The knock on the door was low and tentative.
“It’s open,” Mae said.
Francis pushed his face into the room and held the door.
“You sure?” he said.
“I invited you,” Mae said.
He slipped in and closed the door, as if narrowly escaping from a pursuer in the hallway. He looked around the room. “Like what you’ve done with the place.”
Mae laughed.
“Let’s go to mine instead,” he said.
She thought of protesting but wanted to see what his room looked like. All the dorm rooms varied in subtle ways, and now, because they’d become so popular and practical that many Circlers were living in them more or less permanently, they could be customized by their occupants. When they arrived, she saw that his room was a mirror of her own, though with a few Francis touches, most notably a papier-mâché mask he’d made as a child. Yellow and with enormous bespectacled eyes, it looked out from over the bed. He saw her staring at it.
“What?” he said.
“That’s odd, don’t you think? A mask over the bed?”
“I don’t see it when I sleep,” he said. “You want something to drink?” He looked in the fridge, finding juices and a new kind of sake in a round glass container tinted pink.
“That looks good,” she said. “I don’t have that in my room. Mine’s in a more standard bottle. Maybe a different brand.”
Francis mixed drinks for them both, overfilling each glass.
“I have a few shots every night,” he said. “It’s the only way to slow my head down so I can crash. You have that problem?”
“It takes me an hour to get to sleep,” Mae said.
“Well,” Francis said, “this reduces that come-down from an hour to fifteen minutes.”
He handed her the glass. Mae looked into it, thinking it very sad at first, the sake every night, then knew she would try it herself, tomorrow.
He was looking at something between her stomach and her elbow.
“What?”
“I can never get over your waist,” he said.
“Excuse me?” Mae said, thinking it was not worth it, it couldn’t be worth it, to be with this man who said things like this.
“No, no!” he said, “I mean it’s so extraordinary. The line of it, how it bends in like some kind of bow.”
And then his hands were tracing the contour of her waist, drawing a long C in the air. “I love that you have hips and shoulders. And with that waist.” He smiled, staring straight into Mae, as if he had no idea of the strange directness of what he’d said, or didn’t care.
“I guess thank you,” she said.
“That’s really a compliment,” he said. “It’s like these curves were created for someone to put their hands there.” He mimed the resting of his own palms upon her waist.
She stood, took a sip of her drink, and wondered if she should flee. But it was a compliment. He’d given her an inappropriate, clumsy, but very direct compliment that she knew she would never forget and that had already set her heart to a new and erratic pounding.
“You want to watch something?” Francis asked.
Mae shrugged, still struck dumb.
Francis scrolled through the options. They had access to virtually every movie and television show extant, and spent five minutes noting different things they could see, then thinking of something else that was like it but better.
“Have you heard this new stuff by Hans Willis?” Francis asked.
Mae had decided to stay, and had decided that she felt good about herself around Francis. That she had power here, and she liked that power. “No. Who’s he?”
“He’s one of the musicians-in-residence? He recorded a whole concert last week.”
“Is it out?”
“No, but if it gets good ratings from Circlers they might try to release it. Let me see if I can find it.”
He played it, a delicate piano piece, sounding like the beginning of rain. Mae got up to turn off the lights, allowing the grey luminescence of the monitor to remain, casting Francis in a ghostly light.
She noticed a thick leathery book and picked it up. “What’s this? I don’t have one of these in my room.”
“Oh that’s mine. It’s an album. Just pictures.”
“Like family pictures?” Mae asked, and then remembered his complicated history. “Sorry. I know that’s probably not the best way to put it.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “They’re sort of family pictures. My siblings are in some of them. But they’re mostly just me and the foster families. You want to look?”
“You keep it here at the Circle?”
He took it from Mae and sat on the bed. “No. It’s usually at home, but I brought it in. You want to look at it? It’s mostly depressing.”
Francis had already opened the album. Mae sat next to him, and watched as he turned the pages. She saw glimpses of Francis in modest living rooms, amber-lit, and in kitchens, the occasional amusement park. Always the parents were blurry or cropped from the frames. He arrived at a photo of himself sitting on a skateboard, looking out through enormous glasses.
“Those must have been the mother’s,” he said. “Look at the frames.” He drew his finger over the round lenses. “That’s a woman’s style, right?”
“I think so,” Mae said, staring at Francis’s younger face. He had the same open expression, the same prominent nose, the same full lower lip. She felt her eyes filling.
“I can’t remember those frames,” he said, “I don’t know where they came from. All I can think is that my regular glasses had broken and these were hers, and she was letting me wear them.”
“You look cute,” Mae said, but she wanted to cry and cry.
Francis was squinting at the photo, as if hoping to glean some answers from it if he looked long enough.
“Where was this?” Mae asked.
“No idea,” he said.
“You don’t know where you lived?”
“No clue. Even having pictures is pretty rare. Not all the foster families would give you photos, but when they did, they made sure not to show anything that could help you find them. No exteriors of the houses, no addresses or street signs or landmarks.”
“You’re serious?”
Francis looked at her. “That’s the foster care way.”
