Ear to the Ground

by David L. Ulin

  “… you wouldn’t take it.” The woman smiled a little.

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  She smiled again. “Here it is, a hundred thousand.” She pantomimed holding a suitcase.

  “Maybe I’d take fifty.” He gave her his hand. “My name’s Jon, by the way.”

  Grace tooks the stairs to her apartment slowly. She wasn’t drunk but she had eaten too little. She was exhausted and, frankly, sad. It felt like the weekend on Thursday nights at the Formosa, but Grace knew she still had to get through Friday. Suddenly she felt old, as though the once-promising flame that was her life had dimmed. Just then, Charlie opened his door, and their eyes met through his screen.

  “Hey,” she said, and blushed.

  He pushed open the screen door. “You okay?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You want to come in?”

  “No,” she said, “let’s play this scene right out here on the balcony.” The minute the words came tumbling out of her mouth she couldn’t believe she’d spoken them.

  His eyebrows rose. He came outside, and the screen door slammed behind him. “Is this a balcony?” he asked. And before she lost her nerve, she leaned in and kissed him. Then, without a word, she turned away, went inside her apartment, and went to bed.

  THE CHILDREN’S HOUR

  DOROTHY REMEMBERED BEING LOST SOMEWHERE BEFORE the gauzy filaments of sleep were rended by what felt like an explosion. She remembered a loud bang, and then what sounded like the thudding of horse hooves, coming closer. She remembered looking for the horses, but seeing only black; there had been a crash like thunder, and she remembered opening her eyes.

  Dorothy remembered spinning, as if a tornado had picked up her entire house and cast it carelessly to the ground. She remembered how the walls seemed crooked against the black, star-swept sky. She’d wondered how the stars could be so close; how they had crept through the ceiling into her room. She remembered the pain in her arm, and not being able to move. The last thing she remembered was her mother’s face, hanging over her own—a face wild as the moon, her mouth a red gash, crying, “Oh God, my little girl!”

  It all seemed like a dream twenty months later, except for a small scar above Dorothy’s right elbow and aches that came and went with the rain. Then, this afternoon, while she played a game called Prom, with her Barbies on the living room floor, she remembered it again. Henry had been stretched out on the couch in his pajamas, face flush with flu, when they interrupted Ricki Lake to announce a 5.5 near Barstow, somewhere called China Lake. Dorothy’s mother had been laughing, but as she watched the news flash, her face drained of color.

  “See?” she hissed at Henry.

  He turned onto his side. “For God’s sake, Emma. We didn’t even feel it.”

  “This time.”

  Dorothy took the dolls into her room. Then she came back and stood by the door. “I’m going out.”

  Her mother’s eyes flickered across the television screen, where a seismograph traced aftershocks in waves. “Where?”

  “The park. I wanna climb a tree.”

  “Be careful. And you stay in the park.”

  Dorothy wheeled her bike into the driveway where, through the living room window, she could hear an argument revving up. She pedaled onto the sidewalk toward the park, past two abandoned buildings and another one under reconstruction.

  They had spent two weeks in the park after the earthquake, living in a four-person Army tent, jumping up each time an aftershock shook the aluminum struts like so much Christmas tinsel. They ate canned food and shat in outhouses. There’d been hundreds of families, and kids running around, screaming in the mud, but Dorothy had been in a fresh cast and had missed most of the fun.

  This afternoon, the park was barricaded. Dorothy watched as work crews swarmed the field; bulldozers and cranes had chewed the grass into a fine green pulp. Workmen operated a steamshovel next to a huge old sycamore, digging a trench at the root line.

  A man in a hardhat and blue FEMA windbreaker materialized and spoke to Dorothy in a soft Southern twang. “Stay behind the line, honey.”

  “What are you doing with that tree?”

  “Bringing it down.”

  “Why?”

  “Clearin’ the field.”

  “Why?”

  “Instructions.”

  “You’re afraid of the earthquake. Like maybe the trees’ll fall down.”

