The Pickling Hour

Macy tried the key a third time, mostly because there was nothing left to do, and the lock did the same thing it had done twice already, which was turn halfway and then stop dead like it had changed its mind about her. She jiggled it. She pulled the door toward her a little and pushed it back, the way her dad used to do with the truck door, and the knob gave that hollow clunk that meant nothing inside had moved. She put her forehead against the wood for a second, just to feel how solid it was, and it was very solid.

"Well," she said. "Okay."

Rafael was leaning on the railing at the far end of the landing, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and he looked up at her with his hands in his pockets.

"That bad?"

"That bad. It's done this before, but never for this long. Usually you curse at it and it feels embarrassed and opens."

"Do you want me to try? Sometimes a lock just respects a different person."

So she handed him the key and stepped back, and he did the exact same things she had done, the jiggle and the pull and the push, and got the exact same clunk, and he turned around and gave her a little bow like a doctor delivering bad news. She laughed, because what else was there to do at eight in the evening on a Tuesday with a whole pot of curry cooling on the other side of a door that would not negotiate.

They were thirty-two and thirty-three years old respectively, and they had run into each other three weeks ago at the farmers market in town, where Rafael had been standing at a honey stall looking confused about varieties, and Macy had heard herself say dark or light? before she realized the voice was hers. He had recognized her in about two seconds. They had talked for forty minutes next to the zucchini lady. And now here they were, ten years after one clumsy kiss at a house party during their last year of college, standing on the landing above a pickle works while the whole building breathed vinegar at them.

The smell was the thing you noticed first about living up here. It came up through the floorboards, especially in the evening when the tanks below were working, a warm sour sweetness that Macy had stopped smelling about a week after she moved in and which every guest mentioned within four minutes of arriving. Rafael had mentioned it in the car already. Now he mentioned it again, sniffing the air like a man at a wine tasting.

"I don't know how you sleep," he said. "My whole face is puckering."

"You get used to it. Then you get attached to it. Carole says she can't sleep anywhere else anymore, she goes to her sister's place and lies there listening for the tanks."

"Carole's the roommate, right? The one with the dog?"

"The one with the dog, yeah. She's out tonight anyway, some trivia thing, so she won't even know we got locked out until she comes home and finds two adults sitting on the doormat like a folk tale."

Macy sat down against the wall by the door, because her feet were tired and the landing was clean enough, and after a moment Rafael sat down too, across from her, his long legs sticking out into the stairwell. The lights overhead did their flicker, a stuttery little pulse every twenty seconds or so that the landlord had been promising to fix since before Carole moved in. Below them the tanks hummed. That was another thing you got used to, the hum, a low even note like a refrigerator the size of a chapel.

"I can call a locksmith," Rafael said, and then he checked his phone and made a face. "Or I can call one at seven tomorrow morning, apparently, because that's when anyone answers around here."

"There's a guy in town but he doesn't do evenings. Carole will be back around eleven, she's got a key. So we've got about three hours and one dead phone battery between us."

"Three hours," Rafael said, and he said it in a way that made Macy glance at him, and he was smiling down at his hands, not a big smile, just something happening at the corner of his mouth. "Okay. I've had worse Tuesdays."

She pulled her knees up and looked past him down the stairwell, where the lights kept doing their little stutter, and tried to think of something normal to say, some catching-up question she hadn't already asked at the market. But he got there first, in that way he'd always had, of saying a thing sideways like it was trivial.

"I still have the mixtape, you know," he said. "In the car. It's been in three different cars."

Macy blinked at him. "The what?"

"The mixtape. You made me one. After that party, senior year, the winter one. You burned me a CD with like eighteen songs on it and wrote on the front in marker, and I remember the marker was silver and it said do not read into this, which, you know, I read into immediately and constantly."

"Oh my god!" Macy put her hand over her face. "I forgot I did that. No, I didn't forget, I filed it away somewhere very deep. Do not read into this, god, that's so me it hurts."

