The Circle (30 page)

“Mae. Stop. Please stop.” Mercer was staring at her, his eyes small and round. “I
don’t want to get loud here, in your parents’ home, but either you stop or I have
to walk out.”

“Just hold on a sec,” she said, and scrolled through her messages, looking for one
that she was sure would impress him. She’d seen a message come in from Dubai, and
if she found it, she knew, his resistance would fall away.

“Mae,” she heard her mother say. “Mae.”

But Mae couldn’t locate the message. Where was it? While she scrolled, she heard the
scraping of a chair. But she was so close to finding it that she didn’t look up. When
she did, she found Mercer gone and her parents staring at her.

“I think it’s nice you want to support Mercer,” her mother said, “but I just don’t
understand why you do this now. We’re trying to enjoy a nice dinner.”

Mae stared at her mother, absorbing all the disappointment and bewilderment that she
could stand, then ran outside and reached Mercer as he was backing out of the driveway.

She got into the passenger seat. “Stop.”

His eyes were dull, lifeless. He put the car in park and rested his hands in his lap,
exhaling with all the condescension he could muster.

“What the hell is your problem, Mercer?”

“Mae, I asked you to stop, and you didn’t.”

“Did I hurt your feelings?”

“No. You hurt my brain. You make me think you’re batshit crazy. I asked you to stop
and you wouldn’t.”

“I wouldn’t stop trying to help you.”

“I didn’t ask for your help. And I didn’t give you permission to post a photo of my
work.”

“Your
work
.” She heard something barbed in her voice that she knew wasn’t right or productive.

“You’re snide, Mae, and you’re mean, and you’re callous.”

“What? I’m the
opposite
of callous, Mercer. I’m trying to help you because I believe in what you do.”

“No you don’t. Mae, you’re just unable to allow anything to live inside a room. My
work exists in one room. It doesn’t exist anywhere else. And that’s how I intend it.”

“So you don’t want business?”

Mercer looked through his windshield, then leaned back. “Mae, I’ve never felt more
that there is some cult taking over the world. You
know what someone tried to sell me the other day? Actually, I bet it’s somehow affiliated
with the Circle. Have you heard of Homie? The thing where your phone scans your house
for the bar codes of every product—”

“Right. Then it orders new stuff whenever you’re getting low. It’s brilliant.”

“You think this is okay?” Mercer said. “You know how they framed it for me? It’s the
usual utopian vision. This time they were saying it’ll reduce waste. If stores know
what their customers want, then they don’t overproduce, don’t overship, don’t have
to throw stuff away when it’s not bought. I mean, like everything else you guys are
pushing, it sounds perfect, sounds progressive, but it carries with it more control,
more central tracking of everything we do.”

“Mercer, the Circle is a group of people like me. Are you saying that somehow we’re
all in a room somewhere, watching you, planning world domination?”

“No. First of all, I
know
it’s all people like you. And that’s what’s so scary.
Individually
you don’t know what you’re doing
collectively
. But secondly, don’t presume the benevolence of your leaders. For years there was
this happy time when those controlling the major internet conduits were actually decent
enough people. Or at least they weren’t predatory and vengeful. But I always worried,
what if someone was willing to use this power to punish those who challenged them?”

“What are you saying?”

“You think it’s just a coincidence that every time some congresswoman or blogger talks
about monopoly, they suddenly become ensnared in some terrible sex-porn-witchcraft
controversy? For twenty years, the internet was capable of ruining anyone in minutes,
but not
until your Three Wise Men, or at least one of them, was anyone willing to do it. You’re
saying this is news to you?”

“You’re so paranoid. Your conspiracy theory brain always depressed me, Mercer. You
sound so ignorant. And saying that Homie is some scary new thing, I mean, for a hundred
years there were milkmen who brought you milk. They knew when you needed it. There
were butchers who sold you meat, bakers who would drop off bread—”

“But the milkman wasn’t scanning my house! I mean, anything with a UPC code can be
scanned. Already, millions of people’s phones are scanning their homes and communicating
all that information out to the world.”

