Paul Kolsby - Ear to the Ground

“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.”

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.

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?”

“Pardon?”

“The car.” Navaro nodded at the red Corsica parked across the street. When Charlie didn’t answer, the landlord straightened up and wrung his rag out on the ground. “Never mind. You meet Grace yet?”

“Pardon?” Charlie felt like he was missing something, like he didn’t understood the words.

“Grace.” Navaro looked at him though hooded eyes. “She lives next door to you.”

“Grace?”

Navaro laughed and kicked his right front tire.

The Center for Earthquake Studies occupied a former sound stage on Culver Boulevard just west of Overland, catty-corner to the Sony Pictures Studios. Big and boxy and windowless, the building was painted a stucco shade of tan.

Inside, an arched ceiling hung above the space like a dome of sky, reminding Charlie of a beehive. He nodded hello to a couple of faces he thought he recognized, and moved quickly across the room to a locked, unmarked door.

It was always the same in the Prediction Laboratory, a subtle shade of twilight, quiet beneath the ever-present electrical hum. With its computer models and maps marked with pushpins tracing earthquake activity, the lab reminded Charlie of a command center, more military than scientific. Kenwood was already at his desk, staring at the wall above it as if deep in thought. Charlie didn’t want to disturb him, but then he realized Kenwood wasn’t working, just looking at a picture of a dark-haired woman. “You should really take it down,” Charlie said, his voice as even as the wind.

Kenwood didn’t move. His face looked normal, except for the mouth, cut into an exaggerated mask. “You know what the thing of it is?” he whispered. “I keep thinking that in twenty years, she’ll just be someone I loved when I was young. I won’t even remember her. She’ll be obsolete.”

“People die,” Charlie said.

“We were married one year.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“What’s not his fault?” Charlie turned to see Sterling Caruthers standing in the door. Caruthers was the only other person with a key to the lab, and he made it a habit to show up unannounced, peering through microscopes and at computer screens as if he knew what he was looking for.

“Nothing,” Charlie said.

“What did he do?”

“It’s personal, OK?”

“What did you do?” Caruthers folded his arms across his chest and glared at Kenwood.