The Circle

by Dave Eggers

  “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.”

  Soon both containers, those housing the octopus and the seahorses, were bobbing gently on the neon surface. The octopus seemed aware, to some degree, that there was a far bigger home beneath him, and was pressing itself against the base of his temporary home.

  Mae saw Victor point to the seahorses and give a quick nod to Bailey and Stenton. “Okay,” Bailey said. “It looks like it’s time to release our seahorse friends into their new habitat. Now I expect this to be quite beautiful. Go ahead, Victor, when you’re ready.” And when Victor released them, it was quite beautiful. The seahorses, translucent but tinted just so, as if gilded only slightly, fell into the tank, drifting down like a slow rain of golden question marks.

  “Wow,” Bailey said. “Look at that.”

  And finally the father of them all, looking tentative, fell from the bag and into the tank. Unlike his children, who were spread out, directionless, he maneuvered himself, determinedly, down to the bottom of the tank and quickly hid himself amid the coral and vegetation. In seconds he was invisible.

  “Wow,” Bailey said. “That is one shy fish.”

  The babies, though, continued to float downward, and to swim in the middle of the tank, few of them anxious to go anywhere in particular.

  “We’re ready?” Bailey asked, looking up to Victor. “Well this is moving right along! It seems we’re ready for the octopus now.” Victor opened the bottom of the bag, splitting it, and the octopus instantly spread itself up like a welcoming hand. As it had done when alone, it traced the contours of the glass, feeling the coral, the seaweed, always gentle, wanting to know all, touch all.

  “Look at that. Ravishing,” Bailey said. “What a stunning creature. He must have something like a brain in that giant balloon of his, right?” And here Bailey turned to Stenton, asking for an answer, but Stenton chose to consider the question rhetorical. The slightest smile overtook the corner of his mouth, but he did not turn away from the scene before him.

  The octopus flowered and grew, and flew from one side of the tank to the other, barely touching the seahorses or any other living thing, only looking at them, only wanting to know them, and as he touched and measured everything within the tank, Mae saw movement again on the red ladder.<
br />
  “Now we have Victor and his helper bringing the real attraction,” Bailey said, watching the first caretaker, now joined by a second, also in white, who was manning some kind of forklift. The cargo was a large lucite box, and inside its temporary home, the shark thrashed a few times, its tail whipping left and right, but was far calmer than Mae had seen it before.

  From the top of the ladder, Victor arranged the lucite box on the surface of the water, and when Mae expected the octopus and seahorses to flee for cover, the shark went absolutely still.

  “Well, look at that,” Bailey marveled.

  The watchers spiked again, now to seventy-five million, and climbed frenetically, half a million every few seconds.

  Below, the octopus seemed oblivious to the shark and the possibility of it joining them in the aquarium. The shark was utterly frozen in place, perhaps negating the tank’s occupants’ ability to sense him. Meanwhile, Victor and his assistant had descended the ladder and Victor was returning with a large bucket.

  “As you can see now,” Bailey said, “the first thing Victor is doing is dropping some of our shark’s favorite food into the tank. This will keep him distracted and satisfied, and allow his new neighbors to get acclimated. Victor has been feeding the shark all day, so it should be well-satisfied already. But these tuna will serve as breakfast, lunch and dinner, in case he’s still hungry.”

  And so Victor dropped six large tuna, each ten pounds or more, into the tank, where they quickly explored their environs. “There’s less need to slowly acclimate these guys to the tank,” Bailey said. “They’ll be food pretty soon, so their happiness is less important than the shark’s. Ah, look at them go.” The tuna were shooting across the tank in diagonals, and their sudden presence chased the octopus and seahorse into the coral and fronds at the bottom of the aquarium. Soon though, the tuna became less frantic, and settled into an easy commute around the tank. At the bottom, the father seahorse was still invisible, but his many children could be seen, their tails wrapped around fronds and the tentacles of various anemones. It was a peaceful scene, and Mae found herself temporarily lost in it.