The Circle

the fence beyond, the rooftops of San Vincenzo
     hotels where visitors to the Circle stayed—they toured the company dorms. Mae had
     heard something about them, Annie mentioning that sometimes she crashed on campus
     and now preferred those rooms to her own home. Walking through the hallways, seeing
     the tidy rooms, each with a shiny kitchenette, a desk, an overstuffed couch and bed,
     Mae had to agree that the appeal was visceral.
    “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. Theserooms 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 terriblegame, 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