Ear to the Ground

by David L. Ulin

  SEIZE THE DAY

  IF CHARLIE RICHTER WANTED TO SAVE LOS ANGELES, HIS margin of error stood at less than one-tenth of a percent. Yet every time he thought seriously about his plan, he felt like he couldn’t breathe.

  On Tuesday night, Charlie would fly into Honolulu, where he would pick up plastic explosives before chartering a plane to the tiny island of Lui. There, he would use his rusty surveyor’s skills to find the location his calculations had pinpointed: latitude 155.0357 degrees, longitude 19.8381. Two centuries earlier, a small volcano had anchored the spot, and Charlie hoped there were still some vestiges of rock and earth to mark it. If not, he thought, his face twitching into a grimace, I’m fucked. And so is L.A.

  Charlie wished he didn’t feel so isolated, but he was now, undeniably, on his own. CES was a joke, a mere arm of Warner Brothers, with Caruthers feeding information to the Ear to the Ground marketing machine. The CES director had grown so fond of the camera that he’d become a regular commentator on Ricki Lake, reassuring anxious citizens that a temblor was nothing to fear. He had allowed hype to overtake any sense of scientific responsibility, seduced by Hollywood into believing that seismologists were fortune tellers and the study of earthquakes nothing but a parlor game.

  The whole thing made Charlie wonder if the City of Angels was worth saving, or if it was more noble to let it be destroyed. Then he looked out his window and saw two kids playing across the street. One wore an oversized flannel shirt so large it came down below his knees. At that moment, Charlie realized that, no matter what else happened, he had no choice but to try.

  Grace Gonglewski hated spending Saturday morning on the phone, but she’d allowed Bob Semel’s promises of money and power to overwhelm her better judgment. Having tripled Grace’s salary, the president of the studio seemed convinced he owned a piece of her soul. At least that’s what he’d told her at 7 a.m., when he called for his daily status report.

  Grace had seen the ad in the Los Angeles Times. A full page in the Calendar section, featuring a photo of a crowded downtown L.A., split down the middle by the slogan: “Get Out Before It’s Too Late!” As she twirled a strand of hair around her finger and waited on hold with Ethan Carson, Grace thought how appropriate that tag line truly was. With Ear to the Ground opening in three days, five hundred prints were said to be faulty and in need of recall. Bob Semel wanted answers, and the theater owners were going wild. Last night, Grace dreamt of empty movie screens and crowds rioting on Hollywood Boulevard in front of Mann’s Chinese.

  Fuck it, she thought, and lit a cigarette. Lately, she’d felt like writing again, felt scenes begin to articulate themselves slowly in her head. Partly, she guessed, it was due to Ian’s success; partly the fact that she lived each day like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point.

  This time, however, she wasn’t thinking about writing a script—the fragments she jotted down were prose. She hadn’t told anyone about it, not even Charlie, and she wasn’t sure if it was delusion, or something that would one day take shape. But as she puffed on her cigarette, she could feel whatever it was starting to grow.

  Charlie sat back in his chair and knitted his hands behind his head. Next to the computer, his recorder stood like a wooden sentry, fingerholes straight as coat buttons, mouthpiece a small, impassive head. How long had it been since he’d played? When he picked up the instrument and started to blow, its reedy tone was mournful as a Santa Ana wind.

  The sound brought back the afternoon he had performed for Grace. The music was high and clear and full of hope: a sweet madrigal evoking the sustaining power of love. Five and a half months ago, he thought. It might as well be centuries. He felt ancient now, as if the weight of everything was laid across his back. Lately, he’d noticed tiny lines around his eyes and had become convinced he was growing old before his time.

  On the computer screen, a simulated image of Lui sent waves of energy out into the Pacific. As Charlie watched, he pictured himself there with Grace. It was just a flash, gone as quickly as it appeared. But it left behind a sliver of anticipation, and, for the second time that morning, the certainty that he should seize the day.

  So Charlie put down his recorder and headed for the stairs. On the second-floor landing, he knocked at Grace’s door. For an instant, there was no sound from within. Then the door swung open, revealing Grace, phone in the crook of her neck, looking as if she’d rather be anywhere else.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, eyes coming alive at the sight of his face. She waved him inside, and mumbled a hurried goodbye into the phone.

