The Theremin Talent Show

I haven't seen Jasper Webster in ten years, which is a thing I keep having to re-say to myself while the ferry bumps toward Frøya. I'm thirty-four now. He's thirty-six. We dated from my twenty-second year to my twenty-fourth, back when I was learning to rig falls and he was learning to write essays nobody paid for. We broke up because I wanted to chase movies and he wanted to chase oysters, and neither of us was wrong, and it still stung for about a year.

The job gap is the only reason I'm here. Stunt coordinators between projects have too much time and too much gas money, and I had both, and a postcard from a Norwegian oyster farm seemed like as good an excuse as any.

The farm is called Frøya Oyster Company and it looks like it's losing. That's my first read. A dock with three working crates and one rotting one. A boat with a patch on its hull. A barn that leans a little. I grew up around working water, so I know the signs the way I know a bad rig.

Jasper is on the dock arguing with a man in a good coat.

I hear it before I'm even tied off. "...if the payment isn't made by the first, I have no choice," the man says. He has a tablet and a folder and the posture of someone who delivers bad news for a salary.

"You'll have the money," Jasper says. "I'm not asking you to extend it. I'm telling you the date it lands."

"The first, Mr. Webster."

"The first."

The man nods, sees me, nods again like I'm a problem he doesn't have time for, and walks up the ramp to a gray car. Jasper watches him go. Then he turns and sees me and his whole face does something complicated.

"Elsa," he says.

"Jasper."

"You got my postcard."

"I got your postcard." I look at the farm, then at him. "Who was that?"

He shoves his hands in his pockets. "Bank."

"How bad?"

"Bad enough that I'm glad you're here, actually. Because I need a favor, and you have free time, and God knows you love a crowd."

That is how I end up stage manager of a talent show.

* * *

He explains it in the sorting shed, sitting on an upturned crate while oyster water drips somewhere behind the wall. The farm has an annual talent show. Has had one for six years. Locals, farm hands, a couple of tourists. Five hundred kroner entry from each contestant, audience pays at the door, and this year the prize pot plus a grant Gerard Cobb helped him apply for comes to enough to cover the payment.

"Gerard Cobb, the neighbor? The theremin guy?"

"The theremin guy," Jasper says. "He co-signed. Sort of. He believes in the show."

"Jasper. You built your farm's survival on a talent show."

"It's a good show."

"You built it on a *talent show*."

"It's a very good show." He holds up a hand before I can go again. "There are nine acts. Britt Ward, my farm hand, does a comedy juggling routine that fills the barn every year. She's twenty-eight, been here three years, she's the reason the crates get sold and the books almost balance. There's a man who whistles through his hands. There's a dog act. And there's me."

"And what's your act?"

He looks at the floor. Then the wall. Then me.

"No," I say.

"It's not what you think."

"You're going to play the theremin."

"How did you..."

"Because you played the theremin in our apartment when you were twenty-five and you made the cat leave the room, Jasper. The cat left. Cats don't leave rooms."

"That was eleven years ago. I'm better now. Gerard taught me. Five years of lessons."

"Five years." I put a hand over my mouth, because I'm starting to laugh and it's not kind. "You're betting the farm on a theremin."

"I'm betting the farm on the audience liking me. The theremin is just the delivery system." He says it fast, like if he gets through the sentence the logic will hold. "You know stages. You can tell me if it's ready."

"Am I allowed to be honest?"

"You were always allowed to be honest. It was one of your better features."

That lands somewhere in my chest I don't have time to inspect. I let it go and ask about the stage instead, because that's a thing I can help with. Sightlines, timing, how the spotlight works. He talks. I listen. The shed smells like salt and low tide and it smells like every summer I spent on boats with my uncle, and I hate how easy it is to be sitting here.

* * *

The next day we rehearse. Not his act. The show logistics. He wants to walk the order of the night, so he's carrying a bucket of oysters to the barn for the dog act's trick, because the dog does something with an oyster that I genuinely don't want explained.

He trips on the barn threshold.

I watch it happen in the slow way you watch a fall you can't call. He catches himself on the door frame, the bucket doesn't, and two hundred oysters go across the barn floor in every direction with a sound like a hundred dinner plates deciding to be marbles.

