Ear to the Ground (14 page)

END OF THE ROAD

STERLING CARUTHERS GOT INTO HIS CAR AND SAT FOR A moment. He looked through the windshield, the way people do when they're not thinking about anything specific, or really anything at all. He was staring at the hedges that separated his Laurel Canyon home from that of his neighbor, a man who played catcher for the Dodgers, and with whom, until recently, he was on friendly terms.

Caruthers backed carefully out of his driveway, ran a stop sign at the bottom of his street, and six minutes later was moving northwest in medium traffic on the 101. It was not yet seven a.m., and he consoled himself with the knowledge that the sun was tormenting drivers in the opposite direction. The weather was fair, but the San Fernando Valley was bleak somehow, crawling with cars like maggots on a mango. If he craned his neck, Caruthers could see Warner Brothers, with its soundstages, its bungalows, its trailers and little golf carts, that dreadful commissary, and those corporate offices where he'd been lattéd and seltzered endlessly. He'd like to blow the whole studio up. Maybe he'd get away in time and maybe not. What did it matter, anyway?

As he passed the exit for Calabasas, which he'd taken too often to go to the home of his ex-wife's parents, he wondered if the force of the Warner explosion would take care of them, too. The whole family had turned on him when they'd learned of one of his extramarital affairs. A minor indiscretion: It had
been meaningless, drunken, nothing compared with his love for Emily.

Still, it had gone on for more than a year. Those same in-laws had been so warm before—he often enjoyed golf with Emily's father, who called him “Ster,” or sometimes “son.”

“Two birds with one bomb,” he thought, enamored of the phrase. Then he realized a bomb in Burbank would never blow in Calabasas. Caruthers recognized a pattern: They'd abandoned him, like everybody did. Two wives had left him, a poor one he loved and a rich one he didn't. He regretted losing them both. He tried to remember their faces, but could only remember photographs of their faces. Though his second wife wore Chanel, he could conjure only the
idea,
and not the smell of the perfume. He remembered the dress—black polka-dots on white—one of his mistresses wore like a bathrobe, after they'd had sex. Made love. He couldn't imagine her
wearing
the dress; he could only see it hanging there, up on the end of a door.

The fuel reserve light had been on for fifteen minutes, so Caruthers pulled his 1967 Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible into a Texaco station just off the freeway, and surprised the attendant at the Full Service pumps by asking for only five dollars' worth of regular.

“Check under the hood?”

“No,” he told the grease-covered man. “The oil is fine.”

He got back on the 101 and reached the place where buildings ended and those sprawling cypress trees seemed tiny on the hilltops. He took the Los Virgenes exit and eventually reached Malibu Canyon Road.

The sight of red rock all around him was awesome; the massive slabs sprawled underneath as he climbed the final straightaway through the mountains. Soon, like a flash, that two-mile canyon stretch would afford him his first glorious sight of the Pacific Ocean, only to yank it away like a bullfighter's cape as the car rounded another curve. Caruthers
thought how life did that: dangle fruit so you could smell its ripeness, then snatch it away.

No good lawyer would represent him, and prosecutors had even discussed charging him with treason. The Center for Earthquake Studies was finished, padlocked, under investigation. It had been a good idea, Caruthers thought. It had almost worked.

It's not too difficult to lose control of a car if that's what you're after. Caruthers had read it in a book: At a fairly high speed, with an automatic transmission, simply shift into “Neutral” and then jam it into “Reverse.” The gears won't catch, but they'll almost certainly jam, and the car will change speed at a rate so unpredictable that you're sure to do something strange to compensate. In Caruthers's case, the car veered sharply to the right. To compensate he turned left, but
too far
left. At eighty miles per hour, this sent him easily through the guardrail, and the convertible went sailing through the air. If you were close by in Malibu Canyon early that morning, you'd have thought that his car would fly.

Caruthers's last thought interested him: Life is a takeoff and a landing, with turbulence in between. Two seconds later, the car crashed—headlights first, and rolled once, end over end. Then, instead of exploding, the five dollars' worth of regular began to burn very slowly.

HAPPILY EVER AFTER

GRACE GONGLEWSKI HAD NEVER HIRED A MOVING company before. All her college moves, along with the one across the country, had been of the lug-it-yourself variety: truck rental, hunting for empty boxes, and friends who could be lured by pizza and beer.

