The Circle (5 page)

“Look at this one. She looks so peaceful.” It was a voice close by. Mae realized the
voice, a man’s, was referring to her, and she opened her eyes. She saw no one above
her. Only sky, which was mostly clear, with wisps of grey clouds moving swiftly across
the campus and heading out to sea. Mae’s eyes felt heavy, and she knew it was not
late, not past ten anyway, and she didn’t want to do what she often did, which was
fall asleep after two or three drinks, so she got up and went looking for Annie or
more Riesling or both. She found the buffet, and found it in shambles, a feast raided
by animals or Vikings, and made her way to the nearest bar, which was out of Riesling
and was now offering only some kind of vodka-and-energy drink concoction. She moved
on, asking random passersby about Riesling, until she felt a shadow pass before her.

“There’s more over here,” the shadow said.

Mae turned to find a pair of glasses reflecting blue, sitting atop the vague shape
of a man. He turned to walk away.

“Am I following you?” Mae asked.

“Not yet. You’re standing still. But you should if you want more of that wine.”

She followed the shadow across the lawn and under a canopy of high trees, the moonlight
shooting through, a hundred silver spears. Now Mae could see the shadow better—he
was wearing a sand-colored T-shirt and some kind of vest, leather or suede, over it—a
combination Mae hadn’t seen in some time. Then he stopped and was crouching down near
the bottom of a waterfall, a manmade waterfall coming down the side of the Industrial
Revolution.

“I hid a few bottles here,” he said, his hands deep in the pool that received the
falling water. Not finding anything, he kneeled down, his arms submerged to the shoulder,
until he retrieved two sleek green bottles, stood up and turned to her. Finally she
got a good look at him. His face was a soft triangle, concluding in a chin so subtly
dimpled she hadn’t seen it before that moment. He had the skin of a child, the eyes
of a much older man and a prominent nose, crooked and bent but somehow giving stability
to the rest of his face, like the keel of a yacht. His eyebrows were heavy dashes
rushing away, toward his ears, which were rounded, large, princess-pink. “You want
to go back to the game or …?” He seemed to be implying that the “or” could be far
better.

“Sure,” she said, realizing that she didn’t know this person, knew nothing about him.
But because he had those bottles, and because she’d lost Annie, and because she trusted
everyone within these Circle walls—she had at that moment so much love for everyone
within those walls, where everything was new and everything allowed—she followed him
back to the party, to the outskirts of it anyway, where they sat on a high ring of
steps overlooking the lawn, and watched the silhouettes run and squeal and fall below.

He opened both bottles, gave one to Mae, took a sip from his, and said his name was
Francis.

“Not Frank?” she asked. She took the bottle and filled her mouth with the candysweet
wine.

“People try to call me that and I … I ask them not to.”

She laughed, and he laughed.

He was a developer, he said, and had been at the company for almost two years. Before
that he’d been a kind of anarchist, a provocateur.
He’d gotten the job here by hacking further into the Circle system than anyone else.
Now he was on the security team.

“This is my first day,” Mae noted.

“No way.”

And then Mae, who intended to say “I shit you not,” instead decided to innovate, but
something got garbled during her verbal innovation, and she uttered the words “I fuck
you not,” knowing almost instantly that she would remember these words, and hate herself
for them, for decades to come.

“You fuck me not?” he asked, deadpan. “That sounds very conclusive. You’ve made a
decision with very little information. You fuck me not. Wow.”

Mae tried to explain what she meant to say, how she thought, or some department of
her brain thought, that she would turn the phrase around a bit … But it didn’t matter.
He was laughing now, and he knew she had a sense of humor, and she knew he did, too,
and somehow he made her feel safe, made her trust that he would never bring it up
again, that this terrible thing she said would remain between them, that they both
understood mistakes are made by all and that they should, if everyone is acknowledging
our common humanity, our common frailty and propensity for sounding and looking ridiculous
a thousand times a day, that these mistakes should be allowed to be forgotten.

“First day,” he said. “Well congratulations. A toast.”

