The Bean Vault, a short story by Jeff Goldberg
With coffee, quality depended on bean origin, the roasting of those beans, the manner of grinding, and one’s methodological approach to the final brew. Provenance, preparation, pulverization, and process. No, no, wait: preparation correlated better with the careful application of heat than the careful application of water. So, swap those.
I could sometimes succumb to a fondness for alliteration even when it resulted in a reduction of clarity.
“I have your bowl, Mr. Lask.” Oscar stood in the doorway to my studio with his offering, a tiny white thimble nestled in cupped palms. He took shuffling half-steps across the floor, carried it to me with the care of someone protecting a baby bird. At sixteen, Oscar had proved himself a swift student of ceramic craft.
I plucked the item from him with just my thumb and forefinger, held it close to examine its features. If only I had a jeweler’s loupe. Oscar winced as I smudged fingerprints over his latest fabrication. This was not art, however, but a tool, and it would have to be sullied to serve its purpose. He’d scored the interior with parallel grooves, all expertly aligned, leading to a small hole at the bottom. On the outside Oscar had carved a repeating fleur-de-lis pattern into the white glaze, though the limited surface provided room for only three lilies. The boy showed true artistry.
“Unnecessary embellishments,” I said. He must have wasted hours on the detail work.
“Yes, Mr. Lask,” he replied, not in a deferential way. I’d repeatedly asked him to call me Jake, but he insisted on formality, a defiance, unwillingness to acknowledge or submit to long-term residency. He wore my old jeans, rolled up at the ankles to account for my extra half foot of height, and a white tee-shirt, yellowed with age.
Supplies ran low, what with the decline of global trade and collapse of usable distribution routes. It no longer mattered that I owned two coffee farms in Colombia outside of Cali, plus limited rights to the production output of several more. What did ownership mean if I could not find anyone to transport the beans to my roastery in the low mountains of Western Massachusetts?
A year and a half ago, Oscar, then a few months shy of fifteen, arrived with a final delivery. The sputtering pickup truck, wooden boards bolted to the bed where side paneling had come off, pulled up to my compound gate. Oscar had hopped down from the cab and slapped the storage bins, grinning at me as if he made this intercontinental journey weekly. The vehicle could not survive a return trip, nor were passages guaranteed, so he’d lived here as my apprentice ever since.
During his training, Oscar wanted to know why I warehoused both roasters and a kiln. “The kiln fires and bakes the paraphernalia of coffee,” I said, assuming the roasters explained themselves. “Creating the perfect drippers and mugs is as important as the beans,” though I didn’t really mean the part about mugs. Even I understood one could appear too fussy.
He cut me off before I could go on about fashionable drinking apparatus, always so bold, so lacking in manners, to clarify his point. “I mean why not combine them? Roast the beans in the kiln.” I laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion, my boldness and lack of manners earned through experience. “We roast beans at a range of one-fifty to two hundred degrees Celsius. We fire ceramics at a range of nine to twelve hundred degrees Celsius. One could certainly cook a bean at those latter temperatures. But one couldn’t make coffee from the resulting coal.” And that explanation ignored the difference between low-fire and high-fire pottery.
Not long after that, two of my roasters broke and the third suffered from the resulting balance of load. Of course we couldn’t find replacement parts. Oscar, a natural potter, set up a series of experiments for maintaining consistent low heat in the kiln. Low heat in terms of clay, that is. Even the lowest possible heat was high heat for beans. It turned out we could consolidate purposes if we left enough time between firings. I shouldn’t have, then or ever, scoffed at his inquiries.
Every time Oscar left to hunt for provisions he returned instead with people. Usually children his age or younger, sometimes with their parents or grandparents. Often Colombian, or at least South American, or at least Spanish speaking. “We need the help,” he’d tell me whenever I protested the growth in localized population. We only needed the help because more people meant we needed to grow more food and growing more food required more labor. A snake eating its own tail, humanity. “People mean security,” he’d insist. It had been so long since I’d left the compound. These days I barely left my studio. I had no direct knowledge of the conditions outside the walls.
With that caveat I say: things didn’t seem so bad. Civilization prevailed even if long-distance shipping did not. But this boy had traveled over five thousand miles here on his own and I respected experience.
Oscar provided the idea for a vault. My compound had reinforced underground shelters, an artifact of the dying survivalist from whom I’d purchased the property and not a reflection of my own paranoia. I suppose I shouldn’t call it paranoia when that old man’s fantasies had since manifested. In retrospect, it wasn’t irrational fear but foreshadowing.
On an initial tour of the facilities, Oscar told me the subsurface structures reminded him of a school visit to a seed vault in Palmira, Colombia, where scientists had erected a repository for plant life that would survive a climate apocalypse. “Did they include coffee in their archives?” I asked the boy, a reasonable assumption for a Colombian facility. But he didn’t know and in the post-internet era I had no way of checking.
