Dave Eggers: The Circle

They entered an elevator of glass, tinted faintly orange. Lights flickered on and Mae saw her name appear on the walls, along with her high school yearbook photo. WELCOME MAE HOLLAND. A sound, something like a gasp, left Mae’s throat. She hadn’t seen that photo in years, and had been happy for its absence. This must have been Annie’s doing, assaulting her with it again. The picture was indeed Mae—her wide mouth, her thin lips, her olive skin, her black hair, but in this photo, more so than in life, her high cheekbones gave her a look of severity, her brown eyes not smiling, only small and cold, ready for war. Since the photo—she was eighteen then, angry and unsure—Mae had gained much-needed weight, her face had softened and curves appeared, curves that brought the attention of men of myriad ages and motives. She’d tried, since high school, to be more open, more accepting, and seeing it here, this document of a long-ago era when she assumed the worst of the world, rattled her. Just when she couldn’t stand it anymore, the photo disappeared.

“Yeah, everything’s on sensors,” Renata said. “The elevator reads your ID, and then says hello. Annie gave us that photo. You guys must be tight if she’s got high school pictures of you. Anyway, hope you don’t mind. We do that for visitors, mostly. They’re usually impressed.”

As the elevator rose, the day’s featured activities appeared on every elevator wall, the images and text traveling from one panel to the next. With each announcement, there was video, photos, animation, music. There was a screening of Koyaanisqatsi at noon, a self-massage demonstration at one, core strengthening at three. A congressman Mae hadn’t heard of, grey-haired but young, was holding a town hall at six thirty. On the elevator door, he was talking at a podium, somewhere else, flags rippling behind him, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his hands shaped into earnest fists.

The doors opened, splitting the congressman in two.

“Here we are,” Renata said, stepping out to a narrow catwalk of steel grating. Mae looked down and felt her stomach cinch. She could see all the way to the ground floor, four stories below.

Mae attempted levity: “I guess you don’t put anyone with vertigo up here.”

Renata stopped and turned to Mae, looking gravely concerned. “Of course not. But your profile said—”

“No, no,” Mae said. “I’m fine.”

“Seriously. We can put you lower if—”

“No, no. Really. It’s perfect. Sorry. I was making a joke.”

Renata was visibly shaken. “Okay. Just let me know if anything’s not right.”

“I will.”

“You will? Because Annie would want me to make sure.”

“I will. I promise,” Mae said, and smiled at Renata, who recovered and moved on.

The catwalk reached the main floor, wide and windowed and bisected by a long hallway. On either side, the offices were fronted by floor-to-ceiling glass, the occupants visible within. Each had decorated his or her space elaborately but tastefully—one office full of sailing paraphernalia, most of it seeming airborne, hanging from the exposed beams, another arrayed with bonsai trees. They passed a small kitchen, the cabinets and shelves all glass, the cutlery magnetic, attached to the refrigerator in a tidy grid, everything illuminated by a vast hand-blown chandelier aglow with multicolored bulbs, its arms reaching out in orange and peach and pink.

“Okay, here you are.”

They stopped at a cubicle, grey and small and lined with a material like synthetic linen. Mae’s heart faltered. It was almost precisely like the cubicle she’d worked at for the last eighteen months. It was the first thing she’d seen at the Circle that hadn’t been rethought, that bore any resemblance to the past. The material lining the cubicle walls was—she couldn’t believe it, it didn’t seem possible—burlap.

Mae knew Renata was watching her, and she knew her face was betraying something like horror. Smile , she thought. Smile .

“This okay?” Renata said, her eyes darting all over Mae’s face.

Mae forced her mouth to indicate some level of satisfaction. “Great. Looks good.”

This was not what she expected.

“Okay then. I’ll leave you to get yourself acquainted with the workspace, and Denise and Josiah will be in soon to orient you and get you set up.”

Mae twisted her mouth into a smile again, and Renata turned and left. Mae sat, noting that the back of the chair was half-broken, that the chair would not move, its wheels seeming stuck, all of them. A computer had been placed on the desk, but it was an ancient model she hadn’t seen anywhere else in the building. Mae was baffled, and found her mood sinking into the same sort of abyss in which she’d spent the last few years.

Did anyone really work at a utility company anymore? How had Mae come to work there? How had she tolerated it? When people had asked where she worked, she was more inclined to lie and say she was unemployed. Would it have been any better if it hadn’t been in her hometown?

After six or so years of loathing her hometown, of cursing her parents for moving there and subjecting her to it, its limitations and scarcity of everything—diversion, restaurants, enlightened minds—Mae had recently come to remember Longfield with something like tenderness. It was a small town between Fresno and Tranquillity, incorporated and named by a literal-minded farmer in 1866. One hundred and fifty years later, its population had peaked at just under two thousand souls, most of them working in Fresno, twenty miles away. Longfield was a cheap place to live, and the parents of Mae’s friends were security guards, teachers, truckers who liked to hunt. Of Mae’s graduating class of eighty-one, she was one of twelve to go to a four-year college, and the only one to go east of Colorado. That she went so far, and went into such debt, only to come back and work at the local utility, shredded her, and her parents, though outwardly they said she was doing the right thing, taking a solid opportunity and getting started in paying down her loans.

The utility building, 3B-East, was a tragic block of cement with narrow vertical slits for windows. Inside, most of the offices were walled with cinderblock, everything painted a sickly green. It was like working in a locker room. She’d been the youngest person in the building by a decade or so, and even those in their thirties were of a different century. They marveled at her computer skills, which were basic and common to anyone she knew. But her coworkers at the utility were astounded. They called her the Black Lightning , some wilted reference to her hair, and told her she had quite a bright future at the utility if she played her cards right. In four or five years, they told her, she could be head of IT for the whole sub-station! Her exasperation was unbounded. She had not gone to college, $234,000 worth of elite liberal arts education, for a job like that. But it was work, and she needed the money. Her student loans were voracious and demanded monthly feedings, so she took the job and the paycheck and kept her eyes open for greener pastures.

Her immediate supervisor was a man named Kevin, who served as the ostensible technology officer at the utility, but who, in a strange twist, happened to know nothing about technology. He knew cables, splitters; he should have been operating a ham radio in his basement—not supervising Mae. Every day, every month, he wore the same short-sleeved button-down, the same rust-colored ties. He was an awful assault on the senses, his breath smelling of ham and his mustache furry and wayward, like two small paws emerging, southwest and southeast, from his ever-flared nostrils.

All this would have been fine, his many offenses, but for the fact that he actually believed that Mae cared. He believed that Mae, graduate of Carleton, dreamer of rare and golden dreams, cared about this job at the gas and electric utility. That she would be worried if Kevin considered her performance on any given day subpar. It drove her mad.