This time, however, she and Charlie decided to relax and splurge. She'd made goodbye calls to three people; the others—that slew of acquaintances she'd acquired during four years in L.A.—could simply dial the Arizona number on the recording Pac Bell said they'd keep on her old number for ninety days.

Charlie hated moving. He couldn't stand the sight of movers bumping his delicate machines into the walls. Especially the lumino-oscilloscope, a one-of-a-kind device that measured minute thermal shifts in certain magna and strata. On moving days he always wished he were a blues singer, with nothing but the shirt on his back, able to walk into any bar, anywhere, and sing so well the owner would come out with a plate of steaming food, a glass of good red wine, and a key to the room upstairs. Charlie had moved many times, but this time things were different.

Their first fight had been about Charlie staying nearly every night at Grace's apartment, and how he'd come, unconsciously, to resent it. Grace told him she was more than happy to stay at his place, but four days later they were
both sick of the spartan, bachelor-y way Charlie had arranged his possessions. Finally, they decided to find a place
together.
This conclusion, along with certain others, was reached over a romantic meal at Cafe des Artistes, where Grace had ordered a second bottle of wine because—though you could never know what was going to happen—it was still possible to look across a table and think you were seeing the rest of your life. For a moment, while she smiled into Charlie's eyes, a reddish light radiated behind his head and the rest of the room went dark.

On their last night in Los Angeles, they made love on the carpet of her bedroom. The apartment was empty, hollow, and their voices ricocheted strangely through the rooms. They might have stayed in the living room—after all, the bed had been taken away—but they'd come to the bedroom almost by rote, or by fate, and they laughed when they realized this.

They awoke simultaneously in each other's arms; they showered together and, two distinct eloquences of economy, they finished their last-minute tasks with unprecedented swiftness.

“I'm selling the building.” Navaro told them as they came down his path for the last time. “Was on the phone all morning.”

“Wow,” Grace said.

“Thing is …” Navaro looked serious. “Lemme ask you a question.”

Charlie and Grace both leaned forward.

“I'm in a moral
quarry
.”

Grace smiled at Navaro's mistake, and Charlie pinched her discreetly.

Navaro went on. “I think the
guy
thinks there's four apartments in the building. But he never saw it. Y'know?”

“You mean he doesn't know about the duplex?” Charlie asked.

Navaro shook his head. “But
you
liked it, din't ya?”

Charlie smiled. “Sure I did.”

Then Navaro turned to Grace, gave her a hug, and told them what the doctor had said about his heart. “I'm gonna fucking
start spending money like crazy!” he laughed, and Grace decided, contrary to prior judgment, that the man's life hadn't been lived in vain.

Eight hours later, Charlie and Grace pulled up to the house they'd rented, sight unseen, outside Tucson, Arizona, where nobody they knew had ever been.

Grace unpacked as the sun set across the desert, the fading pink light etching the ragged slopes of mountains in silhouette against the sky. She got up and stood in the back doorway, leaning against the jamb. Then she felt the heat of Charlie's presence and turned. He smiled, his shoulders looser, his posture more relaxed than it had been in a long time.

“How you doing?” he asked, and brushed a lock of hair from her eyes.

“Just fine.”

The house was small and cozy, a ramshackle wooden cottage with an empty fenced-in front yard of desert scrub. There were no neighbors for miles, and the only signs of civilization were the telephone poles that ran alongside the little two-lane blacktop. It was a quiet place, Grace thought, isolated, where she could take off her clothes and run naked if she wanted. “Arizona? Are you
sure
?” her mother had asked. But Grace had never been this sure of anything before.

She took in the mountains, and drew a deep breath of desert air. Then she wrapped herself in Charlie's arms.

All day long, Grace had been too excited to eat, but then Charlie suggested a nighttime picnic to inaugurate their move. Great, she thought, a picnic. Charlie took the odds and ends of food they'd brought from Los Angeles, threw them in a shopping bag, and grabbed a bottle of wine.

They drove for a while into the desert, where the sky was filled with pinwheels of stars and the moon hung low and large. At the edge of a dry riverbed, Charlie stopped the car
and consulted a particularly detailed map Grace hadn't even noticed he had.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Charlie flashed a strange grin and got out of the car. He spread a blanket and laid out the food.

After an hour, Charlie reached out his hand and led Grace into the riverbed, where, she noticed, the ground was broken in long jagged lines.