So we (or, I should say, he) identified residents who had worked in construction—a surprisingly large number, I thought, but maybe this was a representative profession for the demographic—and enlisted aid. Over the next few months, they cleaned out the concrete bunkers and retrofitted them into cold storage. We found it hard to acquire advanced technology and small machined components, but the area had plenty of stone and wood and general building materials; we gathered simple machines and tools in abundance. It seemed like the world could still support big but had trouble with the small. Miniaturization a lost art.
My compound had solar panels and we scavenged more from abandoned properties in the region, we had a spring-fed water source from the mountain flowing into cisterns, we had subterranean heat pumps, we had septic reservoirs and had begun the process to add more, we had propane tanks set up securely at the edge of the forest. I said “we” but that plural pronoun predated Oscar’s arrival. I always thought of the land in collective terms: me and the coffee.
The logistics of it bored me. Before Oscar I employed a small crew, including a handyman/caretaker named Edson who oversaw these mundane operations on my behalf. When communication systems began to fail Edson returned to Sao Paulo to his wife and children and parents, opting to leave before conditions rendered such an intercontinental trip impossible. He explained the decision to me with tears in his eyes and several uncomfortable embraces. I wished him well and told him I understood some people desired proximity to family. So, now, I approved Oscar taking responsibility, a new foreman for the grounds. The facility grounds, that is, and not the coffee. Sorry, that’s a bit of vocational humor.
The two of us stood over the miniature ceramic dripper like viewers at a sculpture gallery or perhaps two bereaved men paying our last respects to a corpse. I settled the dripper into the wire frame and fastened the scaffolding atop the small mug. The thin metal wobbled and risked dislodging the fragile device. Fortunately, no casualties. I took a pre-cut slice from an unbleached bamboo-based filter and double folded it like origami into a tiny cone, then let it waft down gently into the dripper. I used tweezers to move the single roasted bean into my manual burr grinder. I grinded. I tried not to think about how many beans Oscar had ruined in his kiln experiments. I tapped the ground bean into the filter in the dripper in the wire frame above the mug. Such a paltry dusting. I poured in a few drops of water, not boiling but just off boiling. We watched the micro-bloom as the water penetrated the grounds. I added a few additional drops, needing more water to saturate the paper. And then two heavy beads of brown liquid made it through the grounds, through the filter, through the dripper, and landed in the mug. Two dark and promising spots.
I disassembled the apparatus and set it to the side, picked up the mug, and tilted it back to ingest the single sip.
Oscar, after waiting a moment, said, “So?” The boy lacked patience but made up for it with his repeated ingenuity.
I put the cup down. “It’s coffee,” I said.
You might think me a snob, based on my profession and my attitude. And you would be, in many ways, correct. But, also, to be a snob and a connoisseur means more than a discerning palate, at least for me. In fact, it means the opposite. It means exploring the full ranges and possibilities of taste, to open oneself up to experience, good and bad, thin and full, dark, light, and medium, to recognize life is filled with suffering and lasts way too long, and that over the bedeviling course of it the only rational behavior is to drink as much coffee as one can. Oscar may have interpreted my judgment as ironic disparagement, but in my lexicon I could give no greater praise.
“We need a stainless steel filter,” I said, a brewing method preferred by people who prioritized the environment over quality. The joke was on them: they’d been proved correct. “Paper requires too much water to permeate. At this ratio of grounds to liquid it throws off the results.”
“Stainless steel filter,” Oscar said, his habit to parrot back the incomprehensible—not because of a language barrier but because of the arcane vernacular of trade.
“A fine metal mesh,” I said, “something we can shape into a cone.” You couldn’t just order one from a website anymore.
“Would a window screen work?” he asked.
“Finer than that. So fine almost no water makes it through.” The “almost” the key: a nearly imperceptible amount was still perceptible; barely awake still a form of awareness.
“I’ll talk to the machinists,” he said, and scampered out of the room with those quick steps of youth. I hadn’t broken the news that it meant bypassing his ceramic handiwork. Perhaps I could sit the metal filter inside the pottery, use it as a redundant holster. To keep the boy happy.
Apparently, we had “machinists” on the property, whatever that meant. Oscar grew up speaking Spanish and an indigenous tongue native to regions in Colombia and Ecuador, yet his command of English often surpassed my own. I looked out the window and watched him approach a group of three women supervising fieldwork.
So much of my acreage had once been unused, a mix of marshy fields and ponds. Now it overflowed with life, of both the human and plant variety, water rerouted for irrigation and the land tilled and seeded for growth. Small buildings for storage, for housing, for purposes of which I’d lost track. Were these people on salary? Did money still hold meaning?