“Why? So you couldn’t come back or what?”
“It was just a rule. Yeah, so you couldn’t come back. If they had you a year, that was the deal, and they didn’t want you landing back on their doorstep again—especially when you got older. Some of the kids had some serious tendencies, so the families had to worry about when they got older and could track them down.”
“I had no idea.”
“Yeah. It’s a weird system but it makes sense.” He drank the rest of his sake and got up to adjust the stereo.
“Can I look?” Mae asked.
Francis shrugged. Mae paged through it, looking for any identifying imagery. But in dozens of photos, she saw no addresses, no homes. All the photos were interiors, or anonymous backyards.
“I bet some of them would want to hear from you,” she said.
Francis was done with the stereo, and a new song was playing, an old soul song she couldn’t name. He sat down next to her.
“Maybe. But that’s not the agreement.”
“So you haven’t tried to contact them? I mean, with facial recognition—”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided. I mean, that’s why I brought it here. I’m scanning the pictures tomorrow just to see. Maybe we get a few matches. But I’m not planning to do much beyond that. Just fill in a few gaps.”
“You have a right to know at least some basics.”
Mae was leafing through the pages, and landed on a picture of a young Francis, no more than five, with two girls, nine or ten, flanking him. Mae knew these were his sisters, the two who had been killed, and she wanted to look at them, though she didn’t know why. She didn’t want to co
erce Francis into talking about them, and knew she shouldn’t say anything, that she should allow him to initiate any discussion of them, and if he didn’t, soon, she should turn the page.
He said nothing, so she turned the page, feeling a surge of feeling for him. She’d been too tough on him before. He was here, he liked her, he wanted her with him, and he was the saddest person she’d ever known. She could change that.
“Your pulse is going nuts,” he said.
Mae looked down at her bracelet, and saw that her heart rate was at 134.
“Let me see yours,” she said.
He rolled up his sleeve. She grabbed his wrist and turned it. His was at 128.
“You’re not so calm yourself,” she said, and left her hand resting across his lap.
“Leave your hand there and watch it get faster,” he said, and together, they did. It was astonishing. It quickly rose to 134. She thrilled at her power, the proof of it, right before her and measurable. He was at 136.
“Want me to try something?” she said.
“I do,” he whispered, his breath labored.
She reached down into the folds of his pants and found his penis pressing up against his belt buckle. She rubbed its tip with her index finger, and together they watched the numbers rise to 152.
“You’re so easy to excite,” she said. “Imagine if something were really happening.”
His eyes were closed. “Right,” he finally said, his breath labored.
“You’re enjoying this?” she asked.
“Mm-hm,” he managed.
Mae thrilled at her power over him. Watching Francis, his hands on the bed, his penis straining against his pants, she thought of something she could say. It was corny, and she would never say it if she thought anyone would ever know she’d said it, but it made her smile, and she knew it would send Francis, this shy boy, over the edge.
“What else does that measure?” she asked, and lunged.
His eyes went wild, and he struggled with his pants, trying to remove them. But just as he pulled them to his thighs, a sound came from his mouth, something like “Oh god” or “I gotta,” just before he doubled over, his head jerking left and right until he crumpled on the bed, his head to the wall. She backed away, looking at him, his shirt hiked up, his crotch exposed. She could think only of a campfire, one small log, all of it doused in milk.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No. I liked that,” she said.
“That was about as sudden it’s ever happened with me.” He was still breathing heavily. And then some rogue synapse within her connected this scene to her father, to seeing him on the couch, helpless over his body, and she wanted badly to be somewhere else.
“I should go,” she said.
“Really? Why?” he said.
“It’s after one, I should sleep.”
“Okay,” he said, in a way that she found unappealing. He seemed to want her gone as much as she wanted to be gone.
He stood and retrieved his phone, which had been propped upright on the cabinet, facing them.
“What, were you filming us?” she joked.
“Maybe,” he said, his tone making clear that he had.
“Wait. Seriously?”
Mae reached for the phone.
“Don’t,” he said. “It’s mine.” He shoved it into his pocket.
“It’s yours? What we just did is yours?”
“It’s just as much mine as yours. And I was the one having you know, a climax. And why do you care? You weren’t naked or anything.”
“Francis. I can’t believe this. Delete that. Now.”
“Did you say ‘delete’?” he said, jokingly, but the meaning was clear: We don’t delete at the Circle. “I have to have a way to see it myself.”
“Then everyone can see it.”
“I won’t advertise it or anything.”
“Francis. Please.”
“C’mon, Mae. You have to understand how much this means to me. I’m not some stud. This is a rare occasion for me, to have something like this happen. Can’t I keep a memento of the experience?”
“You can’t worry,” Annie said.
They were in the Great Room of the Enlightenment. In a rare occurrence, Stenton was to give the Ideas talk, with the promise of a special guest.
“But I am worrying,” Mae said. She’d been unable to concentrate in the week since her encounter with Francis. The video hadn’t been viewed by anyone else, but if it was on his phone, it was in the Circle cloud, and accessible to anyone. More than anything, she was disappointed in herself. She’d let the same man do the same thing to her, twice.
