The Circle (23 page)

You awake?

Always
.

Still haven’t heard from Kalden
.

The old man? Maybe he died. He had a good long life
.

You really think he was just some interloper?

I think you dodged a bullet. I’m glad he hasn’t come back. I was worried about the
espionage possibilities
.

He wasn’t a spy
.

Then he was just old. Maybe some Circler’s grandfather came to visit and got lost?
It’s just as well. You were too young to be a widow
.

Mae thought of his hands. His hands had ruined her. All she wanted at that moment
was his hands upon her again. His hand on her sacrum, pulling her close. Could her
desires be so simple? And where in the hell had he gone? He had no right to disappear
like this. She checked CircleSearch again; she’d looked for him a hundred times this
way, with no success. But she had a right to know where he was. To at least know where
he was, who he was. This was the unnecessary, and antiquated, burden of uncertainty.
She could know, instantly, the temperature in Jakarta, but she couldn’t find one man
on a campus like this? Where is that man who touched you a certain way? If she could
eliminate this kind of uncertainty—when and by whom would you be touched a certain
way again—you would eliminate most of the stressors of the world, and maybe, too,
the wave of despair that was gathering in Mae’s chest. She’d been feeling this, this
black rip, this loud tear, within her, a few times a week. It didn’t usually last
long,
but when she closed her eyes she saw a tiny tear in what seemed to be black cloth,
and through this tiny tear she heard the screams of millions of invisible souls. It
was a very strange thing, she realized, and it wasn’t anything she’d mentioned to
anyone. She might have described it to Annie, but didn’t want to worry her so soon
into her time at the Circle. But what was this feeling? Who was screaming through
the tear in the cloth? She’d found the best way to get past it was to redouble her
focus, to stay busy, to give more. She had a brief, silly thought that she might find
Kalden on LuvLuv. She checked, and felt stupid when her doubts were confirmed. The
tear was opening up inside her, a blackness overtaking her. She closed her eyes and
heard underwater screams. Mae cursed the not-knowing, and knew she needed someone
who could be known. Who could be located.

The knock on the door was low and tentative.

“It’s open,” Mae said.

Francis pushed his face into the room and held the door.

“You sure?” he said.

“I invited you,” Mae said.

He slipped in and closed the door, as if narrowly escaping from a pursuer in the hallway.
He looked around the room. “Like what you’ve done with the place.”

Mae laughed.

“Let’s go to mine instead,” he said.

She thought of protesting but wanted to see what his room looked like. All the dorm
rooms varied in subtle ways, and now, because they’d become so popular and practical
that many Circlers were living
in them more or less permanently, they could be customized by their occupants. When
they arrived, she saw that his room was a mirror of her own, though with a few Francis
touches, most notably a papier-mâché mask he’d made as a child. Yellow and with enormous
bespectacled eyes, it looked out from over the bed. He saw her staring at it.

“What?” he said.

“That’s odd, don’t you think? A mask over the bed?”

“I don’t see it when I sleep,” he said. “You want something to drink?” He looked in
the fridge, finding juices and a new kind of sake in a round glass container tinted
pink.

“That looks good,” she said. “I don’t have that in my room. Mine’s in a more standard
bottle. Maybe a different brand.”

Francis mixed drinks for them both, overfilling each glass.

“I have a few shots every night,” he said. “It’s the only way to slow my head down
so I can crash. You have that problem?”

“It takes me an hour to get to sleep,” Mae said.

“Well,” Francis said, “this reduces that come-down from an hour to fifteen minutes.”

He handed her the glass. Mae looked into it, thinking it very sad at first, the sake
every night, then knew she would try it herself, tomorrow.

He was looking at something between her stomach and her elbow.

“What?”

“I can never get over your waist,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Mae said, thinking it was not worth it, it couldn’t be worth it, to be
with this man who said things like this.

“No, no!” he said, “I mean it’s so extraordinary. The line of it, how it bends in
like some kind of bow.”

