Ear to the Ground

by David L. Ulin

  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.

  RECOMMENDATION: PASS

  DRIPPING PICTURES

  Title: Ear to the Ground

  Writer: Ian Marcus

  Recommendation: Pass

  Writer: Maybe

  Log Line: A journalist, unable to sleep for fear of earthquakes, finds out the Big One is coming to Los Angeles and that seismologists know about it. What they don’t know is how to alert the city without plunging the populace into turmoil.

  Comment Summary: This story alternates between gentle earnestness and biting sarcasm. Earthquake meets Network. There’s more science than there needs to be, and I’m not sure audiences will buy the paranoid theory behind it.

  Synopsis: BILL MARTIN is a razor-stubbled reporter at the Los Angeles Sun. He’s frequently at odds with his editor, GERARD CONSINO, a small, wiry man with little vision. Bill can’t sleep nights, what with recurring nightmares of the earth opening up and swallowing his Silver Lake apartment building whole. At an editorial meeting one morning, he proposes the idea that earthquakes can be predicted, but the techies are holding out. “Another one of your conspiracy theories?” Gerard asks him.

  This angers Bill. He imagines his colleagues talking behind his
back and begins to worry that the slightest vibration—a refrigerator’s hum or the passing of a bus—is an earthquake. His bad dreams become more frequent, and one night he is compelled to walk through the streets of Los Angeles. He has never done this before, and he finds the sensation thrilling. At 3 a.m., he lies down in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard and puts his ear to the ground. Underneath him is a fault line, and he hears a rumbling from the center of the earth, which he understands like a language. (Doctor Doolittle?) The cops pick him up and keep him briefly under observation.

  A few nights later, while roaming the Hollywood Hills, Bill encounters two seismologists discussing a field experiment they’re conducting in a canyon. One of them keeps saying, “My God, I don’t believe it.” The other says, “Relax.” They’ve predicted the Big One.

  The seismologists find it uncanny that Bill understands the ins and outs of earthquake prediction. They tell him about their experiments, describing how their soil samples yielded an abnormally high alkaline content, and how it was possible to predict patterns once they considered all the factors involved. (Science gets a little thin here.)

  Bill becomes the seismologists’ shadow, following their experiments as best he can. Eventually, the data points in one direction: In exactly five months and five days, at five minutes after five in the morning, an earthquake of between 8.9 and 9.1 will hit near San Bernardino.

  Bill writes up the story and turns in a preliminary draft, stressing that it shouldn’t be printed until an agreement can be reached about how best to inform the public. But Gerard publishes the story immediately.

  Los Angeles is understandably shocked. People talk (seriously) about leaving. The real estate market bottoms out. Religious fanatics take their prayers to the street corners. Each day, dogs bark more loudly.

  The Sun is catapulted to fame, and Bill is nominated for a Pulitzer. But his work suffers. He stops bathing and becomes uninterested in sex. When he begins to live like an animal, his girl friend leaves him. He goes into the hills, burrowing with the coyotes and living off nuts and berries.

  As droves of Angelenos leave the city, the mayor announces that the whole thing is a hoax. The populace is divided between believers and skeptics. Earthquake drills become commonplace in schools. The Dodgers move back to Brooklyn.

  The clock is ticking. When summer passes into fall, and winter’s rains begin, Bill decides to lead the remaining citizens away from L.A. Like Christ, or the Pied Piper, he summons them on the eve of the earthquake, and they follow him north. Riding in his car is SHEILA, the beautiful wife of one of the original seismologists—although her husband has stayed behind to observe the quake.

  Right on schedule, the earth shakes. Buildings tumble. Hollywood is completely destroyed. Burbank is busted, and Venice goes up in flames. Century Park East collapses onto Avenue of the Stars.

  In San Luis Obispo, Bill takes the news hard. Half the remaining populace is thought to be dead. Bill and his group make their way south to do what they can, but with the freeways destroyed, travel is slow. Eventually, they arrive on foot and contribute to the rescue effort.

  While ABC looks for Bill, hoping to put him on Nightline, he is off with Sheila, searching for her husband. They find him just as he utters his dying words: “Take good care of my wife.”

  Bill and Sheila bury the seismologist by the beach and walk quietly as the waves lap at their feet. They kiss.

  Comments: This kind of sensationalist trash preys on human fear and paranoia. As such, it could become a blockbuster. Still, the writing is uneven; the writer unproven. I’d make the protagonist a seismologist, not a journalist. The reporter should be the corrupt one. Johnny Depp passed, as did directors Andrew Davis, James Cameron, and Wolfgang Petersen.

  Although there hasn’t been a really good natural disaster picture in two decades, people have already pretty much forgotten about Northridge. With the ground silent and still, this just isn’t topical.

  PASS.

  HITTING THE FAN

  “LISTEN,” IAN WAS SAYING, “I DON’T MEAN TO BE PUSHY …”

  “But?”

  “Come on, Grace. You know what I mean.”

