The Circle

older
     man? A much older man? It’s musty. Like a wet cardboard box. You like that?”
    “Please.”
    Annie was entertaining herself, and so continued: “I guess there’s comfort there,
     knowing he can cash in his 401(k). And he must be so grateful for any affection at
     all.… Oh shit. I’m at the airport. I’ll call you back.”
    Annie didn’t call back, but texted from the plane and later from Mexico City, sending
     Mae pictures of various old men she saw on the street.
Is this him? This one? That one? Ése? Ése?
    Mae was left to wonder about all of this. How did she not know Kalden’s last name?
     She did a preliminary search in the company directory, and found no Kaldens. She tried
     Kaldan, Kaldin, Khalden. Nothing. Maybe she’d misspelled or misheard it? She could
     have done a more surgical search if she’d known what department he was in, what part
     of campus he might occupy, but she knew nothing.
    Still, she could think of little else. His white V-neck, his sad eyes that tried not
     to seem sad, his skinny grey pants that might have been stylish or horrible, she couldn’t
     decide in the dark, the way he held her at the end of the night, when they’d walked
     to where the helicopters landed, hoping to see one, and then, seeing none, they walked
     back to the lemon grove, and there he said he would have to go, and could she walk
     to the shuttle from there. He pointed to the row of them, not two hundred yards off,
     and she smiled and said she could handle it. Then he’d brought her to him, so suddenly,
     too suddenly for her to know if he planned a kiss or grope or what. What he did was
     a flattening of her shape against his, with his right arm crossingher back, his hand atop her shoulder, and his left hand far lower, bolder, resting
     on her sacrum, his fingers fanning down.
    Then he pulled away and smiled.
    “You sure you’re okay?”
    “I am.”
    “You’re not scared?”
    She laughed. “No. I’m not scared.”
    “Okay. Good night.”
    And he turned and walked in a new direction, not toward the shuttles or the helicopters
     or the circus, but through a narrow shadowed path, alone.
    All week she thought of his retreating form, and his strong hands reaching, and she
     looked at the big green lemon he’d picked, which she’d retrieved and thought, wrongly,
     would have ripened on her desk if given the time. It stayed green.
    But she couldn’t get hold of him. She put out a few all-company zings, looking for
     a Kalden, careful not to look desperate. But she got no response.
    She knew Annie could figure it out, but Annie was now in Peru. The company was in
     some moderately hot water over their plans in the Amazon—something involving drones
     to count and photograph every remaining tree. Between meetings with members of various
     environmental and regulatory officials, Annie finally called back. “Let me do a facial
     rec on him. Send me a photo.”
    But Mae had no photos of him.
    “You’re kidding. Nothing?”
    “It was dark. It was a circus.”
    “You said that. So he gave you a green lemon and no photos. Are you sure he wasn’t
     just visiting?”
    “But I met him before, remember? Near the bathroom? And then he came back to my desk
     and watched me work.”
    “Wow, Mae. This guy sounds like a winner. Green lemons and heavy breathing over your
     shoulder while you answer customer queries. If I were being the slightest bit paranoid,
     I’d think he was an infiltrator of some kind, or a low-grade molester.” Annie had
     to hang up, but then, an hour later, texted.
You have to keep me posted on this guy. Getting increasingly unsettled. We’ve had
     some weird stalker people over the years. Last year we had a guy, some kind of blogger,
     who attended a party and stayed on campus for two weeks, skulking around and sleeping
     in storage rooms. He turned out to be relatively harmless, but you can see how some
     Unidentified Freaky Man would be cause for concern
.
    But Mae wasn’t concerned. She trusted Kalden, and couldn’t believe he had any nefarious
     intentions. His face had an openness, an unmistakable lack of guile—Mae couldn’t quite
     explain it to Annie, but she had no doubts about him. She knew, though, that he was
     not reliable as a communicator, but she knew, also, she was sure of it, that he would
     contact her again. And though being unable to reach anyone else in her life would
     have been grating, exasperating, having him out there, at least for a