The Circle (16 page)

“Mae, I asked you not to read me that.”

“
What?
It was funny!”

“How can I ask you not to do that in a way where you’ll respect my wishes?”

This was the Mercer Mae remembered and couldn’t stand—prickly, moody, high-handed.

“What are you talking about?”

Mercer took a deep breath, and Mae knew he was about to give a speech. If there was
a podium before him, he’d be stepping up to it, removing his papers from his sportcoat
pocket. Two years of community college and he thought he was some kind of professor.
He’d given her speeches about organically sourced beef, about the early work of King
Crimson, and each time it started with this deep breath, a breath that said
Settle in, this will take a while and will blow your mind
.

“Mae, I have to ask you to—”

“I know, you want me to stop reading you customer comments. Fine.”

“No, that’s not what I was—”

“You
want
me to read them to you?”

“Mae, how about if you just let me finish my sentence? Then you’ll know what I’m saying.
You guessing the end of every one of my sentences is never helpful, because you’re
never right.”

“But you talk so
slow
.”

“I talk normally. You’ve just gotten impatient.”

“Okay. Go.”

“But now you’re hyperventilating.”

“I guess I’m just so easily bored by this.”

“By talking.”

“By talking in slow motion.”

“Can I start now? It’ll take three minutes. Can you give me three minutes, Mae?”

“Fine.”

“Three minutes where you won’t know what I’m about to say, okay? It will be a surprise.”

“Okay.”

“All right. Mae, we have to change how we interact. Every time I see or hear from
you, it’s through this filter. You send me links, you quote someone talking about
me, you say you saw a picture of me on someone’s wall.… It’s always this third-party
assault. Even when I’m talking to you face-to-face you’re telling me what some stranger
thinks of me. It becomes like we’re never alone. Every time I see you, there’s a hundred
other people in the room. You’re always looking at me through a hundred other people’s
eyes.”

“Don’t get dramatic about it.”

“I just want to talk with you directly. Without you bringing in every other stranger
in the world who might have an opinion about me.”

“I don’t do that.”

“You do, Mae. A few months ago, you read something about me, and remember this? When
I saw you, you were so standoffish.”

“That’s because they said you were using endangered species for your work!”

“But I’ve never done that.”

“Well, how am
I
supposed to know that?”

“You can
ask
me! Actually ask
me
. You know how weird that is, that you, my friend and ex-girlfriend, gets her information
about me from some random person who’s never met me? And then I have to sit across
from you and it’s like we’re looking at each other through this strange fog.”

“Fine. Sorry.”

“Will you promise me to stop doing this?”

“Stop reading online?”

“I don’t care what you read. But when you and I communicate, I want to do it directly.
You write to me, I write to you. You ask me questions, and I answer them. You stop
getting news about me from third parties.”

“But Mercer, you run a business. You need to participate online. These are your customers,
and this is how they express themselves, and how you know if you’re succeeding.” Mae’s
mind churned through a half-dozen Circle tools she knew would help his business, but
Mercer was an underachiever. An underachiever who somehow managed to be smug about
it.

“See, that’s not true, Mae. It’s not true. I know I’m successful if I sell chandeliers.
If people order them, then I make them, and they pay me money for them. If they have
something to say afterward, they can call me or write me. I mean, all this stuff you’re
involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs.
That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments.
Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream
communication. And besides that, it’s fucking dorky.”

Mae exhaled through her nostrils.

“I love it when you do that,” he said. “Does that mean you have no answer? Listen,
twenty years ago, it wasn’t so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending
all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren’t
doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’
were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and
it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns
and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who
do it, it’s everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I’ve entered some inverted zone,
some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The
world has dorkified itself.”

“Mercer, is it important to you to be cool?”

“Do I look like it is?” He passed a hand over his expanding stomach, his torn fatigues.
“Clearly I’m no master of cool. But I remember when you’d see John Wayne or Steve
McQueen and you’d say, Wow, those guys are badass. They ride horses and motorcycles
and wander the earth righting wrongs.”

Mae couldn’t help but laugh. She saw the time on her phone. “It’s been more than three
minutes.”

Mercer plowed on. “Now the movie stars beg people to follow their Zing feeds. They
send pleading messages asking everyone to smile at them. And holy fuck, the mailing
lists! Everyone’s a junk mailer. You know how I spend an hour every day? Thinking
of ways to unsubscribe to mailing lists without hurting anyone’s feelings. There’s
this new neediness—it pervades everything.” He sighed as if he’d made some very important
points. “It’s just a very different planet.”

“It’s different in a good way,” Mae said. “There are a thousand ways it’s better,
and I can list them. But I can’t help it if you’re not social. I mean, your social
needs are so minimal—”

“It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually
manufacture
unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you’re purveying.
It improves nothing.
It’s not nourishing. It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They
scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep
you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but
you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless
empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally
addictive.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done
nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some
digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.”

“I never feel diminished.” Mae thought of the petition she’d signed that day, to demand
more job opportunities for immigrants living in the suburbs of Paris. It was energizing
and would have impact. But Mercer didn’t know about this, or anything Mae did, anything
the Circle did, and she was too sick of him to explain it all.

“And it’s eliminated my ability to just talk to you.” He was still talking. “I mean,
I can’t send you emails, because you immediately forward them to someone else. I can’t
send you a photo, because you post it on your own profile. And meanwhile, your company
is scanning all of our messages for information they can monetize. Don’t you think
this is insane?”

