The Circle (20 page)

Finally he chose to smile, theatrically twirl his mustache by both ends, and turn.

“Sorry that happened,” Kalden said, helping her up. “You sure you’re okay?”

Mae said she was. The mustache man hadn’t touched her, had only scared her, and even
then, only for a moment.

She stared at his face, which in the suddenly blue light was like some Brancusi sculpture—smooth,
perfectly oval. His eyebrows were Roman arches, his nose like some small sea creature’s
delicate snout.

“Those assholes shouldn’t be here in the first place,” he said. “A bunch of court
jesters here to entertain royalty. I don’t see the point,” he said, now looking around
him, standing on his tiptoes. “Can we leave here?”

They found the food and drinks table en route and took tapas and sausages and cups
of red wine to a row of lemon trees behind the Viking Age.

“You don’t remember my name,” Mae said.

“No. But I know you, and I wanted to see you. That’s why I was near when the mustache
came at you.”

“Mae.”

“Right. I’m Kalden.”

“I know. I remember names.”

“And I try to. I’m always trying. So are Josiah and Denise your friends?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Sure. I mean, they did my orientation and, you know, I’ve talked to
them since. Why?”

“No reason.”

“What do you do here, anyway?”

“And Dan? You hang out with Dan?”

“Dan’s my boss. You won’t tell me what you do, will you?”

“You want a lemon?” he asked, and stood. He kept his eyes on Mae as he reached his
hand into the tree and retrieved a large one. There was a masculine grace to the gesture,
how he stretched, fluidly upward, slower than might be expected, that made her think
of a diver. Without looking at the lemon, he handed it to her.

“It’s green,” she said.

He squinted at it. “Oh. I thought that would work. I went for the biggest one I could
find. It should have been yellow. Here, stand up.”

He gave her his hand, helped her up, and positioned her just away from the boughs
of the tree. Then he threw his arms around the trunk and shook it until lemons rained
down. Five or six hit Mae.

“Jesus. Sorry,” he said. “I’m an idiot.”

“No. It was good,” she said. “They were heavy, and two hit me in the head. I loved
it.”

He touched her then, shaping his hand around her head. “Anything especially bad?”

She said she was fine.

“You always hurt the ones you love,” he said, his face a dark shape above her. As
if realizing what he’d said, he cleared his throat. “Anyway. That’s what my parents
said. And they loved me very much.”

In the morning, Mae called Annie, who was on her way to the airport, heading to Mexico
to untangle some regulatory snafu.

“I met someone intriguing,” Mae said.

“Good. I wasn’t crazy about the other one. Gallipoli.”

“Garaventa.”

“Francis. He’s a nervous little mouse. And this new one? What do we know about him?”
Mae could sense Annie speeding the conversation along.

Mae tried to describe him, but realized she knew almost nothing. “He’s thin. Brown
eyes, tallish?”

“That’s it? Brown eyes and tallish?”

“Oh wait,” Mae said, laughing at herself. “He had grey hair. He
has
grey hair.”

“Wait. What?”

“He was young, but with grey hair.”

“Okay. Mae. It’s okay if you’re a grandpa chaser—”

“No, no. I’m sure he was young.”

“You say he’s under thirty, but with grey hair?”

“I swear.”

“I don’t know anyone here like that.”

“You know all ten thousand people?”

“Maybe he’s got some temporary contract. You didn’t get his last name?”

“I tried, but he was very coy.”

“Huh. That’s not so Circly, is it? And he had grey hair?”

“Almost white.”

“Like a swimmer would? When they use that shampoo?”

“No. This wasn’t silver. It was just grey. Like an old man would have.”

“And you’re sure he
wasn’t
some old man? Like some old man you found on the street?”

“No.”

“Were you roaming the streets, Mae? Are you into that particular smell of an older
man? A much older man? It’s musty. Like a wet cardboard box. You like that?”

“Please.”

Annie was entertaining herself, and so continued: “I guess there’s comfort there,
knowing he can cash in his 401(k). And he must be so grateful for any affection at
all.… Oh shit. I’m at the airport. I’ll call you back.”

