Ear to the Ground

by David L. Ulin

  … was nowhere to be found.

  “Hey.” Grace made sure to keep her voice neutral. “What are you doing right now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You hungry?”

  “I am, actually.” He patted his stomach. “But I have work to do.”

  “Me too, but you gotta eat.”

  “That’s true.”

  “We could order Chinese.”

  Charlie nodded. “I like Chinese.”

  “Great,” Grace said. “Why don’t I go dig up a menu, and I’ll knock on your door?”

  In her apartment Grace grabbed the bottle of good red she’d been saving, dialed Ian’s number, and was happy to get his machine. On her way out, she looked at the pile of scripts, and wondered about falling behind. But once she stepped onto the landing, and approached Charlie’s door, work was the last thing on her mind.

  PRIMARY DISTURBANCE FORCES

  IF YOU LOOKED AT A MAP, YOU’D THINK NORTH AMERICA began at the Atlantic shore and ran west to the Pacific—through that wide, misunderstood state of Ohio, across forgettable Indiana and the confounding yellow-green flatness of Kansas and eastern Colorado. Suddenly, there are the Rockies, whose remotest peaks and crags were never touched by man or woman.

  Past those mountains, to the southwest, lonely desert winds swirl among the Mojave’s dunes and bring dust to the blacktops and souvenir stands, whirring by the gilded death they call Las Vegas, and carrying a whore’s cheap perfume to the California border. The bleakness is broken by San Bernardino; and beyond, at the edge of the continent, lies the great salty municipality of Santa Monica. There you go—from sea to shining sea. But here’s the catch: The earth has only one continent, one floor, one ground. We live on an assemblage of tectonic plates, joined casually, sometimes grinding, and always sliding underneath us. Perhaps this is what we mean when we speak of the connectedness of all things.

  Charlie had been startled. Leaning against a mound of dirt precisely at position D-55 of the San Andreas Fault, and wiping from his hand some mayonnaise from a chicken sandwich, he was working out a simple algorithm. Then suddenly, in the thick of his data, he came upon a curious block of prime numbers—which wasn’t alarming per se, but their proliferation did give him pause, which, in turn, brought him focus. Prime numbers were strange: divisible only by themselves and by the number one, they were anomalies, set off, unrelated. They reminded Charlie of a young boy poring over his butterflies while the other kids were out playing in the street. And here was a veritable convention of butterfly collectors, a group of misfit integers, crying for attention.

  After looking at the numbers some more, he took a long swig of water and recapped his bottle, thinking. Fault lines may be important, but plate tectonics were the Primary Disturbance Forces in the area. And Charlie understood plates. In the mid-1980s a man named Locksley had made brave statements about them, and had been run out of American seismology on a rail. But Locksley had missed an integral piece of the puzzle, and in his passion for plates he’d overlooked fault lines entirely.

  Fault lines were important, Charlie knew, but only as conductors of the disturbances caused by the slippage of plates—not vice versa. This was where the Caltechies had gone wrong; it explained why they’d never predicted an earthquake, and why, Charlie thought with a smirk, they’d never offered him a job. At that moment he felt relieved by the simplicity of his task: to locate which plates were slipping, and wait. This much he’d been doing for more than a year. All that was missing was the link between the plates and these prime numbers. He knew, and yet he didn’t know.

  He studied the data a while longer, and his heart beat with increased fervor. He packed up his gear, crammed it into the minuscule trunk of his forest green Miata, and shook his head. (The dealer had told him it was big enough to hold a set of golf clubs. He hadn’t considered the bag.) As the sun began to set, Charlie drove through the desert with the top down, thinking how some would consider the view romantic. Yet, twisting and turning beneath purple skies, he felt suddenly alone.

  In the chairman’s office at the Center for Earthquake Studies, Sterling Caruthers sat behind his desk in a high-back leather chair, swiveling left and right in jerky movements, and consulting a calendar. Today was the twenty-third of June, he noticed, and sometime before the end of the year, he vowed, his organization would predict a major earthquake. His boys were close. That Kenwood—morose as he was—could program a computer to buy a beer and piss for you; and then there was Charlie Richter. The wild card. Caruthers didn’t like the guy but he knew he was a brilliant scientist, and wondered how long before Richter would do in L.A. what he’d done in Kobe.

  Not that Caruthers particularly gave a shit about science; it might as well have been stocks and bonds, or real estate. But he’d found another land of opportunity—the land of earthquakes. Leaning back, he considered the advantages of knowing when and where a quake would hit. The possibilities were endless. He smiled, glanced at his hairy knuckles, and—stretching fingertips up—examined his nails. Then he unzipped a small leather case, extracted some silver-plated tools, and began to give himself a manicure.

