The Circle (34 page)

It was happening very quickly, but Mae felt this was best. If she had more time she
would only get more nervous. So she listened to Jules and Teresa, and in minutes she
was in the wings of the stage, listening to a thousand Circlers enter the auditorium,
talking and laughing
and dropping themselves into their seats with happy thumps. She wondered, briefly,
if Kalden was anywhere out there.

“Mae.”

She turned to find Eamon Bailey behind her, wearing a sky-blue shirt, smiling warmly
at her. “Are you ready?”

“I think so.”

“You’ll be great,” he said. “Don’t worry. Just be natural. We’re just re-creating
the conversation we had last week. Okay?”

“Okay.”

And then he was onstage, waving to the crowd, everyone clapping with abandon. There
were two burgundy-colored chairs on the stage, facing each other, and Bailey sat down
in one and spoke into the darkness.

“Hello, Circlers,” he said.

“Hello Eamon!” they roared back.

“Thank you for being here today, on a very special Dream Friday. I thought we’d change
it up a bit today and have not a speech, but an interview. As some of you know, we
do these from time to time to shed light on members of the Circle and their thoughts,
their hopes, and in this case, their evolutions.”

He sat in one of the chairs and smiled into the wings. “I had a conversation with
a young Circler the other day that I wanted to share with you. So I’ve asked Mae Holland,
who some of you might know as one of our newbies in Customer Experience, to join me
today. Mae?”

Mae stepped into the light. The feeling was of instant weightlessness, of floating
in black space, with two distant but bright suns blinding her. She couldn’t see anyone
in the audience, and could barely orient herself to the stage. But she managed to
direct her body,
her legs made of straw, her feet leaden, toward Bailey. She found her chair, and with
two hands, feeling numb and blind, lowered herself into it.

“Hello Mae. How are you?”

“Terrified.”

The audience laughed.

“Don’t be nervous,” Bailey said, smiling to the audience and giving her the slightest
look of concern.

“Easy for you to say,” she said, and there was laughter throughout the room. This
laughter felt good and calmed her. She breathed in, and looked in the front row, finding
five or six shadowy faces, all smiling. She was, she realized and now felt in her
bones, among friends. She was safe. She took a sip of water, felt it cool everything
inside her, and put her hands in her lap. She felt ready.

“Mae, in one word how would you describe the awakening you had this past week?”

This part they had rehearsed. She knew Bailey wanted to start with this idea of an
awakening. “It was just that, Eamon”—she’d been instructed to call him Eamon—“it was
an awakening.”

“Oops. I guess I just stole your thunder,” he said. The audience laughed. “I should
have said, ‘What did you have this week?’ But tell us, why that word?”

“Well, ‘awakening’ seems right to me …” Mae said, and then added “… now.”

The word “now” appeared a split-second later than it should have, and Bailey’s eye
twitched. “Let’s talk about this awakening,” he said. “It started on Sunday night.
Many of the people in the room already
know the broad outlines of the events, with SeeChange and all. But give us a summary.”

Mae looked at her hands, in what she realized was a theatrical gesture. She had never
before looked at her hands to indicate some level of shame.

“I committed a crime, basically,” she said. “I borrowed a kayak without the knowledge
of the owner, and I paddled to an island in the middle of the bay.”

“That was Blue Island, I understand?”

“It was.”

“And did you tell anyone you were doing this?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Now Mae, did you have the intention of telling anyone about this trip afterward?”

“No.”

“And did you document it at all? Pictures, video?”

“No, nothing.”

There were some murmurs from the audience. Mae and Eamon had expected a reaction to
this revelation, and they both paused to allow the crowd to assimilate this information.

“Did you know you were doing something wrong, in borrowing this kayak without the
owner’s knowledge?”

“I did.”

“But you did it anyway. Why?”

“Because I thought no one would know.”

Another low murmur from the audience.

“So this is an interesting point. The very fact that you thought
this action would remain secret enabled you to commit this crime, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Would you have done it had you known people were watching?”

“Definitely not.”

