The Circle (2 page)

“Yeah, everything’s on sensors,” Renata said. “The elevator reads your ID, and then
says hello. Annie gave us that photo. You guys must be tight if she’s got high school
pictures of you. Anyway, hope you don’t mind. We do that for visitors, mostly. They’re
usually impressed.”

As the elevator rose, the day’s featured activities appeared on every elevator wall,
the images and text traveling from one panel to the next. With each announcement,
there was video, photos, animation, music. There was a screening of
Koyaanisqatsi
at noon, a self-massage demonstration at one, core strengthening at three. A congressman
Mae hadn’t heard of, grey-haired but young, was holding a town hall at six thirty.
On the elevator door, he was talking at a podium, somewhere else, flags rippling behind
him, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his hands shaped into earnest fists.

The doors opened, splitting the congressman in two.

“Here we are,” Renata said, stepping out to a narrow catwalk of steel grating. Mae
looked down and felt her stomach cinch. She could see all the way to the ground floor,
four stories below.

Mae attempted levity: “I guess you don’t put anyone with vertigo up here.”

Renata stopped and turned to Mae, looking gravely concerned. “Of course not. But your
profile said—”

“No, no,” Mae said. “I’m fine.”

“Seriously. We can put you lower if—”

“No, no. Really. It’s perfect. Sorry. I was making a joke.”

Renata was visibly shaken. “Okay. Just let me know if anything’s not right.”

“I will.”

“You will? Because Annie would want me to make sure.”

“I will. I promise,” Mae said, and smiled at Renata, who recovered and moved on.

The catwalk reached the main floor, wide and windowed and bisected by a long hallway.
On either side, the offices were fronted by floor-to-ceiling glass, the occupants
visible within. Each had decorated his or her space elaborately but tastefully—one
office full of sailing paraphernalia, most of it seeming airborne, hanging from the
exposed beams, another arrayed with bonsai trees. They passed a small kitchen, the
cabinets and shelves all glass, the cutlery magnetic, attached to the refrigerator
in a tidy grid, everything illuminated by a vast hand-blown chandelier aglow with
multicolored bulbs, its arms reaching out in orange and peach and pink.

“Okay, here you are.”

They stopped at a cubicle, grey and small and lined with a material like synthetic
linen. Mae’s heart faltered. It was almost precisely like the cubicle she’d worked
at for the last eighteen months. It was the first thing she’d seen at the Circle that
hadn’t been rethought, that bore any resemblance to the past. The material lining
the cubicle walls was—she couldn’t believe it, it didn’t seem possible—burlap.

Mae knew Renata was watching her, and she knew her face was betraying something like
horror.
Smile
, she thought.
Smile
.

“This okay?” Renata said, her eyes darting all over Mae’s face.

Mae forced her mouth to indicate some level of satisfaction. “Great. Looks good.”

This was not what she expected.

“Okay then. I’ll leave you to get yourself acquainted with the workspace, and Denise
and Josiah will be in soon to orient you and get you set up.”

Mae twisted her mouth into a smile again, and Renata turned and left. Mae sat, noting
that the back of the chair was half-broken, that the chair would not move, its wheels
seeming stuck, all of them. A computer had been placed on the desk, but it was an
ancient model she hadn’t seen anywhere else in the building. Mae was baffled, and
found her mood sinking into the same sort of abyss in which she’d spent the last few
years.

Did anyone really work at a utility company anymore? How had Mae come to work there?
How had she tolerated it? When people had asked where she worked, she was more inclined
to lie and say she was unemployed. Would it have been any better if it hadn’t been
in her hometown?