  THE NUMBERS GAME

  CHARLIE’S EYES SNAPPED OPEN IN THE DARKNESS LIKE window shades. The digital clock screamed out the time in bright broken red. Twelve twenty-nine. One, two, twenty-nine. Prime numbers again. Maybe if he just closed his eyes, everything would be there, waiting for him. But when he tried, there were only grainy little patches of black.

  Damn, he thought. He was so close; he could feel the connections struggling to be made. It was like the slow slipping of tectonic plates as they made their inevitable journeys apart. That was still what captivated Charlie most about seismology: the way the earth seemed so solid on the surface, yet was in a constant state of flux. Just the other day, walking from his Miata to the Versateller machine near the La Brea Tar Pits, he’d looked at the tall buildings lining Wilshire Boulevard, and thought how illusory they were, monuments to stability on a planet where the only constant was change. They were like prayers, these buildings, like gestures of faith in some kind of permanence that no one really believed, but which they counted on just the same. This was the bedrock principle all Angelenos shared, the hope that the city would hold together, and life on the fault line could be more than an extended waiting game.

  Charlie got out of bed and walked naked through his darkened apartment. Something in his mind flashed like a strobe, the hall and the interior stairway appearing in flickers of shadow and light. Downstairs, he glanced towards the corner, where a seismograph traced a line so straight the earth itself appeared dead. Then, he sat at his computer console and listened to the humming of the machines, which gave him a delicious tickle in the pit of his stomach and along the surface of his scrotum.

  “Okay,” he said to himself, barely aware that he had spoken. “Let’s see what we have.” He tapped a key, and two parallel columns of numbers scrolled across the screen. On another console, he accessed CES, and brought up a map of the western United States. He punched in a few coordinates, and a handful of red markers appeared.

  Charlie heard the window rattle, and reached out to steady himself. Was that another one? Ever since Sunday night, when he’d been awakened by a cluster of temblors—a 4.9 and a couple of mid-3s—Charlie had been waiting. Publicly, he’d gone along with the idea that these were just aftershocks, but inside, he knew they were something more. Aftershocks were a fiction, a myth to soothe the worries of non-scientific minds. Earthquakes were connected, that much was true, but the connections were bigger than anyone at CalTech, or CES for that matter, was willing to admit. Charlie looked over at the seismograph. The needle remained still, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something had happened, or was about to happen. Without thinking, he got up and headed for the back door.

  Ian was reading next to a sleeping Grace when he heard the squeak of door springs downstairs. Quietly, gently, so as not to disturb her, he eased his naked body off the bed and cre
pt to the window. For a moment, it was difficult to see the yard. Then, Ian made out a figure bent over the base of one of those metal poles. Charlie, he thought, and looked at the clock. It was one twenty-three. How weird.

  But things got even weirder when Charlie stood up and caught the light. He was naked, too, crossing the yard without a stitch of clothing. Ian thought about waking Grace, but immediately decided against it. Instead, he dropped into a crouch by the window, and watched his neighbor make his way among the poles like a celebrant in some arcane religious rite.

  Charlie was unsettled just then. There was still something he was missing, some information his machines couldn’t provide. He considered going back to the numbers, but he knew they weren’t enough.

  All of a sudden it came to him. The soil samples. He had collected dirt from seven local faults, and the analysis reports were sitting in the Prediction Lab. It might be late, but he’d never fall back asleep, so he went inside, threw on some clothes, and zoomed off to CES.

  The Center for Earthquake Studies was hulking and dark, and Charlie moved through it like a ghost. In the Prediction Lab, he began to pore over the soil analysis charts, checking them against the wall map.

  For more than an hour, Charlie struggled to make sense of the numbers swimming before his eyes. Then he got up, and sat in the corner by the door. With some difficulty, he assumed the lotus position and, concentrating on the steady pattern of his breathing, emptied his mind until there was nothing left within him but light.

  When Charlie returned to his computer, he saw it instantly. A group of samples, abnormally high in alkaline, were clustered in an area near the epicenter of the Northridge quake. He converted their parameters into numbers, and each one came up prime.

  In a daze, Charlie went to the phone, dialed half of Kenwood’s number, and stopped. It’s three seventeen, he thought. Besides, none of this means anything yet. There’s work to do. He turned to his screen and looked back at the numbers. He was still looking at them six hours later, when Kenwood got to work.

  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?