Paul Kolsby - Ear to the Ground

For more than an hour, Charlie struggled to make sense of the numbers swimming before his eyes. Then he got up, and sat in the corner by the door. With some difficulty, he assumed the lotus position and, concentrating on the steady pattern of his breathing, emptied his mind until there was nothing left within him but light.

When Charlie returned to his computer, he saw it instantly. A group of samples, abnormally high in alkaline, were clustered in an area near the epicenter of the Northridge quake. He converted their parameters into numbers, and each one came up prime.

In a daze, Charlie went to the phone, dialed half of Kenwood’s number, and stopped. It’s three seventeen, he thought. Besides, none of this means anything yet. There’s work to do. He turned to his screen and looked back at the numbers. He was still looking at them six hours later, when Kenwood got to work.

CHARLIE WAS FINGERING THE HOLES ON THE SLENDER wooden neck of a recorder when he heard a knock at his back door. Some kids learned baseball from their dads, some learned chess, some learned how to make their ways in the world. Charlie had learned only a love of music from his father. Although he’d wished for more from the old man, at least, he thought, this was something.

Grace waited on the landing, sagging under the weight of a case of beer and three bags of store-bought ice. When Charlie opened the door, her face lit up.

“Happy Fourth,” she said. “Still OK to keep this in your fridge?”

“Uh, sure.” He made no effort to get out of the way.

“You gonna let me in?”

“Sorry.” Charlie passed a hand across his face.

“I didn’t know you were a musician.” Grace nodded at the recorder, which dangled from his hand. She slipped around him into his kitchen, their arms touching as she passed.

“I just like to mess around.”

“Ian has the same problem.” Grace’s voice was flat as sand. “Of course, his weakness is the trumpet.” She slid bottles of beer into the refrigerator’s empty maw. “He used to play for me, but he doesn’t anymore.” Looking up, she flashed another smile. “You could, though.”

For a moment, Charlie stood there, hands useless as fishhooks. Then he raised the recorder to his lips and began an Elizabethan madrigal, notes hanging in the air like questions.

Ian was stoking briquets when he heard a high, thin melody coming from Charlie’s apartment. People would be here any minute, and Grace was getting some kind of private concert, for Christ’s sake. This party was her idea; he had gone along only because she’d been strange lately. Ever since that night with Leonetta. He shrugged the thought away like a nettlesome insect, but not before wondering if there was any way she could know.

“Grace?” He turned the coals with a set of tongs to make sure they were red. “Grace!”

The only response was an old-fashioned twist of music that made him think of Leonetta’s French braid.

Ian trudged across the backyard to Charlie’s door. He knocked once, and the playing stopped. Seconds later, Charlie appeared, lips swollen as if from a long kiss.

“Ian,” Charlie said.

Grace leaned against the refrigerator, cheeks lightly flushed. Her eyes sparkled.

“How’s it going?” she asked, unable to meet Ian’s gaze. Briefly, she had a vision of herself thirty years in the future, sitting with Charlie on a blue velour couch surrounded by photographs and other mementos. She could feel the fuzzy texture of the upholstery, and his body pressing against hers. When she attempted to conjure the same image with Ian, she couldn’t see beyond where they were right then.

“Hate to disturb you,” Ian said, “but what about the chairs?”

“Oh, right.” Grace’s voice fluttered like a hummingbird, unsure where to land. “Sorry. We were just …” She trailed off, and headed for the door.

“Need help?” Charlie asked, watching her from behind.

Grace turned. “We’re OK, I think. But you’re coming, right? You said you would.”

Charlie nodded.

“Good,” Grace said.

Ian watched Grace set a hodgepodge of chairs around the backyard, placing them away from the network of poles. If he didn’t know better, he’d think something had happened in Charlie’s kitchen, but Charlie wasn’t Grace’s type. Grace liked a bit of wildness that Charlie didn’t have; she had always been attracted by Ian’s disheveled good looks, his rumpled pants and torn sweaters. Anyway, there was a big difference between a trumpet and a recorder, and Grace was definitely a trumpeter’s woman. I’m just being paranoid, Ian thought, and walked across the lawn, wrapping his arms around Grace’s waist from behind.

A month ago, or even less, Grace would have tilted her head back so Ian could nuzzle her neck, maybe even moving her butt against him in a gesture somewhere between a grind and a caress. But today, she did neither. She stood rigid for a moment, waiting, it seemed, until he was finished. Then she wriggled free and took a couple of steps away. When Ian came closer, she turned and stopped him with her hand.

“Not now,” she said.

“What?”

“People are coming.”

“You could be one of them.”

“I could be a lot of things.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know what I mean.”

Later, the backyard was filled with people, and music from a boom box drifted through the flat summer air. Grace checked the cooler and found the beer supply had dwindled, so she went into Charlie’s apartment to retrieve the bottles she had stored there.

It was cool and dark inside. Grace paused at the refrigerator, then turned and passed through the door into Charlie’s computer room. She trailed her fingers along the edge of a table, and noticed the seismograph etching straight and silent lines. Sitting next to it was Charlie’s recorder. Grace picked it up, letting her fingers fall across the holes. Without thinking, she raised the instrument to her lips and gave a tentative blow. A reedy chirp broke the stillness, and Grace jumped a little. She lingered at the table, the trace of a smile dancing on and off her face, and wondered where things could possibly go from here.

I’LL STAY IN BED, IAN THOUGHT, AS HE PULLED A RATTY down comforter over his chest and splayed his arms outside it. He hadn’t had gas at his Silver Lake apartment since the brown-uniformed man left a disconnection notice and disapeared down the garden path. Who needs gas? Ian looked at a crack in the ceiling. For that matter, who needs electricity ?

He closed his eyes, but his brain was too active for sleeping. Behind his lids came an image of a tower of bills he had constructed, next to the phone, over a six-month period. If debtors’ prison still existed, he’d be in chains. His car — a metazoan BMW — was a piece of shit, but had once been a running piece of shit. Having lost respect for its driver, it now started less than 20 percent of the time. Ian once felt elegant behind the wheel of that classic luxury sedan — but now he felt like fallen aristocracy, shammed by Hollywood and awakened from the American Dream.

He opened his eyes, threw off the covers, and brought his feet to the floor. I could get a job, he thought for less than a second, and then summoned his “girls,” as he referred to the pile of pornography he kept on the floor of his closet: several Penthouse magazines purchased incognito at a newsstand, along with a slew of Victoria’s Secret catalogs filched from the mail box of the woman upstairs. Masturbation may be dirty, he thought, and its pleasures fleeting — but at least it was truly free.