Ear to the Ground (5 page)

INDEPENDENCE DAY

CHARLIE WAS FINGERING THE HOLES ON THE SLENDER wooden neck of a recorder when he heard a knock at his back door. Some kids learned baseball from their dads, some learned chess, some learned how to make their ways in the world. Charlie had learned only a love of music from his father. Although he'd wished for more from the old man, at least, he thought, this was something.

Grace waited on the landing, sagging under the weight of a case of beer and three bags of store-bought ice. When Charlie opened the door, her face lit up.

“Happy Fourth,” she said. “Still OK to keep this in your fridge?”

“Uh, sure.” He made no effort to get out of the way.

“You gonna let me in?”

“Sorry.” Charlie passed a hand across his face.

“I didn't know you were a musician.” Grace nodded at the recorder, which dangled from his hand. She slipped around him into his kitchen, their arms touching as she passed.

“I just like to mess around.”

“Ian has the same problem.” Grace's voice was flat as sand. “Of course, his weakness is the trumpet.” She slid bottles of beer into the refrigerator's empty maw. “He used to play for me, but he doesn't anymore.” Looking up, she flashed another smile. “You could, though.”

For a moment, Charlie stood there, hands useless as fishhooks. Then he raised the recorder to his lips and began an Elizabethan madrigal, notes hanging in the air like questions.

Ian was stoking briquets when he heard a high, thin melody coming from Charlie's apartment. People would be here any minute, and Grace was getting some kind of private
concert,
for Christ's sake. This party was her idea; he had gone along only because she'd been strange lately. Ever since that night with Leonetta. He shrugged the thought away like a nettlesome insect, but not before wondering if there was any way she could
know.

“Grace?” He turned the coals with a set of tongs to make sure they were red. “Grace!”

The only response was an old-fashioned twist of music that made him think of Leonetta's French braid.

Ian trudged across the backyard to Charlie's door. He knocked once, and the playing stopped. Seconds later, Charlie appeared, lips swollen as if from a long kiss.

“Ian,” Charlie said.

Grace leaned against the refrigerator, cheeks lightly flushed. Her eyes sparkled.

“How's it going?” she asked, unable to meet Ian's gaze. Briefly, she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future, sitting with Charlie on a blue velour couch surrounded by photographs and other mementos. She could feel the fuzzy texture of the upholstery, and his body pressing against hers. When she attempted to conjure the same image with Ian, she couldn't see beyond where they were right then.

“Hate to disturb you,” Ian said, “but what about the chairs?”

“Oh, right.” Grace's voice fluttered like a hummingbird, unsure where to land. “Sorry. We were just …” She trailed off, and headed for the door.

“Need help?” Charlie asked, watching her from behind.

Grace turned. “We're OK, I think. But you're coming, right? You said you would.”

Charlie nodded.

“Good,” Grace said.

Ian watched Grace set a hodgepodge of chairs around the backyard, placing them away from the network of poles. If he didn't know better, he'd think something had happened in Charlie's kitchen, but Charlie wasn't Grace's type. Grace liked a bit of wildness that Charlie didn't have; she had always been attracted by Ian's disheveled good looks, his rumpled pants and torn sweaters. Anyway, there was a big difference between a trumpet and a recorder, and Grace was definitely a trumpeter's woman. I'm just being paranoid, Ian thought, and walked across the lawn, wrapping his arms around Grace's waist from behind.

A month ago, or even less, Grace would have tilted her head back so Ian could nuzzle her neck, maybe even moving her butt against him in a gesture somewhere between a grind and a caress. But today, she did neither. She stood rigid for a moment, waiting, it seemed, until he was finished. Then she wriggled free and took a couple of steps away. When Ian came closer, she turned and stopped him with her hand.

“Not now,” she said.

“What?”

“People are coming.”

“You could be one of them.”

“I could be a lot of things.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know what I mean.”

Later, the backyard was filled with people, and music from a boom box drifted through the flat summer air. Grace checked the cooler and found the beer supply had dwindled, so she went into Charlie's apartment to retrieve the bottles she had stored there.

It was cool and dark inside. Grace paused at the refrigerator, then turned and passed through the door into Charlie's computer room. She trailed her fingers along the edge of a table, and noticed the seismograph etching straight and silent lines. Sitting next to it was Charlie's recorder. Grace picked it up, letting her fingers fall across the holes. Without thinking, she raised the instrument to her lips and gave a tentative blow. A reedy chirp broke the stillness, and Grace jumped a little. She lingered at the table, the trace of a smile dancing on and off her face, and wondered where things could possibly go from here.