“And so what? You don’t want Charmin to know how much of their toilet paper you’re
using? Is Charmin oppressing you in some significant way?”

“No, Mae, it’s different. That would be easier to understand. Here, though, there
are no oppressors. No one’s forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to
these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick
up on basic human communication clues. You’re at a table with three humans, all of
whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you’re staring at a screen,
searching for strangers in Dubai.”

“You’re not so pure, Mercer. You have an email account. You have a website.”

“Here’s the thing, and it’s painful to say this to you. But you’re not very interesting
anymore. You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it
except for some numbers that won’t
exist or be remembered in a week. You’re leaving no evidence that you lived. There’s
no proof.”

“Fuck you, Mercer.”

“And worse, you’re not
doing
anything interesting anymore. You’re not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird
paradox is that you think you’re at the center of things, and that makes your opinions
more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant. I bet you haven’t done
anything offscreen in months. Have you?”

“You’re such a fucker, Mercer.”

“Do you go outside anymore?”

“You’re the interesting one, is that it? The idiot who makes chandeliers out of dead
animal parts? You’re the wonderboy of all that’s fascinating?”

“You know what I think, Mae? I think you think that sitting at your desk, frowning
and smiling somehow makes you think you’re actually living some fascinating life.
You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them. You look at pictures of
Nepal, push a smile button, and you think that’s the same as going there. I mean,
what would happen if you actually went? Your CircleJerk ratings or whatever-the-fuck
would drop below an acceptable level! Mae, do you realize how incredibly boring you’ve
become?”

For many years now, Mercer had been the human she’d loathed more than any other. This
was not new. He’d always had the unique ability to send her into apoplexy. His professorial
smugness. His antiquarian bullshit. And most of all, his baseline assumption—so wrong—that
he knew her. He knew the parts of her he liked and agreed with, and he pretended those
were her true self, her essence. He knew nothing.

But with every passing mile, as she drove home, she felt better. Better with every
mile between her and that fat fuck. The fact that she’d ever slept with him made her
physically sick. Had she been possessed by some weird demon? Her body must have been
overtaken, for those three years, by some terrible force that blinded her to his wretchedness.
He’d been fat even then, hadn’t he? What kind of guy is fat in high school? He’s talking
to
me
about sitting behind a desk when he’s forty pounds overweight? The man was upside
down.

She would not talk to him again. She knew this, and there was comfort in that. Relief
spread over her like warm water. She would never talk to him, write to him. She would
insist that her parents sever any connection to him. She planned to destroy the chandelier,
too; it would look like an accident. Maybe stage a break-in. Mae laughed to herself,
thinking of exorcizing that fat idiot from her life. That ugly, ever-sweating moose-man
would never have a say in her world again.

She saw the sign for Maiden’s Voyages and thought nothing of it. She passed the exit
and didn’t feel a thing. Seconds later, though, she was leaving the highway, and doubling
back toward the beach. It was almost ten o’clock, so she knew the shop had been closed
for hours. So what was she doing? She wasn’t reacting to Mercer’s bullshit questions
about what she was or wasn’t doing outside. She was only seeing if the place was open;
she knew it wouldn’t be, but maybe Marion was there, and maybe she’d let Mae take
one out for half an hour? She lived in the trailer next door, after all. Maybe Mae
could catch her
walking within the compound, and be able to persuade her to rent her one.

Mae parked and peered through the chain-link fence, seeing no one, only the shuttered
rental kiosk, the rows of kayaks and paddle-boards. She stood, hoping to see a silhouette
within the trailer, but there was none. The light within was dim, rose-colored, the
trailer empty.

She walked to the tiny beach and stood, watching the moonlight play on the still surface
of the bay. She sat. She didn’t want to go home, though there was no point in staying.
Her head was full of Mercer, and his giant infant’s face, and all the bullshit things
he said that night and said every night. That would be, she was certain, the last
time she tried to help him in any way. He was in her past, in
the
past, he was an antique, a dull, inanimate object she could leave in an attic.

