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.