  “Hi,” Charlie said, and took a step toward her. “I think we need to talk.”

  WAITING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

  ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 26, THE UNITED STATES ARMY sent double-rotored helicopters into the Los Angeles basin to monitor distress. Throughout the Southland, it was as if Christmas had never happened. In its place was an eastward stream of packed station wagons and moving vans that had now become a deluge. An ordinance had made it illegal for employers to penalize workers for leaving town and, as a result, most businesses were closed until after the first of the year.

  Virtually everything had been affected by the coming disaster—and every corner of the nation’s second largest metropolitan area experienced this psychic foreshock. It was in such an atmosphere that Warner Brothers opened its $210 million extravaganza Ear to the Ground.

  At the premiere, Bruce Springsteen’s “Shaken Up” played softly in the courtyard at Mann’s Chinese. Behind police barricades, throngs of rubberneckers and leaner-inners and know-they-can’ts reached for Henny Rarlin as he got out of his limousine with an unidentified woman—not his wife—and assumed a camera smile. A lot was on Henny’s mind. This fucking movie could kill him. It could send him to the minor leagues, or worse: Finland, to make documentaries on Laplanders. Henny had been drinking since noon, and as he strode cotton-mouthed down the red carpet, he thought only of reaching his seat without incident.

  Another limousine yielded Ethan Carson with Sandra Bullet, who broke her heel as she got out, and recovered marvelously by enacting a Chaplinesque pantomime, in which she attempted to hide her imperfections from the fans. Sandy hoped her cameo as the seismologist’s wife would alter the lovable-but-slightly-naive-girl image she’d acquired. As flashes went off around them, Ethan spent his energy considering whether people would actually think he and Sandy were an item.

  Grace came with—she had to laugh—Matt Dillinger, who was exactly like the character he portrayed in Lasso the Pharmacist. As a fireman in Ear to the Ground, he repeatedly risked his life, always emerging sweaty and covered with soot. Grace wanted to come alone, but that was vetoed by Ethan. “What about your seismologist?” he asked her, mentally tallying the publicity Charlie’s presence might generate. “Out of town,” she’d said, and suggested Dillinger.

  Ian couldn’t have guessed they would boo him. He’d thought, given the circumstances, the applause might be strange, maybe meager, maybe even nonexistent. But, as the third-from-last title—“Written by Ian Marcus”—faded up, the catcalls began.

  Ian sunk down in his seat and looked around for his date. Her name was Maria, and she was very pretty, but she was nowhere to be found. The Jon Kravitz lawsuit had made page one in Variety for a full week, and Ian was now notorious in the town that had once ignored him. Listening to the tumult, he wished silently for some kind of reprieve. Then, to hide his identity, he began to boo along with the crowd.

  Grace had seen the film plenty of times, so she relaxed and let herself drift. Almost immediately, Charlie’s image came to mind. Grace could hardly remember his face, but she could see his chest clearly, with its strawberry tuft of hair. She liked that chest, and she remembered being surprised when Charlie had taken off his shirt and propped it on her bedpost. Quite surprised.

  The movie was predictable but entertaining. Special effects—especially sound effects—were tremendous. At the climax, as the earthquake hit and walls tumbled in on an audience watching
a movie about an earthquake, the effect was suitably disturbing. So much so that, when the lights came up, those Hollywood luminaries remembered it wasn’t just a movie.

  For this reason, an un-native hue of resolution fell over the afterparty.

  People drank less than usual, but smoked more cigarettes and pot, which entailed walking to the far end of the soundstage and cramming onto a sliver of patio. It got so popular out there that the caterers peeled the tent back as much as possible without causing it to collapse on itself.

  Bob Semel sat near the bandstand with his division heads, projecting grosses. Reviews were only a minor consideration, but if the earthquake was a dud, they were in deep shit. This picture should have opened a month ago, and Semel knew it. Now all he could do was airlift the studio to Tucson, Arizona, and hope for the worst.