They clinked bottles and took sips. Mae held her bottle up to the moon to see how
much was left; the liquid turned an otherworldly blue and she saw that she’d already
swallowed half. She put the bottle down.

“I like your voice,” he said. “Was it always that way?”

“Low and scratchy?”

“I would call it
seasoned
. I would call it
soulful
. You know Tatum O’Neal?”

“My parents made me watch
Paper Moon
a hundred times. They wanted me to feel better.”

“I love that movie,” he said.

“They thought I’d grow up like Addie Pray, streetwise but adorable. They wanted a
tomboy. They cut my hair like hers.”

“I like it.”

“You like bowl cuts.”

“No. Your voice. So far it’s the best thing about you.”

Mae said nothing. She felt like she’d been slapped.

“Shit,” he said. “Did that sound weird? I was trying to give you a compliment.”

There was a troubling pause; Mae had had a few terrible experiences with men who spoke
too well, who leaped over any number of steps to land on inappropriate compliments.
She turned to him, to confirm he was not what she thought he was—generous, harmless—but
actually warped, troubled, asymmetrical. But when she looked at him, she saw the same
smooth face, blue glasses, ancient eyes. His expression was pained.

He looked at his bottle, as if to lay the blame there. “I just wanted to make you
feel better about your voice. But I guess I insulted the rest of you.”

Mae thought on that for a second, but her brain, addled with Riesling, was slow-moving,
sticky. She gave up trying to parse his statement or his intentions. “I think you’re
strange,” she said.

“I don’t have parents,” he said. “Does that buy me some forgiveness?” Then, realizing
he was revealing too much, and too desperately, he said, “You’re not drinking.”

Mae decided to let him drop the subject of his childhood. “I’m already done,” she
said. “I’ve gotten the full effect.”

“I’m really sorry. I sometimes get my words in the wrong order. I’m happiest when
I don’t talk at something like this.”

“You are really strange,” Mae said again, and meant it. She was twenty-four, and he
was unlike anyone she’d ever known. That was, she thought drunkenly, evidence of God,
was it not? That she could encounter thousands of people in her life thus far, so
many of them similar, so many of them forgettable, but then there is this person,
new and bizarre and speaking bizarrely. Every day some scientist discovered a new
species of frog or waterlily, and that, too, seemed to confirm some divine showman,
some celestial inventor putting new toys before us, hidden but hidden poorly, just
where we might happen upon them. And this Francis person, he was something entirely
different, some new frog. Mae turned to look at him, thinking she might kiss him.

But he was busy. With one hand, he was emptying his shoe, sand pouring from it. With
the other he seemed to be biting off most of his fingernail.

Her reverie ended, she thought of home and bed.

“How will everyone get back?” she asked.

Francis looked out at a scrum of people who seemed to be trying to form a pyramid.
“There’s the dorms, of course. But I bet those are full already. There are always
a few shuttles ready, too. They probably told you that.” He waved his bottle in the
direction of the main
entrance, where Mae could make out the rooftops of the minibuses she’d seen that morning
on her way in. “The company does cost analyses on everything. And one staffer driving
home too tired or, in this case, too drunk to drive—well, the cost of shuttles is
a lot cheaper in the long run. Don’t tell me you didn’t come for the shuttle buses.
The shuttle buses are awesome. Inside they’re like yachts. Lots of compartments and
wood.”

“Lots of wood? Lots of wood?” Mae punched Francis in the arm, knowing she was flirting,
knowing it was idiotic to flirt with a fellow Circler on her first night, that it
was idiotic to drink this much on her first night. But she was doing all those things
and was happy about it.

A figure was gliding toward them. Mae watched with dull curiosity, realizing first
that the figure was female. And then that this figure was Annie.

“Is this man harassing you?” she asked.

Francis moved quickly away from Mae, and then hid his bottle behind his back. Annie
laughed.

“Francis, what are you so squirrelly about?”

“Sorry. I thought you said something else.”

“Whoa. Guilty conscience! I saw Mae here punch you in the arm and I made a joke. But
are you trying to confess something? What have you been planning, Francis Garbanzo?”

