Dave Eggers: The Circle

“There are 180 rooms now, but we’re growing quickly,” Josiah said. “With ten thousand or so people on campus, there’s always a percentage of people who work late, or just need a nap during the day. These rooms are always free, always clean—you just have to check online to see which ones are available. Right now they book up fast, but the plan is to have at least a few thousand rooms within the next few years.”

“And after a party like tonight’s, these are always full,” Denise said, with what she meant to be a conspiratorial wink.

The tour continued through the afternoon, with stops to sample food at the culinary class, taught that day by a celebrated young chef known for using the whole of any animal. She presented Mae with a dish called roasted pigface, which Mae ate and discovered tasted like a more fatty bacon; she liked it very much. They passed other visitors as they toured the campus, groups of college students, and packs of vendors, and what appeared to be a senator and his handlers. They passed an arcade stocked with vintage pinball machines and an indoor badminton court, where, Annie said, a former world champion was kept on retainer. By the time Josiah and Denise had brought her back around to the center of the campus, the light was dimming, and staffers were installing tiki torches in the grass and lighting them. A few thousand Circlers began to gather in the twilight, and standing among them, Mae knew that she never wanted to work—never wanted to be—anywhere else. Her hometown, and the rest of California, the rest of America, seemed like some chaotic mess in the developing world. Outside the walls of the Circle, all was noise and struggle, failure and filth. But here, all had been perfected. The best people had made the best systems and the best systems had reaped funds, unlimited funds, that made possible this, the best place to work. And it was natural that it was so, Mae thought. Who else but utopians could make utopia?

“This party? This is nothing,” Annie assured Mae, as they shuffled down the forty-foot buffet. It was dark now, the night air cooling, but the campus was inexplicably warm, and illuminated by hundreds of torches bursting with amber light. “This one’s Bailey’s idea. Not like he’s some Earth Mother, but he gets into the stars, the seasons, so the solstice stuff is his. He’ll appear at some point and welcome everyone—usually he does at least. Last year he was in some kind of tanktop. He’s very proud of his arms.”

Mae and Annie were on the lush lawn, loading their plates and then finding seats in the stone amphitheater built into a high grassy berm. Annie was refilling Mae’s glass from a bottle of Riesling that, she said, was made on campus, some kind of new concoction that had fewer calories and more alcohol. Mae looked across the lawn, at the hissing torches arrayed in rows, each row leading revelers to various activities—limbo, kickball, the Electric Slide—none of them related in any way to the solstice. The seeming randomness, the lack of any enforced schedule, made for a party that set low expectations and far exceeded them. Everyone was quickly blitzed, and soon Mae lost Annie, and then got lost entirely, eventually finding her way to the bocce courts, which were being used by a small group of older Circlers, all of them at least thirty, to roll cantaloupes into bowling pins. She made her way back to the lawn, where she joined a game the Circlers were calling “Ha,” which seemed to involve nothing more than lying down, with legs or arms or both overlapping. Whenever the person next to you said “Ha” you had to say it, too. It was a terrible game, but for the time being, Mae needed it, because her head was spinning, and she felt better horizontal.

“Look at this one. She looks so peaceful.” It was a voice close by. Mae realized the voice, a man’s, was referring to her, and she opened her eyes. She saw no one above her. Only sky, which was mostly clear, with wisps of grey clouds moving swiftly across the campus and heading out to sea. Mae’s eyes felt heavy, and she knew it was not late, not past ten anyway, and she didn’t want to do what she often did, which was fall asleep after two or three drinks, so she got up and went looking for Annie or more Riesling or both. She found the buffet, and found it in shambles, a feast raided by animals or Vikings, and made her way to the nearest bar, which was out of Riesling and was now offering only some kind of vodka-and-energy drink concoction. She moved on, asking random passersby about Riesling, until she felt a shadow pass before her.

“There’s more over here,” the shadow said.

Mae turned to find a pair of glasses reflecting blue, sitting atop the vague shape of a man. He turned to walk away.

“Am I following you?” Mae asked.

“Not yet. You’re standing still. But you should if you want more of that wine.”

She followed the shadow across the lawn and under a canopy of high trees, the moonlight shooting through, a hundred silver spears. Now Mae could see the shadow better—he was wearing a sand-colored T-shirt and some kind of vest, leather or suede, over it—a combination Mae hadn’t seen in some time. Then he stopped and was crouching down near the bottom of a waterfall, a manmade waterfall coming down the side of the Industrial Revolution.

“I hid a few bottles here,” he said, his hands deep in the pool that received the falling water. Not finding anything, he kneeled down, his arms submerged to the shoulder, until he retrieved two sleek green bottles, stood up and turned to her. Finally she got a good look at him. His face was a soft triangle, concluding in a chin so subtly dimpled she hadn’t seen it before that moment. He had the skin of a child, the eyes of a much older man and a prominent nose, crooked and bent but somehow giving stability to the rest of his face, like the keel of a yacht. His eyebrows were heavy dashes rushing away, toward his ears, which were rounded, large, princess-pink. “You want to go back to the game or…?” He seemed to be implying that the “or” could be far better.

“Sure,” she said, realizing that she didn’t know this person, knew nothing about him. But because he had those bottles, and because she’d lost Annie, and because she trusted everyone within these Circle walls—she had at that moment so much love for everyone within those walls, where everything was new and everything allowed—she followed him back to the party, to the outskirts of it anyway, where they sat on a high ring of steps overlooking the lawn, and watched the silhouettes run and squeal and fall below.

He opened both bottles, gave one to Mae, took a sip from his, and said his name was Francis.

“Not Frank?” she asked. She took the bottle and filled her mouth with the candysweet wine.

“People try to call me that and I… I ask them not to.”

She laughed, and he laughed.

He was a developer, he said, and had been at the company for almost two years. Before that he’d been a kind of anarchist, a provocateur. He’d gotten the job here by hacking further into the Circle system than anyone else. Now he was on the security team.

“This is my first day,” Mae noted.

“No way.”

And then Mae, who intended to say “I shit you not,” instead decided to innovate, but something got garbled during her verbal innovation, and she uttered the words “I fuck you not,” knowing almost instantly that she would remember these words, and hate herself for them, for decades to come.

“You fuck me not?” he asked, deadpan. “That sounds very conclusive. You’ve made a decision with very little information. You fuck me not. Wow.”

Mae tried to explain what she meant to say, how she thought, or some department of her brain thought, that she would turn the phrase around a bit… But it didn’t matter. He was laughing now, and he knew she had a sense of humor, and she knew he did, too, and somehow he made her feel safe, made her trust that he would never bring it up again, that this terrible thing she said would remain between them, that they both understood mistakes are made by all and that they should, if everyone is acknowledging our common humanity, our common frailty and propensity for sounding and looking ridiculous a thousand times a day, that these mistakes should be allowed to be forgotten.