The Theremin Repair

The trouble started with a locked door and a dead phone. I'll back up.

My name is Daniella, I'm twenty-eight years old, and I was three days into a two-week leave from the army when I locked myself out of a stranger's apartment in Puerto Vallarta. A guy in my unit, Reyes, had set me up with the place. It belonged to his cousin, who was off visiting family in Guadalajara, and the deal was I'd water the plants and not burn anything down. Fair deal. But the cousin had one of those locks, the deadbolt kind that locks itself behind you, and I had stepped out to the little balcony to check if my phone had any signal, and the door had swung shut behind me with the soft, polite click of my entire evening going up in smoke.

I stood there for a minute, hand on the knob, doing the math. My phone was inside. My keys were inside. My wallet was inside, along with every peso I owned, because I'd been planning a quiet night of rice and beans and not spending anything. Reyes wasn't answering, because Reyes was probably elbow-deep in a game of dominoes somewhere, and his cousin was a six-hour bus ride away and I didn't even know her last name.

So I did what any sensible soldier would do. I climbed down the balcony.

It was only the second floor, and there was a rain barrel or something under it, some big plastic drum, and I made it down okay except for scraping my arm on the wall and landing in a pile of what I hoped was dirt. Then I was in the alley behind the building, sweating, covered in mosquitoes, with the sun going down behind the palms and the heat pressing down like a wet blanket. I swatted at my neck and missed. I swatted again and hit myself.

That's when I noticed the humming.

It was coming from down the street, a low mechanical drone, and at the end of the block there was a lumberyard. I know that sounds an odd thing to notice, a lumberyard, but this one had a sign out front, faded paint on wood, and a big gate half open, and stacks of pine planks rising up behind it in the last light. And past the stacks there was a metal building with lights on inside, and machinery running, and one window glowing yellow.

I figured maybe somebody there had a phone. Or a crowbar. Or at least knew the cousin's name, because in a town like this somebody always knows somebody.

So I walked in.

The gate scraped when I pushed it, and a dog somewhere started barking and then stopped, like it had lost interest. The whole place smelled like cut pine and machine oil. There were planks stacked higher than my head, labeled in Spanish, and a forklift parked with its forks down, and a run of humming machinery along one wall that I couldn't identify but that sounded expensive. The office was the lit-up building, a small cinderblock thing with a window and an AC unit dripping water down the wall.

I knocked on the door frame. Nothing. I knocked again, harder.

"If that's the delivery guy, we paid already," came a voice from inside, and then a woman came around the partition and stopped dead.

She was maybe thirty-one, taller than me, with dark hair cut short and pushed back with what I'd later learn was a shop rag, and her hands were stained black to the wrists with grease. She wore a work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a name patch that said LORELEI in thread that had mostly fallen off. She looked at me standing there in the mosquito light, dusty, scratched, half wild, and she started laughing.

"Oh man," she said. "You look like you lost a fight with a hedge."

"Close. Lost a fight with a balcony." I held up my arms, which had three kinds of bug bites and a scrape. "Sorry to barge in. I'm locked out of a place about a mile up the road. Friend of a friend's apartment. I don't have a phone, a wallet, or shoes I can walk back into town in without dying. Do you have a phone I could borrow? Or know the family that owns the place on Calle Palma?"

"The blue one with the ferns on the balcony?" She wiped her hands on the rag, which just moved the grease around. "That's Adelaide's place. She's in Guadalajara till Sunday. You're the soldier friend, right? Bev mentioned somebody was staying there. I'm Lorelei."

"Daniella." We shook hands, and her grip was firm and her palm was rough in a way that told me she used those hands for actual work. "How did you know about me?"

"Bev owns the yard. She's a friend of a friend of Adelaide's, everybody out here is a friend of a friend of everybody. She mentioned it this morning when she dropped off keys. You just missed her by about three hours, by the way. She keeps a spare set in the office." Lorelei held up a finger, disappeared into the back room, and came out jangling a ring of keys. "Here. I'll walk you back after, or you can borrow these and drop them off tomorrow."

I took the keys and then just stood there holding them, because after all that panic it felt anticlimactic. She watched me and grinned.

"You want a chair and a minute?" she said. "I've got half a bottle of tequila and nobody to drink it with, and I've been staring at the same broken machine for six hours. I could use the company."

And that is how I ended up not walking home.

Now, I should say the obvious thing here, since it matters to the rest of this story. I'd been divorced three years by then. Married my high school sweetheart at twenty-two because it was what you did in our town, split up at twenty-five, signed up for the army mostly to have somewhere else to be. Men since then, a couple, nothing that stuck. I'd never been with a woman, and I hadn't exactly planned on it, but I'd also stopped planning much of anything. I was twenty-eight and my whole life had a locked-door feeling to it. So when I say I wanted one reckless night before going back to being sensible, that was already sitting in me before she opened the tequila.

Lorelei poured two plastic cups from a bottle with no label and handed me one. "Fair warning, this stuff is from Bev's cousin's still, and it's a hundred and sixty proof of questionable decisions."

