The Circle

parents do this thing every so often—they sort of have a couples night where they
     go on some bender? They’ve told me about it. They get stoned, drunk, go dancing, stay
     out all night. It’s on their anniversary every year. Sometimes it’s in the city, sometimes
     they go somewhere like Mexico. It’s like some all-night thing to keep them young,
     keep their marriage fresh, whatever.”
    “Okay.”
    “So I know this happened on their anniversary. I was
six years old
.”
    “So?”
    “It’s one thing if I hadn’t been born—Oh shit. So anyway. I don’t know what they were
     doing beforehand, but they show up on this surveillance camera around one a.m. They’re
     drinking a bottle of wine, and kind of dangling their feet over the water, and it
     all seems pretty innocent and boring for a while. But then this man comes into the
     frame. He’s like some kind of homeless guy, stumbling around. And my parents look
     at him, and watch him wandering around and stuff. It looks like he says something
     to them, and they sort of laugh and go back to their wine. Then nothing happens for
     a while, and the homeless guy’s out of the frame. Then about ten minutes later he’s
     back in the frame, and then he falls off the pier and into the water.”
    Mae took in a quick breath. She knew it was making this worse. “Did your parents see
     him fall?”
    Now Annie was sobbing. “That’s the problem. They totally did. It happened about three
     feet from where they were sitting. On the tape you see them get up, sort of lean over,
     yelling down into the water.You can tell they’re freaking out. Then they sort of look around, to see if there’s
     a phone or anything.”
    “And was there?”
    “I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it. They never really left the frame. That’s what’s
     so fucked up. They see this guy drop into the water and they just stay there. They
     don’t run to get help, or call the police or anything. They don’t jump in to save
     the guy. After a few minutes of freaking out, they just sit down again, and my mom
     puts her head on my dad’s shoulder, and the two of them stay there for another ten
     minutes or something, and then they get up and leave.”
    “Maybe they were in shock.”
    “Mae, they just got up and left. They never called 911 or anything. There’s no record
     of it. They never reported it. But the body was found the next day. The guy wasn’t
     even homeless. He was maybe a little mentally disabled but he lived with his parents
     and worked at a deli, washing dishes. My parents just watched him drown.”
    Now Annie was choking on her tears.
    “Have you told them about this?”
    “No. I can’t talk to them. They’re really disgusting to me right now.”
    “But it hasn’t been released yet?”
    Annie looked at the time. “It will be soon. Less than twelve hours.”
    “And Bailey said?”
    “He can’t do anything. You know him.”
    “Maybe there’s something I can do,” Mae said, having no idea what. Annie gave no sign
     she believed Mae capable of slowing or stopping the storm coming her way.
    “It’s so sick. Oh shit,” Annie said, as if the realization had just passed through
     her. “Now I don’t have parents.”
    When their time was up, Annie returned to her office, where, she said, she planned
     to lie down indefinitely, and Mae returned to her old pod. She needed to think. She
     stood in the doorway, where she’d seen Kalden watch her, and she watched the CE newbies,
     taking comfort in their honest work, their nodding heads. Their murmurs of assent
     and disapproval gave her a sense of order and rightness. The occasional Circler looked
     up to smile at her, to wave chastely at the camera, at her audience, before returning
     to the work at hand. Mae felt a surging pride in them, in the Circle, in attracting
     pure souls like this. They were open. They were truthful. They did not hide or hoard
     or obfuscate.
    There was a newbie close to her, a man of no more than twenty-two, with wild hair
     rising from his head like smoke, working with such concentration that he hadn’t noticed
     Mae standing behind him. His fingers were typing furiously, fluidly, almost silently,
     as he simultaneously answered customer queries and survey questions. “No, no, smile,
     frown,” he said, nodding with a quick and effortless pace. “Yes, yes, no, Cancun,
     deep-sea diving, upscale resort, breakaway weekend, January, January, meh, three,
     two, smile,