and an apron. It reminded Charles of the famous American Gothic painting, except that the man had an earring and a tattoo on his neck, peeking out from under his plaid shirt, and the woman looked way too refreshed and delighted to have spent all her life working the fields. Back to the Land, said the caption, in large yellow block letters.
‘So this is the idea,’ his boss, Jake, said. ‘For one year, people give up their lives. They quit their jobs, they leave their homes, maybe they sell their homes. They come to central Pennsylvania and build a house from scratch, out of logs and moss and whatever else. While they’re building their house, they have to live in a tent. Even if it’s winter. They build their own furniture. They grow their own food. If they eat meat, they shoot their own food. They’re given some livestock, sheep and things, and make their own clothes. They can choose to be in a community and have a specialized job, or they can really live in the wilderness. Of course, the wilderness isn’t really that far from civilization. A hospital is only twenty minutes away. If they need a telephone, they can find one.’
The whole table stared at him. ‘And people do this?’ Jessica finally said.
‘A lot of people,’ Jake answered. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many people.’
‘It sounds like a cult,’ Steven murmured.
Jake shrugged. ‘Some people see it as a vacation, I guess. I know. I don’t get it, either.’
‘And you have to pay for this?’ Steven asked.
Jake nodded. ‘You pay for the land you live on. I think it’s thirty thousand dollars a year. And they provide training so that you won’t die out there.’
‘Thirty thousand dollars?’ Jessica whispered.
‘And some people stay for more than a year,’ Jake said. ‘They see it as an escape. Freedom.’
Everyone was silent. ‘Maybe in this day and age, with the economy tanking and terrorists blowing up hotels and the housing market crashing, this is what people want,’ Becky suggested.
Charles looked at the photo again. The couple did look happy. But he figured it was a kooky kind of happiness reserved for the same kinds of people who meditated and spoke to plants.
‘They want us to do a magazine about their community,’ Jake explained, ‘to drum up business. I know it’s a little unusual. Not the normal kind of account we typically accept. But we’re hurting for money. And maybe this will be an opportunity for all of you to stretch your skills a little.’
Charles shifted. Stretching their skills was a euphemism for putting aside all judgments about this kind of endeavor and making the best possible product he could. Then again, it wasn’t that different from the slightly contradictory messages he was encouraged to ignore about Fischer’s other clients. Like the car manufacturer that asked him to write an article about their brand-new SUV and just ‘tone down’ the fact that the car got terrible highway and city gas mileage. Or the credit card company that suggested they write a story encouraging shoestring-budget families to charge more on their VISA, thousands of dollars more, so that they would accrue enough rewards points to buy a handheld shoulder massager or an iPod docking system.
Perhaps Jake had selected Charles and the rest of his colleagues for this particular project because they were all the least likely to say no. Steven was unabashedly Christian – spiritual songs floated out from his office, and at last year’s Christmas party, he’d earnestly asked one of the junior designers to check out his church. He never refused anything that was given to him, as if it wouldn’t be Jesus-like to do so. Jessica was at risk for being fired – she had been egregiously late with shots for another magazine, and another photo editor had had to step in and bail her out. Becky was the type who always did whatever anyone asked of her, without complaint. Charles was somewhat the same: he never voiced moral objection to anything they wrote about or stood behind. Whenever he felt tempted to whine, he saw himself at eight years old, running frantically behind his brother into the ocean. When a wave took him down and washed him back to shore, his father stood over him on the beach. What’s the matter with you? You’re alive. You’re fine. Your brother can do it, and he’s two years younger. Stop crying.
Charles had been fresh out of journalism school when Jake hired Charles three years ago. His dad had gotten Charles the interview without asking if he wanted it – Finn, a colleague at the investment firm, had a wife who was high up at Fischer, and if Charles wanted a job as an editor, he could have one. At first, Charles blurted that it didn’t sound like the type of job he was looking for – it seemed an awful lot like advertising. His dad’s face had clouded. ‘Finn didn’t have to talk to his wife, you know,’ he said. ‘Not every job can be The New York Times.’
And then Charles backpedaled, realizing his mistake and thanking his dad for thinking of him. The night before the interview he had dinner with his parents and his father actually asked him about when the interview was and spoke about how it was a decent company, how Charles would probably get farther working for a company like Fischer than slaving as a beat reporter at a fledgling local newspaper. ‘You and your dad could meet up for lunch!’ his mother added wistfully, because Charles’s office would be only four blocks from his father’s. Charles had nodded along, simply trying to keep the peace. Scott sat at the table, too, snickering. No one asked him what was so damn funny. All their father did was glance benignly at Scott, a hopeful smile on his face, desperate to amend whatever he’d done wrong – or maybe he hadn’t done anything wrong, maybe Scott had begun to snub him simply because he had the liberty to do so. Eventually, Scott laid down his fork and scraped back his chair and left the table, as if he’d suddenly realized they all thought he was willingly participating in a family event.
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 at this age. Traveling the world, reporting on famines and bombings and assassinations. Sneaking into trials, 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, whereas the most influential person Charles had ever met was a hostess of a television quiz show – her 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 instead to his freelancer friends.
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. With all the bloggers and Twitterers and iReporters, journalists were becoming extinct, too. Starting over with another career seemed exhausting, though – and anyway, he had to stand on his own two feet. It was bad enough that he’d had to draw from his trust for the house’s down-payment. His mother 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 newspaper in that little town in Montana, the one for which he’d applied on a whim and had been hired sight unseen?
And there were other choices, too, that quietly dogged him. Where would he be now if he and Scott wouldn’t have gotten into that fight the day of his graduation? What
