Ear to the Ground

by David L. Ulin

  “Closed off. Sorry.” In his other hand the cop held a Mag-Lite like a billy club.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Making a movie.” The cop sounded like he was directing it. “Warners. Earthquake picture. Big one.”

  Navaro sighed, then noticed a guy behind the barrier—a familiar face. The guy wore a black linen suit and spoke on a cellular phone. Navaro squinted, and it came to him.

  “Hey! Ian!”

  “OK, fella!” The cop held out his flashlight.

  “I know that guy,” Navaro told him.

  “Yeah, an’ Bridge Bridges is my brother.”

  “Hey!” Navaro called again.

  Ian looked at him, blinked, and scurried into a trailer.

  “Kid used to live in my building.” Navaro turned and walked away. “I hope he chokes on his vomit.”

  Navaro didn’t remember getting onto the 101, nor could he recall the fifteen-minute drive north to the 405 interchange. He’d made the trip before, and there was no mystery in it. Besides, he’d been rebuffed by this kid, Ian, and in his current state of mind that didn’t help things. He’d misjudged the little sonuvabitch. He should have been nicer, but how the hell could he have known? “The kid scratches his belly all day and ends up a millionaire,” he said aloud. Then he cut off a Toyota Corolla.

  Navaro’s reverie was interrupted when he reached the 405 and found it closed. He was irked further to see other drivers continuing north on the 101, forewarned by huge flashing arrows and detour markers to use an alternate route. Lost in thought, Navaro alone had not seen the signs.

  He stopped his car, got out, and walked to a barrier where several dozen onlookers had assembled. From their conversation, he discerned that a movie was being shot, a truck was about to be blown up, and Bridge Bridges was on his way.

  Suddenly, as the crowd watched, a helicopter began its descent. Wind from its propellers ripped through everyone’s hair, and some people covered their faces with their arms. The helicopter landed, and even Navaro joined in the applause when Bridge Bridges emerged. Behind the actor were Henny Rarlin and, still talking on his cellular phone, Ian Marcus. Navaro rubbed his eyes.

  Just an hour ago, moments before he’d seen Navaro on Hollywood Boulevard, Ian had been approached by an officious looking man in a Dragnet suit who’d handed him a summons. When he saw the words “Theft of Intellectual Property,” Ian understood that Jon Kravitz, his erstwhile friend and collaborator, was suing him. Reading further, he found that unless he properly compensated this Jon Kravitz, Ear to the Ground could be enjoined. Bob Semel had called him immediately, and so had Michael Lipman—from his new corner office at ICM. Nothing yet from Ethan. Dr. Ehrich Weiss had come to his trailer wondering if he wanted to talk. Even Grace had been almost sweet to him. His lawyer was on his way to the set. Things were bad, and Ian was scared. There would be depositions taken. Depositions!

  His father would fly out. Or he would go home and lie in bed for a week. Maybe Grace would take him back. Maybe she’d be surprised by the change in him. Through such a humbling experience, he’d learn integrity, and that’s not such a bad thing.

  Henny Rarlin grabbed Ian’s arm. “We need a line for when the truck is going down and they’re about to die.”

  “But I thought …”

  “Yeah, but now we need a line.”

  Ian thought a moment.

  “What do you think about ‘fuck?’”

  “Fuck? Why ‘fuck?’”

  “Homage to Butch Cassidy. Ironic because we one-up them language-wise, and then switch the result. Cassidy and Sundance live. These guys don’t.”

  Henny Rarlin walked away from him. “Fuck you,” he said. “I’ll do it myself.”

  POINT OF ORIGIN

  CHARLIE RICHTER WAS RUNNING OUT OF TIME. WITH THE earthquake only five weeks away, he began dreaming of crumbling cityscapes, of concrete walls and freeway overpasses reduced to dust. He sat rigidly at his desk, working for hours without moving. And around his shoulders, near the top of his spine, he developed a terrible knot.

  Twice last week, he had tried to explain the concept of retroshocks to Caruthers, but both times he’d been dismissed by the man’s jokes. “What are you blowing up next?” his boss asked him. “Anything good?”

