The Circle (4 page)

“Tom doesn’t look so good here,” Annie noted. “He’s not quite that sharky. But I hear
he loves this picture.”

To the lower left of Ty was Tom Stenton, the world-striding CEO and self-described
Capitalist Prime
—he loved the Transformers—wearing an Italian suit and grinning like the wolf that
ate Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. His hair was dark, at the temples striped
in grey, his eyes flat, unreadable. He was more in the mold of the eighties Wall Street
traders, unabashed about being wealthy, about being single and aggressive and possibly
dangerous. He was a free-spending global titan in his early fifties who seemed stronger
every year, who threw his money and influence around without fear. He was unafraid
of presidents. He was not daunted by lawsuits from the European Union or threats from
state-sponsored Chinese hackers. Nothing was worrisome, nothing was unattainable,
nothing was beyond his pay grade. He owned a NASCAR team, a racing yacht or two, piloted
his own plane. He was the anachronism at the Circle, the flashy CEO, and created conflicted
feelings among many of the utopian young Circlers.

His kind of conspicuous consumption was notably absent from the lives of the other
two Wise Men. Ty rented a ramshackle two-bedroom apartment a few miles away, but then
again, no one had ever seen him arrive at or leave campus; the assumption was that
he lived there. And everyone knew where Eamon Bailey lived—a highly visible, profoundly
modest three-bedroom home on a widely accessible street
ten minutes from campus. But Stenton had houses everywhere—New York, Dubai, Jackson
Hole. A floor atop the Millennium Tower in San Francisco. An island near Martinique.

Eamon Bailey, standing next to him in the painting, seemed utterly at peace, joyful
even, in the presence of these men, both of whom were, at least superficially, diametrically
opposed to his values. His portrait, to the lower right of Ty’s, showed him as he
was—grey-haired, ruddy-faced, twinkly-eyed, happy and earnest. He was the public face
of the company, the personality everyone associated with the Circle. When he smiled,
which was near-constantly, his mouth smiled, his eyes smiled, his shoulders even seemed
to smile. He was wry. He was funny. He had a way of speaking that was both lyrical
and grounded, giving his audiences wonderful turns of phrase one moment and plainspoken
common sense the next. He had come from Omaha, from an exceedingly normal family of
six, and had more or less nothing remarkable in his past. He’d gone to Notre Dame
and married his girlfriend, who’d gone to Saint Mary’s down the road, and now they
had four children of their own, three girls and finally a boy, though that boy had
been born with cerebral palsy. “He’s been touched,” Bailey had put it, announcing
the birth to the company and the world. “So we’ll love him even more.”

Of the Three Wise Men, Bailey was the most likely to be seen on campus, to play Dixieland
trombone in the company talent show, most likely to appear on talk shows representing
the Circle, chuckling when talking about—when shrugging off—this or that FCC investigation,
or when unveiling a helpful new feature or game-changing technology. He preferred
to be called Uncle Eamon, and when he
strode through campus, he did so as would a beloved uncle, accessible and genuine.
“Like Bill Murray striding through Pebble Beach,” was how Stenton once described him.
“Loved by all, and I think he really loves them back.” The three of them, in life
and in this portrait, made for a strange bouquet of mismatched flowers, but there
was no doubt that it worked. Everyone knew it worked, the three-headed model of management,
and the dynamic was thereafter emulated elsewhere in the Fortune 500, with mixed results.

“But so why,” Mae asked, “couldn’t they afford a real portrait by someone who knows
what they’re doing?”

The more she looked at it, the stranger it became. The artist had arranged it such
that each of the Wise Men had placed a hand on another’s shoulder. It made no sense
and defied the way arms could bend or stretch.

“Bailey thinks it’s hilarious,” Annie said. “He wanted it in the main hallway, but
Stenton vetoed him. You know Bailey’s a collector and all that, right? He’s got incredible
taste. I mean, he comes across as the good-time guy, as the everyman from Omaha, but
he’s a connoisseur, too, and is pretty obsessed with preserving the past—even the
bad art of the past. Wait till you see his library.”

They arrived at an enormous door, which seemed and likely was medieval, something
that would have kept barbarians at bay. A pair of giant gargoyle knockers protruded
at chest level, and Mae went for the easy gag.

“Nice knockers.”

Annie snorted, waved her hand over a blue pad on the wall, and the door opened.

Annie turned to her. “Holy fuck, right?”

