Paul Kolsby - Ear to the Ground

No sooner had Charlie stepped outside than he heard someone call his name from above. On the second-floor landing, Ian stood at the rail.

“Hey.” Ian waved. “You got a minute?”

Charlie nodded.

“I wanna ask you something.”

A shape flickered behind Ian like a ghost. At first, Charlie thought it was a shadow, but then he noticed a sweep of blonde hair, and recognized Grace. Her lips were pinched white. They’ve been fighting, Charlie thought, and for some reason, this gave him a jolt of glee.

“The other night?” Ian leaned closer. “When you went to the desert?”

Charlie nodded again.

“You knew it was coming, didn’t you?”

Grace stepped out of the shadows. “Jesus, Ian. Give it a rest.”

“Tell me the truth,” Ian continued.

“Maybe a hunch,” Charlie said.

Ian broke into a toothy grin and turned to Grace. “You see? Now you gonna give it to Ethan?”

“You don’t give up, do you?” Grace hissed. She glared at Ian for a second, then stormed away, footsteps like gunshots from inside.

Half an hour later, Charlie drove down Culver Boulevard, trying to clear his head. He had wanted today to be quiet; he had wanted to look at numbers, at the newest projections of activity on the Pacific Plate. That was what the San Andreas was telling him: Kobe’s shocks were moving east.

The Center for Earthquake Studies was empty, sunlight falling in dusty shafts across the floor. In the lab, Charlie checked the wall map out of habit and looked again for a pattern in the pushpins. An hour later, he had reduced a sixty-four-bit matrix to a sixteen-bit matrix but had learned nothing.

Charlie was in the middle of an elaborate simulation program when he heard a noise from beyond the door. He waited, head cocked like a hunting dog’s. A softer sound came, and Charlie left his computer and went to investigate.

At first, Charlie didn’t notice anything unusual. Then he saw that the door to Caruthers’s office was open, and he caught a glimpse of an unfurled sleeping bag on the couch. In the room, a backpack lay half empty on the floor. Charlie was about to examine its contents when he heard a cough and turned to find Kenwood standing in the door.

“What’s going on?” Charlie said. “Are you …?”

“I can’t go home. I get in the car, and I can’t go home. I just sit there. Since Tuesday.”

“You’ve been here since Tuesday?”

“It’s the only place I feel safe.”

Kenwood rocked back and forth in the doorway, as if doing some kind of dance.

“Have you been looking at her picture?” Charlie asked.

“No. But I’m scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“It’s just this feeling I have.” Kenwood leaned against the doorjamb and took a long breath. “Everything’s about to hit the fan.”

ACTORS SAY THEY FEEL AT HOME IN A THEATER, ANY theater, anywhere. Chefs love kitchens, and taxi drivers live for green lights strung to the horizon. But Charlie Richter loved numbers. He lived with them, found meaning in them. Like a jigsaw puzzle, he could fit the pieces together by applying correct persistence.

Charlie printed hard copies of his numerical tables after the computer monitor began to make his eyes twitch. He lay on the Prediction Lab floor, the carpet digging into his elbows, looking at numbers. Eight-digit prime numbers, nine-digit prime numbers, ten-digit ones. He was tired, and had been considering taking a nap on the floor when he saw it. The number first appeared at the beginning of his tables, and popped up again nearly thirty pages later. A layman would never have recognized the repeated value because he would have ascribed no meaning to it. But Charlie noticed that the two numbers, expressed logarithmically, were identical — the way a guitarist finds different ways to play the same chord.

The double incidence was nothing in itself, Charlie knew, but when he applied this particular integer as a static coefficient, he arrived at a value equidistant from the perimetary, or “bookend,” members of the matrix. Charlie was suddenly able to ascertain the epicenter of a major seismic event. He felt flush then, and began to sweat. Soon the massive logarithm was entirely solvable, like a crossword puzzle, when one nagging four-letter word leads to ten others: Moments after he’d locked down the epicenter (E), Charlie had solved for the quake’s occurrence date (OD) and magnitude (M).

Months and months of struggle and discontinuity came together in a matter of seconds. He had suspected a sizable earthquake was coming, but now he knew exactly what to expect. He took a deep breath and looked over at the map of Southern California. Then, on the back of a tattered envelope, he wrote carefully:

San Andreas, D-55 8.9 December 29 th, 1995

Sterling Caruthers arrived at the Center for Earthquake Studies and went to his office to pick up some e-mail from his newest mistress. When he found none, he got up and ambled through the empty building, having learned to stay atop of his underlings by rifling through their drawers at night. Much to his surprise, he discovered Charlie Richter still tinkering away at this late hour. Noticing the envelope propped against Charlie’s monitor, he picked it up, and looked at it closely. “What’s this?” Caruthers wanted to know.

“Sterling, I …”

It dawned on him. “Eight-point-nine?! My God !” Caruthers was suddenly buoyant.

“Listen,” Charlie implored, “before we do anything, I need to double-check every single value in this enormous matrix. That’ll take time, okay?”

“How much time?”

“A week, at least. Maybe ten days …”

“Of course,” Sterling said gently.

“Thank you,” Charlie said.

There was a pause. Charlie hadn’t expected Caruthers to be so understanding, and it disarmed him. “I’m scared,” Charlie blurted out. “I don’t know what’s worse: the quake, or what’s gonna happen …” He didn’t finish. He meant, of course, what might happen after the announcement was made. When the people found out, and panicked. When they considered that the city they’d been building on the edges of mountainsides would tumble into the sea.

When we’re slow and our minds are slow, we wallow in a pool of time, and tread the stagnant water. I am a lily, Ian thought, browning at the edges. What about law school? There’s still time. Thirty-one isn’t old. He closed his eyes with disgust, and decided he would trade his life for virtually anyone’s. Then he felt almost cheerful, having lost all hope, because hope was the drug that had driven him down. Ian picked up Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen and flung it across the room.

An hour later he lay in bed, alone in his Silver Lake apartment, but he couldn’t fall asleep. He picked up the phone, woke his parents in Philadelphia, and told his father he’d decided to go to law school. The sleepy response was: “We’ll talk tomorrow.” Ian came to the sad conclusion that he couldn’t confide in anyone about the sorry state of his life. To call a friend in the industry would be admitting defeat. By morning it would be all over town that Ian Marcus’s career was in the toilet. What career? he thought. Who cares ?

Charlie tried unsuccessfully to reach Kenwood by phone. Then he got in his car, drove east on Olympic, and took La Brea north toward the hills. He’d passed the Lava Lounge dozens of times — seen it plunked unceremoniously in that mini-mall — and in a detached sort of way was curious to see it from inside. Anyway, he needed a drink. It was ten o’clock, the place was packed, and some Sinatra imitator was crooning. With scientific exactitude, Charlie sat at the bar, consuming a brandy sidecar every twenty minutes. At 1:15, when there was no way he could drive, he called for a taxi.