Ear to the Ground

by David L. Ulin

  “Subtle.”

  “Soft.”

  “Subversive.”

  “God bless California. God bless America,” said the governor, filling his chest with air.

  “Practicing again?”

  “Don’t be a smartass.”

  At Warner Brothers Studios, on the second floor of Producer’s Building Seven, at the Tailspin Pictures conference table, sat the Finnish action director Henny Rarlin, whose blockbuster movie Die Hard as a Rock had earned him a place on the Hollywood A-minus list. A moment ago, Ethan Carson had tried to impress him by speaking some Finnish. No go. Seated on Ethan’s left was Grace, and next to her sat the newest member of the Million Dollar Spec Club. Ian wore tiny round tortoise-shell Armani eyeglasses which, he thought, made him look terribly intelligent. The three of them waited for Henny Rarlin to finish a heated conversation on his cellular phone.

  “Why? Why, why, why?” he asked the apparatus. Then, loudly: “Well don’t call me until you fucking know.” He snapped his cellular before turning to the others and announcing, “I haven’t read the script.”

  Ethan, Grace, and Ian grimaced appropriately.

  “But I love earthquakes. I made some notes.”

  “Notes?” Ian took off his glasses. “But you haven’t read the script.”

  “Ian …” Grace tried.

  “I don’t need to read your fucking …”

  “Now, now.” Ethan began to kiss some Finnish ass.

  Henny Rarlin stood up and towered over Ian. “Lemme tell you something, you little child. You sold your script to Varner Brothers. They bought it for Tailspin Pictures. Now it belongs to me.”

  Ian tried to swallow.

  “Ian …” Grace tried again.

  “You shut up,” he told her. “A week ago you wouldn’t even show the goddamn thing.”

  “Not here, Ian …”

  “What are they fighting about? What are you fighting about?” Henny Rarlin wanted to know.

  “Nothing,” Ethan said. “Creative differences.”

  “I am the director. Who are they to be having creative differences?”

  The room fell silent. Ian fiddled with his glasses. With his eyes, Ethan told Grace to apologize. Right. This is business, she realized. And sometimes business sucks. But then she caught a glimpse of Ian, his expression so smug it nearly knocked her off her chair. You asshole, she thought, and before she could stop herself, she hissed, “If it weren’t for Charlie’s prediction, nobody would’ve looked at your fucking script.” Then she got up and stormed out of the room.

  Grace was so angry she could barely see the road. She shouldn’t have walked out like that, but all she could think about was breaking up with Ian as soon as she got home. Seven months she’d given to that obnoxious come-lately, and she’d be damned if she’d give any more.

  When she turned west onto Franklin, Grace was thoroughly blinded by the setting sun. She pulled to the curb, rooted around in her bag for sunglasses, looked up, and saw a 7-Eleven located conveniently before her. The next thing she remembered was paying for a pack of Merits and getting back into the car. For old time’s sake, she pushed in the dashboard lighter, tore off the cellophane and aluminum wrapping, and tried to retrieve a cigarette before the contraption popped out. Grace examined the lighter’s glowing tip before giving life to the Merit hanging from her lips. She smoked without shifting position and felt a dizziness that soon passed. Then she lit another and, refreshed, pulled back into traffic. And so, in a time of need, Grace had been reunited with an old friend.

  “We live in an age of sound bites and media hype.” The governor smiled across his audience, meeting every attending pair of eyes. “It has become possible to transmit and receive information alarmingly quickly—to compose quickly, send quickly, receive quickly, and, sadly, react quickly. I read everything printed about this sensational prediction, really dug there in the science. But I’m shaking my head. And I’ve been talking to a lot of people who’re shaking their heads, too. Scientists and scholars and heads of universities—they think it’s hullabaloo. But the media spun it into a story, and with that story, they sell papers. I’m all for enterprise, but what we pay for when we buy newspapers, or when we’re watching the news on television, is the truth. So I say, if there’s an earthquake coming, let it be proven beyond a reasonable doubt—in this nation, under God, with liberty. Because in the world of speculation and sensationalism, there is no justice for all. God bless California. And God bless the United States of America.”