At my request they’d planted some coffee varietals, despite the lack of nutritional yield. Those plants, unfortunately, took five years for their initial flowering. My current stock wouldn’t last that long.
I’d never visited my coffee plantations in Colombia, but I suspected Oscar was—intentionally or not—recreating something similar. I always insisted on fair wages and paying above-market prices, and though I relied on intermediaries to enforce those values, the people who delivered my product always confirmed good conditions. But how could one know when all news dripped through limited points of contact? Distant accounts arrived like coffee: accumulated, ground up, sieved through a filter, and presented in a cup. Could you trust the origin through sheer taste? Here, at least, I saw a general joie de vivre, a vibrancy that looked like how this community might define happiness. It represented a new experience for me, to be surrounded by activity and families and noise and human life.
Once Oscar had asked me why I wasn’t married, or, more laughably, he had asked me when my wife had died, a question containing cascading assumptions. “There was someone once,” I told him, a lie I’d crafted over the years to deflect exactly such inquiries. It held enough of an unspoken wound that it comforted people in my normalcy without room to probe further. Oscar, of course, probed further. “When was this? Who was she? What happened?” So I sighed and said, “Before you were born. A school friend. Life.” I had always been better and happier alone. Or not alone. With my beans.
We called them beans by popular convention but they were seeds. The coffea plant, a member of the family rubiaceae, was a flowering shrub that bore fruit, a red or purple cherry. Like all fruit, the cherry housed a pip. From that pip we either regrew or, when I intervened, brewed. Before the change, over half of all wild coffee species already risked extinction. This included coffea arabica, the source of the world’s most popular drink. What had transpired since, I did not know. I lay awake at night and imagined that the situation for my lovely children had improved, that coffee had thrived in inverse proportion to humanity’s decline. I pictured a world overrun by coffee plants, vast fields of blushing cherries, small white blooms scrabbling against the walls of neglected buildings, replacing us in the domination of land.
As I watched from the window, I saw the populace turn, a single unit reacting to some stimulus of noise that evaded me behind my double-paned windows. The people began moving towards the gate, Oscar running to maintain the lead. It appeared I would need to leave my studio today.
A school bus waited outside, engine off but still pinging and clicking, loud enough that I could hear its exhausted labors over the group of gawkers. On each faded plastic bench sat food-grade hydrocarbon-free jute bags of coffee cherries, labeled with varietal and date, ready for production. My babies.
The plantation coordinator, Fabiola, disembarked the yellow coach, smiling and waving to the crowd. “How?” I asked. She said, “Anything for you, Mr. Lask,” and her laughter told a story of a journey less harrowing than what I’d imagined. “Ferry service past the Darién Gap took time to arrange,” she said, “but after that, just a long drive.” She patted the side of the bus, her reliable steed.
Several men and women began to unload, orchestrating a relay to move product from the seats and out the door and into the hands of those ready to lug bags into the compound. No one had coordinated this response; it seemed to emerge out of the necessity of a task to be done.
“Why?” I asked, the more important question, and one I couldn’t explain beyond the single word. Fabiola grasped me by the arms. “You’ve always taken care of us, Mr. Lask.” She pulled me into a hug, a hug which I endured stiffly and at an awkward tilt.
In the next moment she released me, and then she and Oscar locked in a much more dynamic embrace. Fabiola picked the boy off the ground and spun him around several times, both of them shouting in Spanish. “How are my parents?” Oscar asked, switching to English for my benefit. “They miss you, of course,” Fabiola said, “They are ready for you to come home.” I watched the coffee move off of the bus. It had arrived just in time.
Two days later I stood in the dim coolness of the underground vault holding a cup of coffee. A full cup. The first days after new stock arrived I always behaved like a prince, grinding and brewing to excess. Only a fraction of my former customers remained, so I could dispense with frugality. This crop would go stale long before we depleted our supply.
Did I expect this coffee vault to outlast humanity? Probably. Barring unexpected and atypical tectonic activity, I’d say likely. Did I expect it to allow for a planetary-wide resurrection and reforestation? No. Its stated goal had given Oscar hope and purpose, but I doubted such returns. For me, lasting was enough. A permanent record was enough. I’d never held such fondness for art or science or society to argue their preservation. Instead, I preferred to think of these stacks of sealed foil packages as a museum, a research library, an eternal tomb.
One day, long in the future, when human scratch marks upon the Earth have faded away or been overgrown, I imagine this cellar, the coffee beans waiting in their plastic tote containers on metal shelving racks, no longer viable as fodder for life but a reminder, forever, of what once existed. Coffee. A buried monument to the seeds I loved.
Jeff Goldberg is a fiction writer living in the Berkshires, Massachusetts. His short stories have appeared in JAKE magazine, Torpedo, and in the anthology The Apocalypse Reader. He can be found on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/mixedmetaphors.bsky.social