“What are we …?”

Charlie didn't say a word. Instead, he consulted his watch, took her by the shoulders and positioned her precisely, putting his arms around her to make sure she didn't move.

In the desert chill, Charlie's warmth was nice against her skin. Grace felt her heat begin to rise. She leaned upward and kissed him, pressing into the curve of his body.

Then the air filled with rumbling, and the ground began to move and swell. “What the fuck?” Grace said.

“It's just a 3.3,” Charlie told her. “But I thought it might be fun.”

Slowly, the shaking stopped, and Grace felt herself thrust against him completely.

“Fun?” she said. “I know something else that's fun.” She curled away a little, and reached for the buckle of his belt.

At home later, after Charlie was asleep, Grace lifted up the sheets and climbed quietly out of bed. Her skin gleamed silver in the moonlight, and she padded barefoot into the front room. The earthquake had set a charge in her, and she couldn't sleep. Maybe if I wrote about it, she thought, and picked up an old spiral notebook. She shivered at the touch of her naked back against the cold wooden chair.

For a moment, she stared at the page's empty lines. Then she cracked her knuckles and began.

“Los Angeles is the only major city in the world, thought Charlie Richter, heading east on Sunset in his red Rent-a-Corsica, where everybody has to drive. …”

APPENDIX

CHARLIE IN KOBE

Kobe, January 17,1995

Dear Grandfather,

It was a beautiful night. That's the first thing, the thing no one will remember. The dawn was still an hour off and the stars sparkled in the winter sky like ice. There was a dusting of frost on the ground and my footsteps made a crunching sound when I walked into the park. As I set up my equipment my breath hovered before me in a cloud. It was so crisp and clear I began to doubt myself; back home in California, as you well recall, they talk about “earthquake weather” and how the ground starts shaking only when it's hot and dry. Then again, it hadn't been hot for Loma Prieta or for Northridge—just the dreadful symmetry of plates slipping, energy fields shifting, a force more powerful even than history.

The conference was a bust. All along, I knew it would be. But what else could I do but try? For weeks beforehand I'd had these nightmares, these
visions,
the city collapsing in slow motion to a soundtrack of piercing, knife-like screams. Every time I closed my eyes, it all came back again. So I thought, what the hell, your name is
Richter.
If anyone can make them listen,
you
can …

But they shouted me down and told me no one could predict an earthquake and that only a fool would try. What evidence did I have? How could I
explain
it? By telling them
you
were helping me? Verifying my findings and keeping me
on track? These are men of science, after all, blind to anything that can't be proven, blind to anything suggesting the shadows behind the light. But you, Grandfather, you
are
the shadows. You may be dead but you are also living, tracelike, within this computer—your mind embedded in its circuitry, your ideas thrumming through its wires.

No, you are the one thing I can't explain. The one thing … So I walked out of that conference hall, went back to my hotel, and got ready to meet the dawn. I sat there, watching numbers scroll green and black across my screen. Five-forty-five a.m., January 17—virtually a year to the day since Northridge—the coincidence was striking. Evanrude had laughed when I announced the date, as if the whole thing were a joke or a cynical play for attention to predict a killer quake on the anniversary of another one.

But I knew it was coming. That night, in the hotel room, I saw buildings collapsing and heard the muffled roars of people trapped beneath the debris. Finally, I went down to the bar and drank a carafe of sake but, rather than calming me, it settled hot and sticky in my stomach and filled my throat with bile. At three a.m. I packed up my equipment: video camera, portable seismograph, infrared binoculars, laptop, electric lantern, and a folding camp chair. Now I could ride out the carnage, if my own excitement or the force of the tremor didn't shake me to the ground.

I remembered a moment as a boy, out walking with you, when you'd picked up a handful of gravel and told me, “This is the only thing that's real. Everything else is just wave form and energy, but this—is
solid
.” And you let go of that gravel. We watched it fall through your fingers like lost time, spreading along the ground. That's why earthquakes fascinated you, because they represented solid matter turned fluid, but rather than seeing that as a contradiction, you said it just expanded our definitions of what solid and fluid really were. There was no reason solid states must be static; earthquakes merely illustrated the solidity of the earth reconforming itself. It was like a Gaia theory, the planet as living creature, even though
you would never have admitted to believing in any idea as touchy-feely as that. As I looked for a place to observe the entire city, I thought about you, and asked you, and the earth, to keep me safe.