“Garaventa.”

“Yes. I know your name.”

“Francis,” Annie said, dropping herself clumsily between them, “I need to ask you
something, as your esteemed colleague but also as your friend. Can I do that?”

“Sure.”

“Good. Can I have some alone time with Mae? I need to kiss her on the mouth.”

Francis laughed, then stopped, noticing that neither Mae nor Annie was laughing. Scared
and confused, and visibly intimidated by Annie, he was soon walking down the steps,
and across the lawn, dodging revelers. Halfway across the green he stopped, turned
back and looked up, as if making sure Annie intended to replace him as Mae’s companion
that night. His fears confirmed, he walked under the awning of the Dark Ages. He tried
to open the door, but couldn’t. He pulled and pushed, but it would not budge. Knowing
they were watching, he made his way around the corner and out of view.

“He’s in security, he says,” Mae said.

“That’s what he told you? Francis Garaventa?”

“I guess he shouldn’t have.”

“Well, it’s not like he’s in se
cur
ity-security. He’s not Mossad. But did I interrupt something you definitely shouldn’t
be doing on your first night here you idiot?”

“You didn’t interrupt anything.”

“I think I
did
.”

“No. Not really.”

“I did. I know this.”

Annie located the bottle at Mae’s feet. “I thought we ran out of everything hours
ago.”

“There was some wine in the waterfall—by the Industrial Revolution.”

“Oh, right. People hide things there.”

“I just heard myself say, ‘There was some wine in the waterfall by the Industrial
Revolution.’ ”

Annie looked across the campus. “I know. Shit. I know.”

At home, after the shuttle, after a jello shot someone gave her onboard, after listening
to the shuttle driver talk wistfully about his family, his twins, his wife, who had
gout, Mae couldn’t sleep. She lay on her cheap futon, in her tiny room, in the railroad
apartment she shared with two near-strangers, both of them flight attendants and rarely
seen. Her apartment was on the second floor of a former motel and it was humble, uncleanable,
smelling of the desperation and bad cooking of its former residents. It was a sad
place, especially after a day at the Circle, where all was made with care and love
and the gift of a good eye. In her wretched low bed, Mae slept for a few hours, woke
up, recounted the day and the night, thought of Annie and Francis, and Denise and
Josiah, and the fireman’s pole, and the
Enola Gay
, and the waterfall, and the tiki torches, all of these things the stuff of vacations
and dreams and impossible to maintain, but then she knew—and this is what was keeping
her up, her head careening with something like a toddler’s joy—that she would be going
back to that place, the place where all these things happened. She was welcome there,
employed there.

She got to work early. When she arrived, though, at eight, she realized she hadn’t
been given a desk, at least not a real desk, and so she had nowhere to go. She waited
an hour, under a sign that said L
ET
’
S
D
O
T
HIS
. L
ET
’
S
D
O
A
LL OF
T
HIS
, until Renata arrived and
brought her to the second floor of the Renaissance, into a large room, the size of
a basketball court, where there were about twenty desks, all different, all shaped
from blond wood into desktops of organic shapes. They were separated by dividers of
glass, and arranged in groups of five, like petals on a flower. None were occupied.

“You’re the first here,” Renata said, “but you won’t be alone for long. Each new Customer
Experience area tends to fill pretty quickly. And you’re not far from all the more
senior people.” And here she swept her arm around, indicating about a dozen offices
surrounding the open space. The occupants of each were visible through the glass walls,
each of the supervisors somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-two, starting their
day, seeming relaxed, competent, wise.

“The designers really like glass, eh?” Mae said, smiling.

Renata stopped, furrowed her brow and thought on this notion. She put a strand of
hair behind her ear and said, “I think so. I can check. But first we should explain
the setup, and what to expect on your first real day.”

Renata explained the features of the desk and chair and screen, all of which had been
ergonomically perfected, and could be adjusted for those who wanted to work standing
up.

“You can set your stuff down and adjust your chair, and—Oh, looks like you have a
welcoming committee. Don’t get up,” she said, and made way.