THE WAY OF ZEN

I'LL STAY IN BED, IAN THOUGHT, AS HE PULLED A RATTY down comforter over his chest and splayed his arms outside it. He hadn't had gas at his Silver Lake apartment since the brown-uniformed man left a disconnection notice and disapeared down the garden path. Who needs gas? Ian looked at a crack in the ceiling. For that matter, who needs
electricity
?

He closed his eyes, but his brain was too active for sleeping. Behind his lids came an image of a tower of bills he had constructed, next to the phone, over a six-month period. If debtors' prison still existed, he'd be in chains. His car—a metazoan BMW—was a piece of shit, but had once been a
running
piece of shit. Having lost respect for its driver, it now started less than 20 percent of the time. Ian once felt elegant behind the wheel of that classic luxury sedan—but now he felt like fallen aristocracy, shammed by Hollywood and awakened from the American Dream.

He opened his eyes, threw off the covers, and brought his feet to the floor. I could get a
job,
he thought for less than a second, and then summoned his “girls,” as he referred to the pile of pornography he kept on the floor of his closet: several
Penthouse
magazines purchased incognito at a newsstand, along with a slew of Victoria's Secret catalogs filched from the mail box of the woman upstairs. Masturbation may be dirty, he thought, and its pleasures fleeting—but at least it was truly
free.

Which was more than you could say for a lot of things. Like relationships. Or friendships. Nothing beats a social
connection, Ian thought, and you never forget a guy once you smoke a joint with him in some parking lot. The Formosa on Thursday nights yielded
mucho connectiones industrio.
Sometimes he'd even move the crowd over to Bar Deluxe, where he played his horn with Raf Green's band. But it all had its price.

Ten minutes later, Ian lay in a sea of Kleenex, wondering lazily what it took for a writer to get work in Los Angeles. Then he stood under a hot but under-pressured shower. He dragged the soap across his genitals. Why did he always do that first? Not a bad character thing. I'll use it, he thought.

Refreshed, Ian left a message on Michael Lipman's staticky answering machine and thought about how to find another agent. Last month Michael had told him things were
heating up
with the script, that buyers were circling like hawks and it was only a matter of time. But who was he kidding?
Ear to the Ground
was dead. Prospects were flatter than a Paris crepe. As he booted his computer to work on the screenplay some more, he forced himself to think about what would really
happen
to Los Angeles if Caltech or CES predicted an earthquake? He scrolled to the big scene on page seventy-five. Los Angeles gets plunged into turmoil around page forty (Syd Field would be proud), and the city spends much of act two breaking apart in anticipation of the Big One (a nifty piece of irony, he thought smugly). I'll knock heads a little more with my main character, he thought. If I got to
know
him better, who knows?

Ian was struck by how easily he wrote good supporting characters, yet at the same time, left his protagonist a gaping vortex. Why does everything happen
to
him? What does he
do
? Then again, what does
anybody
do? What do
agents
do? They certainly don't call a guy back. Agents are persistent by profession, Ian thought. But in Hollywood, the chain of desperation has many links. Even Mike Ovitz gets blown off sometimes.

Never take things personally. Always be detached. Ian had heard that Ovitz had studied Buddhism in college. So, from his bookcase, he extracted Alan Watts's
The Way of Zen
and read the first five pages of the introduction.

Satisfied with the completeness of his study, he walked over to the window and opened the blinds. The sun was hot and bright and critical, and it occurred to him then that he wouldn't be able to pay his rent even if he found a job. He had two days to rescue his phone. An auto-registration-due notice was propped against his computer monitor, next to some parking tickets, which he sometimes used as bookmarks. And he
did
need electricity. He had lied to his creditors about having already sold
Ear to the Ground.
The price, he'd told them, was in the high six figures, but studio business affairs were slow-moving. At first, the collection agents had been friendly, even congratulatory. But they're not idiots. Once they found out the truth, he'd never get any credit for the rest of his life. Ian sat there, having nothing, owing everything, and for a long time he didn't move. Then he yanked a cord, and the dusty blinds went down with a crack. What a delightful image, Ian thought, for my biographers.

SHAKING ALL OVER

CHARLIE WAS HEADING OUT TO THE FIELD. IT WAS TEN o'clock on a Thursday evening, and he was in the kitchen, preparing a Thermos of coffee for the night ahead. Ever since he'd deciphered those prime numbers, he'd been running computer simulations of local faults, and if his data was right, there would be a small earthquake along the San Andreas sometime before dawn. It was a long shot, he knew, but he had to see.