It was a three-story library, three levels built around an open atrium, everything
fashioned in wood and copper and silver, a symphony of muted color. There were easily
ten thousand books, most of them bound in leather, arranged tidily on shelves gleaming
with lacquer. Between the books stood stern busts of notable humans, Greeks and Romans,
Jefferson and Joan of Arc and MLK. A model of the
Spruce Goose
—or was it the
Enola Gay?
—hung from the ceiling. There were a dozen or so antique globes lit from within, the
light buttery and soft, warming various lost nations.

“He bought so much of this stuff when it was about to be auctioned off, or lost. That’s
his crusade, you know. He goes to these distressed estates, these people who are about
to have to sell their treasures at some terrible loss, and he pays market rates for
all this, gives the original owners unlimited access to the stuff he’s bought. That’s
who’s here a lot, these grey-hairs who come in to read or touch their stuff. Oh you
have to see
this
. It’ll blow your head off.”

Annie led Mae up the three flights of stairs, all of them tiled with intricate mosaics—reproductions,
Mae assumed, of something from the Byzantine era. She held the brass rail going up,
noting the lack of fingerprints, of any blemish whatsoever. She saw accountants’ green
reading lamps, telescopes crisscrossed and gleaming in copper and gold, pointing out
the many beveled-glass windows—“Oh look up,” Annie told her, and she did, to find
the ceiling was stained glass, a fevered rendering of countless angels arranged in
rings. “That’s from some church in Rome.”

They arrived at the library’s top floor, and Annie led Mae through narrow corridors
of round-spined books, some of them as tall as
her—Bibles and atlases, illustrated histories of wars and upheavals, long-gone nations
and peoples.

“All right. Check this out,” Annie said. “Wait. Before I show you this, you have to
give me a verbal non-disclosure agreement, okay?”

“Fine.”

“Seriously.”

“I’m serious. I take this seriously.”

“Good. Now when I move this book …” Annie said, removing a large volume titled
The Best Years of Our Lives
. “Watch this,” she said, and backed up. Slowly, the wall, bearing a hundred books,
began to move inward, revealing a secret chamber within. “That’s High Nerd, right?”
Annie said, and they walked through. Inside, the room was round and lined with books,
but the main focus was a hole in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a copper barrier;
a pole extended down, through the floor and to unknown regions below.

“Does he fight fires?” Mae asked.

“Hell if I know,” Annie said.

“Where does it go?”

“As far as I can tell, it goes to Bailey’s parking space.”

Mae mustered no adjectives. “You ever go down?”

“Nah, even showing me this was a risk. He shouldn’t have. He told me that. And now
I’m showing you, which is silly. But it shows you the kind of mind this guy has. He
can have anything, and what he wants is a fireman’s pole that drops seven stories
to the garage.”

The sound of a droplet emitted from Annie’s earpiece, and she said “Okay” to whomever
was on the other end. It was time to go.

“So,” Annie said in the elevator—they were dropping back to the main staff floors—“I
have to go and do some work. It’s plankton-inspection time.”

“It’s what time?” Mae asked.

“You know, little startups hoping the big whale—that’s us—will find them tasty enough
to eat. Once a week we take a series of meetings with these guys, Ty-wannabes, and
they try to convince us that we need to acquire them. It’s a little bit sad, given
they don’t even pretend to have any revenue, or even potential for it, anymore. Listen,
though, I’m going to hand you off to two company ambassadors. They’re both very serious
about their jobs. Actually, beware of just
how
into their jobs they are. They’ll give you a tour of the rest of the campus, and
I’ll pick you up for the solstice party afterward, okay? Starts at seven.”

The doors opened on the second floor, near the Glass Eatery, and Annie introduced
her to Denise and Josiah, both in their late-middle-twenties, both with the same level-eyed
sincerity, both wearing simple button-down shirts in tasteful colors. Each shook Mae’s
hand in two of theirs, and almost seemed to bow.

“Make sure she doesn’t work today,” were Annie’s last words before she disappeared
back into the elevator.

Josiah, a thin and heavily freckled man, turned his blue unblinking eyes to Mae. “We’re
so glad to meet you.”

Denise, tall, slim, Asian-American, smiled at Mae and closed her eyes, as if savoring
the moment. “Annie told us all about you two, how far back you go. Annie’s the heart
and soul of this place, so we’re very lucky to have you here.”

“Everyone loves Annie,” Josiah added.

Their deference to Mae felt awkward. They were surely older than her, but they behaved
as if she were a visiting eminence.