She stood up, thinking she should go back to work on her PartiRank, when she saw something
odd. Against the far side of the fence, outside the enclosure, she saw a large object,
leaning precariously. It was either a kayak or paddleboard, and she quickly made her
way to it. It was a kayak, she realized, and it was resting on the free side of the
fence, a paddle next to it. The positioning of the kayak made little sense; she’d
never seen one standing nearly upright before, and was sure that Marion wouldn’t have
approved. Mae could only think that someone had brought a rental back after closing,
and tried to get it as close to the enclosure as possible.

Mae thought at the very least she should bring the kayak to the ground, to reduce
the chances that it would fall overnight. She did so, carefully lowering it to the
sand, surprised by how light it was.

Then she had a thought. The water was just thirty yards away, and she knew that she
could easily drag it to shore. Would it be theft to borrow a kayak that had already
been borrowed? She wasn’t lifting it over the fence, after all; she was only extending
the borrowing that someone else had extended. She would return it in an hour or two,
and no one would know the difference.

Mae put the paddle inside and dragged the kayak across the sand for a few feet, testing
the feeling of this act.
Was
it theft? Certainly Marion would understand if she knew. Marion was a free spirit,
not a rule-bound shrew, and seemed like the type of person who, in Mae’s shoes, would
do the same thing. She would not like the liability implications, but then again,
were
there such implications? How could Marion be held accountable if the kayak was taken
without her knowledge?

Now Mae was at the shore, and the bow of the kayak was wet. And then, feeling the
water under the vessel, the way the current seemed to pull the kayak out from her
and into the fuller volume of the bay, Mae knew that she would do this. The one complication
was that she wouldn’t have a life preserver. It was the one thing the borrower managed
to heave over the fence. But the water was so calm that Mae saw no possibility of
real danger if she stayed close to the shore.

Once she was out on the water, though, feeling the heavy glass under her, the quick
progress she was making, she thought she might not stay in the shallows. That this
would be the night to make it to Blue Island. Angel Island was easy, people went there
all the time, but Blue Island was strange, jagged, never visited. Mae smiled, picturing
herself there, and smiled wider, thinking of Mercer, his smug
face, surprised, upended. Mercer would be too fat to fit into a kayak, she thought,
and too lazy to make it out of the marina. A man, fast approaching thirty, making
antler chandeliers and lecturing her—who worked at the Circle!—about life paths. This
was a joke. But Mae, who was in the T2K and who was moving quickly up through the
ranks, was also brave, capable of taking a kayak in the night into the blackwater
bay, to explore an island Mercer would only view through a telescope, sitting on his
potato-sack ass, painting animal parts with silver paint.

Hers was not an itinerary rooted in any logic. She had no idea of the currents deeper
in the bay, or of the wisdom in getting so close to the tankers that used the nearby
shipping lane, especially given she would be in the dark, invisible to them. And by
the time she reached, or got close to, the island, the conditions might be too rough
for her to go back. But driven by a force within her as strong and reflexive as sleep,
she knew she would not stop until she’d made it to Blue Island, or was somehow prevented
from doing so. If the wind kept quiet and the water held steady, she would make it
there.

As she paddled beyond the sailboats and breakers, she looked south, squinting in search
of the barge where the woman and man lived, but the shapes that far away were not
clear, and anyway, they were unlikely to have lights on this late. She stayed on course,
cutting quickly beyond the anchored yachts and into the round stomach of the bay.

She heard a quick splash behind her, and turned to find the black head of a harbor
seal, not fifteen feet away. She waited for him to drop below the surface, but he
stayed, staring at her. She turned back and paddled again toward the island, and the
seal followed her for a bit, as
if also wanting to see what she wanted to see. Mae wondered, briefly, if the seal
would follow her all the way, or if he was, perhaps, on his way to the group of rocks
near the island, where many times, driving on the bridge overhead, she’d seen seals
sunning. But the next time she turned around, the animal was gone.