The Circle Read online

  PUBLISHED BY

  ALFRED A. KNOPF

  & ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  PUBLISHED BY

  MCSWEENEY’S BOOKS

  SAN FRANCISCO

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  Copyright © 2013 by Dave Eggers

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  www.randomhouse.ca

  www.mcsweeneys.net

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  McSweeney’s and colophon are registered trademarks of McSweeney’s, a privately held company with wildly fluctuating resources.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress and from Library and Archives Canada.

  ISBN: 978-0-385-35139-3

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-35140-9

  Jacket design by Jessica Hische

  v3.1

  There wasn’t any limit, no boundary at all, to the future. And it would be so a man wouldn’t have room to store his happiness.

  JOHN STEINBECK

  East of Eden

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Book I

  Book II

  Book III

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  MY GOD, MAE thought. It’s heaven.

  The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands. On land that had once been a shipyard, then a drive-in movie theater, then a flea market, then blight, there were now soft green hills and a Calatrava fountain. And a picnic area, with tables arranged in concentric circles. And tennis courts, clay and grass. And a volleyball court, where tiny children from the company’s daycare center were running, squealing, weaving like water. Amid all this was a workplace, too, four hundred acres of brushed steel and glass on the headquarters of the most influential company in the world. The sky above was spotless and blue.

  Mae was making her way through all of this, walking from the parking lot to the main hall, trying to look as if she belonged. The walkway wound around lemon and orange trees and its quiet red cobblestones were replaced, occasionally, by tiles with imploring messages of inspiration. “Dream,” one said, the word laser-cut into the red stone. “Participate,” said another. There were dozens: “Find Community.” “Innovate.” “Imagine.” She just missed stepping on the hand of a young man in a grey jumpsuit; he was installing a new stone that said “Breathe.”

  On a sunny Monday in June, Mae stopped in front of the main door, standing below the logo etched into the glass above. Though the company was less than six years old, its name and logo—a circle surrounding a knitted grid, with a small ‘c’ in the center—were already among the best-known in the world. There were over ten thousand employees on this, the main campus, but the Circle had offices all over the globe, and was hiring hundreds of gifted young minds every week. It had been voted the world’s most admired company four years running.

  Mae wouldn’t have thought she had a chance to work at such a place, but for Annie. Annie was two years older and they’d roomed together for three semesters in college, in an ugly building made habitable through their extraordinary bond, something like friends, something like sisters or cousins who wished they were siblings and would have reason never to be apart. Their first month living together, Mae had broken her jaw one twilight, after fainting, flu-ridden and underfed, during finals. Annie had told her to stay in bed, but Mae had gone to the 7-Eleven for caffeine and woke up on the sidewalk, under a tree. Annie took her to the hospital, and waited as they wired her jaw, and then stayed with Mae, sleeping next to her, in a wooden chair, all night, and then at home, for days, had fed Mae through a straw. It was a fierce level of commitment and competence that Mae had never seen from someone her age or near her age, and Mae was thereafter loyal in a way she’d never known she could be.

  While Mae was still at Carleton, meandering between majors, from art history to marketing to psychology—getting her degree in psych with no plans to go further in the field—Annie had graduated, gotten her MBA from Stanford and was recruited everywhere, but particularly at the Circle, and had landed here days after graduation. Now she had some lofty title—Director of Ensuring the Future, Annie joked—and had urged Mae to apply for a job. Mae did so, and though Annie insisted she pulled no strings, Mae was sure that Annie had, and she felt indebted beyond all measure. A million people, a billion, wanted to be where Mae was at this moment, entering this atrium, thirty feet high and shot through with California light, on her first day working for the only company that really mattered at all.

  She pushed open the heavy door. The front hall was as long as a parade, as tall as a cathedral. There were offices everywhere above, four floors high on either side, every wall made of glass. Briefly dizzy, she looked downward, and in the immaculate glossy floor, she saw her own face reflected, looking worried. She shaped her mouth into a smile, feeling a presence behind her.

  “You must be Mae.”

  Mae turned to find a beautiful young head floating atop a scarlet scarf and white silk blouse.

  “I’m Renata,” she said.

  “Hi Renata. I’m looking for—”

  “Annie. I know. She’s on her way.” A sound, a digital droplet, came from Renata’s ear. “She’s actually …” Renata was looking at Mae but was seeing something else. Retinal interface, Mae assumed. Another innovation born here.

