Ear to the Ground (2 page)

Man, Ian thought, this is too much. Maybe I should do something else, and start to write when my buzz wears off. For a moment, he just sat there, his mind as blank as the morning light. Then he unhooked the phone and plugged the cord into the back of his computer, making sure to deactivate Grace's call-waiting before dialing America Online.

At eleven fifty, Charlie entered the ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel and searched out Sterling Caruthers, who promptly fixed his colleague's tie by tightening its knot. Already, journalists were scurrying around like noxious bugs, bearing press credentials from newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV.

“Nice of you to join us, Mr. Richter,” Caruthers said, his voice dripping blood. The press conference would begin in ten minutes.

“I'm sorry. I …”

“Never mind.” Caruthers dismissed him with the wave of a hand. Charlie would be seated, he was told, at the far end of the dais, where it was unlikely he'd be called upon to speak. Once there, he began an entanglement with a heavy velvet curtain, which not only obstructed part of his chair but obscured his microphone, as well. He tried pushing the curtain backwards, and then forwards; finally, having no other choice, he slung the thing around his neck and wore it like a shawl.

Charlie's new employer, the Center for Earthquake Studies, or CES, was endowed with a multimillion-dollar budget rumored to have come about, in part, through a hushed yet symbiotic relationship with the entertainment industry, whose interest lay in the Earthquake Channel, as well as an interactive TV series called
Rumble.
“If the Big One hits L.A.,” mused an inside source, “the studios will be in on the ground floor.”

There was dissent; the Caltech people were up in arms. The mixing of science with commerce, they claimed, would make it impossible for pure research to take place. Caruthers begged to differ. As CES's nonscientific figurehead, he'd engaged the services of Gold & Black, a pair of entertainment publicists who had called this press conference and guaranteed a respectable turnout from journalists and other notables—in return for ten thousand dollars.

The first difficult question came from Maggie Murphy of the
Los Angeles Reader,
who asked Caruthers whether CES had enough scientific vision to warrant spending so much money. Caruthers answered feebly. When pressed with a follow-up, he shot back a question of his own: “How much money is too much?”

“It all depends on what you intend to do with it,” Murphy said. “Do you know that the Caltechies are calling you guys CESSPOOL?”

“That's their business,” Caruthers announced. “Ours is to develop techniques that will enable us to predict earthquakes with enough time and accuracy to save the city of Los Angeles and other municipalities considerable expense and loss of human life.” He fixed Murphy with a take-that glare.

But Murphy had done her homework. She was Lois Lane with a metallic toughness. “I assume Dr. Richter will be involved in this prediction effort?” Caruthers nodded. “Then why,” she went on, “do you have him over there behind a curtain?”

Embarrassed, Charlie unraveled himself, while a hotel employee held the curtain aside.

“You're Charles Richter, right?” Murphy asked in a staccato voice. “Grandson of the Richter scale Richter?”

“Yes,” Charlie mumbled.

“And you predicted the quake in Kobe, Japan?”

Camera crews adjusted their positions, and lights were aimed at Charlie's eyes. He stared into them, looking for a face, but all that came back at him was an aurora of white.

It was true, if not very well known, that Charlie, who'd been traveling for research and for escape, had been in Kobe at the time of the earthquake, giving a paper called “Fault Lines: The Mystery of Plate Tectonics” at a seismographic conference in nearby Osaka. Strolling along the banks of Osaka Bay, shoes in hand and trousers rolled to the knee, he'd noticed something irregular about the tide-flow. After testing water samples, Charlie studied the data—blocks of numbers—and felt a sudden nausea. He took a taxi to a grassy hillock and noticed birds flying overhead in strange configurations. Then he removed a stethoscope from his knapsack and, for more than an hour, kept his ear to the ground. At dinner, he mentioned to a colleague in passing that metropolitan Kobe sat on a tectonic boundary in the process of shifting. Later, drinking Burmese whiskey in his room, he noticed an undeniable correlation between two disparate columns of numbers. He dialed his colleague's extension and arranged to meet him in the hotel bar, where he explained that Kobe could go at any moment. The man laughed in Charlie's face and spread the word to some other seismologists, who reacted similarly, behind his back. Twenty-four hours later, no one was laughing.