“So in a way, doing all this in darkness, unobserved and unaccountable, it facilitated
impulses that you regret?”

“Absolutely. The fact that I thought I was alone, unwatched, enabled me to commit
a crime. And I risked my life. I wasn’t wearing a life preserver.”

Again, a loud murmur rippled through the audience.

“So you not only committed a crime against the owner of this property, but you risked
your own life. All because you were being enabled by some, what, some cloak of invisibility?”

The audience rumbled with laughter. Bailey’s eyes stayed on Mae, telling her
Things are going well
.

“Right,” she said.

“I have a question, Mae. Do you behave better or worse when you’re being watched?”

“Better. Without a doubt.”

“When you’re alone, unwatched, unaccountable, what happens?”

“Well, for one thing, I steal kayaks.”

The audience laughed in a sudden bright burst.

“Seriously. I do things I don’t want to do. I lie.”

“The other day, when we spoke, you had a way of putting it that I thought was very
interesting and succinct. Can you tell us all what you said?”

“I said that secrets are lies.”

“Secrets are lies. It’s very memorable. Can you walk us through your logic with that
phrase, Mae?”

“Well, when there’s something kept secret, two things happen. One is that it makes
crimes possible. We behave worse when we’re not accountable. That goes without saying.
And second, secrets inspire speculation. When we don’t know what’s being hidden, we
guess, we make up answers.”

“Well that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Bailey turned to the audience. “When we can’t
reach a loved one, we speculate. We panic. We make up stories about where they are
or what’s happened to them. And if we’re feeling ungenerous, or jealous, we make up
lies. Sometimes some very damaging lies. We assume they’re doing something nefarious.
All because we don’t know something.”

“It’s like when we see two people whispering,” Mae said. “We worry, we feel insecure,
we make up terrible things they might be saying. We assume it’s about us and that
it’s catastrophic.”

“When they’re probably asking where the bathroom is.” Bailey got a big laugh and enjoyed
it.

“Right,” Mae said. She knew she was approaching a few phrases she needed to get right.
She’d said them in Bailey’s library, and she just needed to say them again the way
she’d first said them. “For example, if there’s a locked door, I start to make up
all kinds of stories about what might be behind it. I feel like it’s some kind of
secret, and it leads to me making up lies. But if all the doors are open, physically
and metaphorically, there’s only the one truth.”

Bailey smiled. She’d nailed it.

“I like that, Mae. When the doors are open, there’s only one truth. So let’s recap
that first statement of Mae’s. Can we get that on the screen?”

The words S
ECRETS
A
RE
L
IES
appeared on the screen behind Mae. Seeing the words four feet tall gave her a complicated
feeling—something between thrill and dread. Bailey was all smiles, shaking his head,
admiring the words.

“Okay, we’ve resolved that had you known that you’d be held accountable for your actions,
you wouldn’t have committed this crime. Your access to the shadows, in this case illusory
shadows, facilitates bad behavior. And when you know you’re being watched, you are
your better self. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“Now let’s talk about the second revelation you made after this episode. You mentioned
that you didn’t document this trip to Blue Island in any way. Why not?”

“Well, first of all, I knew I was doing something illegal.”

“Sure. But you’ve said that you often kayak in the bay, and you’d never documented
these trips. You hadn’t joined any Circle clubs devoted to kayaking, and you hadn’t
posted accounts, photos, video, or comments. Have you been doing these kayak trips
under the auspices of the CIA?”

Mae, and the audience, laughed. “No.”

“Then why these secret trips? You haven’t told anyone about them before or after,
you haven’t mentioned them anywhere. No accounts exist of any of these excursions,
am I right?”

“You are right.”

Mae heard loud clucks spread through the auditorium.

“What did you see on this last trip, Mae? I understand it was quite beautiful.”

“It was, Eamon. There was an almost-full moon, and the water was very calm, and I
felt like I was paddling through liquid silver.”

“Sounds incredible.”

“It was.”

“Animals? Wildlife?”

