The Confocal Compromise

Ambrose checks the hygrometer for the fourth time in ten minutes. Eighty-two percent. Still fine. He nudges the dial anyway, because touching things makes him feel useful.

"Humid enough for you, ladies?" he mutters at the shelves. Nine trays of tempeh sit there in their little perforated bags, white fuzz creeping across the soybeans like slow frost. His babies. Four months of work since Deirdre left him, and honestly the fungus has been better company.

There is a sticky note on his desk upstairs. Yellow. Mabel's handwriting, which looks like a typewriter had a fight with a spider. It says: YOUR INCUBATOR FAN WAS AUDIBLY RUNNING DURING A CLIENT CALL. PLEASE ADVISE.

"Please advise," Ambrose says to the room. "Please advise. Forty-two years old and she still writes notes like a middle manager from 1987."

The room hums back at him. Climate control does that, steady and warm, a kind of white noise that Ambrose has come to love. The whole place smells faintly nutty, like toasted grain, which is exactly what fermenting soybeans should smell like, thank you very much. His tempeh is legitimate R&D. He has a folder. He has slides. He has, if he's honest, a small chip on his shoulder that is as large as a dinner plate.

The door bangs open.

Mabel. Forty-two, pencil in her hair, blazer already coming off one shoulder because she's been running around the building all afternoon. She looks as though she has been losing arguments with spreadsheets.

"You," she says.

"Me," Ambrose agrees. He keeps adjusting the dial. Very calm. Extremely calm. "Something wrong?"

"Do you know what happened today?" She comes in and stands in front of the trays like a bouncer. "The salmon farm. The feed barge. Its thruster failed. Do you know what that does to my quarterly forecast?"

"Slows the boat?"

"Ambrose." She says his name the way other people say words like audit. "It tanks it. It completely tanks it. I had the number. I had the bet won. And now I'm going to spend the rest of the quarter explaining to men in gray sweaters why a fish barge is floating sideways in a Norwegian fjord."

"That does sound bad," Ambrose says. "Genuinely. But I fail to see what that has to do with my fungus."

"Your fungus!" She flings a hand at the shelves. "This is what I'm talking about! This is the distraction! You're supposed to be doing procurement data for the aquaculture account, which, need I remind you, is MY account, and instead you're up here playing mad scientist with a bag of beans."

"They are not just beans." Now he's defensive and he knows it and he doesn't care. "This is applied fermentation research. It's legitimate R&D. I have a proposal drafted. There could be a whole product line. Alternative protein, Mabel. It's a growth market."

"A growth market. You know what else grows? My blood pressure, every time I walk past this room."

The incubator fan cycles on. It is, admittedly, loud. Mabel points at it like a lawyer resting her case.

"There. Do you hear that? That's the fan that interrupted my client call. I got a note. From the client. About your fan."

"I know about the note," Ambrose says. "I found it. It was very yellow."

"It was professionally worded."

"It said please advise, Mabel. Please advise. Who says please advise to a coworker about a fan?"

"Someone with boundaries." She paces a step, turns, paces back. The room is warm and it's getting to her; there's a damp curl sticking to her forehead and she doesn't seem to know it's there. "You know what else I found? While I was doing the audit trail for my forecast, which is now a disaster, by the way? I found the equipment log. Confocal microscope. Booked out. By you. Three nights last week."

Ah. Ambrose keeps his face very still.

"That," he says, "was research."

"You don't even have microscope clearance."

"I have adjacent clearance. It's practically the same clearance."

"You borrowed the confocal," Mabel says, slowly, like she's savoring each word, "to take pictures of your spores."

"They're not spores exactly, they're more like..."

"You took pictures. Of your bean fuzz. On a machine that costs more than both our cars. At eleven p.m. On a Thursday."

"They were beautiful pictures," Ambrose says, with some dignity.

Mabel makes a sound. Not a laugh. Not quite a scream. Something between the two that she probably practices in the mirror. She stalks over to the microscope, which does indeed live in this room, squeezed between a shelf of trays and a rack of sample tubes, because the startup is small and space is money.

"This," she says, patting it, "is for client deliverables. This is for billable hours. Which, in case you've forgotten, is what our entire bet is about. Twenty-five euros and eternal bragging rights. And you're over here doing hobby photography with the company's most expensive toy while my forecast drowns in a fjord."

"The fjord is not my fault."

