“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.
Grace was getting ready for bed when she heard a car come down Spaulding and stop in front of the building. The night was woolly and otherwise silent, but for the drone of air conditioners. Grace heard the car door open and slam, and then the clack of footsteps coming up the path. “Please don’t let it be Ian,” she whispered to herself, and crept to the front window to see. Outside, a taxi pulled away from the curb, and Charlie walked drunkenly toward the building’s entryway, his steps exaggerated and overly precise. A low droning sound accompanied his passage; as she listened, Grace realized he was talking to himself. My God, she thought, and without a second’s hesitation she headed downstairs.
She got to the bottom of the stairwell just as Charlie began trying to fit his key into the lock. His eyes were red and bleary, and Grace could smell booze on him from ten feet away. He was still mumbling and was oblivious to her presence. “Hey,” she said as quietly as she could manage. When he turned, she smiled. “Are you all right?” “Yeah,” he said. “Fine.” He kept trying to work the lock, but no matter what he did, the cylinder’s logic eluded him.
Grace was on the verge of opening the door for him, when all of a sudden he hurled the keys to the ground. “Goddammit!” he yelled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” Across the street a light switched on, and Grace could see a curtain drawn back to make room for a pair of eyes. From Navaro’s apartment came the creak of floorboards. “Maybe we should get you inside.” She tried to work her hand under Charlie’s elbow but he twisted away. He seemed about to protest further, but then his shoulders deflated and his head sunk down on his neck, and it was all he could do to remain upright. “I just …” he mumbled, his voice softer than a whisper, his body limp at Grace’s touch. “Shhh,” she said. “Don’t worry.” His keys glittered where he had thrown them, and Grace picked them up as they started up the stairs.
Grace sat Charlie on her couch and went into the kitchen, where she started brewing coffee and spread some store-bought cookies on a plate. With Ian spending less time here, the place was neater and better stocked; she’d grown used to finding things where she’d left them, of being able to enjoy what she’d bought. There were nights, of course, when her empty living room seemed as expansive and lonely as Siberia. But on this night, all that seemed part of someone else’s life.
Grace set the coffee and cookies on a tray, and carried the whole arrangement into the living room. She couldn’t help laughing at herself. All her life, she’d strived for distance from her mother’s domesticity. Yet here she was, entertaining. Still, Charlie needed something, and this was all she could think to do. He was sitting in the center of the sofa, head tilted all the way back, brow furrowed like a freshly plowed field. “Coffee?” Grace asked, and Charlie lowered his head slowly.
“Sorry,” he said. Then, by way of explanation: “My grandfather. Grandfather.”
“What are you talking about?”
“D’y’know my grandfather was a seismologist? D’veloped the Richter Scale. Pasadena. Pasadena. Said the earth could tell us things, if we knew how to listen.”
Grace didn’t know how to respond. “My grandfather’s a doctor,” she said. “He lives in New York.”
“They have fault lines in New York.”
Five minutes later he was heaving into her toilet, as she stroked his back self-consciously.
Grace awoke to the chatter of birds, and stripes of sunlight fell across the living room floor. She wasn’t sure where she was. Her legs felt heavy and her neck was stiff, and she had difficulty moving. Then she realized she was still on the couch, and that Charlie was snoring lightly, with his head nuzzled into her lap. Looking at him, she felt a pleasant tingle in her loins, and wiggled a little deeper into the cushions. Soon her pleasure turned to apprehension, though, and she quickly inched out from underneath him. Way to go, Grace, she thought. Way to keep complicating your life.
Out of habit, she clicked on Good Day L.A., but seconds later it was interrupted by a live newscast carrying some kind of breaking story. We finally bombed Bosnia, she thought, or maybe the president got shot. Grace rubbed her eyes, and on the screen she could make out a graphic: two numerals and a decimal point, carved out of stone: “8.9.” She looked more closely. Dan Rather looked rather grim. “… cannot say whether California will be declared an a priori emergency zone. Dr. Richter is the grandson of the man responsible for the scale with which we measure the force …”
Grace looked over at Charlie, and called his name. When he didn’t stir, she looked back at the TV and stood motionless. Suddenly aware of her surroundings, she heard a sound from the street like bees buzzing, and went over to the window. There, Grace saw about a dozen reporters — some on the landing, others standing along the stairway and on the lawn. The one closest to her front window talked on a cellular phone and scribbled something onto a back-pocket pad. From the television Grace heard the name “Richter” come twice in succession and she turned to find Charlie’s picture emblazoned on the screen. “Charlie!” she yelled, and he stirred. The first thing her next-door neighbor saw that morning was himself, on television. He looked up at her like a child, eyes wide and red. “What’s going on?” he asked.