“Don’t ask me again to delete it,” Annie said, waving to a few senior Circlers in the crowd, members of the Gang of 40.
“Please delete it.”
“You know I can’t. We don’t delete here, Mae. Bailey would freak. He’d weep. It hurts him personally when anyone even considers the deleting of any information. It’s like killing babies, he says. You know that.”
“But this baby’s giving a handjob. No one wants that baby. We need to delete that baby.”
“No one will ever see it. You know that. Ninety-nine percent of the stuff in the cloud is never seen by anyone. If it even gets one view, we can talk again. Okay?” Annie put her hand on Mae’s. “Now watch this. You don’t know how rare it is to have Stenton doing the address. This must be big, and it must involve some kind of government thing. That’s his niche.”
“You don’t know what he’s about to say?”
“I have some idea,” she said.
Stenton took the stage without an introduction. The audience applauded, but in a way that was markedly different from the way they had for Bailey. Bailey was their talented uncle who had saved every one of their lives personally. Stenton was their boss, for whom they had to act professionally and clap professionally. In a flawless black suit, no tie, he walked to the center of the stage, and without introducing himself or saying hello, he began.
“As you know,” he said, “transparency is something we advocate here at the Circle. We look to a guy like Stewart as an inspiration—a man who’s willing to open up his life to further our collective knowledge. He’s been filming, recording, every moment of his life now for five years, and it’s been an invaluable asset to the Circle, and soon, I bet, to all of humankind. Stewart?”
Stenton looked out to the audience, and found Stewart, the Transparent Man, standing with what looked like a small telephoto lens around his neck. He was bald, about sixty, bending slightly, as if from the weight of the device resting on his chest. He got a warm round of applause before sitting down.
“Meanwhile,” Stenton said, “there’s another area of public life where we want and expect transparency, and that’s democracy. We’re lucky to have been born and raised in a democracy, but one that is always undergoing improvements. When I was a kid, to combat back-room political deals, for example, citizens insisted upon Sunshine Laws. These laws give citizens access to meetings, to transcripts. They could attend public hearings and petition for documents. And yet still, so long after the founding of this democracy, every day, our elected leaders still find themselves embroiled in some scandal or another, usually involving them doing something they shouldn’t be doing. Something secretive, illegal, against the will and best interests of the republic. No wonder public trust for Congress is at 11 percent.”
There was a wave of murmuring from the audience. Stenton fed off it. “Congressional approval is actually at 11 percent! And as you know, a certain senator was just revealed to be involved in some very unsavory business.”
The crowd laughed, cheered, tittered.
Mae leaned to Annie. “Wait, what senator?”
“Williamson. You didn’t hear? She got busted for all kinds of weird stuff. She’s under investigation for a half-dozen things, all kinds of ethical violations. They found everything on her computer, a hundred weird searches, downloads—some very creepy stuff.”
Mae th
ought, unwillingly, of Francis. She turned her attention back to Stenton.
“Your occupation could be dropping human feces on the heads of senior citizens,” he said, “and your job approval would be higher than 11 percent. So what can be done? What can be done to restore the people’s trust in their elected leaders? I am happy to say that there’s a woman who is taking all this very seriously, and she’s doing something to address the issue. Let me introduce Olivia Santos, representative from District 14.”
A stout woman of about fifty, wearing a red suit and a yellow floral scarf, strode from the wings, both arms waving high over her head. From the scattered and polite applause, it was clear that few in the Great Hall knew who she was.
Stenton gave her a stiff hug, and as she stood beside him, her hands clasped in front of her, he continued. “For those who need a civics refresher, Congresswoman Santos represents this very district. It’s okay if you didn’t know her. Now you do.” He turned to her. “How are you today, Congresswoman?”
“I’m fine, Tom, very fine. Very happy to be here.”
Stenton offered his version of a warm smile to her, and then turned back to the audience.
“Congresswoman Santos is here to announce what I must say is a very important development in the history of government. And that is a move toward the ultimate transparency that we’ve all sought from our elected leaders since the birth of representative democracy. Congresswoman?”
Stenton stepped back and sat behind her on a high stool. Representative Santos moved to the front of the stage, hands now entwined behind her, and swept her eyes over the room.
“That’s right, Tom. I’m as concerned as you are about the need for citizens to know what their elected leaders are doing. I mean, it is your right, is it not? It’s your right to know how they spend their days. Who they’re meeting with. Who they’re talking to. What they’re doing on the taxpayer’s dime. Until now, it’s been an ad hoc system of accountability. Senators and representatives, mayors and councilpersons, have occasionally released their schedules, and have allowed citizens varying degrees of access. But still we wonder, Why are they meeting with that former-senator-turned-lobbyist? And how did that congressman get that $150,000 the FBI found hidden in his fridge? How did that other senator arrange and carry out trysts with a series of women while his wife was undergoing cancer treatment? I mean, the array of misdeeds carried out while these officials were being paid by you, the citizenry, is not only deplorable, not only unacceptable, but also unnecessary.”