The Circle (53 page)

“Thank you,” Mae said.

“And your parents? They’re okay?”

“They’re fine. Thank you.”

“It must have been good to see them at the service.”

“It was,” Mae said, though they’d barely spoken then, and hadn’t spoken since.

“I know there’s still some distance between you all, but it will collapse with time.
Distance always collapses.”

Mae felt thankful for Bailey, for his strength and his calm. He was, at that moment,
her best friend, and something like a father, too. She loved her own parents, but
they were not wise like this, not strong
like this. She was thankful for Bailey, and Stenton, and especially for Francis, who
had been with her most of every day since.

“It frustrates me to see something like that happen,” Bailey continued. “It’s exasperating,
really. I know this is tangential, and I know it’s a pet issue of mine, but really:
there’d be no chance of that happening if Mercer was in a self-driving vehicle. Their
programming would have precluded this. Vehicles like the one he was driving should
frankly be illegal.”

“Right,” Mae said. “That stupid truck.”

“And not that it’s about money, but do you know how much it’ll cost to repair that
bridge? And what it already cost to clean up the whole mess down below? You put him
in a self-driving car, and there’s no option for self-destruction. The car would have
shut down. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t get on my soapbox about something so unrelated to
your grief.”

“It’s okay.”

“And there he was, alone in some cabin. Of
course
he’s going to get depressed, and work himself into a state of madness and paranoia.
When the participants arrived, I mean, that guy was far past gone. He’s up there,
alone, unreachable by the thousands, millions even, who would have helped in any way
they could if they’d known.”

Mae looked up to Bailey’s stained-glass ceiling—all those angels—thinking how much
Mercer would like to be considered a martyr. “So many people loved him,” she said.

“
So
many people. Have you seen the comments and tributes? People wanted to help. They
tried
to help.
You
did. And certainly there would have been thousands more, if he’d let them. If you
reject
humanity, if you reject all the tools available to you, all the help available to
you, then bad things will happen. You reject the technology that prevents cars from
going over cliffs, and you’ll go over a cliff—physically. You reject the help and
love of the world’s compassionate billions, and you go over a cliff—emotionally. Right?”
Bailey paused, as if to allow the two of them to soak in the apt and tidy metaphor
he’d conjured. “You reject the groups, the people, the listeners out there who want
to connect, to empathize and embrace, and disaster is imminent. Mae, this was clearly
a deeply depressed and isolated young man who was not able to survive in a world like
this, a world moving toward communion and unity. I wish I’d known him. I feel like
I did, a little bit, having watched the events of that day. But still.”

Bailey made a sound of deep frustration, a guttural sigh.

“You know, a few years ago, I had the idea that I would endeavor, in my lifetime,
to know every person on Earth. Every person, even if just a little bit. To shake their
hand or say hello. And when I had this inspiration, I really thought I could do it.
Can you feel the appeal of a notion like that?”

“Absolutely,” Mae said.

“But there are seven-odd billion people on the planet! So I did the calculations.
The best I could come up with was this: if I spent three seconds with each person,
that’s twenty people a minute. Twelve hundred an hour! Pretty good, right? But even
at that pace, after a year, I would have known only 10,512,000 people. It would take
me 665 years to meet everyone at that pace! Depressing, right?”

“It is,” Mae said. She had done a similar calculation herself. Was it enough, she
thought, to be
seen
by some fraction of those people? That counted for something.

“So we have to content ourselves with the people we do know and can know,” Bailey
said, sighing loudly again. “And content ourselves with knowing just how many people
there are. There are so many, and we have many to choose from. In your troubled Mercer,
we’ve lost one of the world’s many, many people, which reminds us of both life’s preciousness
and its abundance. Am I right?”

“You are.”

