume reduced and increased. Chemicals were injected. Readings taken, smears smeared.

  From his hospital bed, Ehrich wrote a book entitled Relationships: A Collaboration. And after a month his condition improved. A simple diet and serious work restored him. He went home with his strength and, perhaps more miraculously, his dignity.

  He married Hillary Semel, sister of Bob Semel. Soon he became a close friend of the entire Warner Brothers family, and when Martin Long had his legendary tiff with director Jon Lansid, Ehrich was brought in to smooth things over. The men were hugging in less than an hour. Ehrich became Warner’s vice president for psychology in 1991.

  Four years later, Grace Gonglewski, Ethan Carson, Ian Marcus, and Henny Rarlin were in Dr. Weiss’s office on the Warner lot, waiting to begin Collaboration Therapy. There was little conversation among them. Instead, there was that element of negotiation where no party wished to spill before another did. It had taken some doing to get them together, and no one wanted to be the first to play his hand. With Ear to the Ground scheduled to begin shooting in twenty-four hours, confusion abounded.

  Ethan sat in the first chair by the door, checking his watch every few seconds. He could hardly bring himself to look at Grace. He would have fired her if she hadn’t already quit, and he would never have asked her back if Bob Semel hadn’t demanded her presence on the set. She was a D-girl, for Christ’s sake, and now he had to kowtow to her? We’ll see about that, Ethan thought, and examined his watch again.

  Next to him, Ian wondered whether he’d have time to keep his rendezvous with the blonde from the Craft Services truck. There were advantages to being the writer of a blockbuster script, but he’d been working too hard to enjoy them. Now he had to deal with this. He looked over at Henny, but the director just seemed bored.

  Grace stood alone by the windows, her back to the others. All week, she had ignored messages from Ethan, even as they grew increasingly desperate. What concern was it of hers if Ear to the Ground became a multimillion-dollar flop? In a certain sense, Grace believed in karma, and if you thought that way, Ethan was getting his. Stuck in the middle of production, watching it fall to pieces, with his starched shirt collar finally slicing through the tender skin of his neck.

  But then Bob Semel had called her and explained how much he wanted her around. If she would return, he would consider it a personal favor, and personal favors were always repaid. Exactly what that meant had yet to be determined, but Grace knew she had been noticed, and that she was finally in position to leave these three assholes behind.

  Grace was interrupted by a door swishing open on well-oiled hinges, and the padding of Ehrich Weiss’s expensive loafers across the floor. The doctor nodded at no one in particular, then took a seat behind his desk. “Act one,” he announced, “getting to know you.” When no one uttered so much as a hello, he spread his hands and said, “Let’s not all talk at once.”

  A MODEL WORLD

  LOUIS NAVARO ROSE AT SEVEN-FIFTEEN THURSDAY morning to the sound of a Skilsaw buzzing through wood. At first, he just pulled the pillow over his head and tried to go back to sleep, but then he realized the noise was coming from his own backyard. He raised his body out of bed slowly and grabbed a ribbed undershirt and a pair of workpants. Then, lighting a Pall Mall and coughing the day’s first cough, he headed outside to see what the hell was going on.

  In the yard, he discovered Charlie Richter, covered in sawdust and dirt, fitting a long two-by-four into what looked like an oversized frame. It was an oddly shaped construction, and Navaro noticed another, parallel structure already put together and leaning up against the house.

  Navaro cleared his throat. “Little early in the day for this, wouldn’t you say?”

  Charlie jumped at the sound of his landlord’s voice. “Oh, Mr. Navaro. Sorry if I disturbed you.”

  “Disturbed me?” Navaro took another pull off his cigarette and threw it to the ground. “You woke me up. What the …”

  “It’s a model,” Charlie said.

  “A model. Just what I was thinking.”

  “It’s the San Andreas, see? A replica. I’m going to rig a generator …”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Navaro said, lighting his second cigarette. “You do that. But do me a favor, will ya?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Don’t be sawing any wood before nine.”