Annie didn’t call back, but texted from the plane and later from Mexico City, sending
Mae pictures of various old men she saw on the street.
Is this him? This one? That one? Ése? Ése?

Mae was left to wonder about all of this. How did she not know Kalden’s last name?
She did a preliminary search in the company directory, and found no Kaldens. She tried
Kaldan, Kaldin, Khalden. Nothing. Maybe she’d misspelled or misheard it? She could
have done a more surgical search if she’d known what department he was in, what part
of campus he might occupy, but she knew nothing.

Still, she could think of little else. His white V-neck, his sad eyes that tried not
to seem sad, his skinny grey pants that might have been stylish or horrible, she couldn’t
decide in the dark, the way he held her at the end of the night, when they’d walked
to where the helicopters landed, hoping to see one, and then, seeing none, they walked
back to the lemon grove, and there he said he would have to go, and could she walk
to the shuttle from there. He pointed to the row of them, not two hundred yards off,
and she smiled and said she could handle it. Then he’d brought her to him, so suddenly,
too suddenly for her to know if he planned a kiss or grope or what. What he did was
a flattening of her shape against his, with his right arm crossing
her back, his hand atop her shoulder, and his left hand far lower, bolder, resting
on her sacrum, his fingers fanning down.

Then he pulled away and smiled.

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I am.”

“You’re not scared?”

She laughed. “No. I’m not scared.”

“Okay. Good night.”

And he turned and walked in a new direction, not toward the shuttles or the helicopters
or the circus, but through a narrow shadowed path, alone.

All week she thought of his retreating form, and his strong hands reaching, and she
looked at the big green lemon he’d picked, which she’d retrieved and thought, wrongly,
would have ripened on her desk if given the time. It stayed green.

But she couldn’t get hold of him. She put out a few all-company zings, looking for
a Kalden, careful not to look desperate. But she got no response.

She knew Annie could figure it out, but Annie was now in Peru. The company was in
some moderately hot water over their plans in the Amazon—something involving drones
to count and photograph every remaining tree. Between meetings with members of various
environmental and regulatory officials, Annie finally called back. “Let me do a facial
rec on him. Send me a photo.”

But Mae had no photos of him.

“You’re kidding. Nothing?”

“It was dark. It was a circus.”

“You said that. So he gave you a green lemon and no photos. Are you sure he wasn’t
just visiting?”

“But I met him before, remember? Near the bathroom? And then he came back to my desk
and watched me work.”

“Wow, Mae. This guy sounds like a winner. Green lemons and heavy breathing over your
shoulder while you answer customer queries. If I were being the slightest bit paranoid,
I’d think he was an infiltrator of some kind, or a low-grade molester.” Annie had
to hang up, but then, an hour later, texted.
You have to keep me posted on this guy. Getting increasingly unsettled. We’ve had
some weird stalker people over the years. Last year we had a guy, some kind of blogger,
who attended a party and stayed on campus for two weeks, skulking around and sleeping
in storage rooms. He turned out to be relatively harmless, but you can see how some
Unidentified Freaky Man would be cause for concern
.

But Mae wasn’t concerned. She trusted Kalden, and couldn’t believe he had any nefarious
intentions. His face had an openness, an unmistakable lack of guile—Mae couldn’t quite
explain it to Annie, but she had no doubts about him. She knew, though, that he was
not reliable as a communicator, but she knew, also, she was sure of it, that he would
contact her again. And though being unable to reach anyone else in her life would
have been grating, exasperating, having him out there, at least for a few days, unreachable
but presumably somewhere on campus, provided a jolt of welcome frisson to her hours.
The week’s workload was heavy but while thinking of Kalden, every query was some glorious
aria. The customers sang to her and she sang back. She loved them all. She loved Risa
Thomason in Twin Falls, Idaho. She loved Mack Moore in Gary, Indiana. She loved the
newbies around
her. She loved Jared’s occasionally worried visage appearing in his doorway, asking
her to see how they could keep their aggregate over 98. And she loved that she had
been able to ignore Francis and his constant contacting of her. His mini videos. His
audio greeting cards. His playlists, all of them songs of apology and woe. He was
a memory now, obliterated by Kalden and his elegant silhouette, his strong searching
hands. She loved how she could, alone, in the bathroom, simulate the effect of those
hands, could, with her own hand, approximate the pressure he applied to her. But where
was he? What had been intriguing on Monday and Tuesday was approaching annoying by
Wednesday and exasperating by Thursday. His invisibility began to feel intentional
and even aggressive. He’d promised to be in touch, hadn’t he? Maybe he hadn’t, she
thought. What
had
he said? She searched her memory and realized, with a kind of panic, that all he’d
said, at the end of the night, was “Good night.” But Annie would be coming back on
Friday, and together, with even an hour together, they could find him, know his name,
lock him in.