In the end, I settled on a field high up in the hills that ring Kobe—a deserted place with a panoramic view of the city and the harbor below. I arrived at exactly four-thirty-one, another coincidence—the time Northridge had exploded, exactly one year before. I parked on a service road, unloaded the trunk and trudged to the center of that field. I set the video camera on a tripod, hooked up the seismograph, lit the lantern, and lay everything else where I could reach it, when the time came.

The hour I spent waiting was one of the most wonderful in my life. All the anxiety of the preceding months left my body; there was no more wondering about how I'd tell the scientific community about this, what their reaction would be. I'd told them, and they hadn't believed me. The story had made the newspapers, and I'd been dismissed as yet another apocalyptic crank. What people didn't understand was that I was predicting not destruction but
change,
a larger picture, the image of a world in a state of solid flux.

And yet, sitting in my camp chair above the city, huddled into the bulk of my thick down coat for warmth, I fell under the spell of a most striking illusion—the permanence of reality, the immutability of matter, and the everlasting nature of all things. It was the stars that did it, I think, the same stars Dad used to study, sneering at your claims that the earth was all there is. I looked up and began to name the constellations—Big Dipper, Little Dipper, and the three sharp points of Orion's Belt. I remembered Dad telling me that, long after the earth had disappeared into the crucible of the sun, the stars would still be there, that it was just a conceit of yours, this importance of our world.

But now, I began to think the two things weren't mutually exclusive. My eyes moved from the stars to the lights of the night-wrapped city, to the twinkles of ship-light sparkling
from the waters of the harbor, and I started to see how
they
were connected. I let my eyes go unfocused, and the boundaries disappeared. When I focused them again, I was struck by how solid everything looked, the trees fringing the perimeter of this field, the skyscrapers downtown, the four and five-story residential buildings in the city's sprawling neighborhoods. I picked up the binoculars and watched as neon signs flashed on and off throughout the city like heartbeats. An elevated highway ran along the lip of the shoreline, and train tracks, empty in the depth of night, cut a swath through the center of town. The night was so still and silent that the city seemed like an inevitability God had set into place, fully formed and complete. Thinking that, I began to doubt myself for the first time …

And that's when it happened. The first rush was like a stutter, and after that everything moved like a dream. The trees around me began to spasm, and the lights of the city flared as transformers began to blow. Buildings shook and some of them fell. I was thrown, spread-eagle, across the grass—it was like being on the back of a beast, of an elephant running wild. I began to doubt gravity's existence, to think the earth itself might throw me. With the transformers went the lights, and then the quake shook my lantern to the ground, where it seemed to bounce in several directions at once, casting irregular beams of light across the field before me like a spastic searchlight. Beyond the narrow focus of its glow, the darkness was so thick it was surreal, as all the light in the world had been snuffed out. And yet, through it all, there were the stars …

When the shaking finally ended, the stillness was intense. Not even the whisper of a ghost. From the city below came the screaming of car alarms, a million of them punctuating the horror of the night. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, felt around for my machines. I kept feeling the earth beneath me to make sure it was there. The video camera was still running, although it, too, had fallen, and the lens was dug face first in the dirt. I found the binoculars, turned them in the direction of the darkened city, where I saw the hot spots of newborn fires, and wisps of
curling smoke rising to meet the sky. The elevated highway I'd noticed only minutes before had shaken onto its side; I looked at it once, twice, and a third time before I understood what I saw. All over Kobe, buildings were down, some in rubble, others slid akimbo halfway off their foundations. And the people, from this distance, were small as insects, swarming from the ruins into the streets.

I put down the binoculars, and lay out across the grass. It was cold, but my body had gone numb; it didn't matter anymore. For a moment, the thought flashed across my mind that it had happened as I'd predicted, that I was vindicated, that I was right. But then I remembered that elevated highway, down off its base like a child's plaything, and I thought less about the people who hadn't
listened
to me than those who'd never
heard.
By now, there were fires big enough to see with the naked eye, and sirens pulsing underneath the car alarms in a sharp and steady refrain. I tried to block the sounds out of my mind, but it was as if the night itself were screaming, and my entire body began to clench. I picked up the binoculars again, but it was too overwhelming. There was no such thing as scientific detachment anymore.

Instead, I found myself doing what my father might have done. I turned away from the earth and looked to the sky.