After the interview, Charles drove back to his parents’ house and triumphantly told them that he got the job. His father looked at him blankly, and then guffawed. “Well of course you got it. Finn promised me you would. That interview was just a formality.” And then he went back to his newspaper.
That was three years ago. Charles always thought he’d be at a different point in his career by this age. Traveling the world, reporting on famines, bombings, and assassinations. Sneaking into trials and interviewing the wrongfully accused. Possibly ghostwriting a book about a senator with secrets. His mother had told him that by the time his great-grandfather was thirty-one, he’d had a private meeting with Nelson Rockefeller. The most influential person Charles had ever met was a hostess of a television quiz show whose program was being converted into a game that a certain cell phone provider’s customers could play on their BlackBerries. And though Jake promised that Charles would get a lot of opportunities to write, usually he passed Charles over for assignments, giving them to his freelancer friends instead.
Every so often Charles would glance through the paper for entry-level newspaper jobs, but they didn’t seem to exist. Newspapers were disappearing across the country and with all the bloggers, Twitterers, and iReporters, journalists were becoming extinct as well. Though starting over seemed exhausting, and he had to stand on his own two feet. It was bad enough that he’d had to draw from his trust fund for the house’s down payment. His mother had always told him not to feel bad about using money from the trust. It was his, there was no use feeling ashamed. But Charles couldn’t help it—everything made him feel ashamed. Every choice seemed incorrect. What would his life have been like if he’d gone to law school? Where would he be now if he’d taken that job at the local newspaper in that little town in Montana? The one he’d applied for on a whim and been hired for, sight unseen?
And there were other choices, ones that quietly dogged him. Where would he be now if he and Scott hadn’t gotten into that fight the day of his graduation? What would be happening now if he could take back what he had said? Would he still be with his high-school girlfriend, Bronwyn? Would she still be speaking to him at least? And would this business with Scott and the wrestlers have even happened?
Maybe it was foolish to think like that. One episode couldn’t have altered Scott’s entire trajectory. Scott was who he was before Charles had said what he said. The past was the past, and the best thing Charles could do was put it out of his mind.
By the time the meeting ended, the editorial team had decided the story lineup for the Back to the Land promotional feature. There would be a short piece about the land the organization had annexed for the community in central Pennsylvania, a valley rife with deer and rabbits for shooting, streams for drinking, and hearty trees for log cabins. Charles had no idea how a plot of land in the middle of Pennsylvania could be desolate and remote enough to trick people into thinking they were truly alone. Sure, parts of the state were quieter than others, but evidence of modern civilization was everywhere. It was in the smell of a factory, the roar of a truck, the itchy tag on the back of a T-shirt. Or would the people of Back to the Land make their own T-shirts? Would they mix up their own medication, resort to Native American–style poultices and inhalants?
And yet, the literature said people thrived living this way, even chronically sick people with cancer and diabetes and autoimmune diseases. That was another story for the lineup: an interview with a doctor who had treated several people before they moved to Back to the Land and then tested them again once they’d been living there for a year. The improvements were amazing. Allegedly the lifestyle’s simplicity and lack of commercial pollutants had remarkable healing powers. But it had to be a placebo effect, Charles thought. They got better because they wanted to. He didn’t believe in any of that New Age nonsense. The power of positive thought couldn’t save you. Circumstance was circumstance, and you had to make do with what you were dealt.