I laugh. I can't help it. It comes out of me in one piece, loud and rude, and I put both hands on my knees because I'm bending over with it.

"Thank you," Jasper says flatly, from the door frame.

"You tripped on the same threshold every person trips on and you *carried them*."

"I was being efficient."

"You were being a man who has never once asked for help." I'm wiping my eyes. "Get up. We'll pick them up."

So we pick up two hundred oysters off a barn floor, and somewhere around the eightieth one I pitch one to him, underhand, just to see. He catches it. He pitches it back. It's a small stupid thing and it turns into a rally, oyster arcing between us in the barn light, and I'm laughing again and he's laughing too and it hits me how little it takes.

"Okay," he says, after a bad throw nearly takes out a lantern. "You're a stunt professional. Teach me to throw."

"Teach me the theremin."

"That's a trap."

"Obviously it's a trap. Do we have a deal or not."

We have a deal. Evenings in the barn, after the hands go home. Him showing me the theremin, me showing him how to throw a shell so it doesn't wobble. He's not terrible, which annoys me. I'm terrible, which annoys me more.

* * *

Britt Ward catches us the third night.

She's twenty-eight, built like a swimmer, and she comes through the barn door while Jasper is doing the eerie swell of whatever Gerard's been making him practice, and she stands there with her arms crossed until he notices.

"That's better," she says. "Last week a seagull flew off on that note."

"Thank you, Britt."

"Except you're rushing the end. Gerard told you that too, I bet." She drops onto a crate and looks between us. "So this is the thing now. Secret rehearsals. Fine. But here's my problem, Webster. I've won this show three years running, and you're out here practicing like you plan to take it, and I don't lose to a theremin."

"You might."

"I definitely won't." She stands, juggling balls already out of her jacket pockets, three of them, going in a lazy circle. "Rehearsal duel. Right now. You play your worst eight bars, I juggle blindfolded, and the dog judges."

"The dog can't judge."

"The dog judges everything, Jasper, that's his whole personality." She ties a rag over her eyes and keeps the balls going. "Also, Elsa. You're running the stage, so no coaching him. That's cheating."

"I would never coach him."

"She coached me this morning," Jasper says.

"She's *supposed* to coach you, you're hopeless, I meant at the show." Britt turns in a slow circle, blindfolded, balls steady. "Okay. Go. Worst eight bars."

He goes. It's bad. It's genuinely, remarkably bad, and I don't know if I'm allowed to say that as the stage manager or if stage managers have to be polite, so I say it anyway and Britt laughs so hard a ball drops, and the dog picks it up and won't give it back.

After that it all goes sideways, the way good evenings do. Someone, and I will never admit who, starts throwing oyster shells instead of balls, and Britt takes the blindfold off to defend her honor, and suddenly it's a three-way throwing contest across the barn with shells whistling past the lantern and Jasper ducking behind a crate like a man in a war movie and me pitching sidearm the way I learned on a set in Vancouver.

Britt wins, obviously. She's twenty-eight and has the arm of a dock worker and no fear at all.

"One more," she says, breathless, holding up a shell. "Loser cleans the barn."

"That's not a punishment, that's Tuesday," Jasper says.

"Then loser cleans the barn AND buys the coffee."

We throw. I lose. I'm fine with it, mostly, except for the small part of me that's a stunt professional and does not lose throwing contests, and that small part is already planning tomorrow.

* * *

The polaroid happens on the fifth night, and I still don't know how to talk about it.

I'm digging in the theremin case for a spare pitch antenna because Jasper bent the main one, don't ask, and my fingers find an envelope taped under the lid lining. Old tape, gone sticky and gray. I peel it before I think about it.

It's me. It's me at twenty-two, in his old apartment, sitting on a kitchen counter with a beer and a theremin on the table behind me and my mouth open mid-laugh. Someone took it the exact week we started. The paper is sun-faded at the edges. Twelve years old and he kept it taped inside the case of an instrument he didn't even learn until five years ago.

"You went through my case," he says from the doorway.

"Your antenna is bent. This was in the way." I'm holding it up. He can see what it is. There's no pretending around it.

He crosses the barn and takes it from me, careful with the corners. "I forgot I had it."

"You taped it under the lining."

"That's what forgetting looks like for me, Elsa. It looks like taping something