And then his hands were tracing the contour of her waist, drawing a long C in the
air. “I love that you have hips and shoulders. And with that waist.” He smiled, staring
straight into Mae, as if he had no idea of the strange directness of what he’d said,
or didn’t care.

“I guess thank you,” she said.

“That’s really a compliment,” he said. “It’s like these curves were created for someone
to put their hands there.” He mimed the resting of his own palms upon her waist.

She stood, took a sip of her drink, and wondered if she should flee. But it was a
compliment. He’d given her an inappropriate, clumsy, but very direct compliment that
she knew she would never forget and that had already set her heart to a new and erratic
pounding.

“You want to watch something?” Francis asked.

Mae shrugged, still struck dumb.

Francis scrolled through the options. They had access to virtually every movie and
television show extant, and spent five minutes noting different things they could
see, then thinking of something else that was like it but better.

“Have you heard this new stuff by Hans Willis?” Francis asked.

Mae had decided to stay, and had decided that she felt good about herself around Francis.
That she had power here, and she liked that power. “No. Who’s he?”

“He’s one of the musicians-in-residence? He recorded a whole concert last week.”

“Is it out?”

“No, but if it gets good ratings from Circlers they might try to release it. Let me
see if I can find it.”

He played it, a delicate piano piece, sounding like the beginning of rain. Mae got
up to turn off the lights, allowing the grey luminescence of the monitor to remain,
casting Francis in a ghostly light.

She noticed a thick leathery book and picked it up. “What’s this? I don’t have one
of these in my room.”

“Oh that’s mine. It’s an album. Just pictures.”

“Like family pictures?” Mae asked, and then remembered his complicated history. “Sorry.
I know that’s probably not the best way to put it.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “They’re sort of family pictures. My siblings are in some of
them. But they’re mostly just me and the foster families. You want to look?”

“You keep it here at the Circle?”

He took it from Mae and sat on the bed. “No. It’s usually at home, but I brought it
in. You want to look at it? It’s mostly depressing.”

Francis had already opened the album. Mae sat next to him, and watched as he turned
the pages. She saw glimpses of Francis in modest living rooms, amber-lit, and in kitchens,
the occasional amusement park. Always the parents were blurry or cropped from the
frames. He arrived at a photo of himself sitting on a skateboard, looking out through
enormous glasses.

“Those must have been the mother’s,” he said. “Look at the frames.” He drew his finger
over the round lenses. “That’s a woman’s style, right?”

“I think so,” Mae said, staring at Francis’s younger face. He had the same open expression,
the same prominent nose, the same full lower lip. She felt her eyes filling.

“I can’t remember those frames,” he said, “I don’t know where they came from. All
I can think is that my regular glasses had broken and these were hers, and she was
letting me wear them.”

“You look cute,” Mae said, but she wanted to cry and cry.

Francis was squinting at the photo, as if hoping to glean some answers from it if
he looked long enough.

“Where was this?” Mae asked.

“No idea,” he said.

“You don’t know where you lived?”

“No clue. Even having pictures is pretty rare. Not all the foster families would give
you photos, but when they did, they made sure not to show anything that could help
you find them. No exteriors of the houses, no addresses or street signs or landmarks.”

“You’re serious?”

Francis looked at her. “That’s the foster care way.”

“Why? So you couldn’t come back or what?”

“It was just a rule. Yeah, so you couldn’t come back. If they had you a year, that
was the deal, and they didn’t want you landing back on their doorstep again—especially
when you got older. Some of the kids had some serious tendencies, so the families
had to worry about when they got older and could track them down.”

“I had no idea.”

“Yeah. It’s a weird system but it makes sense.” He drank the rest of his sake and
got up to adjust the stereo.

“Can I look?” Mae asked.

Francis shrugged. Mae paged through it, looking for any identifying imagery. But in
dozens of photos, she saw no addresses, no homes. All the photos were interiors, or
anonymous backyards.

“I bet some of them would want to hear from you,” she said.

