Straw Bale Springs

Helene, a Black farmer's daughter from Georgia who now ran her own few acres up the valley, parked her truck behind The Hive at seven on a Thursday, between a Tesla and a moped. She looked at the boots on her feet, caked with actual dirt from actual soil, and decided she didn't care. She was twenty-four years old and bored enough to attend a tech demo night on purpose, which told you most of what you needed to know about her October.

She had been dating Saul for three months. He was twenty-eight, a pale, dark-haired Jewish guy from New Jersey who worked at a startup called Lariat Tech, and he was the most earnest man she had ever kissed. He wore the same four shirts in rotation and explained things in bullet points when he got excited. She liked him. She just couldn't always find the thread of him.

Her last relationship, two years back, had been with a farmhand named Trevor. Trevor was kind and patient and dull as a fence post, and after five months Helene had realized she'd rather talk to her seed catalog. She had worried for a while that she was the problem. Then she worried she was right. Maybe that's how it always looks from the inside, she thought. You can't really tell.

The building was a former tire warehouse that some developer had gutted and turned into loft space for startups. Lariat shared it with two other companies. Inside, the ceiling was high and bare, strung with lights somebody had hung crooked. The air was coffee and soldering iron and, under that, old pizza. It smelled like a dorm room with ambitions.

* * *

Saul found her by the door almost immediately. He was wearing the gray shirt, the one with the small llama stitched over the pocket, because his sister had given it to him and he claimed it was lucky. His hair was doing the thing where it looked like he'd lost an argument with a pillow.

"You came," he said, like she'd crossed an ocean.

"You said there'd be snacks."

"There are snacks. There's a whole charcuterie thing Ida ordered. I think some of the olives are still intact."

He walked her in with a hand at her back, careful not to touch her shirt. The shirt was a farm shirt, the kind with the faded print across the chest, and she had worn it deliberately. She had also considered changing her boots and deliberately not done it. Some of that was honesty. Some of it was armor.

"Helene, this is Ida. Ida, Helene."

Ida was short and sharp-eyed and wore a blazer over a hoodie, which Helene had never seen on an actual human before. She stuck out her hand with the speed of somebody who worked a room for a living.

"So good to finally meet you," Ida said. "Saul says you're involved in agriculture. We should talk, actually. We've been looking at a seed round and there's real appetite right now for sustainability plays, vertical farming, that whole space. Are you connected to any funds?"

"I grow vegetables," Helene said. "Real things. In dirt. For people to eat."

Ida blinked twice. "Ah. Not an investor, then."

"Not even slightly."

"Well," Ida said, and recovered with a smile that was mostly genuine. "Then eat the olives. They're for everyone."

She moved off toward a cluster of men in Patagonia vests, and Saul looked at Helene with something between apology and pride.

"That went fine," he said. "She does that to everybody. She once tried to pitch my dentist."

"At your dentist appointment?"

"He was already mid-cleaning. She just handed him a card."

Helene took an olive because it was there. Around them, the room filled up with people holding drinks and nodding at things on screens. Somebody had set up a robot arm that was supposed to fold napkins and was instead crumpling them one at a time with great dignity. A projector showed slides nobody was reading.

"So what is it you all actually do," Helene asked, "in words I'd use?"

Saul considered. "We write software that tells delivery trucks which farms to pick up from and in what order. So a truck doesn't drive past a farm on Monday and come back for it on Thursday."

"That's it?"

"That's it. It's a math problem wearing a suit."

"And the server room I keep hearing about? You mentioned it once and then got weird."

"I didn't get weird."

"You got weird. You did the voice. The bullet-point voice."

He laughed and steered her toward the back of the loft, past a kitchenette and a wall of whiteboards with arrows pointing at other arrows. There was a door, gray and unmarked, half hidden behind a stack of folding chairs. He opened it.

The room was small, maybe eight feet by six. Wire racks along one wall held machines with tiny lights, green and amber, blinking in no rhythm at all. There was a hum, low and steady, the kind of sound you stopped hearing after a minute and then noticed again like a tide. The air was warmer in there by several degrees. On the floor, wedged between a cable spool and the wall, sat a single beanbag chair. It was the color of an old avocado and it had been sat in enough times to hold a shape.

"This is the server room," Helene said.

"This is the server room."

"And the beanbag is..."

"Mine. Technically it belongs to whoever sits in it. That's been me for two years."

She stepped in and stood in the middle of the small warm room. The racks gave off heat like animals. One rack had a strip of tape on it with handwriting that read DO NOT REBOOT, and under that, in different ink, OR ELSE, and under that, in a third pen, or else what, coward.

"You come in here to think," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Sometimes. When the loft gets loud. It's quiet in here and it's warm and the noise is..." He searched. "Steady. Everything in there talks to everything else, and none of it gets bored of the conversation."

She sat down in the beanbag to test it. It swallowed her. From down there, the racks were towers and the blinking lights were at eye level, hundreds of them, patient and unreadable. She found she didn't want to get up right away, which surprised her.