"I want to be sure we're thinking of the same one. It had that song on it, the one about the lighthouse keeper? And you told me track seven was about me and then you refused to ever say which part."

"It was not about you," Macy said through her fingers, and then she dropped the hand because lying through her fingers at thirty-two felt worse than the truth. "It was a little about you. Track seven was a little about you. You had that laugh, you'd do the thing where you'd start laughing before the joke was finished, and I was twenty-two and stupid about it."

"You were not stupid about it. I was the stupid one, I waited four months and then it was graduation and everyone was leaving." He shrugged, and the shrug had ten years in it. "Anyway. It's in the glovebox of my car right now, in a case with a cracked hinge. I've never been able to throw it out. I don't even have a CD player anymore. I just keep it like it's a passport from a country that stopped existing."

Macy looked at him and felt something in her chest do a slow turn, like a key halfway in a lock, which was an image she had some feelings about tonight in particular. Ten years. She'd been a server at that café near campus through all of it, and he'd shown up at the five-year reunion when they were twenty-seven, and she'd seen him across the room and walked the other way, and she still didn't fully know why. And now here they were, locked out of her own apartment above a pickle works, and he'd kept a CD in three cars.

"Play it for me sometime," she said. "When your car's not going anywhere. Just sit in it and play it."

"Deal," he said, too fast, like he'd been holding the offer in his mouth.

The lights stuttered. Down in the building the tanks hummed on. And Macy, who had been sitting on something all evening and who had promised herself she would not bring it up on a first dinner, heard herself bring it up, because the landing was dark and warm and smelled like vinegar and it seemed suddenly like the only place in the world where the thing could be said out loud.

"Can I tell you something weird?" she said. "It's weird. I need you to not do the polite face."

"I have never once done the polite face."

"Your polite face is legendary. Ask anyone from our program. Okay." She took a breath. "My hives are making dark honey. Not dark like buckwheat, dark like, I don't have a word. Almost black. It came on over about two months and it's only from the back hives, the four by the tree line, and the honey is fine, it tastes fine, it tastes like nothing I've tasted, but here's the weird part. At night they hum. Not normal hive hum, which I know like I know my own name. This is different. It's like they're holding one note, all of them, all night, and some nights I swear it's almost a tune. I've had two beekeeper friends out and they both said they'd never heard anything like it and then they both changed the subject fast."

Rafael had gone still. Not relaxed-sitting-still, but the other kind, the kind where a person is listening with their whole body, and when Macy looked at his hands she saw they were trembling, just slightly, resting there on his knees.

"Macy," he said quietly. "I have to tell you about a dream I've been having."

And the lights above them flickered twice in a row, which had never happened before, and the hum of the tanks below seemed, for just a moment, to lift up half a step.

Rafael looked down at his knees for a second, then back up, and when he spoke his voice was low, like he was afraid the words would bounce down the stairwell and into the tanks.

"It starts in a hallway," he said. "A long one, dim, and I can hear a sound coming from behind a door, this deep steady hum, and I know, in the way you know things in dreams, that I have to get into that room. Not want to. Have to. Like the hum is pulling a string attached somewhere behind my ribs." He rubbed his thumb along the seam of his jeans. "So I open the door and it's full of combs. Not honeycomb from a hive box, I mean combs everywhere, stacked to the ceiling, in the walls, growing out of the floor, and they're all warm and I can smell the honey and it smells like flowers but also like something else I can't name." He stopped, and Macy waited, because she could feel there was more, and the lights flickered again, once, and neither of them said anything about it.

"There's a woman in the room," he went on. "Standing in the middle of all the combs. Her hair is like golden filaments, that's the only way I can describe it, like thousands of fine threads all moving slightly, even when there's no air moving. And her face is not quite a face, like it's lit from behind, and she reaches out her hand and I take it, every time, I always take it, and she pulls me deeper into the room and the combs close behind us and I wake up with my heart going and the taste of honey in my mouth. Every time. Macy, it's every time. It's been months."