  “She’s in the Old West,” Renata said, focusing on Mae again, “but she’ll be here soon.”

  Mae smiled. “I hope she’s got some hardtack and a sturdy horse.”

  Renata smiled politely but did not laugh. Mae knew the company’s practice of naming each portion of the campus after an historical era; it was a way to make an enormous place less impersonal, less corporate. It beat Building 3B-East, where Mae had last worked. Her last day at the public utility in her hometown had been only three weeks ago—they’d been stupefied when she gave notice—but already it seemed impossible she’d wasted so much of her life there. Good riddance, Mae thought, to that gulag and all it represented.

  Renata was still getting signals from her earpiece. “Oh wait,” she said, “now she’s saying she’s still tied up over there.” Renata looked at Mae with a radiant smile. “Why don’t I take you to your desk? She says she’ll meet you there in an hour or so.”

  Mae thrilled a bit at those words, your desk, and immediately she thought of her dad. He was proud. So proud, he’d said on her voicemail; he must have left the message at four a.m. She’d gotten it when she’d woken up. So very proud, he’d said, choking up. Mae was two years out of college and here she was, gainfully employed by the Circle, with her own health insurance, her own apartment in the city, being no burden to her parents, who had plenty else to worry about.

  Mae followed Renata out of the atrium. On the lawn, under dappled light, a pair of young people were sitting on a manmade hill, holding some kind of clear tablet, talking with great intensity.

  “You’ll be in the Renaissance, over here,” Renata said, pointing across the lawn, to a building of glass and oxidized copper. “This is where all the Customer E
xperience people are. You’ve visited before?”

  Mae nodded. “I have. A few times, but not this building.”

  “So you’ve seen the pool, the sports area.” Renata waved her hand off toward a blue parallelogram and an angular building, the gym, rising behind it. “Over there there’s the yoga studio, crossfit, Pilates, massages, spinning. I heard you spin? Behind that there’s the bocce courts, and the new tetherball setup. The cafeteria’s just across the grass …” Renata pointed to the lush rolling green, with a handful of young people, dressed professionally and splayed about like sunbathers. “And here we are.”

  They stood before the Renaissance, another building with a forty-foot atrium, a Calder mobile turning slowly above.

  “Oh, I love Calder,” Mae said.

  Renata smiled. “I know you do.” They looked up at it together. “This one used to hang in the French parliament. Something like that.”

  The wind that had followed them in now turned the mobile such that an arm pointed to Mae, as if welcoming her personally. Renata took her elbow. “Ready? Up this way.”

  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.

  The times he would ask her to come in, when he would close his door and sit at the corner of his desk—they were excruciating. Do you know why you’re here? he would ask, like a highway cop who’d pulled her over. Other times, when he was satisfied with whatever work she’d done that day, he did something worse: he praised her. He called her his protégée. He loved the word. He introduced her to visitors this way, saying, “This is my protégée, Mae. She’s pretty sharp, most days”—and here he’d wink at her as if he were a captain and she his first mate, the two of them veterans of many raucous adventures and forever devoted to each other. “If she doesn’t get in her own way, she has a bright future ahead of her here.”

  She couldn’t stand it. Every day of that job, the eighteen months she worked there, she wondered if she could really ask Annie for a favor. She’d never been one to ask for something like that, to be rescued, to be lifted. It was a kind of neediness, pushiness—nudginess, her dad called it, something not bred into her. Her parents were quiet people who did not like to be in anyone’s way, quiet and proud people who took nothing from anyone.

  And Mae was the same, but that job bent her into something else, into someone who would do anything to leave. It was sickening, all of it. The green cinderblocks. An actual water cooler. Actual punch cards. The actual certificates of merit when someone had done something deemed special. And the hours! Actually nine to five! All of it felt like something from another time, a rightfully forgotten time, and made Mae feel that she was not only wasting her life but that this entire company was wasting life, wasting human potential and holding back the turning of the globe. The cubicle at that place, her cubicle, was the distillation of it all. The low walls around her, meant to facilitate her complete concentration on the work at hand, were lined with burlap, as if any other material might distract her, might allude to more exotic ways of spending her days. And so she’d spent eighteen months in an office where they thought, of all the materials man and nature offered, the one their staff should see, all day and every day, was burlap. A dirty sort of burlap, a less refined form of burlap. A bulk burlap, a poor man’s burlap, a budget burlap. Oh god, she thought, when she left that place she vowed never to see or touch or acknowledge the existence of that material again.