The Circle (15 page)

“You’re awesome, Gus!” a woman’s voice yelled from the audience.

“Thank you! Will you go out with me?” he said, and waited for an answer. When the
woman went quiet, he said, “See, this is why I need help. Now, to test this software,
I think we require an actual person who wants to find out more about an actual potential
romantic interest. Can I have a volunteer?”

Gus looked out to the audience, theatrically peering around with his hand shielding
his eyes.

“No one? Oh wait. I see a hand up.”

To Mae’s shock and horror, Gus was looking her way. More specifically, he was looking
at Francis, whose hand was raised. And before she could say anything to him, Francis
was out of his seat and headed up to the stage.

“Give this brave volunteer a round of applause!” Gus said, and Francis jogged up the
steps and was enveloped in the warm spotlight, next to Gus. He had not looked back
to Mae since he’d left her side.

“Now what is your name, sir?”

“Francis Garaventa.”

Mae thought she’d puke. What was happening? This isn’t real, she said to herself.
Was he really going to talk about her onstage? No, she assured herself. He’s just
helping a friend, and they’ll do their demonstration using fake names.

“Now Francis,” Gus continued, “am I to assume you have someone you’d like to date?”

“Yes, Gus, that is correct.”

Mae, dizzy and terrified, nonetheless couldn’t help noticing that onstage, Francis
was transformed, just as Gus had been. He was playing along, showing his teeth, acting
shy but doing so with great confidence.

“Is that person a real person?” Gus asked.

“Of course,” Francis said. “I no longer date imaginary people.” The crowd laughed
heartily, and Mae’s stomach dropped to her shoes.
Oh shit
, she thought.
Oh shit
.

“And her name?”

“Her name is Mae Holland,” Francis said, and for the first time, looked down to her.
Her face was in her hands, her eyes peeking from under her trembling fingers. With
an almost imperceptible tilt of his head, he seemed to register that Mae wasn’t entirely
comfortable with the proceedings thus far, but just as soon as he acknowledged her,
he turned back to Gus, grinning like a game-show host.

“Okay,” Gus said, typing the name into his tablet, “Mae Holland.” In the search box,
her name appeared in three-foot letters on the screen.

“So Francis wants to go out with Mae, and he doesn’t want to make an ass out of himself.
What’s one of the first things he needs to know. Anyone?”

“Allergies!” someone yelled.

“Okay, allergies. I can search for that.”

He clicked on an icon of a cat sneezing, and immediately a stanza appeared below.

Likely gluten allergy

Definite horse allergy

Mother has nut allergy

No other likely allergies

“Okay. I can click on any one of these listings and find out more. Let’s try the gluten
one.” Gus clicked on the first line, revealing a more complex and dense scroll of
links and text blocks. “Now as you can see, LuvLuv has searched everything Mae’s ever
posted. It’s collated this information and analyzed it for relevance. Maybe Mae’s
mentioned gluten. Maybe she’s bought or reviewed gluten-free products. This would
indicate she’s likely gluten-allergic.”

Mae wanted to leave the auditorium, but knew it would make more of a scene than staying.

“Now let’s look at the horse one,” Gus said, and clicked on the next listing. “Here
we can make a more definite assertion, given it’s found three instances of messages
posted that directly say, for example,
I’m allergic to horses
.”

“So does that help you?” Gus asked.

“It does,” Francis said. “I was about to take her to some stables to eat leavened
bread.” He mugged to the audience. “Now I know!”

The audience laughed, and Gus nodded, as if to say,
Aren’t we a pair?
“Okay,” Gus continued, “now notice that the mentions of the horse allergy were way
back in 2010, from Facebook of all places. For all of you who thought it was silly
of us to pay what we did for Facebook’s archives, take heed! Okay, no allergies. But
check this out, right nearby. This is what I had in mind next—food. Did you think
you might take her out to eat, Francis?”

Francis answered gamely. “Yes I did, Gus.” Mae didn’t recognize this man on stage.
Where had Francis gone? She wanted to kill this version of him.

