Ear to the Ground (4 page)

SATURDAY NIGHT, PART TWO

GRACE WAS PISSED. IAN'S RIDICULOUS AGENT HAD CALLED and harassed her—at home, for Christ's sake—about
Ear to the Ground.
What a joker Michael Lipman was. Here it was, Saturday night, and he had set up some kind of meeting. Grace was so angry she hardly even looked up when Ian headed for the door. “I'll call you,” he told her.

Three hours later, though, Ian still hadn't called, and Grace had moved toward the numb realization that she'd been taken for granted again. It was almost summer, and the days were languid, nearly tropical. As twilight settled over the city and fog began to drift across the Hollywood Hills, Grace found herself pacing the rooms of her apartment, imagining a man who wouldn't leave her hanging on a Saturday, who would maybe buy her flowers once in a while, clean up the kitchen after himself, or at least replace the coffee when he'd used it up.

She dialed Ian's number, left a nasty message, and went to get her keys. Fuck him, she thought. She didn't need Ian. She was an adult. She could take care of herself. There was that new place on Beverly they'd been wanting to try, where she could get a nice piece of fish, lightly grilled, and a glass of wine. And after that … well, she could always read a couple of scripts.

Navaro was on the building's front stoop when Grace reached the bottom of the stairs. Please don't talk to me, she thought,
and then: I don't have to deal with you, I can just go on my way. But he said hello and, of course, she said hi, cursing herself for not having the strength to be rude.

“All alone tonight?” Navaro asked. In her faded jeans and T-shirt, Grace clearly was not dressed for a date.

“Ian's working.”

“He don't know the meaning of the word.” Navaro shook his head with a bitter little laugh. “He sits around all day and works on Saturday
night
? The whole time me and Elise, God forgive her, were together, I'd always be home by six-thirty, every Saturday night.”

God forgive her? Grace thought. “That's nice,” she said.

“Yeah. Elise.” Over Navaro's shoulder, the last dregs of daylight faded to black. “I ever show you her picture?”

“No.” Grace's stomach tightened like a fist.

“Wanna see?”

She hesitated, and Navaro took that for a yes. He headed for his front door, leaving her on the steps to wait for him.

Just then, a Honda Civic pulled up in front of the building, and Charlie climbed out the passenger side. He leaned into the open window and looked at Kenwood, who was sitting in the driver's seat, hands tight on the wheel.

“You're not gonna go home and stare at her picture, are you?” Charlie asked.

Kenwood shook his head.

“You want to get some dinner?”

“Not hungry.”

“Then do me one favor? Don't go jumping off any bridges.”

“What bridge did you have in mind?” Kenwood looked up.

“Good point.” Charlie smiled, and backed away from the car. “So I'll see you Monday?”

Kenwood nodded, and the Civic crawled away from the curb.

Grace watched the sandy-haired man walk up the path, flickering in and out of patches of lamplight.

“You must be Charlie,” she said.

“And you must be Grace.”

They smiled for a moment that stretched nearly into discomfort. Then Navaro's door squeaked open, and Grace's face fell like a stone.

“Do you know about computers and everything?” She spoke quickly, moving her face toward Charlie's ear.

Charlie didn't understand.

“I mean, you work with them, don't you?”

“Yeah …”

Before Grace could elaborate, Navaro came up behind them, bearing a photograph of a middle-aged woman in a ratty bouffant. “I see you two met,” he said, wheezing a little, a Pall Mall hanging from his lips.

“Incorrect path, incorrect path,” Grace said to Charlie. “Every time I try it, I keep getting ‘incorrect path.'” Her eyes sparkled, and a smile crept from the corners of her mouth. “I'm so confused.”

Briefly, the three of them stood in suspension, and even the crickets in the cool Los Angeles night seemed to grow still.

“Probably have to defrag the system,” Charlie told her. “Right away.”

“You guys with your computers,” Navaro laughed, shaking his head. And as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.

“Thanks,” Grace said to Charlie when they reached the second floor landing.

“No problem.” He turned slightly toward his door. Something in his way reminded Grace of an old boyfriend who'd never taken the initiative, always waiting for her to make the first move. Charlie would be like that, she figured. But it didn't matter, she was with Ian, and Ian …

… 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 tectonic
s 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 crept 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.