"The distraction is. Four months ago you were fine. Four months ago you were a normal procurement analyst with a normal desk and a normal life and now, what, you had a breakup and grew a fungus about it?"

That lands harder than she probably means it to. Ambrose feels it in his chest, that old sore spot, Deirdre, the apartment, the boxes still in the hallway.

"Well," he says. "That's one theory."

"I didn't mean..." Mabel stops. Recalibrates. Accountants are quick at that. "I meant the distraction is the problem. Not the, you know. Cause of the distraction."

"The breakup."

"The bean thing," she says, at the same time, and then they're both just standing there in the humid hum, and the word breakup is sitting in the air between them like something nobody wants to touch.

Ambrose turns back to the trays. Runs a thumb along the edge of one bag. The mycelium is knit tight and even. Genuinely good work, for a procurement analyst.

"Deirdre left in March," he says, because apparently his mouth has decided to have this conversation without him. "It's July. I'm allowed a hobby."

"You're allowed a hobby. You're not allowed my microscope."

"It's the company's microscope."

"You know what I mean."

"I know exactly what you mean," Ambrose says, turning around. "You mean the bet matters more to you than anything else in this building, including me, which, fine, great, very consistent of you after fifteen years."

"Fifteen years of what?" Mabel's voice goes up. "Fifteen years of you hiding snack food in my filing drawers?"

"Fifteen years of you putting passive-aggressive notes on my monitor."

"Those are reminders."

"They are not reminders, Mabel, nobody gets a reminder about the smell of their own lunch."

She opens her mouth. Closes it. The fan cycles off and the room goes briefly, weirdly quiet, just the drip of condensation somewhere behind the shelving. It's hot in here. Really hot, when you stop and notice it. Both of them are flushed. Ambrose has sweat at his temples. Mabel has given up on the blazer entirely; it hangs off her elbow like she's forgotten she's wearing it.

"Your room is a sauna," she says.

"It's climate controlled."

"It's a sauna with beans in it." She wipes her forehead with the back of her wrist. "Why do you even like it in here?"

Ambrose considers the question. The hum, the warmth, the nutty smell, the little white cakes quietly becoming something better than they started out. Everything in here is patient and slow and turns out fine if you just leave it alone long enough.

"It's quiet," he says. "Nobody bothers me in here."

"Except you're bothered constantly, apparently. By my notes."

"By your notes, yes."

"Then this is the last time." She plants her feet. "You tell me, right now, why your bean project deserves one square meter of this company's floor space, and you make it good, because I have a quarterly forecast to resurrect and a bet to win and I am not in the mood."

Ambrose looks at her. Sweaty, furious, blazer half off, pencil sliding out of her hair. She looks, he thinks, exactly like she did at twenty-seven when she beat him on the Henderson account and grinned about it for a year. Not much has changed. Just the heat.

"Fine," he says. "Sit down. This may take a while."

"There's nowhere to sit."

"There's an equipment crate."

"I'm not sitting on your bean crate, Ambrose."

"Then stand," he says, and pulls the slide folder off the shelf, "and advise."

Mabel doesn't sit. Of course she doesn't sit. Instead she snatches a petri dish off the bench beside the microscope and holds it up like evidence at a trial.

"This," she says, squinting at the label, "says 'batch four, do not open.' This is mislabeled. This is mislabeled on purpose, because you know I read labels."

"That's batch three."

"Same thing." And she hurls it at the wall.

The dish explodes in a spray of agar and gray fuzz. Spores, probably. Definitely spores. A little puff of white dust drifts down the wall like sad confetti.

"Mabel."

"What?"

"You just aerosolized my culture."

"You aerosolized my quarter."

And then Ambrose does the thing he will think about later, at length, in the shower, in bed, on trains. He crosses the small room in two steps and stops in front of her, closer than coworkers stand. She has backed against the incubator shelf, whether on purpose or not, and the trays rattle and the pencil falls clean out of her hair.

"Enough," he says.

She's breathing fast. He's breathing fast. The room is eighty-two percent humidity and roughly a thousand degrees and there is a smudge of agar on her collarbone and her blazer is hanging off one elbow and his hands are raised, an inch from her shoulders, not touching, and neither of them moves.

"Well," Mabel says. Her voice comes out lower than usual. "This is new."

"Sorry." He doesn't step back, though. That's the thing. He should step back. "Mabel. I would very much like to kiss you. If the answer is no, say so and I will go back to adjusting the dial and we never mention it."