  Caruthers’s reaction galled him because the retroshock idea was simple: Aim one force directly at another force of equal size and the two forces will be neutralized. What wasn’t so simple was the question of magnitude, 8.9. About five thousand times the size of the Oklahoma City blast.

  It wasn’t long, however, before Charlie had a realization that was startling in its completeness, overwhelming in its immediate practical value. Like most great discoveries, it didn’t come about by calculation, but rather by calculation’s opposite.

  Charlie was meditating, lying on his back with his knees slightly raised. He closed his eyes, and what he found behind his lids was not darkness at all, but an entirely different kind of light. When he stretched out his arms, he had the sensation of leaving his body and looking down from above. He was seized by an image, remembered from a snapshot, of his mother holding him as a baby, and unconsciously he curled into the fetal position. He felt confined, and a great pressure built up in his ears. Then the pressure ceased, and Charlie felt suddenly pure—pure, and clean, and newly born.

  He got up and went to his desk, thinking about birth. Birth. Birth. Birth. Slowly, he began to smile.

  Earthquakes worked in three stages, Charlie thought: beginning, middle, and end. It is the end we feel, the end that is tragic and destructive. In the end, the earth moves—after the offending energy, having been propelled across the planet, gathering steam under the surface, settles finally on its place of impact: the epicenter. At the beginning, however, there is a mere spark, whose damage comes only from what it can incite.

  All along, Charlie had understood the way one temblor presaged another, fields of energy rippling back and forth across the Pacific plate like dominoes in a chain. He had used this information to predict the coming San Andreas quake, and to locate and project the epicenter at position D-55. Now the expression “Nip it in the bud” suggested itself to him.

  He returned to his work table and began to manipulate data: magnitudes, longitudes and latitudes, dates and times and distance and miles. Via modem, he imported more data from the CES network, to pinpoint the exact time and place tectonic energy would begin to roll eastward toward Los Angeles. He looked at release histories and at projected points of origin from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Ditto Tokyo, 1923; Long Beach, 1933; and Anchorage, 1964. He pulled figures from Loma Prieta, Northridge, and Kobe, and soon he was swimming in his familiar sea of numbers. As the sun started to rise over the Los Angeles basin, he found a point near the island of Lui, an uninhabited member of the Hawaiian chain.

  Charlie heard the slap of the Los Angeles Times against his front door. Outside, morning dew had become mist, and birds chirped more sweetly than usual. There was something lovely in their singing, some quality of hope Charlie had never before noticed. For the first time in a long time, he could see past December 29.

  Charlie reached into his box to retrieve yesterday’s mail. Among the bills and direct mail solicitations, he found a padded envelope embossed with the White House seal. Curiously, he tore it open and pulled out three Grateful Dead concert tapes and a short, handwritten note on presidential stationery.

  Back inside, Charlie unfolded the newspaper and realized it was Thanksgiving. He slipped one of the Dead bootlegs into his tape deck, then pulled a chair in front of the television. After finding the Macy’s parade, he turned the sound off. It had been a long time since he’d watched all those huge helium balloons float down Central Park West, but this morning his heart soared at the sight of them, drifting toward him above the latticework of Jerry Garcia’s guitar.

  He turned up the volume on the stereo and scrunched down into his seat. “Thank you,” he said to no one in particular, eyes fixed
on the screen.

  DARKNESS VISIBLE

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, THREE FIRST-UNIT FILM CREWS and six second units were splayed throughout the streets and establishments of greater Los Angeles. Principal photography on Ear to the Ground, more grueling than Ugandan boot camp, would end Monday at midnight—if all went well.

  The day’s excitement began with a scene—a shot really—where the camera was simply meant to record Bridge Bridges looking out the second-floor window of a crumbling apartment building in Northridge. Why it took so long to set up was anyone’s guess. In the finished film, the image would precede the “WHAT-HE-SEES” shot, of a child crying in an adjacent window, which had been filmed two weeks earlier.