Macy sat there with her hands flat on her knees and the cold of the landing coming up through her jeans, and she thought about lying, about doing the polite face herself, and then she thought about the note the hives held all night, the single held note, and she heard herself say it.

"I dream about her too."

Rafael's head came around slowly.

"Except in mine," Macy said, and her voice came out strange and flat, "she's wearing my face. It's me standing in the combs, with the filament hair, gold instead of my brown, and she's holding her hand out, and in the dream I know that if I take it I'll finally understand something, something I've been trying to understand for years, and I always wake up right before I touch her. Right before. My hand out, her hand out, and then morning."

The tanks hummed below them and the stairwell light steadied, and Rafael said, "Macy, when did the honey start? Exactly."

"Two months ago. I told you."

"Two months." He laughed, a short broken sound with no humor in it. "That's when mine started. Within a week of yours, at most. We haven't spoken in years, we didn't even know where each other lived, and our dreams started within days of each other."

They looked at each other, and then, at almost the same moment, they both reached out, and their hands touched on the cold concrete of the landing between them, the first time either of them had touched the other in ten years, and Macy felt his fingers were still trembling a little, and her own were not steady either, and neither of them pulled back. His hand was warm and hers was cold from the rail and where they met the temperature evened out, and it was such a small thing, just hands on concrete, but it felt like track seven, like a sentence neither of them had finished in a decade.

"So we're having the same dream," she said quietly. "Except mine's from the inside and yours is from the outside."

"Or," Rafael said, and he said it slowly, like he was testing the weight of the words, "we're having the same dream and it's not a dream."

Down below, through the floor, through the old boards and the brick, the hum of the tanks lifted again, that half step, held it, and settled back. They both looked down at the landing floor like they could see through it.

"Okay," Macy said. "That. Did you hear that too."

"I heard it."

"That's the tanks. That's fermentation tanks, Rafael, they're big plastic vats of cucumbers and brine, they don't change pitch. Except apparently they do, tonight, twice." She pushed her hair back off her face with her free hand, because she wasn't letting go of his other hand, and she noticed that she wasn't letting go and decided not to mention it. "There's a basement down there. Under the pickle works. The landlord keeps it locked, has the whole time I've lived here, and Carole says once she saw him go down with a flashlight and come up twenty minutes later and he wouldn't talk about it, just wiped his feet like he'd been somewhere with a floor of a different kind."

"You're saying the sound is coming from the basement."

"I'm saying the sound is coming from under my apartment, and my bees two fields away are singing the same note, and a woman made of golden thread has been holding her hand out to both of us, and I don't know what any of it means but I know it all belongs to the same thing."

Rafael squeezed her hand, briefly, and let it rest there. "Okay. Okay. Let's be the sensible versions of ourselves for one minute. My dream is just a dream, we're tired, you had a long day at the hives, I drove up from the city this morning, there's a completely reasonable explanation involving brine and old wiring and a landlord who's bad at his job."

"Sure," Macy said.

"And the sensible thing to do is sit on this landing until Carole gets home at eleven and then eat cold pickles and go to bed and forget all of it."

"Sure," Macy said again, and they both sat there, and neither of them moved, and down in the dark under the pickle works something hummed the note, patient, the way a thing hums when it has been holding the note for a very long time and is very good at waiting.

The lights flickered. Twice. Then, for the first time all evening, they went out entirely, and the landing went dark except for the thin glow coming up from below, faint and golden, like something down there had turned on a light that had never had a bulb in it.

"Rafael," Macy said in the dark.

"Yeah."

"That's not coming from a fixture."

"No," he said. "It is not."

They sat there in the golden dark for a while, and Macy realized she could hear her own heartbeat and also a low rhythmic thrum coming up through the floor, steady, patient, not at all the sound the tanks made, because the tanks made a mechanical flat drone and this had a beat to it, slow and even, like something