  Around the room, the talk was earthquake, earthquake, earthquake. “Look for a slew of movies about ’em,” Sterling Caruthers told a pair of actresses.

  “You a producer?” a bobbed redhead asked him.

  “Among other things, yes. I helped produce this film.”

  “Really?” the other one asked.

  “I’m director of the Center for Earthquake Studies.”

  “A producer and a director!” The redhead made a joke.

  “The truth is”—Caruthers took her hand—“I like the movies. I just signed with Warners to consult on scientific matters, with a first-look deal on projects of my own.”

  “Exciting!” the redhead said.

  “Listen,” Caruthers continued, “I’m leaving in five minutes, and thought you might like to come with me.”

  “Uh … where?”

  “To a press conference, briefly. Then, hopefully, to a nice supper.”

  The redhead looked over at her friend.

  “I just need to leave, that’s all,” Caruthers said, and smiled gently.

  “Sure,” she looked back at him. “That sounds fun.”

  Charlie Richter sat in a cab driving down La Cienega toward LAX. Beside him on the back seat was a rucksack containing some clothes, a laptop computer, a surveyor’s compass, and nasty-looking drill bits designed to cut through volcanic rock. In his hand, he held the photo of Grace he’d stolen so many months ago, her face as unreadable as the first time he’d seen it.

  Charlie didn’t regret telling Grace about the retroshock, nor about the trip to Lui. He also didn’t regret what happened after they’d finished talking, although it had complicated things. Now, on his way out of town, he felt as if he were leaving a little piece of himself behind. For the first time since he was a boy, he felt like Los Angeles was home. At the same time, he was more than a little worried: L.A. could become a very dangerous place in the next few days.

  The cab’s AM radio spilled a litany of panic into the air. Every flight out of LAX, Burbank, Ontario, and John Wayne had been booked through Thursday night, and all four airports would be closed on December 29. It was impossible to find a seat anywhere—even on a bus or a train. The freeways, too, were overloaded: If you took the 10 east from La Cienega, it would take two hours to reach downtown. All across Southern California, entire neighborhoods had become modern ghost towns. There were isolated reports of looting, and clusters of small fires dotted the night sky.

  At the airport, the gridlock was impossible. So Charlie paid the driver and walked around the terminal buildings until he found Hawaiian Air. Wherever he looked, young men and women in white robes walked in wide circles, chanting and holding up signs: “The End Is Near” and “Welcome to the Apocalypse.”

  Charlie had heard about these people, these apocalyptics, who, in the last week or so, had actually begun arriving in L.A. And who knows: they could be right. But Charlie knew, if everything worked out as planned, they would once again be denied the chance to glimpse the face of God. It was not his intention to interfere with their faith but, in the end, faith was such a tenuous thing. Charlie’s was in the perfectibility of science, the way everything, if examined properly, could be codified and explained.

  At a quarter to seven on Wednesday morning, the sun was barely a rumor, daylight gray and streaked with purple, silent but for a tentatively squawking bird. In the driveway of 1939 Topeka Drive, Emma Grant stood wiping her hands on her sweatpants, staring at the house.

  It had all happened so quickly. One minute, she’d been sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the bill of sale; the next, Henry was standing over her, transfixed by the sight of that twenty-thousand-dollar check. She hadn’t heard him come in, but Frank Baum sure had, and within half an hour, the paperwork had been signed, the money turned over, and Henry was talking, talking—always talking—about how they were rich.

  Emma shook her head. Twenty thousand dollars. It wouldn’t last long, she thought. And yet twenty thousand dollars was what her whole life was worth. She’d walked through every room in the house that night, trying to memorize the details of her past. But as soon as they took the check, the past started to dissipate. Standing here now, it was hard for her to remember anything but their decision to leave.

  Henry came out the front door carrying two suitcases, which he threw in the back of his pickup. The truck bed was stuffed to the point of bulging; throw in anything else, Emma thought, and the suspension would give way.

  “That’s it,” Henry said, and lit a cigarette. The smoke was invisible against the early morning sky. “All set?”

