Ear to the Ground. David L. Ulin

Caltechies are calling you guys CESSPOOL?”

      “That’s their business,” Caruthers announced. “Ours is to develop techniques that will enable us to predict earthquakes with enough time and accuracy to save the city of Los Angeles and other municipalities considerable expense and loss of human life.” He fixed Murphy with a take-that glare.

      But Murphy had done her homework. She was Lois Lane with a metallic toughness. “I assume Dr. Richter will be involved in this prediction effort?” Caruthers nodded. “Then why,” she went on, “do you have him over there behind a curtain?”

      Embarrassed, Charlie unraveled himself, while a hotel employee held the curtain aside.

      “You’re Charles Richter, right?” Murphy asked in a staccato voice. “Grandson of the Richter scale Richter?”

      “Yes,” Charlie mumbled.

      “And you predicted the quake in Kobe, Japan?”

      Camera crews adjusted their positions, and lights were aimed at Charlie’s eyes. He stared into them, looking for a face, but all that came back at him was an aurora of white.

      It was true, if not very well known, that Charlie, who’d been traveling for research and for escape, had been in Kobe at the time of the earthquake, giving a paper called “Fault Lines: The Mystery of Plate Tectonics” at a seismographic conference in nearby Osaka. Strolling along the banks of Osaka Bay, shoes in hand and trousers rolled to the knee, he’d noticed something irregular about the tide-flow. After testing water samples, Charlie studied the data—blocks of numbers—and felt a sudden nausea. He took a taxi to a grassy hillock and noticed birds flying overhead in strange configurations. Then he removed a stethoscope from his knapsack and, for more than an hour, kept his ear to the ground. At dinner, he mentioned to a colleague in passing that metropolitan Kobe sat on a tectonic boundary in the process of shifting. Later, drinking Burmese whiskey in his room, he noticed an undeniable correlation between two disparate columns of numbers. He dialed his colleague’s extension and arranged to meet him in the hotel bar, where he explained that Kobe could go at any moment. The man laughed in Charlie’s face and spread the word to some other seismologists, who reacted similarly, behind his back. Twenty-four hours later, no one was laughing.

      Maggie Murphy stood now, as did the Times reporter and the guy from ABC. Sterling Caruthers hadn’t opened his mouth in half an hour, as Charlie, blithely sipping from a glass of water, more or less became the subject of these proceedings, deflecting and focusing the debate, explaining technical principles in layman’s terms. Finally, he and Caruthers exchanged a meaningful but complicated glance. Things were winding down.

      “What are your present plans, Mr. Richter?” asked Murphy with a smile.

      “I go where the promise of seismic activity exists.”

      “Yes?”

      “And I’ve just taken an apartment in Los Angeles.”

       THURSDAY NIGHT

      YOU CAN FIND THEM BY THE BAR, OR IN THE BACK booths of the last room at the Formosa on Thursday nights, where there’s no smoking until ten-thirty, after which the waitresses couldn’t care less. Just half a year ago, they went to Dominick’s off San Vicente—slews of them from Fox and Paramount, and from Sony—but when Dominick’s faded out, and the Olive dissolved into Jones, everyone cut to the Formosa. Among studio youngsters, Friday has always been Hangover Day.

      Grace watched Ian peeling off his Budweiser label at a table across the room, while two girls sitting next to her—an agent’s assistant and a VP (in title only)—admitted freely that they’d fuck him at the drop of a hat. Women liked Ian, which exhilarated Grace because it made her nervous, but it disappointed her that, as a result, she felt more attracted to him. Was he better on paper, she thought, or in bed?

      Ian was in good form just then. “Imagine,” he said, “if we had interactive cameras in our living rooms, right?” His whole table listened. “And there was an earthquake, and some computer geek, in Iraq for chrissake, could watch our TVs smashing and our books falling out of the shelves, and paintings coming off hooks; and us walking in, rubbing our eyes, checking our limbs, freaked out but alive, as the car alarms are going off and the dogs are howling and soon everyone around you is awake …”

      “Nobody’s putting a camera in my living room,” announced a former writing partner.

      “Why not? Everybody’ll do it. Or mostly everybody.”

      The others seemed unsure.

      “Look at it this way,” Ian continued, “a hundred years ago, Bell was shouting into this archaic telephone: ‘Watson, can you hear me?’ Now we have voice-mail, and car phones; we hang up on each other, and Star-69. Two hundred years ago”—he was on a roll now—“if you wanted to listen to music you either played it yourself, or you heard someone else playing it. I mean …”

      “That’s true,” said a guy from Fox.

      Ian leaned back, satisfied with himself. Fox thinks I’m smart, he thought. He thinks I’m smart, and he’ll probably hire me—not right now, but down the line. In for a penny, in for a pound. Life is long. Grace came over then and scooted next to him, put her arm around him, and smiled to the others. He liked the way she smelled. She crossed her legs, making sure to pull down her skirt. She was pretty. That wouldn’t hurt him at Fox, either.

      Ian’s father still sent him two thousand a month, so he ordered another beer and one for Grace. A guy named Marcus began to talk about his new script—the dreadful tale of an airplane, a bomb, several black nuns from Detroit, and an ex-New York City cop. Meanwhile, under the table, Ian ran his hand lightly up Grace’s thigh. She tried to take it seriously—the story—because this twenty-three-year-old schmuck, Marcus, sold a spec last month to Joel Gold and was at the top of the B-list.

      However, by the time the SECOND NUN pulled an assault rifle on the hijackers, Grace was turned on. Ian had worked his way to her hip, fiddling with the elastic at the edge of her panties and watching her smile. Then he excused himself, went to the bathroom, and rolled a joint, which they smoked alone together in the parking lot, stealing kisses between hits, leaning against the rear quarter-panel of an old Ford Bronco parked in a space marked Ethel Waters. Across the street, a dark figure hustled toward Jones, a valet. He would make a fine character, Ian thought, and he and Grace kissed deeply for a moment, probing like scientists with their tongues.

      Charlie heard them come up the stairs, laughing and drunk; he heard their voices soften as they got inside her apartment, and when they came into the bedroom he heard them rise again as sighs and moans, a steamy call-and-response through the hollow wall. On the floor in front of him, two laptop computers exchanged data; their screens cast an eerie, underwater light. They’re screwing next door, Charlie thought, as he picked up the dog-eared address book by his side and reached for the phone. Flipping through the pages, he wondered who’d mind least if he woke them up.

       THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

      CHARLIE KEPT THINKING ABOUT THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. Ever since the night he’d heard her, like a Santa Ana wind through the bedroom wall, he had found her entering his mind at odd moments: in the supermarket, for instance, or while staring at a computer screen. He wasn’t obsessed—he had never even seen her, for Christ’s sake—just a little, well, curious, if that was still something people felt in this day and age, where everything was up for grabs and yours for the taking, if only you knew better than to ask.

      This morning, as he left his apartment, checking to make sure he had turned both locks, Charlie glanced across the landing at her door. The day was silent, the sun as white as movie light.

      On the sidewalk, Navaro dragged a dirty rag soaked in sudsy water across the hood of his Le Sabre.

      “So tell me,” he asked Charlie. “You renting that thing by the week?”