  “Look, little girl …”

  “My whole life I played in this park.”

  “Well, you can’t play here now.”

  Henry and Emma were still arguing when Dorothy got home, so she leaned her bike against the summer-singed bougainvillea and went around to the backyard. Her fort stood in the center of the grass.

  The fort was little more than a lean-to, built of discarded materials Henry had scavenged for her from various construction sites. Inside, there was a stool and a wooden box for a table. She pretended some rusty aluminum casing was a stove, and near it an upturned milk crate served as a cradle for her favorite doll, a red-headed baby named Samantha. Dorothy sat down and rocked the cradle, leaning in and brushing the doll’s hair back with her hand. Gently, she pulled a thin strip of green cloth up under her chin.

  “Still sleeping, Samantha? Don’t you wanna hear a story?” The doll looked up with blank glass eyes.

  “Once upon a time there was a nine-year-old girl named Dorothy, who lived in Northridge, California. She had the power to move the earth.”

  Dorothy got up slowly and moved to the exact center of the room. Placing her hands at the corners of the fort’s patchy roof, she began to shake the structure for all it was worth.

  “Earthquake! Earthquake!” she shouted. “Oh baby, cover your head!”

  Dorothy flung the cradle across the room, doing a spastic dance as she pretended to keep herself from falling. Samantha ended up crumpled in a corner, arms and legs splayed.

  Dorothy lunged over to where the doll lay. She picked it up and held it in her arms, pressing the plastic flesh to her own. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “Oh God,” she cried. “My little girl!”

  AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

  CHARLIE WAS IN THE PREDICTION LAB, STARING INTO THE ash-gray glow of his computer screen, when word began to circulate throughout the Center for Earthquake Studies that a verdict had come down in the Simpson case. The whole beehive was abuzz: Secretaries chattered to each other animatedly, and technicians gathered in front of a small color TV, flipping back and forth between the Angels’ sudden-death playoff against the Mariners and CNN. Eventually, someone in the office started collecting money for a gambling pool, noting people’s predictions carefully in a ledger. The wagering had nothing to do with baseball; innocent or guilty—that was the question.

  Charlie liked to think of himself as the one person in Los Angeles who couldn’t have cared less. He had not watched the trial on television, nor read the stories about Marcia Clark’s hairdo. He didn’t give a damn about Lance Ito’s hourglasses, and he wouldn’t have recognized Mark Fuhrman if the detective had waved a blood-stained glove in his face.

  He’d met Simpson as a kid, when Charlie’s grandfather had taken him to see the Heisman Trophy winner play at USC. After the game, they’d been escorted into the locker room, and O. J. had signed young Charlie’s program: “O. J. Simpson, number 32.” There had been something flat and distant in O. J.’s eyes—shark’s eyes, rolling over from gray to black. Charlie had gone home and put that program in the back of his closet. Years later, he finally threw it away.

  Now, from what little Charlie knew or cared, O. J. Simpson had killed his ex-wife and also the man who’d seen him do it. He had left his own blood at the crime scene and had carried the blood of his victims back to his home. What could be more scientific or empirical than that?

  Still, Charlie felt a twinge of curiosity, as if his indifference had somehow unraveled and worked its way inside him like a tangle of worms. He tried to focus on the screen, but
soon he pushed away from his work station and went over to where the technicians still clustered and conjectured around the TV.

  “Hey, Charlie. You want a piece of this?”

  Charlie pulled out a bill. “Guilty,” he said. “On both counts.”

  Tuesday morning, for the first time in a long time, there were no reporters waiting on the sidewalk in front of Charlie’s apartment. Navaro sat in the early mist smoking a Pall Mall on the steps, and he gave a small laugh as Charlie came outside.

  “Look at you,” said the landlord, sweeping his arm across the empty lawn. “Yesterday’s news.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, stopping at the bottom of the stoop. “Too bad they won’t stay away.”

  Navaro took a long drag off his cigarette and exhaled a ghostlike spray of smoke into the air. “He’s gonna walk. You know that?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Ever heard of ‘reasonable doubt’?”