"That's my favorite kind." I sipped it and my eyes watered. It was good, actually, smoky and rough at the same time.

"So what do you do, besides lose fights with architecture?" She sat down on a stack of two-by-sixes near the door like it was a couch she'd been using all week.

"I'm a soldier. Supply, mostly. Two weeks' leave, first real one in a year." I sat down on the planks across from her. "What about you? You don't strike me as lumberyard people."

"Nobody here is lumberyard people. I fix bowling alley machinery in Portland, and I'm down here visiting, and Bev roped me into a side job." She said it easy, the way people say things they've told a hundred times. "There's an old theremin in the back of her storage room. Do you know what a theremin is?"

"Isn't that the thing in the Beach Boys song? You wave your hands at it?"

"That's the one. Only instrument you play without touching it. Bev's husband bought it at an estate sale years ago and it's been dead ever since, and she promised a friend of theirs I'd take a look before my flight home Saturday." She shrugged. "I fix things that hum for a living. Different brand of hum, same idea."

She got up and waved me over to the workbench along the far wall, and there it was. A wooden box, old-fashioned looking, with a loop antenna standing on one side and a straight metal wand on the other, and the whole guts of it laid out on the bench like a surgery. Wires and little glowing-looking tubes and a circuit board with a scorched brown patch on it.

"There's your patient," she said, tapping the scorched spot with a screwdriver. "Oscillator's fried. That's the part that makes the tone. Everything else works, more or less. Which means I've got one part to find or rebuild in a town with no electronics store, and three days to do it."

"So you're stuck here drinking tequila with a stranger."

"I'm stuck here drinking tequila with a stranger," she agreed, and raised her cup. "Bev's got a spare cot in the office, by the way, if you'd rather not walk back in the dark. No pressure. But the mosquitoes are on a schedule and it's their hour."

I looked at the keys in my hand, then at the dark street, then at the cup. Somewhere behind us the machinery hummed on, steady as anything.

"One more cup," I said. "Then I'll decide."

She grinned and poured. "Smartest thing anybody's said to me all week."

We drank and talked about nothing for a while, the yard, the heat, the mosquitoes keeping their appointment. Lorelei told me about a pinsetter in Portland that had eaten a customer's shoe and how she'd had to write it up as "foreign object, unexplained." I told her about the world's worst supply sergeant and she laughed so hard she had to set her cup down on the planks.

Then she squinted at me over her cup and said, "Okay, so what's your deal? You've got this look. Like you're doing the math on your own life and the numbers aren't coming out."

I should have deflected. I was good at deflecting. But the tequila was smoky and warm in my chest and she had grease on her hands and no reason to judge me, so I just said it.

"I've been sensible my whole life. That's my deal. Married at twenty-two because that's what you did where I'm from, stayed sensible through the whole thing, got divorced at twenty-five, joined the army to have somewhere sensible to go, and now I'm on leave and I don't know what to do with myself because every option I look at, I ask if it's sensible first."

"And what does sensible say about tonight?"

"Sensible says take the keys, go home, lock the door, get a taxi in the morning for a locksmith. Sensible says thank you very much and good night."

"Sounds exhausting," she said, and drank. "Sensible is boring. I mean that. I did sensible for years. Sensible moved me to Portland for a guy. Sensible kept me in an apartment after the guy left because moving was a hassle. You know what finally got me out of it? I woke up one day and realized I could name every single thing that would happen to me for the next forty years. Every one. And that was the scariest feeling I've ever had."

"So what did you do?"

"Booked a flight to Mexico to look at a broken theremin, apparently." She grinned at me. "Best decision I've made in ages."

I laughed, but something in my chest went loose when she said it. Because that was it, exactly. I could name everything too. Retire at thirty-eight if I stayed in, go back to my hometown if I didn't, date somebody reasonable, buy a sensible car. It was all laid out like a menu and none of it tasted like anything.

"Here's the embarrassing part," I told her. "I'm three days into two weeks of leave and this is the first night I've felt anything at all. And it's because I locked myself out and fell in the dirt and met a stranger at a lumberyard. That's pathetic."

"That's not pathetic. That's your sensible self getting its door locked for once." She raised her cup. "To locked doors."

"To locked doors," I said, and we drank.

Then she set her cup down and turned back to the workbench, because she'd been frowning at that circuit board all night and something had apparently clicked. "Wait. Wait wait wait. Hold this light."

I held a little flashlight while she worked, and I'll be honest, I mostly watched her hands. Her fingers were sure in a way that made me feel clumsy just looking. She pulled the dead part out, dug through a tackle box of junk she'd scavenged, wound wire around a spool muttering numbers to herself, soldered something, swore softly when it didn't take, soldered it again. It took maybe forty minutes and I held that light the whole time without thinking about my arm getting tired.

"Okay," she said finally. "Either this works or I've built a very expensive paperweight." She plugged the thing into a power strip hanging off a nail and flipped a switch, and the theremin hummed to life with a low tone that rose and fell as she moved her hand near the metal wand without ever touching it.