"Okay," she said from the floor. "I get it. It's the best room in the building and it has no snacks."

"I knew you'd get it. That's why I showed you and not the napkin robot."

"Does anyone else know about this?"

"Ross, because he runs the network. And now you." He said it plainly, and then went a little pink, as if he'd said more than he meant to.

She looked up at him from inside the chair. He was backlit by the little lights, all those green and amber points scattered over him, and for a second he did not look like the same man who explained delivery routes in bullet points. She didn't have a word for it. She was a dirt farmer and she was sitting in a closet full of humming heat and it was, against all her expectations, the most interesting room she'd been in all month.

"Tell me what they're doing," she said, nodding at the racks. "Not the suit version."

So he sat down on the cable spool, which was clearly the second chair of this two-chair establishment, and started talking. She understood maybe a third of it. She listened to all of it.

He pointed at one rack and then another, and she asked questions that mostly weren't stupid. The script that ran the whole operation had stalled that afternoon, he admitted, and it was still stalled, and he'd been meaning to fix it all evening but instead he'd been at a party explaining napkin robots to strangers.

"Fix it now," Helene said. "I'll watch."

"Nobody watches. That's the point of this room."

"I'm not nobody. I'm the beanbag's owner as of ten minutes ago."

He got his laptop from his desk and came back, and she scooted over in the beanbag so he could sit beside her. There wasn't a lot of room. The beanbag had been built for one sitting person, not for a twenty-four year old farmer and a twenty-eight year old engineer shoulder to shoulder, so his shoulder pressed against hers and stayed there. Neither of them moved it. The screen threw blue light on their faces and the racks hummed the whole time, and Helene found she was leaning into him a little without deciding to.

She turned her head and kissed him because there was no other reasonable move left. He kissed back immediately, hand coming up to her jaw, and the laptop slid off his knee onto the floor with a clunk neither of them cared about.

"We're in the server room," he said against her mouth.

"I know. I own the beanbag."

They kissed for a long, warm, ridiculous while, until the laptop screen dimmed itself out of politeness. "The bug is still a bug," he said eventually, forehead against hers.

"Then fix the bug," she said. "We'll see about the rest."

He retrieved the laptop from the floor with the dignity of a man who had been kissed in a closet and was trying to act normal about it.

The bug turned out to be a timeout. A farm's pickup window was too short, and when a truck got delayed by ten minutes the script gave up and froze the whole route, like a horse refusing a fence and deciding no fences existed. She understood that part immediately, because it was what horses did.

"So it's stubborn," she said.

"That's a generous word for it. Ross calls it a coward."

"Ross sounds smart."

"Ross is smart. Ross is also asleep right now, so I'm the one sitting in a beanbag at ten p.m. on a Thursday." He typed for a while. She watched the code scroll. It looked like weather to her, patterns that meant something if you were the kind of person who read patterns. She had expected to be bored. She'd come to the demo in the first place because she was bored, and because Saul at three months of dating had settled into a predictable shape, quirky on schedule. But there was nothing scheduled about this. His voice did something different when he talked about the problem, looser, faster, like a man pulling weeds and finding the roots came up easy.

"There," he said. He widened the window and reran the script and the little progress bar on his screen went from stuck to crawling to moving. The lights on the racks blinked the same as before, but Saul watched them like they'd changed.

"Congratulations on your harvest," she said.

"Thank you. First good crop all quarter." He closed the laptop. They sat there in the warm room for another minute anyway, because the room made you want to stay. His arm was along the back edge of the beanbag, or as close to the back edge as a beanbag has, and it was behind her shoulders, and he did not make anything of it. She noticed that. Trevor had been kind and dull in a steady way, and dull men made things of nothing. Saul made nothing of it, and somehow that made more of it.

"Well," he said finally. "Truck."

"Yeah."

* * *

The next week was the one where the squash went crazy. Helene spent three days pulling vines out of the walkway paths and two more mornings at the market, and by Saturday night she was dirty in a way that felt permanent. Saul texted her around nine and asked if she was alive. She said mostly. He said he was at The Hive alone and there was pad thai and a problem he didn't want to solve alone, which meant come, if she wanted. She wanted. She parked behind The Hive at ten on a Saturday, which was a different building at night than it was on a Thursday. The loft was dark except for one corner where his monitors glowed, and the smell of coffee and solder and old pizza hung in the air like it had soaked into the walls. The pizza smell was the strongest. Somebody had abandoned a box on the counter and Saul claimed it was not his.

The pad thai was his, though. He'd ordered two boxes and had already stolen a bite out of hers when she sat down, which she decided was fair since he'd paid.

"So the problem," she said.

"Can I just say it's nice that you ask about the problem before the food."

"I've been working outside since seven in the morning. Ask me about your problem after the food."

He laughed and let her eat. She was hungrier than she'd realized, and for a while they just ate, and the building was so quiet she could hear the refrigerator in the kitchenette, and somewhere