  THEY ALL LAUGHED

  EARTHQUAKES MEANT BIG MONEY. STERLING CARUTHERS knew that. Loma Prieta had paid off sixteen billion dollars, and Northridge had come through for thirty. The key, Caruthers thought, was in knowing how to make devastation work for you.

  He sat in his office at the Center for Earthquake Studies pondering just that, watching stock quotations and real estate prices scroll down his computer screen. Both were declining steadily, but he knew there was a way to make a killing from it all. There must be a passage through those numbers, a pathway to exorbitant wealth. It was just a matter of solving the equations, of studying the situation until the proper combinations made themselves known.

  Caruthers thought about the moguls. What would they have done? The Chandlers, the Dohenys, the Harrison Gray Otises. Men of vision, he thought, who made a killing in the San Fernando Valley, way back in 1904. Caruthers sat in his swivel chair, and praised the science that had brought him to the threshold of an opportunity this large. Watching columns of numbers cascade on his monitor, he opened his mind to the world of speculation, lighter than air.

  But Charlie Richter lived in the world of doubt and deliberation, and suffered from the disease of integrity. Was predicting earthquakes any better than snooping around, telling someone her husband or his wife was unfaithful? Was he providing a service? Or just gossiping scientifically, on a global scale?

  Whatever the case, in the past week he had come to be perceived as a doomsayer, less a scientist than a hack. First came the governor’s speech, and now everyone from Maggie Murphy to Jay Leno found fault with Charlie’s work. What a laugh! Suddenly, everybody was a seismologist.

  More than ever before, Charlie lived and breathed and slept with his numbers. At the moment, in fact, he was eating with them—at the bar of the Authentic Café. What could he do, he wondered, to prove this earthquake beyond a reasonable doubt? And what did “reasonable doubt” mean? As a legal expression it referred to past events, but Charlie was venturing into the future. What could he do when everyone was so numerically illiterate?

  Charlie left his wonderings and looked up. He didn’t expect to see anything, but there, across the dining room, was Grace, having dinner with a long-haired man of unknown identity. Charlie wondered if she had spotted him earlier, when she’d come in; and then he considered what she’d do if their eyes were suddenly to meet. It was a game he played to test a woman’s love, a silly and unscientific game, but Charlie played it anyway. And this time, he won. Grace covered her mouth with a napkin and jumped up from her chair. When she excused herself, her companion looked concerned.

  Charlie stood as Grace approached somewhat defensively.

  “Are you OK?” she asked him. “I tried to call you.” She looked back at her table and smiled.

  “It’s been …” Charlie suddenly felt depressed.

  “Ian and I broke up.”

  “Really?” He brightened, but without letting her see. Then she noticed Charlie noticing the long-haired man.

  “It’s business,” she told him. “A film maker.”

  “When did you and Ian …?”

  “This morning.”

  He smiled. “How many times have you two broken up?”

  “Don’t make fun of me, Charlie.”

  Henny Rarlin got up then and strode across the restaurant, embarrassed that a man of his stature would be left sitting alone. Grace explained to Charlie that Henny had made Die Hard as a Rock. He thrust his hand into Charl
ie’s and spit out his name like an Uzi fires bullets. Then, he took Grace by the elbow and tried to steer her toward their table.

  “What are you doing?” she said, and pulled away.

  Diners looked up as Henny Rarlin ranted. “Are you having dinner with him, or me!?” Charlie gestured for his check, and Rarlin said something he couldn’t hear. Grace slapped the film maker’s face, and stalked out of the restaurant. It all happened so quickly, Charlie just laughed.

  It was laughter, probably, that gave him the idea. His body’s convulsing, the release of tension, the movement of unnoticed muscles. Five minutes later, at a pay phone on Beverly, Charlie called someone at ABC News. Then he jumped into his car and headed east on the 10.

  Outside of Indio, he saw them—the vans, the crews. A helicopter hovered. When he pulled up, a sea of microphones came through his driver-side window, so he told the one about the Pirate and the Parrot, and they all laughed.