  Bridge, deep in character and annoyed at having to stand around so long, had the impulse, on the second take, to bound from his window onto the trunk of a coconut palm he’d been watching sway gently for nearly an hour. He sprained his ankle.

  At the same time, at the “B-Set” in the San Bernardino desert, ninety halogen lamps were being prepped to ignite in a flash near what would be the great quake’s epicenter. The effect would last half a second onscreen, cost ninety thousand dollars, and hopefully inject a spiritual angle into the latter part of the story.

  The wrinkle began at the “C-Set” downtown, at five o’clock, when a vehicle from the sheriff’s office pulled up in front of the unit production manager’s trailer. A deputy got out and knocked on the trailer door. He was told by a harried-looking girl that the UPM was currently on-set, and the girl began giving him directions.

  “Just get him over here for me.”

  Fifteen minutes later, setups had ceased and cameras had stopped rolling in all three locations. Deputies held sway over their operations. No explanation was given.

  It had been a shrewd decision on the part of Jon Kravitz and his lawyers to wait before they went after Warner Brothers. Now they could name their price. Ten million dollars had been their first demand, to test the waters in the sea of negotiation.

  Consensus had been reached that Ian had spoken to Jon about Ear to the Ground. Jon’s ideas had found their way into the script, and some of his bits had been committed to celluloid.

  But Bob Semel and Ethan Carson were in agreement: Warner Brothers had bought from Ian Marcus what they assumed was his to sell. They owed nothing further, they felt, to either party. Michael Lipman, Ian’s literary representative, denied everything and refused to relinquish any commissions.

  Interested parties had assembled in the Warner’s eighth-floor suite at the Four Seasons Hotel. Ian’s lawyer was talking to Jon Kravitz’s lawyer, or, rather, listening to him; Bob Semel and Ethan were on separate phones. Henny Rarlin showed up briefly with a girl on his arm, not his wife. Grace stopped by, and so did Dr. Ehrich Weiss, who assumed the air of a priest giving last rites.

  Ian sat outside on the balcony, thinking about how fucked up life was, and how ridiculous it was to try to understand it. He really wanted a blended margarita more than anything, but worried that it was inappropriate. His feet were up on the railing, and he could feel lines forming around his eyes. How could this be happening?

  Again, he did the math. Tax and commissions. The expenditures: first-class airline tickets, hotels, lunches to impress friends, tips out the wazoo, little things that catch the eye in boutique windows, taxis (just put your hand in the air!), the bottles of French wine he now took to dinner parties, the Mercedes, the fresh-water aquarium, the linen suits and silk shirts and socks that cost twelve dollars a pair, the beautiful bags of Humboldt green, and, of course, the incidentals: “Champagne, waiter!” Or, “Let’s go to Vegas!”

  Ehrich Weiss poked his head onto the balcony. “How are you?” he asked.

  “Bad.”

  “Life goes on. It’s not the end of the world.”

  Ian stared into space.

  The doctor waited a moment. “Somebody wants to see you,” he said, and disappeared.

  Grace, Ian thought. It would have to be. She had always been attracted to his heartache, and Ian suspected she would be there in his darkest hour. She was dependable, if a bit tight around the lips. She meant well, and he guessed he loved her. Would always love her. Grace.

  A moment later, Jon Kravitz came onto the balcony.

  “Hey, man,” he said. Ian couldn’t look at him, and it took a moment to realize what was going on. Jon continued: “Just wanted to say it’s not a personal thing. It’s business. And I hope it doesn’t put a permanent damper on our friendship.”

  “What?”

  “It’ll probably be a while before we have the kind of trust we once did. Just wanted to say if there’s anything I can do …” He nodded, and went inside.

  Ian put his head in his hands. Then he got up, opened the door to the suite, and went to inspect the minibar.

  BUYER’S MARKET

  AT 4:15 ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, THE HORSE AND BUGGY, a workingman’s bar on Roscoe Boulevard in Northridge, was empty except for an elderly man drinking alone, a couple of kids from CSUN, and Henry Grant. He sat in the shadows, sipping a beer and talking to Eddie, the bartender, with whom he had a long, though glancing, acquaintance.

