The Circle

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 justunder 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