Mae’s thoughts had followed the same path. After Mercer’s death, after Annie’s collapse,
when Mae felt so alone, she felt the tear opening up in her again, larger and blacker
than ever before. But then watchers from all over the world had reached out, sending
her their support, their smiles—she’d gotten millions, tens of millions—she knew what
the tear was and how to sew it closed. The tear was not knowing. Not knowing who would
love her and for how long. The tear was the madness of not knowing—not knowing who
Kalden was, not knowing Mercer’s mind, Annie’s mind, her plans. Mercer would have
been saveable—would have been saved—if he’d made his mind known, if he’d let Mae,
and the rest of the world, in. It was not knowing that was the seed of madness, loneliness,
suspicion, fear. But there were ways to solve all this. Clarity had made her knowable
to the world, and had made her better, had brought her close, she hoped, to perfection.
Now the world would follow. Full transparency would bring full access, and there would
be no more not-knowing. Mae smiled, thinking about how simple it all was, how pure.
Bailey shared her smile.

“Now,” he said, “speaking of people we care about and don’t want to lose, I know you
visited Annie yesterday. How’s she doing? Her condition the same?”

“It’s the same. You know Annie. She’s strong.”

“She
is
strong. And she’s so important to us here. Just as you are. We’ll be with you, and
with Annie, always. I know you both know that, but I want to say it again. You’ll
never be without the Circle. Okay?”

Mae was trying not to cry. “Okay.”

“Okay then.” Bailey smiled. “Now we should go. Stenton awaits, and I think we could
all,” and here he indicated Mae and her watchers, “use some distraction. You ready?”

As they walked down the dark hallway toward the new aquarium, radiating a living blue,
Mae could see the new caretaker climbing a ladder. Stenton had hired another marine
biologist, after he’d had philosophical differences with Georgia. She’d objected to
Stenton’s experimental feedings and had refused to do what her replacement, a tall
man with a shaved head, was about to do, which was to combine all of Stenton’s Marianas
creatures into one tank, to create something closer to the real environment in which
he’d found them. It seemed like an idea so logical that Mae was glad that Georgia
had been dismissed and replaced. Who wouldn’t want all the animals in their near-native
habitat? Georgia had been timid and lacked vision, and such a person had little place
near these tanks, near Stenton or in the Circle.

“There he is,” Bailey said as they approached the tank. Stenton stepped into view
and Bailey shook his hand, and then Stenton turned to Mae.

“Mae, so good to see you again,” he said, taking both her hands in
his. He was in an ebullient mood, but his mouth frowned, briefly, in deference to
Mae’s recent loss. She smiled shyly, then raised her eyes. She wanted him to know
that she was fine, she was ready. He nodded, stepped back and turned to the tank.
For the occasion, Stenton had built a far larger tank, and filled it with a gorgeous
array of live coral and seaweed, the colors symphonic under the bright aquarium light.
There were lavender anemones, and bubble corals in green and yellow, the strange white
spheres of sea sponges. The water was calm but a slight current swayed the violet
vegetation, pinched between nooks of the honeycomb coral.

“Beautiful. Just beautiful,” Bailey said.

Bailey and Stenton and Mae stood, her camera trained on the tank, allowing her watchers
a deep look into the rich underwater tableau.

“And soon it will be complete,” Stenton said.

At that moment, Mae felt a presence near her, a hot breath on the back of her neck,
passing left to right.

“Oh, there he is,” Bailey said. “I don’t think you’ve met Ty yet, have you, Mae?”

She turned to find Kalden, standing with Bailey and Stenton, smiling at her, holding
out his hand. He was wearing a wool cap and an oversized hoodie. But it was unmistakably
Kalden. Before she could suppress it, she’d let out a gasp.

He smiled, and she knew, immediately, that it would seem natural to her watchers,
and to the Wise Men, that she would gasp in the presence of Ty. She looked down and
realized she was already shaking his hand. She couldn’t breathe.

She looked up to see Bailey and Stenton grinning. They assumed she was in thrall of
the creator of all this, the mysterious young man
behind the Circle. She looked back to Kalden, looking for some explanation, but his
smile didn’t change. His eyes remained perfectly opaque.

“So good to meet you, Mae,” he said. He said it shyly, almost mumbling, but he knew
what he was doing. He knew what the audience expected from Ty.

“Good to meet you, too,” Mae said.

Now her brain splintered. What the fuck was happening? She scanned his face again,
seeing, under his wool cap, a few of his gray hairs. Only she knew they existed. Actually,
did Bailey and Stenton know that he’d aged so dramatically? That he was masquerading
as someone else, as a nobody named Kalden? It occurred to her that they had to know.
Of course they did. That’s why he appeared on video feeds—probably pre-taped long
ago. They were perpetuating all of this, helping him disappear.