“Okay, this is where things usually get ugly and stupid. There’s nothing worse than
the back and forth: ‘Where do you want to eat?’ ‘Oh, anything’s fine.’ ‘No, really.
What’s your preference?’ ‘Doesn’t matter to me. What’s yours?’ No more of that bull … shite.
LuvLuv breaks it down for you. Any time she’s posted, any time she’s liked or disliked
a restaurant, any time she’s
mentioned
food—it all gets ranked and sorted and I end up with a list like this.”

He clicked on the food icon, which revealed a number of subset lists, with rankings
of type of food, names of restaurants, restaurants
by city and by neighborhood. The lists were uncanny in their accuracy. They even featured
the place she and Francis had eaten earlier that week.

“Now I click on the place I like, and if she paid through TruYou, I know what she
ordered last time she ate there. Click here and see the specials for those restaurants
on Friday, when our date will happen. Here’s the average wait for a table that day.
Uncertainty eliminated.”

Gus went on and on throughout the presentation, into Mae’s preferences for films,
for outdoor spaces to walk on and jog through, to favorite sports, favorite vistas.
It was accurate, most of it, and while Gus and Francis hammed it up onstage, and the
audience grew ever-more impressed with the software, Mae had first hidden behind her
hands, then sunk to the lowest-possible place in her seat, and finally, when she felt
that any moment she’d be asked to get onstage to confirm the great power of this new
tool, she slipped out of her seat, across the aisle, out the auditorium’s side door
and into the flat white light of an overcast afternoon.

“I’m sorry.”

Mae couldn’t look at him.

“Mae. Sorry. I don’t understand why you’re so mad.”

She did not want him near her. She was back at her desk, and he’d followed her there,
standing over her like some carrion bird. She didn’t glance at him, because besides
loathing him and finding his face weak and his eyes shifty, besides being sure she’d
never need to see that wretched face again, she had work to do. The afternoon chute
had been opened and the flow was heavy. “We can talk later,” she said
to him, but she had no intention of talking to him again, that day or any day. There
was relief in that certainty.

Eventually he left, at least his corporeal self left, but he appeared in minutes,
on her third screen, pleading for forgiveness. He told her he knew he shouldn’t have
sprung it on her, but that Gus had insisted on it being a surprise. He sent forty
or fifty messages throughout the afternoon, apologizing, telling her what a big hit
she was, how it would have been even better if she’d gotten onstage, because people
were clapping for her. He assured her that everything that had been onscreen was publicly
available, none of it embarrassing, all of it culled from things she’d posted herself,
after all.

And Mae knew all this to be true. She wasn’t angry at the revelation of her allergies.
Or her favorite foods. She had openly offered this information for many years, and
she felt that offering her preferences, and reading about others’, was one of the
things she loved about her life online.

So what had so mortified her during Gus’s presentation? She couldn’t put her finger
on it. Was it only the surprise of it? Was it the pinpoint accuracy of the algorithms?
Maybe. But then again, it wasn’t entirely accurate, so was
that
the problem? Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole
you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted.
And if Francis wanted any or all of that information, why couldn’t he just
ask
her? Her third screen, though, all afternoon was filled with congratulatory messages.

You’re awesome, Mae
.

Good job, newbie
.

No horseback rides for you. Maybe a llama?

She pushed through the afternoon and didn’t notice her blinking phone till after five.
She’d missed three messages from her mother. When she listened to them, they all said
the same thing: “Come home.”

As she drove over the hills and through the tunnel, heading east, she called her mom
and got the details. Her father had had a seizure, had gone to the hospital, was asked
to spend the night for observation. Mae was told to drive directly there, but when
she arrived, he was gone. She called her mother.

“Where is he?”

“Home. Sorry. We just got here. I didn’t think you’d get out here so soon. He’s fine.”

So Mae drove home, and when she arrived, breathless and angry and scared, she saw
Mercer’s Toyota pickup in the driveway, and this sent her into a mental bramble. She
didn’t want him here. It complicated an already gory scene.