After six or so years of loathing her hometown, of cursing her parents for moving
there and subjecting her to it, its limitations and scarcity of everything—diversion,
restaurants, enlightened minds—Mae had recently come to remember Longfield with something
like tenderness. It was a small town between Fresno and Tranquillity, incorporated
and named by a literal-minded farmer in 1866. One hundred and fifty years later, its
population had peaked at just
under two thousand souls, most of them working in Fresno, twenty miles away. Longfield
was a cheap place to live, and the parents of Mae’s friends were security guards,
teachers, truckers who liked to hunt. Of Mae’s graduating class of eighty-one, she
was one of twelve to go to a four-year college, and the only one to go east of Colorado.
That she went so far, and went into such debt, only to come back and work at the local
utility, shredded her, and her parents, though outwardly they said she was doing the
right thing, taking a solid opportunity and getting started in paying down her loans.

The utility building, 3B-East, was a tragic block of cement with narrow vertical slits
for windows. Inside, most of the offices were walled with cinderblock, everything
painted a sickly green. It was like working in a locker room. She’d been the youngest
person in the building by a decade or so, and even those in their thirties were of
a different century. They marveled at her computer skills, which were basic and common
to anyone she knew. But her coworkers at the utility were astounded. They called her
the
Black Lightning
, some wilted reference to her hair, and told her she had
quite a bright future
at the utility if she played her cards right. In four or five years, they told her,
she could be head of IT for the whole sub-station! Her exasperation was unbounded.
She had not gone to college, $234,000 worth of elite liberal arts education, for a
job like that. But it was work, and she needed the money. Her student loans were voracious
and demanded monthly feedings, so she took the job and the paycheck and kept her eyes
open for greener pastures.

Her immediate supervisor was a man named Kevin, who served as the ostensible technology
officer at the utility, but who, in a strange twist, happened to know nothing about
technology. He knew
cables, splitters; he should have been operating a ham radio in his basement—not supervising
Mae. Every day, every month, he wore the same short-sleeved button-down, the same
rust-colored ties. He was an awful assault on the senses, his breath smelling of ham
and his mustache furry and wayward, like two small paws emerging, southwest and southeast,
from his ever-flared nostrils.

All this would have been fine, his many offenses, but for the fact that he actually
believed that Mae cared. He believed that Mae, graduate of Carleton, dreamer of rare
and golden dreams, cared about this job at the gas and electric utility. That she
would be worried if Kevin considered her performance on any given day subpar. It drove
her mad.

The times he would ask her to come in, when he would close his door and sit at the
corner of his desk—they were excruciating.
Do you know why you’re here?
he would ask, like a highway cop who’d pulled her over. Other times, when he was
satisfied with whatever work she’d done that day, he did something worse: he
praised
her. He called her his
protégée
. He loved the word. He introduced her to visitors this way, saying, “This is my protégée,
Mae. She’s pretty sharp, most days”—and here he’d wink at her as if he were a captain
and she his first mate, the two of them veterans of many raucous adventures and forever
devoted to each other. “If she doesn’t get in her own way, she has a bright future
ahead of her here.”

She couldn’t stand it. Every day of that job, the eighteen months she worked there,
she wondered if she could really ask Annie for a favor. She’d never been one to ask
for something like that, to be rescued, to be lifted. It was a kind of neediness,
pushiness
—nudginess
, her dad called it, something not bred into her. Her parents were quiet
people who did not like to be in anyone’s way, quiet and proud people who took nothing
from anyone.

And Mae was the same, but that job bent her into something else, into someone who
would do anything to leave. It was sickening, all of it. The green cinderblocks. An
actual water cooler. Actual punch cards. The actual
certificates of merit
when someone had done something deemed special. And the hours! Actually nine to five!
All of it felt like something from another time, a rightfully forgotten time, and
made Mae feel that she was not only wasting her life but that this entire company
was wasting life, wasting human potential and holding back the turning of the globe.
The cubicle at that place,
her
cubicle, was the distillation of it all. The low walls around her, meant to facilitate
her complete concentration on the work at hand, were lined with burlap, as if any
other material might distract her, might allude to more exotic ways of spending her
days. And so she’d spent eighteen months in an office where they thought, of all the
materials man and nature offered, the one their staff should see, all day and every
day, was burlap. A dirty sort of burlap, a less refined form of burlap. A bulk burlap,
a poor man’s burlap, a budget burlap. Oh god, she thought, when she left that place
she vowed never to see or touch or acknowledge the existence of that material again.

