Although there hasn’t been a really good natural disaster picture in two decades, people have already pretty much forgotten about Northridge. With the ground silent and still, this just isn’t topical.
PASS.
HITTING THE FAN
“LISTEN,” IAN WAS SAYING, “I DON’T MEAN TO BE PUSHY …”
“But?”
“Come on, Grace. You know what I mean.”
Ian glared across the table. It was late Sunday morning, and he was sitting with Grace on the sidewalk outside Quality, traffic racing past on Third Street as they waited for their food. Inside the restaurant, Ian could see Elliott Gould and, slouched over coffee and toast at another table, Drew Barrymore and Eric Erlandson. Ah, Hollywood, where celebrity was a spectator sport, and just going out for brunch was like being on TV.
Ian ran a hand across his face. Two tables away, a redheaded woman and a guy with a gray ponytail sat facing a stroller, chattering at a brown-haired baby with two tiny teeth. All of a sudden, the kid caught Ian’s eye and grinned. Ian tried to imagine what it would be like to be so young, so open to the world. Then he looked up, and Grace gave him such a tired stare he felt he’d never be young again.
“What?” he asked her.
“It’s not my fault your life’s falling apart.”
“My life’s not falling apart.”
“Whatever you say.”
“It’s a good script, Grace.”
“That’s not the point.”
“That’s the whole point.”
“Tracy lost her job going out on that limb.”
“You’re not going out on any limb.” Ian leaned across the table and smiled. “Trust me.”
“You keep saying that.”
Charlie was on his way out when he heard voices in the hall. He waited until the noise receded before he emerged into the white summer heat. These last few days, he’d felt a little off, as if the unsteady earth were transferring some of its shakiness to the marrow of his bones, leaving him unsure how to behave. Now that the entryway was deserted, he breathed a silent prayer of thanks.
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.”
SAN ANDREAS, D–55–8.9–DECEMBER 29, 1995
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 29th, 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.