Maggie Murphy stood now, as did the
Times
reporter and the guy from ABC. Sterling Caruthers hadn't opened his mouth in half an hour, as Charlie, blithely sipping from a glass of water, more or less became the subject of these proceedings, deflecting and focusing the debate, explaining technical principles in layman's terms. Finally, he and Caruthers exchanged a meaningful but complicated glance. Things were winding down.

“What are your present plans, Mr. Richter?” asked Murphy with a smile.

“I go where the promise of seismic activity exists.”

“Yes?”

“And I've just taken an apartment in Los Angeles.”

THURSDAY NIGHT

YOU CAN FIND THEM BY THE BAR, OR IN THE BACK booths of the last room at the Formosa on Thursday nights, where there's no smoking until ten-thirty, after which the waitresses couldn't care less. Just half a year ago, they went to Dominick's off San Vicente—slews of them from Fox and Paramount, and from Sony—but when Dominick's faded out, and the Olive dissolved into Jones, everyone cut to the Formosa. Among studio youngsters, Friday has always been Hangover Day.

Grace watched Ian peeling off his Budweiser label at a table across the room, while two girls sitting next to her—an agent's assistant and a VP (in title only)—admitted freely that they'd fuck him at the drop of a hat. Women liked Ian, which exhilarated Grace because it made her nervous, but it disappointed her that, as a result, she felt more attracted to him. Was he better on paper, she thought, or in bed?

Ian was in good form just then. “Imagine,” he said, “if we had interactive cameras in our living rooms, right?” His whole table listened. “And there was an earthquake, and some computer geek, in
Iraq
for chrissake, could watch our TVs smashing and our books falling out of the shelves, and paintings coming off hooks; and us walking in, rubbing our eyes, checking our limbs, freaked out but alive, as the car alarms are going off and the dogs are howling and soon everyone around you is awake …”

“Nobody's putting a camera in my living room,” announced a former writing partner.

“Why not? Everybody'll do it. Or mostly everybody.”

The others seemed unsure.

“Look at it this way,” Ian continued, “a hundred years ago, Bell was shouting into this archaic telephone: ‘Watson, can you
hear
me?' Now we have voice-mail, and car phones; we hang up on each other, and Star-69.
Two
hundred years ago”—he was on a roll now—“if you wanted to listen to music you either played it yourself, or you heard someone else playing it. I mean …”

“That's true,” said a guy from Fox.

Ian leaned back, satisfied with himself. Fox thinks I'm smart, he thought. He thinks I'm smart, and he'll probably hire me—not right now, but down the line. In for a penny, in for a pound. Life is
long.
Grace came over then and scooted next to him, put her arm around him, and smiled to the others. He liked the way she smelled. She crossed her legs, making sure to pull down her skirt. She was pretty. That wouldn't hurt him at Fox, either.

Ian's father still sent him two thousand a month, so he ordered another beer and one for Grace. A guy named Marcus began to talk about his new script—the dreadful tale of an airplane, a bomb, several black nuns from Detroit, and an ex-New York City cop. Meanwhile, under the table, Ian ran his hand lightly up Grace's thigh. She tried to take it seriously—the story—because this twenty-three-year-old schmuck, Marcus, sold a spec last month to Joel Gold and was at the top of the B-list.

However, by the time the SECOND NUN pulled an assault rifle on the hijackers, Grace was turned on. Ian had worked his way to her hip, fiddling with the elastic at the edge of her panties and watching her smile. Then he excused himself, went to the bathroom, and rolled a joint, which they smoked alone together in the parking lot, stealing kisses between hits, leaning against the rear quarter-panel of an old Ford Bronco
parked in a space marked Ethel Waters. Across the street, a dark figure hustled toward Jones, a valet. He would make a fine character, Ian thought, and he and Grace kissed deeply for a moment, probing like scientists with their tongues.

Charlie heard them come up the stairs, laughing and drunk; he heard their voices soften as they got inside her apartment, and when they came into the bedroom he heard them rise again as sighs and moans, a steamy call-and-response through the hollow wall. On the floor in front of him, two laptop computers exchanged data; their screens cast an eerie, underwater light. They're screwing next door, Charlie thought, as he picked up the dog-eared address book by his side and reached for the phone. Flipping through the pages, he wondered who'd mind least if he woke them up.

THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

CHARLIE KEPT THINKING ABOUT THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. Ever since the night he'd heard her, like a Santa Ana wind through the bedroom wall, he had found her entering his mind at odd moments: in the supermarket, for instance, or while staring at a computer screen. He wasn't obsessed—he had never even
seen
her, for Christ's sake—just a little, well, curious, if that was still something people felt in this day and age, where everything was up for grabs and yours for the taking, if only you knew better than to ask.

This morning, as he left his apartment, checking to make sure he had turned both locks, Charlie glanced across the landing at her door. The day was silent, the sun as white as movie light.

On the sidewalk, Navaro dragged a dirty rag soaked in sudsy water across the hood of his Le Sabre.

“So tell me,” he asked Charlie. “You renting that thing by the week?”

“Pardon?”

“The car.” Navaro nodded at the red Corsica parked across the street. When Charlie didn't answer, the landlord straightened up and wrung his rag out on the ground. “Never mind. You meet Grace yet?”

“Pardon?” Charlie felt like he was missing something, like he didn't understood the words.

“Grace.” Navaro looked at him though hooded eyes. “She lives next door to you.”

“Grace?”

Navaro laughed and kicked his right front tire.

The Center for Earthquake Studies occupied a former sound stage on Culver Boulevard just west of Overland, catty-corner to the Sony Pictures Studios. Big and boxy and windowless, the building was painted a stucco shade of tan.

Inside, an arched ceiling hung above the space like a dome of sky, reminding Charlie of a beehive. He nodded hello to a couple of faces he thought he recognized, and moved quickly across the room to a locked, unmarked door.

It was always the same in the Prediction Laboratory, a subtle shade of twilight, quiet beneath the ever-present electrical hum. With its computer models and maps marked with pushpins tracing earthquake activity, the lab reminded Charlie of a command center, more military than scientific. Kenwood was already at his desk, staring at the wall above it as if deep in thought. Charlie didn't want to disturb him, but then he realized Kenwood wasn't working, just looking at a picture of a dark-haired woman. “You should really take it down,” Charlie said, his voice as even as the wind.

Kenwood didn't move. His face looked normal, except for the mouth, cut into an exaggerated mask. “You know what the thing of it is?” he whispered. “I keep thinking that in twenty years, she'll just be someone I loved when I was young. I won't even remember her. She'll be obsolete.”

“People die,” Charlie said.

“We were married one year.”

“It's not your fault.”

“What's not his fault?” Charlie turned to see Sterling Caruthers standing in the door. Caruthers was the only other person with a key to the lab, and he made it a habit to show up unannounced, peering through microscopes and at computer screens as if he knew what he was looking for.

“Nothing,” Charlie said.

“What did he do?”

“It's personal, OK?”

“What did you do?” Caruthers folded his arms across his chest and glared at Kenwood.

“We were just talking,” Charlie told him.

“You should be working. What about Indio?”

“Indio was nothing.”

“There were two temblors less than a mile apart.”

“Tremors like that happen all the time out there.”

“Listen,” Caruthers said, “if you don't think Caltech's getting ready to make a prediction of its own …”

“Sterling,” Charlie said again, “those quakes don't add up to a thing.”

“Then it's your job to
make
them add up. We are here to predict an earthquake, gentlemen. Now, if we mark a course from Indio up to L.A. …”

Caruthers sat down at Kenwood's work station and began to tap at the keyboard. On the screen, a map of Southern California took shape, a latticework of fine green lines. Charlie stared at it for a moment, thinking there was something delicate in its construction, a fragile balance similar to that of the earth itself. Certainly, he thought, there had to be a way to read that balance consistently. But it would take time to find.

Caruthers's voice droned on and on as he plotted points on the computer, and Charlie stopped listening, hearing it as if through a wall. It was like a sound that came at him from the other apartment. In the last week, there had been lots of noises, and once he thought he'd heard someone in the hall, but it was only a cat scratching at his doormat, looking for a place to get warm. Charlie tried to concentrate on what Caruthers was saying, but he couldn't stop thinking of the girl next door.