  “Mike Blowers?” Henry was saying. “I wouldn’t trade my mother-in-law for Mike Blowers.”

  “Your mother-in-law’s dead, Henry.”

  “Thank Christ. She still plays a better third base.”

  Eddie looked down and took a swipe at the bar’s burnished surface with a wet rag. “Come on, Henry. Two weeks, there ain’t gonna be any Dodgers. No Dodger Stadium.”

  “That earthquake’s never gonna happen.”

  “No?” Eddie gestured at the empty room. “Then where is everybody? Take a look outside. You ever see so many moving vans in your life?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Henry waved him off. “All my neighbors are moving away …”

  “That doesn’t worry you?”

  Henry took a long pull off his beer. “Where the hell am I gonna go?”

  Emma was sitting in the living room, watching Ricki Lake interview earthquake survivors about stress, when the doorbell rang. On her way to answer it, she glanced toward the backyard, where Dorothy was running in and out of her playhouse.

  A short, stocky man in a business suit stood on the front steps. He clutched a peeling leather briefcase.

  “Mrs. Grant?” he asked, and offered her a card. “Frank Baum, American Realty Company. Like to talk to you about your home.”

  “My husband isn’t here.” Emma regretted the words as soon as she’d said them. How stupid she must sound, like a child, unable to make a decision on her own. “I guess it’d be OK for a minute,” she amended.

  Inside, they sat around the kitchen table.

  “You’ve owned this place how long?” he asked.

  “About thirty years. It was my parents’ house.”

  “Like to sell it?”

  Emma didn’t know how to answer. From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of the backyard—of Dorothy tearing up her playhouse with glee. She envied her daughter’s innocence, until she remembered the last quake, when the ceiling had collapsed and the little girl’s arm had snapped like a twig. Sell the fucking house, she thought.

  “I might,” Emma said.

  “Like to sell it today?”

  “Today?”

  “Your neighbors are gone.”

  “Not this minute. I don’t think I can.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong. I just heard you say you wanted to sell it.”

  “Well, I…”

  “Why not now?”

  Emma stood up and began rummaging for a coffee filter. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.

  “Thanks,” Baum said.

  She turned on the tap and began measuring out the water, a gesture so ingrained it took no thought. Thirty years in this kitchen. Thirty years. As she poured in the grounds, she couldn’t help considering another little
girl, who bore her own name and face. She thought of her mother telling her a bedtime story in the room where her daughter now slept; and her father, in dirty work clothes, sipping beer and watching the Dodgers on television. The memories were like little films to her. And if she left this house, they would stay behind.

  “I don’t know what I want to do,” she said.

  Baum smiled. “Where did your next door neighbors go?”

  “Tucson.”

  “I have a nephew in Tucson. In construction.”

  “My husband’s in construction.”

  “Yeah?” Baum took a sip of his coffee. “My nephew’s doing very well. Your husband should give him a call.”

  “I should talk it over with him first.”

  “Why? You own this house, don’t you, Mrs. Grant?”

  “How do you know that?”

  Baum gave her a teasing smile and went to his briefcase. Two chrome latches slapped against the leather. He withdrew a piece of paper and placed it on the table in front of her.

  “OK, Mrs. Grant,” he said. “This is a bill of sale. One house at 1939 Topeka Drive, in exchange for a cashier’s check in the sum of twenty thousand dollars.”

  “I …”

  “You want to sell this house, Mrs. Grant. Your neighbors have all moved away.” He leaned in close across the table. “And your child was hurt in the last earthquake.”

  Emma felt the air explode from her lungs like someone had kicked her in the solar plexus. For a moment, she thought she was screaming, but then she looked around her and saw Baum nodding at her from across the table, while Dorothy continued to play in the backyard. The only sound was that of the kitchen faucet, dripping as it had for years.

  Frank Baum took a check from his briefcase. Emma could make out her name, printed clearly, along with the dollar amount.

  “This offer might not be available tomorrow,” Baum said. “Tomorrow might be something else again.” He pushed his gold pen across the table. “So, Mrs. Grant. What do you say?”