Ear to the Ground. David L. Ulin

of his back and, as his breathing rose and fell in small crescendos, her revulsion faded into a shimmering aura of desire.

      Outside, the sun was bright but not hot, and morning mist hung like vapor in the air. As usual, Navaro was sitting at the bottom of the front steps, staring at his 1979 Le Sabre as if it were a limousine. When Grace passed, he raised his head and leered at her, sunlight reflecting like lightning off his oiled black hair.

      “Guess what?” he said, eyes on her breasts. “I rented the place.”

      It took a moment, but then Grace saw the open doorway behind him, and understood.

      “Really?” she said. “To who?”

      “Some guy,” Navaro explained. He took a quick look over his shoulder before cocking his finger to his ear and moving it around. “He’s a little strange, you know? Asking me about the foundations, shit like that. But hey”—he raised his palms to the sky in an exaggerated shrug—“he paid me three months’ rent, up-front.”

      “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Grace said, not really caring but wanting to be polite. Still, she lingered, the glimmer of a question flickering at the edges of her mind. “He’s not in the entertainment business, is he?”

      “Depends on how you define entertainment. He says he’s a scientist, whatever that means.”

      The first thing Charlie did inside his new apartment was to hang his suit and dress shirt in the upstairs hall closet. Then he walked off the dimensions of the place, jotting his findings in a blue pocket notebook, and trying to picture how it would look after his machines had been installed.

      In the master bedroom, Charlie looked out the windows at the overgrown backyard. Beyond it lay a high chicken wire fence and the back of another house. He didn’t know much about the neighborhood but, Charlie thought, it didn’t matter; the only important thing was that he was here. He could taste the excitement, a flavor in his mouth. He took a deep breath, and another. Then he went into the bathroom and let the old stall shower run.

      For as long as Charlie could remember, the feeling of running water on his body had calmed him, had helped him sort out his thoughts and clear his emotions. Today was no different—until he stepped out of the shower only to realize, too late, that he did not have a towel. For a moment, he stood there, helpless, but then he shrugged, and shook himself off like a dog. Water splattered everywhere, fanning out like the cracks left behind by an earthquake … and suddenly, Charlie was seeing the connectedness of the pattern, each drop linked to the ones around it. He closed his eyes and tried to imprint the vision but, like some abstract notion, the floating image would not coalesce.

      So Charlie walked naked through the apartment. Briefly, he considered getting dressed, but it was still too early, so instead, he carefully laid out his clothes on the hardwood floor and sat down to meditate. Slowly, painfully, he folded his legs into a lotus position and let his eyes unfocus on a spot across the room. He drifted, but only until a driving bass line began to rumble through the wall from the apartment next door, followed by a fuzzed-out electric guitar, and the steady snap of a bass drum and snare. Although Charlie tried to ignore it, within seconds, there was nothing in his head but noise. Christ, he sighed. Then, refocusing his eyes, he extricated himself from the lotus and went for his clothes.

      In the middle of the spare white expanse of Grace’s living room, Ian was in his boxer shorts, rocking back and forth to Courtney Love. He had only been out of bed for five minutes or so, but already the day was beginning to unveil its charms. The bag he’d stashed in the battery compartment of his laptop had yielded exactly one joint, and now he stood smoking and swaying, the sun glancing off his back and legs like a lover’s caress, muscles melting into languid liquid, and the edges of the world going all woolly, as if a layer of green gauze had been laid across his eyes.

      Ian noticed the stacks of scripts next to the couch, and he felt himself drawn. A month before, he’d given Grace an old screenplay of his and asked about rewrite work, but although she had smiled and said she’d see what she could do, he’d had the feeling that his request had made her uncomfortable, and he was wary of bringing it up again. He did, however, wonder about the competition, and staring at the piles, he felt his bowels tighten with the incipient thrill of illicit snooping. Grabbing a script, Ian flipped past the title page—Web of Sin—and turned quickly to page one:

       EXT. DARK NEW YORK STREET – NIGHT

      Let me guess, he thought, I’ll bet there’s a gunshot somewhere in here. He scanned down the page until he found one. Then, nodding to himself in satisfaction, he put the screenplay back, not noticing that the head had fallen off the joint and burned its way through the first few pages, leaving a small, but noticeable, scar.

      Ian booted up his computer at the kitchen table and ground some beans for coffee, leaving a residue on the counter near where the filters were stored. He took a final hit off the joint and squeezed the roach into the watch pocket of his jeans, then popped two slices of bread into the toaster. Once the toast was singed brown as a Malibu hillside, he slathered on some peanut butter and began to eat, standing there without a plate, crumbs falling to the floor like flakes of ash.

      After the coffee was ready, Ian sat down and adjusted the contrast on his laptop. He was working on a new screenplay, and now he opened up the file, enthralled as the words emerged like magic on the screen. He scrolled back five or six pages, watching the sentences appear and disappear as he retreated to the middle of Act Two. The script was at a critical juncture, he realized, and he’d been working around the issue for days, spinning scenes that didn’t go anywhere, that took up pages and pages without moving the story along. He had his characters together, but somehow they kept walking off in their own directions, and when it came to the earthquake with which he wanted to end, everything he’d written seemed like a cliché.

      Man, Ian thought, this is too much. Maybe I should do something else, and start to write when my buzz wears off. For a moment, he just sat there, his mind as blank as the morning light. Then he unhooked the phone and plugged the cord into the back of his computer, making sure to deactivate Grace’s call-waiting before dialing America Online.

      At eleven fifty, Charlie entered the ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel and searched out Sterling Caruthers, who promptly fixed his colleague’s tie by tightening its knot. Already, journalists were scurrying around like noxious bugs, bearing press credentials from newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV.

      “Nice of you to join us, Mr. Richter,” Caruthers said, his voice dripping blood. The press conference would begin in ten minutes.

      “I’m sorry. I …”

      “Never mind.” Caruthers dismissed him with the wave of a hand. Charlie would be seated, he was told, at the far end of the dais, where it was unlikely he’d be called upon to speak. Once there, he began an entanglement with a heavy velvet curtain, which not only obstructed part of his chair but obscured his microphone, as well. He tried pushing the curtain backwards, and then forwards; finally, having no other choice, he slung the thing around his neck and wore it like a shawl.

      Charlie’s new employer, the Center for Earthquake Studies, or CES, was endowed with a multimillion-dollar budget rumored to have come about, in part, through a hushed yet symbiotic relationship with the entertainment industry, whose interest lay in the Earthquake Channel, as well as an interactive TV series called Rumble. “If the Big One hits L.A.,” mused an inside source, “the studios will be in on the ground floor.”

      There was dissent; the Caltech people were up in arms. The mixing of science with commerce, they claimed, would make it impossible for pure research to take place. Caruthers begged to differ. As CES’s nonscientific figurehead, he’d engaged the services of Gold & Black, a pair of entertainment publicists who had called this press conference and guaranteed a respectable turnout from journalists and other notables—in return for ten thousand dollars.

      The first difficult question came from Maggie Murphy of the Los Angeles Reader, who asked Caruthers whether CES had enough scientific vision to warrant spending so much money. Caruthers answered feebly. When pressed with a follow-up,