  Exactly six days later, Charlie finished his model, and stood over it like a god. Before him lay a panorama of the desert that was so realistic it could have been used as a miniature set for Ear to the Ground. The two wooden forms had been fitted into the frame, filled with dirt and earth, and landscaped to replicate the barren crags and rocky hillocks outside San Bernardino. Charlie had even included lichen and small bushes to approximate desert growth.

  The entire structure stood on a platform supported by sawhorses, beneath which sat a small gasoline generator and a system of pulleys and winches. When Charlie tested the machinery, the effect was quite convincing: As pressure built, the forms began to grind until, with a rip, they slid apart, rending the earth of this model world. It was exactly what would happen on December 29th. Exactly what was happening already under the ground.

  Then Charlie went about setting up the charge. By his side were plastic explosives, which he lifted gingerly from a corrugated box. When the time came, he would have to know the exact direction of the slippage, which would determine the direction of the neutralizing charge. This was the wild card and, in the end, he’d have to make an educated guess. For now, the only question was simply whether or not a retroshock would work.

  Charlie took the packs of explosives and joined them to create a single, or united, charge. Out of one end ran an electronic fuse, controlled by remote; out of the other was a detonator pin which would conduct and focus the explosive charge, with pinpoint accuracy, to a specific place in the model’s crevice.

  When the wiring was complete, Charlie carried the remote to a far corner of the yard. It was only then that he realized he had forgotten, for quite some time, to breathe. He looked up and noticed the way the sky crested above the treetops and extended upward, out of reach. It felt like the moment before a thunderstorm, the moment before a fight. “OK,” Charlie whispered, as if a normal tone of voice would detonate the charge.

  Then he flipped the switch, and all hell broke loose.

  The call came in at three-seventeen—an explosion at 418 North Spaulding Avenue. Parked in the lot at Canter’s, having a cup of coffee and eating a knish, Officer Eric Blair picked up his handset and radio
ed that he was on his way.

  When Blair arrived on the scene, there was the usual complement of reporters, all screaming frantically into cell phones and trying to get inside. A second police cruiser pulled up simultaneously, and two officers set up a barrier across the street. Blair walked around to the back of the building, where smoke continued to billow lazily into the air. By the fence, what looked like an oversized ping pong table lay in several pieces on its side. A hole had been blown through one end, and there was a three-feet-deep crater in the ground.

  Another policeman entered the yard and began to comb for evidence. Blair approached Charlie, who was sitting on the back stoop. His white button-down shirt was streaked with dirt; his eyes were glazed, his lashes singed.

  “You all right?” Blair asked.

  Charlie nodded, staring at the place where his model once stood.

  “Then would you mind explaining what the hell is going on?”

  CITY UNPLUGGED

  LOUIS NAVARO HAD AN APPOINTMENT WITH THE TICKER doctor in Torrance at one, so he decided to pay a surprise morning visit to the home of his handyman, with the intention of finding out if the guy was truly a lousy worker or just in the habit of drinking early. Navaro could forgive the man his mediocrity, could forgive even his own mediocrity, but a drunk was a drunk was a drunk.

  The handyman lived on Las Palmas Avenue, north of Hollywood Boulevard—in the land of malt liquor and crack smoke, of struggling guitar players and cold beans eaten from from cans. Navaro had planned only to drop in, say hello to the guy and check him out, then hop right on the 101 and pick up the 405 down to Torrance. At ten o’clock, though, the handyman didn’t answer his door, so Navaro decided he’d walk around the neighborhood to see how it had changed.

  He didn’t get far. Hollywood Boulevard was closed to pedestrian and vehicular traffic from Highland to Fairfax. Proprietors of seedy establishments stood on sidewalks, arms folded, incensed; the tourists had no way to get to those T-shirts and fuzzy dice and postcard racks. At a street corner, as Navaro hit the change-light-please button, a policeman stopped him with his arm.