[Excerpt]: The Geographer's Library

True it is, without falsehood, certain and most true.

For a journalist at a weekly paper, especially one as small as the Carrier,
The Day the Paper Comes Out is a day of rest. I usually strolled into the
office around eleven, caught up on correspondence, read all of the magazine
articles I hadn't been able to read during the week, made some long-distance
personal calls, pretended to start thinking about next week's pieces, and
left at five sharp. If I was feeling virtuous, I'd file some of my week's
notes and clear a landing strip on my desk, but usually I saved that for
when I was on deadline and needed mindless industry to clear my head. Not
that a deadline really mattered all that much: Lincoln, Connecticut, like
many small towns, specialized in news with a long shelf life. Anyway, nobody
was going to lose a job if an article detailing the controversy over the
high school's mascot -- the Fighting Sioux: culturally insensitive,
respectfully traditional, or traditionally respectful? -- didn't make it.
First of all, the debate would recur next year, probably in the fall, right
about the time ambitious seniors wanted to polish their agit-cred for
college. Second, we had an endless supply of ads, announcements, notices,
and just plain filler we could recycle or resize if the cub reporter
couldn't quite ride without training wheels.

And the times when I couldn't were getting more and more infrequent. I had
been working at the Lincoln Carrier for almost a year and a half, ever since
graduating from Wickenden University. I had friends who had slid seemingly
without thought from college to med school or law school, or to fancy
consulting jobs or some sort of literary underling work in New York, as
though those things were just what you did. I had no such prospects, nor did
I much want to go back to New York, where I grew up. Actually, I had a vague
plan to attend graduate school and eventually settle down to live the
cloistered, quiet life of a history professor in some picturesque little
college town (steeple, main street called Main Street, movie theater with a
marquee), someplace where I could get all of my aging out of the way in my
early thirties and live without crises or surprises, changing only
incrementally for the rest of my allotted threescore and ten.

I hadn't really thought of becoming a journalist, mostly because I didn't
really understand how one did it. I had turned out a few music and book
reviews for my college paper, mainly for the free books and CDs; I would
read or listen to something, write a couple hundred words about it, and a
week later I'd see my name above some prose that bore a passing resemblance
to what I had written. A racket, not a career.

After graduation I had just stayed on in the same apartment I lived in
during the year: I had no reason to be anywhere else. A month into that
stagnant summer, I declined my father's offer/mandate to work as a paralegal
at his friend's law firm in Indianapolis, where my father had moved after my
parents finally split. He made me feel so guilty about not having a job that
I went, for the first and only time, to Wickenden's Career Promotion Center.
There I filled out questionnaire after questionnaire, and I talked to
chipper recent grads with sweater sets and pearl necklaces, loafers and the
beginnings of beer guts. I looked through job ads that made no sense. My
favorites were from the consulting firms: "You will learn to implement
strategic management protocol decisions," et cetera. I worried that I would
turn into some sort of cyborg after three weeks at one of these places; I
would return home for my first Thanksgiving and communicate via streams of
ticker tape issuing from my mouth.

After a couple of hours of Career Promoting, I felt certain that I would
live a long, lonely, useless life and die alone and unmissed (did I mention
that I never bothered filling out any grad-school applications?). It's
self-indulgent, I know, but this is what happens to the overachieving but
essentially useless children of parents who raised their children to do well
on tests but failed to equip them with the poison-tipped spurs of true
ambition.

Art Rolen called Career Promotion as I was getting ready to trudge home and
maintain a full schedule of feeling sorry for myself. I remember watching
the face of my Career Finder become radiant, just beatific, as she nodded
with increasing excitement and finally said into the phone, "Sir, I think I
have someone for you sitting right across from me. He's not from the college
paper, but his Gibson-Montaneau scores indicate that he might be a rilly,
rilly good fit for you."

She winked twitchily at me and handed me the phone with one hand while
making a 1983-vintage thumbs-up sign with the other. I said hello, and this
drawly growl in the earpiece said, "Well, I hear those Gibbon- Martindale
numbers of yours are really adding up. But here's what I want to know: What
do they mean? And can you write?"

I tucked the phone into my chest and turned away from my Career Finder's
blinding enthusiasm. "Well, I don't really know what they mean, to tell you
the truth. They seem to put some stock in them here, I guess. And
technically I'm not from the college paper: I wrote for them every so often.
I guess I can write well enough. Where is it you're calling from?"

"Lincoln, Connecticut. About two hours west of Wickenden. I run a small
weekly paper here, about sixteen pages. What I need is another fulltime,
little-bit-of-everything kind of person. Right now it's just me and a
columnist, and we got an ad lady. The other full-timer we had just left, got
a job in Storrs. Greener pastures, I guess. Anyway, you'd do a little
reporting, little writing, little editing, little paper shuffling, some
office work." I heard the muffled hoosh of a cigarette being smoked. "Some
phone answering, but no more than anyone else. Nothing fancy. No Woodstein
stuff. Maybe a way to see if you want to do something like this or not."

I shrugged, then remembered that shrugs don't translate over the phone.
"Sounds interesting. Sure. You want me to send you my résumé?"

"Yeah, do that. But do me a favor: send it by mail. My new fax machine's
having some trouble making it from the box to the desk, and I'd rather see a
hard copy than something on the computer screen. You do that?"

"Sure, no problem. Should I come out and see you? Do you want to interview
me or anything like that?"

"I thought that's what we were doing. For now just send your stuff up here.
My name's Art Rolen, by the way; send it to my attention. Résumé and a few
writing samples. We'll go from there. Sound okay?"

It sounded fine, and sixteen months later, here I was in Lincoln, hauling
myself out of bed at the crack of ten on a chilly Tuesday morning. I had
stayed at the printing press until all the papers rolled off at 3 :00 A.M.
Art liked one of us to stay at the printers' until the job was done, and
technically the duty was supposed to rotate among the four of us on staff,
but as I was the youngest and the only one who wasn't married, it fell to me
more often than not. I didn't mind, really: the drive back from New Haven at
that hour was always fast and peaceful, and I liked the smell of the air
late at night. Strange to think of what was happening back in sleepy Lincoln
during that particular drive. I suppose I won't ever know, exactly.

Excerpted from The Geographer's Library, by Jon Fasman. Reprinted by
arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Copyright © Jon Fasman, 2006.

Jon Fasman was born in Chicago in 1975 and grew up in Washington, D.C.
Educated at Brown and Oxford universities, he has worked as a journalist in
Washington, New York, Oxford, Moscow, and London. His writing has appeared
in The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, Legal Affairs, The Moscow Times,
The Washington Post, The Morning News, and The Economist. He now lives in
Brooklyn.