  Was there nothing else to talk about? Charlie wondered. Nothing at all?

  “Four hours,” Navaro continued. “You don’t condemn a man in four hours.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Charlie started walking.

  “Eight million of my tax dollars, pissed away …”

  “Yeah, well …”

  “Justice!” Navaro spat on the pavement. “No such thing as justice with these lawyers running wild. That Johnnie Cochran’s got everybody so worried about a riot they forget two people got their throats cut!” The angry old man’s voice got low. “All you need is money in this world. Y’got money, you can kill whoever you want.”

  At nine-fifty on the morning of October 3, the city of Los Angeles drew a sharp collective breath of anticipation, then grew silent as a tomb. Television sets emerged from office desk drawers, and workers gathered before them with the reverence of the faithful. In bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens they watched, as the honorable Judge Ito welcomed the jury into the courtroom for the last time, and O. J.’s granite jaw quivered and was still. They watched while they drove the freeways, or sat down in restaurants, and on the sidewalks; they saw the images multiplied in the windows of appliance stores. They watched and they waited, until the bailiff stumbled: “In the matter of the people versus Oren … Orenthal James Simpson …”

  Afterward, Charlie looked around at his colleagues. He saw the elation of some and the dismay of others. To his surprise, he found that he felt sick—and not because he’d lost five dollars. No, in the absence of another suspect, it was as if the killings had never taken place.

  Later, Charlie would consider the verdict to have caused its own kind of earthquake, ripping through the soul of the city with a palpable seismic force. And for a few days afterward, as jurors made appearances on daytime talk shows, it became clear that this trial had shaken a divided nation. How ironic, Charlie thought, that in eighty-seven days, quite something else would shake and divide the ground beneath their feet.

  GREEN MEANS GO

  GRACE GONGLEWSKI SPENT EARLY OCTOBER IN THE conference room at Tailspin Pictures, playing host to producers and associate producers and assistant producers and line producers and co-executive producers, production managers and post-production supervisors, explosives experts and special effects designers, directors of photography and camera assistants and assistant camera assistants, location scouts, location coordinators, and George Lucas.

  Top brass at Warner Brothers popped in twice a day to say hello and give their full support to the most ambitious project in the studio’s history: A feature film from script to theaters in seventy days. Less than three weeks into pre-production, not including core salaries, two million dollars had been spent on Ear to the Ground, primarily, it seemed, on doughnuts, coffee, and Wolfgang Puck gourmet pizzas.

  Five separate first-units would film simultaneously, and a helicopter would shuttle the director and actors among them. Six hundred crew members and six thousand extras would be employed. A tidal wave would be enacted, freeways collapsed, and—at last count—eight high-rises would be swallowed whole. Three thousand walkie-talkies were to be rented, along with three hundred on-road and off-road vehicles. And three million feet of film would be exposed. Editing would begin the minute film was shot. Six months of work would be collapsed into one, at a cost of a hundred million dollars. And rising.

  When Grace’s alarm went off at six-fifteen on Friday morning, her eyes and lids had fused, and it took a combination of Visine, saline, and water to separate them. Once upon a time, she had looked forward to Fridays, but the bleary-eyed reality was that she wouldn’t have a day off until the new year.

  Casting began today, and Grace hated nothing more than seeing three hundred people deliver the same stupid lines differently, over and over. She hated casting directors, especially the parties they threw, where empty-headed beauties were just waiting to get your card so they could call you at the office. Actors were nightmares, not to be trusted. Their talent was to be whoever you wanted them to be. In that regard, she thought, they were nothing.

  There were a hundred pretty actresses gathered outside a soundstage near the Burton Way gate. The cavernous interior had been divided by screens, which didn’t make the place seem any more intimate. Grace was well into her fourth cup of coffee when Ian walked onto the stage.

  “Have you seen Henny this morning?” he asked Grace.

  She shook her head.

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “No.”

  Ian’s cell phone rang.

  “Hello?” he said.