Francis was done with the stereo, and a new song was playing, an old soul song she
couldn’t name. He sat down next to her.

“Maybe. But that’s not the agreement.”

“So you haven’t tried to contact them? I mean, with facial recognition—”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided. I mean, that’s why I brought it here. I’m scanning
the pictures tomorrow just to see. Maybe we get a few matches. But I’m not planning
to do much beyond that. Just fill in a few gaps.”

“You have a right to know at least some basics.”

Mae was leafing through the pages, and landed on a picture of a young Francis, no
more than five, with two girls, nine or ten, flanking him. Mae knew these were his
sisters, the two who had been killed, and she wanted to look at them, though she didn’t
know why. She didn’t want to coerce Francis into talking about them, and knew she
shouldn’t say anything, that she should allow him to initiate any discussion of them,
and if he didn’t, soon, she should turn the page.

He said nothing, so she turned the page, feeling a surge of feeling for him. She’d
been too tough on him before. He was here, he liked her, he wanted her with him, and
he was the saddest person she’d ever known. She could change that.

“Your pulse is going nuts,” he said.

Mae looked down at her bracelet, and saw that her heart rate was at 134.

“Let me see yours,” she said.

He rolled up his sleeve. She grabbed his wrist and turned it. His was at 128.

“You’re not so calm yourself,” she said, and left her hand resting across his lap.

“Leave your hand there and watch it get faster,” he said, and together, they did.
It was astonishing. It quickly rose to 134. She thrilled at her power, the proof of
it, right before her and measurable. He was at 136.

“Want me to try something?” she said.

“I do,” he whispered, his breath labored.

She reached down into the folds of his pants and found his penis pressing up against
his belt buckle. She rubbed its tip with her index finger, and together they watched
the numbers rise to 152.

“You’re so easy to excite,” she said. “Imagine if something were really happening.”

His eyes were closed. “Right,” he finally said, his breath labored.

“You’re enjoying this?” she asked.

“Mm-hm,” he managed.

Mae thrilled at her power over him. Watching Francis, his hands on the bed, his penis
straining against his pants, she thought of something she could say. It was corny,
and she would never say it if she thought anyone would ever know she’d said it, but
it made her smile, and she knew it would send Francis, this shy boy, over the edge.

“What
else
does that measure?” she asked, and lunged.

His eyes went wild, and he struggled with his pants, trying to remove them. But just
as he pulled them to his thighs, a sound came from his mouth, something like “Oh god”
or “I gotta,” just before he doubled over, his head jerking left and right until he
crumpled on the bed, his head to the wall. She backed away, looking at him, his shirt
hiked up, his crotch exposed. She could think only of a campfire, one small log, all
of it doused in milk.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No. I liked that,” she said.

“That was about as sudden it’s ever happened with me.” He was still breathing heavily.
And then some rogue synapse within her connected this scene to her father, to seeing
him on the couch, helpless over his body, and she wanted badly to be somewhere else.

“I should go,” she said.

“Really? Why?” he said.

“It’s after one, I should sleep.”

“Okay,” he said, in a way that she found unappealing. He seemed to want her gone as
much as she wanted to be gone.

He stood and retrieved his phone, which had been propped upright on the cabinet, facing
them.

“What, were you filming us?” she joked.

“Maybe,” he said, his tone making clear that he had.

“Wait. Seriously?”

Mae reached for the phone.

“Don’t,” he said. “It’s mine.” He shoved it into his pocket.

“It’s
yours
? What we just did is
yours
?”

“It’s just as much mine as yours. And I was the one having you know, a climax. And
why do you care? You weren’t naked or anything.”

“Francis. I can’t believe this. Delete that. Now.”

“Did you say ‘delete’?” he said, jokingly, but the meaning was clear:
We don’t delete at the Circle
. “I have to have a way to see it myself.”

“Then
everyone
can see it.”

“I won’t advertise it or anything.”

“Francis. Please.”