She opened the door and saw not her parents, but Mercer’s giant shapeless form. He
was standing in the foyer. Every time she saw him again after time apart she was jarred
by how big he was, how lumpy. His hair was longer now, adding to his mass. His head
blocked all light.

“Heard your car,” he said. He had a pear in his hand.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“They called me to help,” he said.

“Dad?” She rushed past Mercer and into the living room. There,
her father was resting, lengthwise, on the couch, watching baseball on the television.

He didn’t turn his head, but looked her way. “Hey hon. Heard you out there.”

Mae sat on the coffee table and held his hand. “You okay?”

“I am. Just a scare, really. It started strong but petered out.” Almost imperceptibly,
he was inching his head forward, to see around her.

“Are you trying to watch the game?”

“Ninth inning,” he said.

Mae moved out of the way. Her mother entered the room. “We called Mercer to help get
your father into the car.”

“I didn’t want the ambulance,” her father said, still watching the game.

“So was it a seizure?” Mae asked.

“They’re not sure,” Mercer said from the kitchen.

“Can I hear the answer from my own parents?” Mae called out.

“Mercer was a lifesaver,” her father said.

“Why didn’t you call me to say it wasn’t so serious?” Mae asked.

“It
was
serious,” her mother said. “That’s when I called.”

“But now he’s watching baseball.”

“It’s not as serious now,” her mother said, “but for a while there, we really didn’t
know what was happening. So we called Mercer.”

“He saved my life.”

“I don’t think Mercer saved your life, Dad.”

“I don’t mean that I was dying. But you know how I hate the whole circus with the
EMTs and the sirens, and the neighbors knowing.
We just called Mercer, he got here in five minutes, helped get me to the car, into
the hospital, and that was that. It made all the difference.”

Mae fumed. She’d driven two hours in a red panic to find her father relaxing on the
couch, watching baseball. She’d driven two hours to find her ex in her home, anointed
the hero of the family. And what was she? She was somehow negligent. She was superfluous.
It reminded her of so many of the things she didn’t like about Mercer. He liked to
be considered kind, but he made sure everyone knew it, and that drove Mae mad, always
having to hear about his kindness, his straight-upness, his reliability, his boundless
empathy. But with her he’d been diffident, moody, unavailable too many times she needed
him.

“You want some chicken? Mercer brought some,” her mother said, and Mae decided that
was a good cue to use her bathroom for a few minutes or ten.

“I’m gonna clean up,” she said, and went upstairs.

Later, after they’d all eaten, and recounted the day, explaining how her father’s
vision had diminished to an alarming state, and the numbness in his hands had worsened—symptoms
the doctors said were normal and treatable, or at least addressable—and after her
parents had gone to bed, Mae and Mercer sat in the backyard, the heat still coming
off the grass, the trees, the rain-washed grey fences that surrounded them.

“Thanks for helping,” she said.

“It was easy. Vinnie’s lighter than he used to be.”

Mae didn’t like the sound of that. She didn’t want her father to be lighter, easily
carried. She changed the subject.

“How’s business?”

“Really good. Really good. I actually had to take on an apprentice last week. Isn’t
that cool? I have an apprentice. And your job? Great?”

Mae was taken aback. Mercer was rarely so ebullient.

“It
is
great,” she said.

“Good. Good to hear. I was hoping it’d work out. So you’re doing what, programming
or something?”

“I’m in CE. Customer Experience. I deal with the advertisers right now. Wait. I saw
something about your stuff the other day. I looked you up and there was this comment
about someone getting something shipped damaged? They were so pissed. I’m assuming
you saw that.”

Mercer exhaled theatrically. “I didn’t.” His face had gone sour.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It was just some nutjob.”

“And now it’s in my head.”

“Don’t blame me. I just—”

“You just made me aware that there’s some kook out there who hates me and wants to
hurt my business.”

“There were other comments, too, and most of them were nice. There was actually one
really funny one.” She began scrolling through her phone.

“Mae. Please. I’m asking you not to read it.”

“Here it is: ‘All those poor deer antlers died for this shit?’ ”