Paul Kolsby - Ear to the Ground

Which was more than you could say for a lot of things. Like relationships. Or friendships. Nothing beats a social connection, Ian thought, and you never forget a guy once you smoke a joint with him in some parking lot. The Formosa on Thursday nights yielded mucho connectiones industrio. Sometimes he’d even move the crowd over to Bar Deluxe, where he played his horn with Raf Green’s band. But it all had its price.

Ten minutes later, Ian lay in a sea of Kleenex, wondering lazily what it took for a writer to get work in Los Angeles. Then he stood under a hot but under-pressured shower. He dragged the soap across his genitals. Why did he always do that first? Not a bad character thing. I’ll use it, he thought.

Refreshed, Ian left a message on Michael Lipman’s staticky answering machine and thought about how to find another agent. Last month Michael had told him things were heating up with the script, that buyers were circling like hawks and it was only a matter of time. But who was he kidding? Ear to the Ground was dead. Prospects were flatter than a Paris crepe. As he booted his computer to work on the screenplay some more, he forced himself to think about what would really happen to Los Angeles if Caltech or CES predicted an earthquake? He scrolled to the big scene on page seventy-five. Los Angeles gets plunged into turmoil around page forty (Syd Field would be proud), and the city spends much of act two breaking apart in anticipation of the Big One (a nifty piece of irony, he thought smugly). I’ll knock heads a little more with my main character, he thought. If I got to know him better, who knows?

Ian was struck by how easily he wrote good supporting characters, yet at the same time, left his protagonist a gaping vortex. Why does everything happen to him? What does he do ? Then again, what does anybody do? What do agents do? They certainly don’t call a guy back. Agents are persistent by profession, Ian thought. But in Hollywood, the chain of desperation has many links. Even Mike Ovitz gets blown off sometimes.

Never take things personally. Always be detached. Ian had heard that Ovitz had studied Buddhism in college. So, from his bookcase, he extracted Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen and read the first five pages of the introduction.

Satisfied with the completeness of his study, he walked over to the window and opened the blinds. The sun was hot and bright and critical, and it occurred to him then that he wouldn’t be able to pay his rent even if he found a job. He had two days to rescue his phone. An auto-registration-due notice was propped against his computer monitor, next to some parking tickets, which he sometimes used as bookmarks. And he did need electricity. He had lied to his creditors about having already sold Ear to the Ground. The price, he’d told them, was in the high six figures, but studio business affairs were slow-moving. At first, the collection agents had been friendly, even congratulatory. But they’re not idiots. Once they found out the truth, he’d never get any credit for the rest of his life. Ian sat there, having nothing, owing everything, and for a long time he didn’t move. Then he yanked a cord, and the dusty blinds went down with a crack. What a delightful image, Ian thought, for my biographers.

CHARLIE WAS HEADING OUT TO THE FIELD. IT WAS TEN o’clock on a Thursday evening, and he was in the kitchen, preparing a Thermos of coffee for the night ahead. Ever since he’d deciphered those prime numbers, he’d been running computer simulations of local faults, and if his data was right, there would be a small earthquake along the San Andreas sometime before dawn. It was a long shot, he knew, but he had to see.

Charlie packed the coffee in a rucksack, then loaded his laptop and a couple of empty sample trays. He thought again about the numbers, the alkalinity of the soil. The Northridge data had been the first indicator, but when he’d gone back and looked at the information from Indio, he’d begun to understand that this was bigger than he’d thought. He remembered the day his grandfather had explained how fault lines were interrelated. “Think of the faults as highways,” the old man had said, “and earthquakes as cars. Some cars remain on one road, but others take exits and branch off. It’s the same with temblors. Conceivably, a big enough jolt could trigger any number of quakes up and down the line.”

Indeed, Charlie thought. Up and down the line. He shouldered the rucksack and moved toward the door.

Outside, Charlie ran into Ian coming up the path. Ian looked more disheveled than usual, with big black circles under his eyes.

“Hey,” Charlie said. “How you doing? Haven’t seen you around.”

“Everything’s fucked.” Ian put his hands in his pockets and attempted a grin. His face looked hollow, like a lost little boy’s. “Grace up there?” He nodded toward her apartment.

“Couldn’t tell you.”

“Yeah, well …” He stared at her windows for a moment, then focused on Charlie’s rucksack. “Where you off to?”

“Duty calls.”

“A seismologist’s work is never done?”

“Something like that. Earthquakes are unpredictable.”

“So they say.” Ian threw him a sly grin. “You want company? I’m dying to see what you do.”

“Maybe some other time,” Charlie said. “The desert’s no place…”

“The desert ?” Ian’s eyes lit up like fluorescent bulbs. “You going to the San Andreas?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “There’s something there I have to do.”

Charlie took the 10 to San Bernardino, his Miata cutting like a laser through the night. Just east of the city, he turned north off the freeway, then went east again to position D-55 of the San Andreas Fault.

The desert night was cool and still, and Charlie uncorked his Thermos of coffee immediately. Sipping slowly, he walked around the perimeter of the site. Here, the San Andreas cut a visible rift through the brown rocky earth; it looked like a furrow, made by some gigantic plow. He sat on one raised edge of the fault line and turned his face to the sky.

Charlie loved the desert at night. The sky was filled with clustered stars, dotting the blackness in pinpricks of light. Sitting with his coffee, Charlie began to name the constellations — Big Dipper, Little Dipper, and the three sharp points of Orion’s Belt. If he listened closely to the silence, he could almost hear his father, the astronomer, dismissing his grandfather’s work. “Long after the planet has disappeared into the sun,” Charlie’s father liked to say, “the stars will continue to exist. Of what importance will earthquakes be then?” In a way, Charlie knew, he was right, but there had always been a coldness to the heavens that could not compete with the warmth of the world, the way a stone kept its heat long after the sun had set. The stars were distant, beautiful like diamonds, but unfeeling, abstract. Thinking about it, Charlie realized his father was much the same way, which, he suddenly understood, explained a lot.

Charlie removed a sample tray from his rucksack and slipped down into the fault. As he scraped some dirt from the bottom of the fissure, the earthquake struck. At first, there was a low rumbling, like the sound of an oncoming train, then the ground started twisting in a side-to-side motion, and the walls of the San Andreas shook like something from a bad horror film. Charlie tried to stand, but was thrown to his knees. Reflexively, he put his hands out, one on either edge of the fault. The vibrations moved from the earth through his palms, and up his arms to his heart.

When the temblor was over, Charlie lay in the fault fissure and drew a deep breath. His whole body rang from the shaking; his legs were weak and spent. He tried to catalog what had happened. Intense as it seemed, this had been a small earthquake, probably no larger than a 4.5. The jolt couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of seconds, but from where Charlie sat, the world felt upside down. I just rode out a quake from the center of the San Andreas, he thought, but his mind wouldn’t grasp the particulars, and it was all he could do to scramble up the side of the ridge. Although it didn’t look like there’d been any substantial slippage, he scooped up some additional soil samples to bring to CES.