She was still holding his hand. She pulled away.

“It should have happened sooner,” he said. “I apologize for that.” And now he spoke
into Mae’s lens, giving a perfectly natural performance for the watchers. “I’ve been
working on some new projects, lots of very cool things, so I’ve been less social than
I should have been.”

Instantly Mae’s watcher numbers rose, from just over thirty million to thirty-two,
and climbing quickly.

“Been a while since all three of us were in one place!” Bailey said. Mae’s heart was
frantic. She’d been sleeping with Ty. What did that mean? And Ty, not Kalden, was
warning her about Completion? How was that possible? What did
that
mean?

“What are we about to see?” Kalden asked, nodding to the water. “I think I know, but
I’m anxious to see it happen.”

“Okay,” Bailey said, clapping his hands and wringing them in anticipation. He turned
to Mae, and Mae turned her lens to him. “Because he’d get too technical, my friend
Stenton here has asked me to explain. As you all know, he brought back some incredible
creatures from the unmapped depths of the Marianas Trench. You all have seen some
of them, in particular the octopus, and the seahorse and his progeny, and most dramatically,
the shark.”

Word was getting out that the Three Wise Men were together and on camera, and Mae’s
watchers hit forty million. She turned to the three men, and saw, on her wrist, she’d
captured a dramatic picture of their three profiles as they all looked to the glass,
their faces bathed in blue light, their eyes reflecting the irrational life within.
Her watchers, she noticed, were at fifty-one million. She caught the eye of Stenton,
who, with an almost imperceptible tilt of his head, made clear that Mae should turn
her lens back to the aquarium. She did, her eyes straining to catch Kalden in some
acknowledgement. He stared into the water, giving away nothing. Bailey continued.

“Until now, our three stars have been kept in separate tanks as they’ve acclimated
to their lives here at the Circle. But this has been an artificial separation, of
course. They belong together, as they were in the sea where they were found. So we’re
about to see the three reunited here, so they can co-exist and create a more natural
picture of life in the deep.”

On the other side of the tank, Mae could now see the caretaker climbing the red ladder,
holding a large plastic bag, heavy with water and tiny passengers. Mae was trying
to slow her breathing but couldn’t. She felt like she’d throw up. She thought about
running off, somewhere very far away. Run with Annie. Where was Annie?

She saw Stenton staring at her, his eyes concerned, and also stern, telling her to
get herself together. She tried to breathe, tried to concentrate on the proceedings.
She would have time after all this, she told herself, to untangle this chaos of Kalden
and Ty. She would have time. Her heart slowed.

“Victor,” Bailey said, “as you might be able to see, is carrying our most delicate
cargo, the seahorse, and of course his many progeny. As you’ll notice, the seahorses
are being brought into the new tank in a baggie, much as you would bring home a goldfish
from the county fair. This has proven to be the best way to transfer delicate creatures
like this. There are no hard surfaces to bump against, and the plastic is far lighter
than lucite or any hard surface would be.”

The caretaker was now at the top of the ladder, and, after a quick visual confirmation
from Stenton, carefully lowered the bag into the water, so it rested on the surface.
The seahorses, passive as always, were reclining near the bottom of the bag, showing
no sign that they knew anything—that they were in a bag, that they were being transferred,
that they were alive. They barely moved, and offered no protestation.

Mae checked her counter. The watchers were at sixty-two million. Bailey indicated
that they would wait a few moments till the water temperatures of the bag and the
tank might be aligned, and Mae took the opportunity to turn back to Kalden. She tried
to catch his eye, but he chose not take his eyes away from the aquarium. He stared
into it, smiling benignly at the seahorses, as if looking at his own children.

At the back of the tank, Victor was again climbing the red ladder. “Well, this is
very exciting,” Bailey said. “Now we see the octopus
being carried up. He needs a bigger container, but not proportionately bigger. He
can fit himself into a lunchbox if he wanted to—he has no spine, no bones at all.
He is malleable and infinitely adaptable.”