  Grace tried not to watch him, but she couldn’t help herself. Ian seemed so fulfilled, like a butterfly that had emerged from a cocoon. She tried to remember how he used to be—pale, unkempt, eyes always looking for an angle to play. Now, he seemed possessed of a preternatural calm that radiated from his face and shoulders in exponentially increasing waves. He wasn’t even rattled when Henny Rarlin stalked onto the stage and told him to get off the phone.

  “The pages suck,” Henny bellowed. “You haven’t incorporated one …”

  Ian pulled half a dozen sheets of script from an expensive black-leather shoulder bag and handed them to the director. “You must’ve read the old ones,” he announced.

  Henny grabbed the pages, pulled a pair of John Lennon glasses from his pocket, and wound them dramatically over his ears. Then he began to read.

  When word got around that Henny Rarlin had arrived, at least ten actresses found a reason to draw near. But Henny, ever the leerer, interrupted his reading for only a second before he returned to the script. Turning a page, he smiled; he chuckled. In a gesture symbolizing his deepest concentration, he flung his arm over his head and grasped his opposite ear. A moment later, he smiled broadly to Ian.

  “This sucks much less,” Henny said.

  At Warner’s, marketing usually met on Mondays, but this Friday, they were having a special session to figure out how they would ever be able to cover costs on Ear to the Ground. What had been publicized, even paraded, as a hundred-million-dollar movie was now their problem. Or, depending on how you looked at it, their challenge.

  First, they condemned the costliness of special effects in general; then they discussed whether anybody really believed the Big One was coming. Most of them did. “Nobody’s leaving, I hope,” somebody said, in an attempt at a joke.

  This much they knew: The film had to open at least two weeks before December 29. If it was a stinker, and the quake came, they’d probably be rescued. If it was a hit, and the quake came, it’d be a fucking bonanza.

  But what if the quake didn’t come? What if it was early, or late? What would happen to the hype? What they needed was a way to link the actual facts about the earthquake with the marketing campaign for Ear to the Ground. That was when Meyer Stern, worldwide president of marketing, had the idea of calling Sterling Caruthers.

  THE LOGIC OF NUMBERS

  STERLING CARUTHERS HUNG UP THE PHONE AND SAT for a long time without moving any part of his body. This tem
porary paralysis, caused by a jolting stimulus to his pineal gland, was actually the result of a five-minute conversation that had netted him seven million dollars. Having not yet let go of the cradled receiver, and sitting still as a fly the instant before you take a swat at it, Caruthers realized that his schemes to capitalize on the coming earthquake had been merely the uncreative ideas of a desperate man. He had pushed when he should have relaxed. The Simpson trial had temporarily stolen his limelight. Now, he knew, the opportunities would come.

  Caruthers suddenly remembered a “SALE” sign by that chateau on Mulholland; then he recalled a BMW commercial he’d seen on television that morning. Victoria M., the agent he’d met weeks ago at William Morris, was hopeful he could become the premier earthquake spokesman—that is, should the disaster strike. Already, there was money swirling around this quake, and the young agent had been particularly shocked to find how badly she wanted it. Nothing comparable had happened to her since coming to Hollywood, and Caruthers had been impressed at the way she’d adapted herself to the idea of cashing in on future pain and suffering. In the closing chapter of the second millennium, he thought, the smart money was squarely on doom.

  The call from Warner Brothers had come out of the blue, but by the end of the week there would be dozens of calls. Perhaps hundreds. Turning down million-dollar offers suddenly seemed the most delightful of pursuits.

  His brother had made scads of money in telecommunications, and his sister’s husband’s real-estate portfolio grew larger every Christmas. But this year, Sterling Caruthers would surpass them both. He’d stuff their stockings with hate, and with expensive little nuggets from Caldwell or Tiffany’s. It’d be the worst Christmas of their lives.

  Caruthers began to play a game people sometimes play when they’re immobilized by their own thoughts: pretending for a moment the paralysis is real and that they’ll never move again.