  Ian glared across the table. It was late Sunday morning, and he was sitting with Grace on the sidewalk outside Quality, traffic racing past on Third Street as they waited for their food. Inside the restaurant, Ian could see Elliott Gould and, slouched over coffee and toast at another table, Drew Barrymore and Eric Erlandson. Ah, Hollywood, where celebrity was a spectator sport, and just going out for brunch was like being on TV.

  Ian ran a hand across his face. Two tables away, a redheaded woman and a guy with a gray ponytail sat facing a stroller, chattering at a brown-haired baby with two tiny teeth. All of a sudden, the kid caught Ian’s eye and grinned. Ian tried to imagine what it would be like to be so young, so open to the world. Then he looked up, and Grace gave him such a tired stare he felt he’d never be young again.

  “What?” he asked her.

  “It’s not my fault your life’s falling apart.”

  “My life’s not falling apart.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “It’s a good script, Grace.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “That’s the whole point.”

  “Tracy lost her job going out on that limb.”

  “You’re not going out on any limb.” Ian leaned across the table and smiled. “Trust me.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  Charlie was on his way out when he heard voices in the hall. He waited until the noise receded before he emerged into the white summer heat. These last few days, he’d felt a little off, as if the unsteady earth were transferring some of its shakiness to the marrow of his bones, leaving him unsure how to behave. Now that the entryway was deserted, he breathed a silent prayer of thanks.

  No sooner had Charlie stepped outside than he heard someone call his name from above. On the second-floor landing, Ian stood at the rail.

  “Hey.” Ian waved. “You got a minute?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “I wanna ask you something.”

  A shape flickered behind Ian like a ghost. At first, Charlie thought it was a shadow, but then he noticed a sweep of blonde hair, and recognized Grace. Her lips were pinched white. They’ve been fighting, Charlie thought, and for some reason, this gave him a jolt of glee.

  “The other night?” Ian leaned closer. “When you went to the desert?”

  Charlie nodded again.

  “You knew it was coming, didn’t you?”

  Grace stepped out of the shadows. “Jesus, Ian. Give it a rest.”

  “Tell me the truth,” Ian continued.

  “Maybe a hunch,” Charlie said.

  Ian broke into a toothy grin and turned to Grace. “You see? Now you gonna give it to Ethan?”

  “You don’t give up, do you?” Grace hissed. She glared at Ian for a second, then stormed away, footsteps like gunshots from inside.

  Half an hour later, Charlie drove down Culver Boulevard, trying to clear his head. He had wanted today to be quiet; he had wanted to look at numbers, at the newest projections of activity on the Pacific Plate. That was what the San Andreas was telling him: Kobe’s shocks were moving east.

  The Center for Earthquake Studies was empty, sunlight falling in dusty shafts across the floor. In the lab, Charlie checked the wall map out of habit and looked again for a pattern in the pushpins. An hour later, he had reduced a sixty-four-bit matrix to a sixteen-bit matrix but had learned nothing.

  Charlie was in the middle of an elaborate simulation program when he heard a noise from beyond the door. He waited, head cocked like a hunting dog’s. A softer sound came, and Charlie left his computer and went to investigate.

  At first, Charlie didn’t notice anything unusual. Then he saw that the door to Caruthers’s office was open, and he caught a glimpse of an unfurled sleeping bag on the couch. In the room, a backpack lay half empty on the floor. Charlie was about to examine i
ts contents when he heard a cough and turned to find Kenwood standing in the door.

  “What’s going on?” Charlie said. “Are you …?”

  “I can’t go home. I get in the car, and I can’t go home. I just sit there. Since Tuesday.”

  “You’ve been here since Tuesday?”

  “It’s the only place I feel safe.”

  Kenwood rocked back and forth in the doorway, as if doing some kind of dance.

  “Have you been looking at her picture?” Charlie asked.

  “No. But I’m scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “It’s just this feeling I have.” Kenwood leaned against the doorjamb and took a long breath. “Everything’s about to hit the fan.”

  SAN ANDREAS, D–55–8.9–DECEMBER 29, 1995

  ACTORS SAY THEY FEEL AT HOME IN A THEATER, ANY theater, anywhere. Chefs love kitchens, and taxi drivers live for green lights strung to the horizon. But Charlie Richter loved numbers. He lived with them, found meaning in them. Like a jigsaw puzzle, he could fit the pieces together by applying correct persistence.

  Charlie printed hard copies of his numerical tables after the computer monitor began to make his eyes twitch. He lay on the Prediction Lab floor, the carpet digging into his elbows, looking at numbers. Eight-digit prime numbers, nine-digit prime numbers, ten-digit ones. He was tired, and had been considering taking a nap on the floor when he saw it. The number first appeared at the beginning of his tables, and popped up again nearly thirty pages later. A layman would never have recognized the repeated value because he would have ascribed no meaning to it. But Charlie noticed that the two numbers, expressed logarithmically, were identical—the way a guitarist finds different ways to play the same chord.