Mae looked at his fat face. He was thickening everywhere. He seemed to be developing
jowls. Could a man of twenty-five already have jowls? No wonder snack food was on
his mind.

“Thanks for helping my dad,” she said, and went inside and
waited for him to leave. It took him a few minutes to do so—he insisted on finishing
his beer—but soon enough he did, and Mae turned out the downstairs lights, went to
her old room and dropped herself into her bed. She checked her messages, found a few
dozen that needed her attention, and then, because it was only nine o’clock and her
parents were already asleep, she logged on to her Circle account and handled a few
dozen queries, feeling, with every fulfilled request, that she was cleaning the Mercer
off of herself. By midnight she felt reborn.

On Saturday Mae woke in her old bed, and after breakfast, she sat with her father,
the two of them watching women’s professional basketball, something he’d taken to
doing with great enthusiasm. They wasted the rest of the day playing cards, and running
errands, and together cooked a chicken-sauté dish her parents had learned at a cooking
class they’d taken at the Y.

On Sunday morning, the routine was the same: Mae slept in, feeling leaden and feeling
good about it, and wandered into the TV room, where her father was again watching
some WNBA game. This time he was wearing a thick white robe a friend of his had pilfered
from a Los Angeles hotel.

Her mother was outside, using duct tape to repair a plastic garbage can that raccoons
had damaged while trying to extract its contents. Mae was feeling dull-witted, her
body reluctant to do anything but recline. She had been, she realized, on constant
alert for a full week, and hadn’t slept more than five hours on any given night. Simply
sitting in her parents’ dim living room, watching this basketball game, which meant
nothing to her, all those ponytails and braids leaping, all that squeaking of sneakers,
was restorative and sublime.

“You think you can help me up, Sweet Pea?” her father asked. His fists were deep in
the couch, but he couldn’t lift himself. The cushions were too deep.

Mae got up and reached for his hand but when she did, she heard a faint liquid sound.

“Mother-bastard,” he said, and began to sit down again. Then he adjusted his trajectory,
and leaned on his side, as if he’d just remembered there was something fragile he
couldn’t sit on.

“Can you get your mother?” he asked, his teeth clenched, his eyes closed.

“What’s wrong?” Mae asked.

He opened his eyes, and there was an unfamiliar fury in them. “Please just get your
mother.”

“I’m right here. Let me help,” she said. She reached for his hand again. He swatted
her away.

“Get. Your. Mother.”

And then the smell hit her. He’d soiled himself.

He exhaled loudly, composing himself. Now with a softer voice he said, “Please. Please
dear. Get Mom.”

Mae ran to the front door. She found her mother by the garage and told her what had
happened. Mae’s mother did not rush inside. Instead, she held Mae’s hands in her own.

“I think you better head back now,” she said. “He won’t want you to see this.”

“I can help,” Mae said.

“Please, honey. You have to grant him some dignity.”

“Bonnie!” His voice boomed from inside the house.

Mae’s mother grabbed her hand. “Mae, sweetie, just get your stuff and we’ll see you
in a few weeks, okay?”

Mae drove back to the coast, her body shaking with rage. They had no right to do that,
to summon her home and then cast her out. She didn’t
want
to smell his shit! She would help, yes, any time she was asked, but not if they treated
her that way. And Mercer! He was scolding her in her own house. Jesus Christ. The
three of them. Mae had driven two hours there, and now was driving two back, and what
had she gotten for all this work? Just frustration. At night, lectures from fat men,
and during the day, shooed away by her own parents.

By the time she got back to the coast, it was 4:14. She had time, she thought. Did
the place close at five or six? She couldn’t remember. She swerved off the highway
and toward the marina. When she got to the beach, the gate to the kayak-storage areas
was open, but there was no one in sight. Mae looked around, between the rows of kayaks
and paddles and life preservers. “Hello?” she said.

“Hello!” a voice said. “Over here. In the trailer.”

Behind the rows of equipment, there was a trailer, on cinderblocks, and through the
open door, Mae could see a man’s feet on a desk, a phone cord stretching from a desk
unit to an unseen face. She walked up the steps, and in the darkened trailer she saw
a man, in his thirties, balding, holding his index finger up to her. Mae checked her
phone for the time every few minutes, seeing the minutes slip away: 4:20, 4:21, 4:23.
When he was off the phone, he smiled.

“Thanks for your patience. How can I help?”

“Is Marion around?”

“No. I’m her son. Walt.” He stood and shook Mae’s hand. He was tall, thin, sunburned.

“Nice to meet you. Am I too late?”

“Too late for what? Dinner?” he said, thinking he’d made a joke.

“To rent a kayak.”

“Oh. Well, what time is it? I haven’t checked in a while.”

She didn’t have to check. “4:26,” she said.

He cleared his throat and smiled. “4:26, eh? Well, we usually close at five, but seeing
as you’re so good with time, I bet I can trust you to bring it back at 5:22. You think
that’s fair? That’s when I have to leave to pick up my daughter.”

“Thank you,” Mae said.

“Let’s get you set up,” he said. “We just digitized our system. You said you have
an account?”

Mae gave him her name, and he typed it into a new tablet, but nothing registered.
After three tries, he realized his wifi wasn’t working. “Maybe I can check you in
on my phone,” he said, taking it from his pocket.

“Can we do it when I come back?” Mae asked, and he agreed, thinking it would give
him time to bring the network back up. He set Mae up with a life preserver and kayak,
and when she was out on the water, she checked her phone again. 4:32. She had almost
an hour. On the bay, an hour was always plenty. An hour was a day.