  Looking closely at his watch, Charlie got out of his car, stood on a mound of dirt, and put his arms in the air till the crowd quieted down. “It’s gonna be between a 3.1 and a 3.3,” he announced. “Right where you’re standing.” A cacophony resulted, and twenty reporters hurled questions at Charlie. “One at a time!” he shouted. He turned to a sober-looking blonde whose hair appeared frozen to her head. “Yes?” he smiled.

  But before she could say a word, the rumbling began.

  BEDTIME STORIES

  EMMA GRANT SAT ON THE EDGE OF HER NINE-YEAR-OLD daughter Dorothy’s bed, tucking the child in. It was 9:30, and Dorothy was yawning, but Emma lingered, taking her time. She had lived all her life in this house in Northridge, but lately she had begun to worry about the windows with their cheap little slats of glass, and the building’s shoddy wooden frame. Now, staring at her daughter, she had a momentary flash of panic and, for the millionth time, felt a phantom rumbling in the ground.

  The house was a one-family ranch, shielded from the street by a ragged spray of bougainvillea, with a postage stamp yard that was unkempt and long. When Emma’s parents bought it, thirty years ago, Northridge had been on the outer rim of Los Angeles’s suburbs, its wide, clean streets full of kids on bicycles and dads mowing the lawn after work. These days, the whole place looked like a construction site, with stacks of lumber and mountains of gravel piled up in driveway after driveway, the sounds of drills and hammers punctuating the air like the calls of angry birds. Only a few blocks away, condemned apartment complexes had been taken over by squatters and gangs, and the boulevards were littered with broken glass. It had gotten so Emma wouldn’t let Dorothy outside alone anymore. But whenever she pestered Henry to pull up stakes, he reminded her they’d just spent a fortune rebuilding.

  Emma’s family had meant for it to be their starter house, but they had never moved on. Her parents had paid off the mortgage, and then died. And Emma couldn’t help feeling she had taken over their lives.

  Her reverie was interrupted by what sounded like the chirping of a bird. Good, she thought, birds never chirp if there’s a shaker coming, but then the noise came again. It was Dorothy, sitting up in bed, eyes rheumy with exhaustion.

  “Mom?”

  Emma shook away her thoughts. “What?”

  “Could you please let me go to sleep?”

  In the living room, the Dodger game flickered across the TV. Nomo on the mound; Henry on the sofa. His big feet hung over the armrest like hams—but Emma could tell by the regular sound of his breathing that he was asleep. Sure enough, when she stepped through the doorway from the hall and came around the side, his eyes were closed, and his stomach rose and fell evenly, like a piston engine. She raised her eyes to the incomplete molding at the top of the walls. He’d been promising to finish it since January but, every night, after he drained four or five MGD Lights, he’d pass out on the couch. Molding forgotten, another promise left unkept.

  “Henry.” Emma kicked the sofa, and he stirred with a groan.

  “Huh?” He rubbed his eyes. “Time is it?”

  “Almost ten.”

  “Rough day.”

  It was always a rough day for Henry, a rough week, a rough year, a rough life. Today he’d poured concrete on a job site, and hopefully tomorrow he’d be back out there again. Still …

  “You gonna finish that molding, Henry?”

  “I said it was a rough day.”

  “The washer’s still broken; you said you’d fix that, too …”

  “Come on, Em. Gimme a break in my own damn house.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Say it.”

  She took a deep breath and ran her hands down the front of her dress. “We’ll never sell if the work’s not done.”

  “We’re not selling.”

  “If that earthquake comes …”

  “Let it come.” He stood up and headed down the hall.

  Emma walked around the house turning off lights. She got a beer and sat down on the couch. She flipped channels for a few minutes, before landing on the news. The top five stories were about the coming earthquake.

  She sat rigid, eyes fixed on the screen. Her stomach tensed during an interview with a man who was moving his family east. In the background a minivan waited, full of children and clothes. Watching him, Emma’s heart started racing, and she began to feel the way she might if she were contemplating her own death—nauseated, overwhelmed, as if everything she had, or was, was only a dream.

