Selection is an act

That was the year he found out what he was actually good at, and it was not the buying and it was not the selling. It was the telling. A version of an event, arranged properly and delivered in the right voice, travels further and lands harder than the event, and almost nobody goes back to check, and once a man has seen that clearly he cannot unsee it. He did not experience this as permission to lie. He experienced it as the correction of an injustice. He had been robbed in a room with no witnesses. Here was a skill that meant he would never again be at the mercy of what had merely happened.

Television was where the skill was housed at the time. Runner, then researcher, then a producer at twenty-nine on a show about people's debts that ran three seasons — long enough for him to understand that the same hour of a stranger's life could be cut two ways from identical footage, that both cuts would be true, and that the choice between them was his and was never once questioned by anyone, including the stranger.