His brother had made scads of money in telecommunications, and his sister’s husband’s real-estate portfolio grew larger every Christmas. But this year, Sterling Caruthers would surpass them both. He’d stuff their stockings with hate, and with expensive little nuggets from Caldwell or Tiffany’s. It’d be the worst Christmas of their lives.
Caruthers began to play a game people sometimes play when they’re immobilized by their own thoughts: pretending for a moment the paralysis is real and that they’ll never move again.
Then the phone rang, and Caruthers picked it up. “Victoria M. from William Morris,” his secretary told him. Probably wants a commission from the Warner thing, he thought. Tough luck, sweetie.
Caruthers wondered if what he was doing was legal, making a deal to sell information to a movie studio twenty-four hours before it went to the media. Then again, if William Morris didn’t seem bothered by it, how bad could it be? He let Victoria M. dangle on hold for several minutes, then proceeded to beat her up over the commission. The little bitch wouldn’t yield. “At the William Morris Agency,” she told him, “we’re not in the practice of representing half-clients.” By the time they hung up, he’d made a verbal agreement for across-the-board representation. Then Caruthers called Charlie Richter to see if there was any information on which he could trade.
Charlie sat across from Ian in the dining room of Chaya Brasserie, eating a bowl of spicy shrimp soup. Ian had called him, hoping to pick his brain on a point of science. Ear to the Ground, whose script was now on its ninth draft, was scheduled to go before the cameras in two weeks, at a Current Estimated Cost (CEC) of $135 million. Industrywide chants of “Quake Gate” increased in volume and fervor whenever the studio announced a budget increase. Sour grapes, Ian knew. But now Ian knew a lot of things. He knew enough about fault lines and plate tectonics and soil samples, but he still did not know the simple scientific principle by which earthquakes could be predicted.
“That can’t really be easily explained,” Charlie told him.
“Try me.”
Charlie felt a twinge of discomfort ripple through him, and he put his soup spoon down. In a certain way, he felt guilty for having been the catalyst in Grace and Ian’s breakup. It was funny how things worked, he thought: A rift in a relationship could go undetected for months, just something between two people that they both ignored, like a dormant seismic fault. Then, all of a sudden, it was like there was too much alkaline in the soil.
Charlie wasn’t proud of it, but he knew Grace had placed Ian and him side-by-side like suspects in a police lineup. She had released Ian on his own recognizance but had held Charlie for further questioning.
Perhaps that was why he’d agreed to come to lunch, to talk about Grace. But soon he felt guilty and realized how inappropriate that would be. Besides, the earth was moving underneath them right now; it would move differently in sixty-three days. Nauseated, he pushed his bowl away. Then he took out a mechanical pencil and proceeded to give Ian his first lesson in the logic of numbers.
PARALLEL LIVES
WHEN GRACE GONGLEWSKI GOT HOME FROM WORK ON Thursday, it was already Friday morning: two-twenty-three, according to her Honda’s dashboard digital clock, its little colon blinking on and off like a pair of knowing eyes. Upstairs, her answering machine also flickered, but Grace ignored it. What she wanted most was to take off her cowboy boots and fall into a deep sleep.
Not that such a thing was likely. Not at all. Grace realized this when she went into the bedroom and fiddled with the alarm. She would be back at work in five hours. She hated her life just then, and kicked her right boot into the corner, where it ricocheted like a stray bullet before coming to rest, right side up, at the foot of her bed. Her left boot, however, went straight in the air and landed on her dresser, scattering coins and keys and assorted odds and ends.
The perfect cap to the perfect day, she thought. One endless stream of disappointments, from the moment Ethan told her she wouldn’t be picking up Bridge Bridges from the airport.
“Why?” Grace said.
“I need you to collate scripts.”
“How many scripts?” Grace’s heart clenched.
“Five hundred. With three stages of rewrites.”
“Come on, Ethan, that’s an assistant’s job.”
“Oh?” Ethan countered. “So it’s an ego thing.”
Ever since Bridge Bridges had been cast in Ear to the Ground, she’d looked forward to meeting him. He was a star, a real movie star, and she loved the way, in films like The First TV Show and Hairless, his sleepy grin and piercing blue eyes lit up the screen. Grace’s anticipation had increased considerably when a friend at New Line confided that Bridge was as nice as he looked. It was for moments like these, Grace thought, that she’d gotten into the movies.
But no, Grace would be collating scripts instead. And not just any script; Ian’s script, the script he had written in this very living room while she was at Tailspin Pictures all day. I’m surrounded by assholes, she thought. The air around her thinned, and she almost couldn’t breathe. She had a vision of a porch swing, a place where the wind rippled the leaves of trees. But the vision had no face. She was watching the scene from here, from this apartment, from this job, from this life. She answered to Ethan, always answered to Ethan, instead of telling him to take his sorry job and shove it up his ass.
That was the last thought Grace had before she went to sleep, and the first thing she thought about when the alarm went off at six-thirty. At seven-oh-five, the phone rang. She decided to let the machine pick it up.
“Hey, Grace,” came Ian’s voice. “Sorry so early, but my e-mail’s down, and these pages need to go in. I’m faxing them over. Could you please input them for me?”
Grace stared gape-mouthed as the phone rang again. A moment later, a monumental length of fax paper spewed onto her floor.
Charlie got up and made coffee, then sat down at his computer and accessed the CES network. Reporters had been around the office like a swarm of bees, so he had begun to spend a lot of time at home. As he’d explained to Caruthers, it didn’t matter where he did his work. And, besides, he had a new idea that, until it was better formed, he wanted to keep out of the public eye.
Charlie had begun to think about epicenters. After China Lake, he studied points of impact, tracing the ways they appeared up and down a fault. He knew there was a pattern to epicenters, and that the location of each temblor would affect other local temblors.
Charlie had tried to explain this to Caruthers at their weekly meeting. “I have an idea about epicenters that might enable us to head this thing off,” he’d said.
“Head it off?” Caruthers looked confused. “You mean so the earthquake wouldn’t happen?”
“It would still happen, but we might be able to deflect the shock, and the city could be spared.”
Caruthers knitted his brow and folded his hands in front of his face. “How?”
Charlie explained his notion of a retroshock, a kind of counter-quake, explosively induced, that could neutralize the Big One.
“You want to create an explosion of nine-point magnitude?”
“Maybe.”
“Are you crazy? Stop wasting your time.”
Charlie knew it wasn’t a waste of time. It was just that bureaucrats like Caruthers never had an ounce of vision. But with only fifty-six days left …