And finally, on Friday morning, Annie returned, and they made plans to meet just before
the Dream Friday. There was supposed to be a presentation about the future of CircleMoney—a
way to send all online purchases through the Circle and, eventually, obviate the need
for paper currency at all—but then the presentation was cancelled. All staffers were
asked to watch a press conference being held in Washington.

Mae hurried down to the lobby of the Renaissance, where a few hundred Circlers were
watching the wallscreen. A woman in a
blueberry-colored suit stood behind a podium festooned with microphones, surrounded
by aides and a pair of American flags. Below her the ticker: S
ENATOR
W
ILLIAMSON SEEKING TO BREAK UP THE
C
IRCLE
. It was too loud at first to hear anything, but a series of hissing shushes and volume
increases made her voice audible. The senator was in the middle of reading a written
statement.

“We are here today to insist that the Senate’s Antitrust Task Force begin an investigation
into whether or not the Circle acts as a monopoly. We believe that the Justice Department
will see the Circle for what it is, a monopoly in its purest sense, and move to break
it up, just as they did with Standard Oil, AT&T and every other demonstrated monopoly
in our history. The dominance of the Circle stifles competition and is dangerous to
our way of free-market capitalism.”

After she was finished, the screen went back to its usual purpose, to celebrate the
thoughts of the Circle staff, and amid the throngs that day were many thoughts. The
consensus was that this senator was known for her occasionally outside-the-mainstream
positions—she had been against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and thus she would
not get much traction with this antitrust crusade. The Circle was a company popular
on both sides of the aisle, known for its pragmatic positions on virtually every political
issue, for its generous donations, and thus this left-of-center senator wouldn’t get
much support from her liberal colleagues—much less among the Republican ranks.

Mae didn’t know enough about antitrust laws to have an off-the-cuff opinion. Was there
really no competition out there? The Circle had 90 percent of the search market. Eighty-eight
percent of the free-mail market, 92 percent of text servicing. That was, in her
perspective, a simple testament to their making and delivering the best product. It
seemed insane to punish the company for its efficiency, for its attention to detail.
For succeeding.

“There you are,” Mae said, seeing Annie coming toward her. “How was Mexico? And Peru?”

“That idiot,” Annie scoffed, narrowing her eyes at the screen where the senator had
recently appeared.

“So you’re not concerned about this?”

“You mean, like she’s going to actually get somewhere with this? No. But personally,
she’s in a world of shit.”

“What do you mean? How do you know this?”

Annie looked at Mae, then turned to face the back of the room. Tom Stenton stood,
chatting with a few Circlers, his arms crossed, a posture that in someone else might
convey concern or even anger. But more than anything, he seemed amused.

“Let’s go,” Annie said, and they walked across campus, hoping to get lunch from a
taco truck hired to feed Circlers that day. “How’s your gentleman caller? Don’t tell
me he died during sex.”

“I still haven’t seen him since last week.”

“No contact at all?” Annie asked. “What a shit.”

“I think he’s just from some other era.”

“Some other era? And grey hair? Mae, you know that moment in
The Shining
when Nicholson is having some kind of sexy encounter with the woman in the bathroom?
And then the lady turns out to be some elderly undead corpse?”

Mae had no idea what Annie was talking about.

“Actually—” Annie said, and her eyes lost focus.

“What?”

“You know, with this Williamson investigation thing, it worries me to have some shadowy
guy skulking around campus. Can you tell me the next time you see him?”