  Emma nodded. Henry acted as if they were merely going for a spin. She looked up and down Topeka Drive and saw a forest of “Sold” signs. Last night, she passed the park where Dorothy played. The trees had been uprooted, and a team of FEMA workers were frantically constructing a tent city on the newly cleared land. It was so much like January 1994 that she pulled the car over to catch her breath.

  When she got home, she had begun packing immediately, losing herself in an attempt to forget. The news contained reports of more looting, and Emma felt tears welling in her eyes. She had ridden her bike on this street, and watched her daughter do the same. She wondered if they’d ever come back to this place, and if they did, what would remain. Would the ordered pattern of houses and streets survive, or would they all be shaken away?

  Henry went around to the pickup’s cab and climbed inside. After a moment, the tinny voice of a traffic reporter alerted them that the 405 was backed up all the way from the 101 to the 5. Henry took a drag off his cigarette and squinted at the sky.

  “It’s getting late,” he said. “Why don’t you wake the little girl?”

  In Honolulu, Charlie met a leathery-faced man who sold him sixty pounds of plastic explosives—enough to sink a battleship. Then he chartered an amphibious plane that could land in the small natural harbor of Lui and coast toward the shore. Fifty yards from the island, he lowered an inflatable raft into the warm Pacific waters, threw down his gear, and told the pilot when to pick him up on Thursday. Then the plane took off, and Charlie realized he was utterly alone.

  On the beach, Charlie took inventory: food, water, flashlight, drill, generator, laptop, and explosives. He began to trek inland. The ground was hilly, with outcroppings of volcanic rock rising in irregular formations, and lush, overhanging growth so dense it obscured the sun. Humidity made the whole place feel like a sauna, and before he’d gone half a mile, Charlie stripped down to his underwear. Grace’s presence, like an invisible spirit, hovered at his hand, and he imagined what it would be like if she were there, running naked with him in and out of the sea.

  But there would be plenty of time for vacations. Briefly, he was struck by the old familiar doubts—that what he was trying to do was absurd, a small man’s attempt to tamper with the forces of nature. Then Grace’s face returned to him. She was in Los Angeles, he thought, and he appreciated the fact that it meant he had no choice but to succeed.

  Eventually, Charlie came to a clearing with a dusty covering of brittle soil. This is it, he thought. He checked his compass and the coordinates of his map. His stomach began to flutter,
accompanied by a clenching of his sphincter and a tightening of his balls. To his right, like a revelation, was the shape of a small, dormant volcano, its rocky sides rising in jagged minarets to the sky.

  Charlie threw off his backpack and took out his equipment piece by piece. He turned on the laptop, and an image of Lui appeared on the screen, along with specific coordinates, angles of entry, and depths of charge.

  He spent a while comparing the computer simulation with the actual landscape, walking off distances and doing tests of the soil. On the southwest side of the volcano, Charlie went to work. The drill whined like a dentist’s, its three diamond-tipped bits glinting in the sun like bad teeth. He looked at his watch. Wednesday, December 27, three-seventeen p.m. Less than twenty-nine hours to go.

  Thursday morning, Grace was awakened at six-thirty by the phone. She had been dreaming of Charlie, and when the ringing sliced its way into her consciousness, her first thought was that he was dead. When she got to the living room, however, it was Ian’s voice emerging from the answering machine, plaintive and petulant.

  “Come on, Grace,” he was saying. “I know you’re there.”

  She turned the volume down, but the damage was done. Back in bed, she couldn’t sleep. Pictures swirled in her mind: Charlie trekking through the middle of nowhere, without sufficient food or water. With explosives strapped to his back. Charlie stumbling. Charlie falling.

  Shit, Grace thought. She took off her nightgown, pulled on a pair of jeans, and caught a glimpse through the open window of the sun rising in the east. The sky was clear as ice; the flanks of the mountains stained rose with spreading light. Tomorrow, she thought, it could all be gone.

  Grace walked up Spaulding toward Melrose, listening for even the slightest sign of life. They were reporting violence, but here the street was deserted, with a single car parked at the curb. In the last few days, she had watched her neighbors leaving town, even as her life continued to be possessed by Ear to the Ground. I should call Semel, she thought. When I get back.