  She clicked off the television and paced, checking the bolts that held everything to the walls. She pushed against the TV, making sure it, too, was fixed in place.

  In her dreams, the television was always the first thing to go. Usually, Dorothy was still a baby, crawling around in front of it, laying her little hands across the screen. As it came crashing down, Emma could do nothing but watch. She would wake up in a cold sweat, gasping for equilibrium, as if the world had flipped inside out.

  In Dorothy’s room, Emma watched her daughter’s gentle breathing. Then she headed to the kitchen for another beer. On the table was a stack of bills.

  Oh God, she thought, and sat to keep from falling. It was going to be a long night.

  THURSDAY NIGHT, PART TWO

  SOME FRIDAY MORNING, TAKE SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD to work and get a load of the cars in the Formosa’s parking lot. They don’t serve breakfast there, but you can bet they served a whole lot of booze the night before. The place is packed Thursday nights with twentysomethings who haven’t learned how to drink. Or maybe they’ve learned how to drink but not how to hold their drink. Maybe they have something to drink about, some sad thing, some loss. They can’t find work. They work too hard. Or they work and work but don’t make a dime. Then again, maybe they’re worried about the earthquake.

  As the waitress approached, Grace thwapped back the spittle of her Amstel Light and ordered another round. She wasn’t worried about the earthquake, or anything else, because she knocked on Charlie’s door every other night, for the latest science, the latest anything, whatever. She wanted to be near him. Kiss him. But she couldn’t bring herself to make the first move. What if he’d never even considered it? It would kill her if Charlie got this shocked look on his face and suddenly stopped trusting her. She had chosen, as the object of her desire, the busiest and most preoccupied man in Southern California. Still, she imagined that, when the earthquake came, she could be in his arms. What a sap I am, Grace thought. What a romantic sap.

  As far as she was concerned, Ian Marcus, former sponge, present swaggerer and future prick—who was, at the moment, sitting across the room from her—didn’t exist. He, on the other hand, glanced in Grace’s direction often, surreptitiously as a millionaire can, or a six-fifty-against-a-million-millionaire, anyway.

  He was different now. He looked better. He smiled more, and when he did, he smiled more truly, because suddenly he didn’t need anything from anyone. He kissed the ass of nobody. And that can be a pretty important thing.


  Ian sat talking to a guy he had once written a spec script with: a buddy comedy, set in a beach town, called The Cape of Great Hope. Ian had never thought much of his writing.

  “Remember,” the guy asked Ian, “when we talked last Christmas?”

  “Last Christmas?”

  “Like around Christmas? I think it was Damiano’s.”

  “When?”

  “We had pizza, late,” the guy said. His name was Jon. Ian didn’t know what he was talking about. “And you got a stomachache. Yes, you got a stomachache.”

  “I think I remember.”

  “Do you remember what we talked about? That night you got a stomachache?”

  “What?”

  “We talked about Ear to the Ground.”

  Ian took a nonchalant sip of beer. “So?”

  “Do you remember specifically what we talked about in regard to Ear to the Ground?”

  “What are you talking about, Jon?”

  “Act two was basically constructed that night at Damiano’s.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You know what I’m saying. You had them meeting on like page eighty, and I told you if you moved that up …”

  “That’s pretty simple stuff.”

  “What about the scene, Ian? I gave you the whole fucking scene with the seismologist’s wife!”

  Jon disgustedly got up, nodded to a few people on his way to the bar, and ordered a Maker’s Mark neat. He turned once toward Ian and shook his head. Then he leaned over to an attractive woman in an old-fashioned dress.

  “Do you know that the guy sitting over there is like one of my closest friends? That he just sold a script for a million dollars? And that he took an idea, took part of an idea, took all of an idea for an important part of his script, that just sold for a million dollars, and he won’t even admit we discussed it? I say this to you not wanting any money from him. Even if he were to offer it to me. If he said, like, ‘Here’s a hundred thousand …’”