And she did not expect to see it again. How often, outside of the nineteenth century,
outside a general store of the nineteenth century, does one encounter burlap? Mae
assumed she never would, but then here it was, all around her in this new Circle workspace,
and looking at it, smelling its musty smell, her eyes welled up. “Fucking burlap,”
she mumbled to herself.

Behind her, she heard a sigh, then a voice: “Now I’m thinking this wasn’t such a good
idea.”

Mae turned and found Annie, her hands in fists at her sides, posing like a pouting
child. “Fucking burlap,” Annie said, imitating her pout, then burst out laughing.
When she was done, she managed, “That was incredible. Thank you so much for that,
Mae. I knew you’d hate it, but I wanted to see just how much. I’m sorry you almost
cried. Jesus.”

Now Mae looked to Renata, whose hands were raised high in surrender. “Not my idea!”
she said. “Annie put me up to it! Don’t hate me!”

Annie sighed with satisfaction. “I had to actually
buy
that cubicle from Walmart. And the computer! That took me ages to find online. I
thought we could just bring that kind of stuff up from the basement or something,
but we honestly had nothing on the entire campus ugly and old enough. Oh god, you
should have seen your face.”

Mae’s heart was pounding. “You’re such a sicko.”

Annie feigned confusion. “Me? I’m not sick. I’m awesome.”

“I can’t believe you went to that much trouble to upset me.”

“Well, I did. That’s how I got to where I am now. It’s all about planning and it’s
all about follow-through.” She gave Mae a salesman’s wink and Mae couldn’t help but
laugh. Annie was a lunatic. “Now let’s go. I’m giving you the full tour.”

As Mae followed her, she had to remind herself that Annie had not always been a senior
executive at a company like the Circle. There was a time, only four years ago, when
Annie was a college student
who wore men’s flannel housepants to class, to dinner, on casual dates. Annie was
what one of her boyfriends, and there were many, always monogamous, always decent,
called a
doofus
. But she could afford to be. She came from money, generations of money, and was very
cute, dimpled and long-lashed, with hair so blond it could only be real. She was known
by all as effervescent, seemed incapable of letting anything bother her for more than
a few moments. But she was also a doofus. She was gangly, and used her hands wildly,
dangerously, when she spoke, and was given to bizarre conversational tangents and
strange obsessions—caves, amateur perfumery, doo-wop music. She was friendly with
every one of her exes, with every hookup, with every professor (she knew them all
personally and sent them gifts). She had been involved in, or ran, most or all of
the clubs and causes in college, and yet she’d found time to be committed to her coursework—to
everything, really—while also, at any party, being the most likely to embarrass herself
to loosen everyone up, the last to leave. The one rational explanation for all this
would have been that she did not sleep, but this was not the case. She slept decadently,
eight to ten hours a day, could sleep anywhere—on a three-minute car ride, in the
filthy booth of an off-campus diner, on anyone’s couch, at any time.

Mae knew this firsthand, having been something of a chauffeur to Annie on long rides,
throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin and Iowa, to countless and largely meaningless
cross-country contests. Mae had gotten a partial scholarship to run at Carleton, and
that’s where she met Annie, who was effortlessly good, two years older, but was only
intermittently concerned with whether she, or the team, won or lost. One meet Annie
would be deep in it, taunting the opponents, insulting their uniforms or SATs, and
the next she’d be wholly uninterested
in the outcome but happy to be along for the ride. It was on the long rides, in Annie’s
car—which she preferred Mae to drive—that Annie would put her bare feet up or out
the window, and would riff on the passing scenery, and would speculate, for hours,
on what went on in the bedroom of their coaches, a married couple with matching, almost
military, haircuts. Mae laughed at everything Annie said, and it kept Mae’s mind off
the meets, where she, unlike Annie, had to win, or at least do well, to justify the
subsidy the college had provided her. They would invariably arrive minutes before
the meet, with Annie having forgotten what race she was meant to run, or whether she
really wanted to run at all.