The Classifieds

The envelope had been sitting on the corner of Kevin Fitzgerald’s desk for four days, and he had covered it, without quite admitting to himself that he was covering it, first with a notebook and then with a press kit from the convention authority and then with a paper cup, so that by Friday afternoon in the fall of 2007 it was the bottom stratum of a small archaeological dig, and he sat in the newsroom of the Reno Gazette-Journal on Kuenzli Street and looked at the mound on his desk and thought that in twenty-two years of writing about this town he had never once had trouble with a document until they handed him one about himself.

It was a good offer, people kept telling him. That was the word going around the building, good offer, said the way you would say it about a horse that had to be put down. The company was inviting a certain number of people with a certain number of years to take a sum of money and their pension and leave, voluntarily, before the arithmetic came around to doing it the other way. Nobody said the other way out loud. But Kevin had been a reporter long enough to hear the shape of a sentence that had its real verb removed, and this whole autumn had been full of them, buyout and reorganization and going forward and doing more with less, the language a company reaches for when it is subtracting and would rather you did not watch.

He had watched, though. It was the only thing he really knew how to do. And what he had watched over about three years now was the slow draining of the one part of the paper nobody ever wrote a word for, which was the back of it, the small type, the classifieds. He walked over to the rack by the elevators and pulled a copy of that morning’s paper and folded it open to those pages the way you would check a pulse, and it was thinner again, thinner every quarter, a section that ten years ago had run for pages and pages and made most of the money that paid for everything in front of it, the reporters and the photographers and the trucks and the ink, and that now was going the way of everything else in his lifetime in this town, quietly, into somewhere you could not see.

Because the town had found a new place to talk to itself. That was the thing he could not make his editor let him write about, because his editor was living inside it. For a hundred and thirty years, if you had a car to sell in Reno or a room to rent or a job to fill or a dog that had gotten out, you paid the paper a few dollars and it printed your two lines in the back, and the whole town read those two lines, and that was how the town found each other, in the small type, every morning. His great-great-grandmother Bridget had come off a train in the eighteen-seventies and cooked in a hotel that advertised for a cook in exactly those columns. His mother had bought the west-side house he grew up in off a listing in that section. Kevin had learned half of what he knew about how a town actually worked, who was hiring and who was leaving and who had died, not from the front page his family bragged about but from the back page nobody signed. And now all of it, the cars and the rooms and the jobs and the lost dogs, was going onto the internet, for free, onto a website out of San Francisco that a man had built for nothing and that was, quietly, without meaning any harm to anyone, pulling the floor out from under every newspaper in the country a nickel at a time.

He was fifty years old. He was the city-hall man and had been since he was a young reporter, and he had covered this town’s whole long argument with itself about what it wanted to be, the freeway trench they dropped the railroad into, the casinos they blew up, the hotels they gutted into condominiums this very year, the endless business of Reno tearing down the thing that stopped paying and building the next thing before the bank noticed. He had written all of it down. That had been the family trade, once his grandfather Michael quit riveting buildings up and Kevin took to writing them down instead, and Kevin had always privately believed the writing down was the more permanent of the two, because a building could come down in six seconds on a Sunday morning but the record of it stayed, in the morgue, in the bound volumes, in the paper of record that would be there when everyone who remembered was gone.

Except that the paper of record was a business, and the business was the classifieds, and the classifieds were leaving. He had it backward, he was beginning to think, standing by the elevators with the thin gray section open in his hands. He had spent his life believing he was the permanent one, the one who outlasted the things he covered. And it was turning out that the reporters were just the front of the building, the beautiful expensive front, and the money that held the whole thing up had always been the two-line ads in the back, the town’s own daily record of its ordinary self, and when that record moved onto a screen it was going to take the front of the building with it, him included, and there would be no morgue, no bound volume, no back page anyone could hand a grandchild fifty years on and say, here, look, this is what it cost to rent a room in Reno the year you were born.

He went back to his desk and moved the paper cup and the press kit and the notebook off the envelope, one at a time, until it lay there by itself, his own name in the window of it. He picked it up. He had until the end of the month. Half the newsroom was going to take it and half was going to stay and gamble that the building held, and Kevin genuinely did not know which half he was, which was a thing that had almost never happened to him, this failure of the instinct that had carried him through every hard story of his career, the instinct that told him where the true sentence was.

He held the envelope and did not open it. Out past the loading dock the presses would start their run in a few hours, the way they had every night of his working life, printing tomorrow’s record of the town onto paper that fewer people paid for every quarter, and he stood in the thinning newsroom with the decision in his hand and, for once in his life, wrote nothing down.

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