“So I know some of this might be redundant,” Josiah said, “but if it’s okay we’d like
to give you the full newcomer tour. Would that be okay? We promise not to make it
lame.”

Mae laughed, urged them on, and followed.

The rest of the day was a blur of glass rooms and brief, impossibly warm introductions.
Everyone she met was busy, just short of overworked, but nevertheless thrilled to
meet her, so happy she was there, any friend of Annie’s … There was a tour of the
health center, and an introduction to the dreadlocked Dr. Hampton who ran it. There
was a tour of the emergency clinic and the Scottish nurse who did the admitting. A
tour of the organic gardens, a hundred yards square, where there were two full-time
farmers giving a talk to a large group of Circlers while they sampled the latest harvest
of carrots and tomatoes and kale. There was a tour of the mini-golf area, the movie
theater, the bowling alleys, the grocery store. Finally, deep in what Mae assumed
was the corner of the campus—she could see the fence beyond, the rooftops of San Vincenzo
hotels where visitors to the Circle stayed—they toured the company dorms. Mae had
heard something about them, Annie mentioning that sometimes she crashed on campus
and now preferred those rooms to her own home. Walking through the hallways, seeing
the tidy rooms, each with a shiny kitchenette, a desk, an overstuffed couch and bed,
Mae had to agree that the appeal was visceral.

“There are 180 rooms now, but we’re growing quickly,” Josiah said. “With ten thousand
or so people on campus, there’s always a percentage of people who work late, or just
need a nap during the day. These
rooms are always free, always clean—you just have to check online to see which ones
are available. Right now they book up fast, but the plan is to have at least a few
thousand rooms within the next few years.”

“And after a party like tonight’s, these are always full,” Denise said, with what
she meant to be a conspiratorial wink.

The tour continued through the afternoon, with stops to sample food at the culinary
class, taught that day by a celebrated young chef known for using the whole of any
animal. She presented Mae with a dish called roasted pigface, which Mae ate and discovered
tasted like a more fatty bacon; she liked it very much. They passed other visitors
as they toured the campus, groups of college students, and packs of vendors, and what
appeared to be a senator and his handlers. They passed an arcade stocked with vintage
pinball machines and an indoor badminton court, where, Annie said, a former world
champion was kept on retainer. By the time Josiah and Denise had brought her back
around to the center of the campus, the light was dimming, and staffers were installing
tiki torches in the grass and lighting them. A few thousand Circlers began to gather
in the twilight, and standing among them, Mae knew that she never wanted to work—never
wanted to be—anywhere else. Her hometown, and the rest of California, the rest of
America, seemed like some chaotic mess in the developing world. Outside the walls
of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been
perfected. The best people had made the best systems and the best systems had reaped
funds, unlimited funds, that made possible this, the best place to work. And it was
natural that it was so, Mae thought. Who else but utopians could make utopia?

“This party? This is nothing,” Annie assured Mae, as they shuffled down the forty-foot
buffet. It was dark now, the night air cooling, but the campus was inexplicably warm,
and illuminated by hundreds of torches bursting with amber light. “This one’s Bailey’s
idea. Not like he’s some Earth Mother, but he gets into the stars, the seasons, so
the solstice stuff is his. He’ll appear at some point and welcome everyone—usually
he does at least. Last year he was in some kind of tanktop. He’s very proud of his
arms.”

Mae and Annie were on the lush lawn, loading their plates and then finding seats in
the stone amphitheater built into a high grassy berm. Annie was refilling Mae’s glass
from a bottle of Riesling that, she said, was made on campus, some kind of new concoction
that had fewer calories and more alcohol. Mae looked across the lawn, at the hissing
torches arrayed in rows, each row leading revelers to various activities—limbo, kickball,
the Electric Slide—none of them related in any way to the solstice. The seeming randomness,
the lack of any enforced schedule, made for a party that set low expectations and
far exceeded them. Everyone was quickly blitzed, and soon Mae lost Annie, and then
got lost entirely, eventually finding her way to the bocce courts, which were being
used by a small group of older Circlers, all of them at least thirty, to roll cantaloupes
into bowling pins. She made her way back to the lawn, where she joined a game the
Circlers were calling “Ha,” which seemed to involve nothing more than lying down,
with legs or arms or both overlapping. Whenever the person next to you said “Ha” you
had to say it, too. It was a terrible
game, but for the time being, Mae needed it, because her head was spinning, and she
felt better horizontal.