“I was followed for a while by a sole harbor seal, and he dipped above and below the
surface, as if he was curious, and also urging me on. I’d never been to this island.
Very few people have. And once I got to the island, I climbed to the top, and the
view from the peak was incredible. I saw the golden lights of the city, and the black
foothills toward the Pacific, and even saw a shooting star.”

“A shooting star! Lucky you.”

“I was very lucky.”

“But you didn’t take a picture.”

“No.”

“Not any video.”

“No.”

“So there’s no record of any of this.”

“No. Not outside my own memory.”

There were audible groans from the audience. Bailey turned to the audience, shaking
his head, indulging them.

“Okay,” he said, sounding as if he were bracing himself, “now this is where we get
into something personal. As you all know, I have a son, Gunner, who was born with
CP, cerebral palsy. Though he’s living a very full life, and we’re trying, always,
to improve his opportunities, he
is
confined to a wheelchair. He can’t walk. He can’t run. He
can’t go kayaking. So what does he do if he wants to experience something like this?
Well, he watches video. He looks at pictures. Much of his experiences of the world
come through the experiences of others. And of course so many of you Circlers have
been so generous, providing him with video and photos of your own travels. When he
experiences the SeeChange view of a Circler climbing Mount Kenya, he feels like he’s
climbed Mount Kenya. When he sees firsthand video from an America’s Cup crew member,
Gunner feels, in some way, that he’s sailed in the America’s Cup, too. These experiences
were facilitated by generous humans who have shared what they saw with the world,
my son included. And we can only extrapolate how many others there are out there like
Gunner. Maybe they’re disabled. Maybe they’re elderly, homebound. Maybe a thousand
things. But the point is that there are millions of people who can’t see what you
saw, Mae. Does it feel right to have deprived them of seeing what you saw?”

Mae’s throat was dry and she tried not to show her emotion. “It doesn’t. It feels
very wrong.” Mae thought of Bailey’s son Gunner, and thought of her own father.

“Do you think they have a right to see things like you saw?”

“I do.”

“In this short life,” Bailey said, “why shouldn’t everyone see whatever it is they
want to see? Why shouldn’t everyone have equal access to the sights of the world?
The knowledge of the world? All the experiences available in this world?”

Mae’s voice was just above a whisper. “Everyone should.”

“But this experience you had, you kept it to yourself. Which is curious, because you
do share online. You work at the Circle. Your
PartiRank is in the T2K. So why do you think this particular hobby of yours, these
extraordinary explorations, why hide these from the world?”

“I can’t quite figure out what I was thinking, to be honest,” Mae said.

The crowd murmured. Bailey nodded.

“Okay. We just talked about how we, as humans, hide what we’re ashamed of. We do something
illegal, or unethical, and we hide it from the world because we know it’s wrong. But
hiding something glorious, a wonderful trip on the water, the moonlight coming down,
a shooting star …”

“It was just selfish, Eamon. It was selfish and nothing more. The same way a child
doesn’t want to share her favorite toy. I understand that secrecy is part of, well,
an aberrant behavior system. It comes from a bad place, not a place of light and generosity.
And when you deprive your friends, or someone like your son Gunner, of experiences
like I had, you’re basically stealing from them. You’re depriving them of something
they have a right to. Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible
human experiences is a basic human right.”

Mae surprised herself with her eloquence, and the audience answered with thunderous
applause. Bailey was looking at her like a proud father. When the applause subsided,
Bailey spoke softly, as if reluctant to get in her way.

“You had a way of putting it that I’d like you to repeat.”

“Well, it’s embarrassing, but I said that sharing is caring.”

The audience laughed. Bailey smiled warmly.

“I don’t think it’s embarrassing. This expression has been around for a while, but
it applies here, doesn’t it, Mae? Maybe uniquely apropos.”

“I think it’s simple. If you care about your fellow human beings, you share what you
know with them. You share what you see. You give them anything you can. If you care
about their plight, their suffering, their curiosity, their right to learn and know
anything the world contains, you share with them. You share what you have and what
you see and what you know. To me, the logic there is undeniable.”