Charlie packed the coffee in a rucksack, then loaded his laptop and a couple of empty sample trays. He thought again about the numbers, the alkalinity of the soil. The Northridge data had been the first indicator, but when he'd gone back and looked at the information from Indio, he'd begun to understand that this was bigger than he'd thought. He remembered the day his grandfather had explained how fault lines were interrelated. “Think of the faults as highways,” the old man had said, “and earthquakes as cars. Some cars remain on one road, but others take exits and branch off. It's the same with temblors. Conceivably, a big enough jolt could trigger any number of quakes up and down the line.”

Indeed, Charlie thought. Up and down the line. He shouldered the rucksack and moved toward the door.

Outside, Charlie ran into Ian coming up the path. Ian looked more disheveled than usual, with big black circles under his eyes.

“Hey,” Charlie said. “How you doing? Haven't seen you around.”

“Everything's fucked.” Ian put his hands in his pockets and attempted a grin. His face looked hollow, like a lost little boy's. “Grace up there?” He nodded toward her apartment.

“Couldn't tell you.”

“Yeah, well …” He stared at her windows for a moment, then focused on Charlie's rucksack. “Where
you
off to?”

“Duty calls.”

“A seismologist's work is never done?”

“Something like that. Earthquakes are unpredictable.”

“So they say.” Ian threw him a sly grin. “You want company? I'm dying to see what you do.”

“Maybe some other time,” Charlie said. “The desert's no place…”

“The
desert
?” Ian's eyes lit up like fluorescent bulbs. “You going to the San Andreas?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “There's something there I have to do.”

Charlie took the 10 to San Bernardino, his Miata cutting like a laser through the night. Just east of the city, he turned north off the freeway, then went east again to position D-55 of the San Andreas Fault.

The desert night was cool and still, and Charlie uncorked his Thermos of coffee immediately. Sipping slowly, he walked around the perimeter of the site. Here, the San Andreas cut a visible rift through the brown rocky earth; it looked like a furrow, made by some gigantic plow. He sat on one raised edge of the fault line and turned his face to the sky.

Charlie loved the desert at night. The sky was filled with clustered stars, dotting the blackness in pinpricks of light. Sitting with his coffee, Charlie began to name the constellations—Big Dipper, Little Dipper, and the three sharp points of Orion's Belt. If he listened closely to the silence, he could almost hear his father, the astronomer, dismissing his grandfather's work. “Long after the planet has disappeared
into the sun,” Charlie's father liked to say, “the stars will continue to exist. Of what importance will earthquakes be then?” In a way, Charlie knew, he was right, but there had always been a coldness to the heavens that could not compete with the warmth of the world, the way a stone kept its heat long after the sun had set. The stars were distant, beautiful like diamonds, but unfeeling, abstract. Thinking about it, Charlie realized his father was much the same way, which, he suddenly understood, explained a lot.

Charlie removed a sample tray from his rucksack and slipped down into the fault. As he scraped some dirt from the bottom of the fissure, the earthquake struck. At first, there was a low rumbling, like the sound of an oncoming train, then the ground started twisting in a side-to-side motion, and the walls of the San Andreas shook like something from a bad horror film. Charlie tried to stand, but was thrown to his knees. Reflexively, he put his hands out, one on either edge of the fault. The vibrations moved from the earth through his palms, and up his arms to his heart.

When the temblor was over, Charlie lay in the fault fissure and drew a deep breath. His whole body rang from the shaking; his legs were weak and spent. He tried to catalog what had happened. Intense as it seemed, this had been a small earthquake, probably no larger than a 4.5. The jolt couldn't have lasted more than a couple of seconds, but from where Charlie sat, the world felt upside down. I just rode out a quake from the center of the San Andreas, he thought, but his mind wouldn't grasp the particulars, and it was all he could do to scramble up the side of the ridge. Although it didn't look like there'd been any substantial slippage, he scooped up some additional soil samples to bring to CES.

Back at the car, Charlie retrieved his laptop and ran the simulation program, extending the parameters to see what might happen next. The San Andreas was becoming increasingly active—he'd known that since Indio—but without
the exact epicenter of this event, it was impossible to tell what anything meant. He needed more information, to see what the numbers looked like now. Charlie loaded up his rucksack and started on the long ride home.