You've got the string?

It had taken hours, many of them in a row. The mystery machine sat lying on one side, the bottom cover hidden under a week's worth of dust. There were screws and bits and tufts of lint strewn across the oily wooden work bench top. The days had lapsed. Each beginning as exuberant and slowly turning into toil and drudgery, uncovering technological anomalies, strange things in the dark, but never once a spark of life.

There were pivoting spring plates, ancient oil and paper condensers, and wire nuts and none of these were the root cause. Nor were the wheel weights: small flat metal pieces that looked stationary but were meant to move, meant to swing out as motor velocity increased as if speed were adjusted by g-force.

There were spring levered copper contacts that worked back and forth with the antenna controls, and a spaghetti pile of wires in different colors that chased each other around the inner workings, some held by clips, others managed to survive protected only by a well placed piece of cardboard.

When I gave up, which I did daily, I'd grab my hat and coat and walk around the neighborhood just to clear the cobwebs and visualize how I thought it was supposed to work. It didn't help. I believe now, in retrospect, that I'd convinced myself that if the machine had ever sewed... it must have done so by magic.

None of it made sense. As if maybe it had been wired for something else, something notorious and dark: a faux short wave radio smuggled to a third-world field agent, or worse yet: a homing signal. They knew exactly where I was and I'd never hear the black helicopters until it was way too late.

Friday morning, up early, and I dressed and headed out. An estate sale promised sewing machines and there was that photograph: the one with a sixty year old spool case. The sale was a bust. Online auctions had given them the idea that things were worth three times the price of the real world, and it didn't help one bit that I actually wanted the case for the most outrageous reason possible: to store spools.

What was worse, nearly criminal, was to advertise things and not have them. I was there ten minutes after they opened and asked.
"Sewing machines?"
"Those have been sold." the lady said.
"Already? You just opened." I inquired and she looked a little frazzled when she said the machines had been given away, donated to a local church group.
"Then perhaps you shouldn't advertise things you don't have," I stated flatly trying not to be too curt, "you might waste somebody's time..." I turned to leave.
"I still have the one here," she countered and looked across the room, under a table, and ran to fetch an open box and showed it to me. It was a Necchi, white with blue trim and a three digit model number: 5 3 1.

"Taiwan" I said, and she looked puzzled and I wanted to explain it. I wanted to go into all the gory details. I wanted to tell her about Italy, Japan, Taiwan, and China. I wanted to confess my intimacy with Silvia, Nora, and Julia... and then disclose the four downward steps. How to go from great steel and close tolerances to intolerable crap plastic in four easy falls, but I could tell she wasn't ready for it, so I kept my mouth shut.

"You know a lot about these?" she asked.
"They're like old cars." I said, and on the way home that statement stuck with me. There was more truth to it than I thought. Something I'd seen the bowels of the portable; something I hadn't seen in years - a familiar image - if I could only place it.

Once at home, I slipped out of my car and down to the work bench and there it was, that same image: plain, simple, and thirty years since I'd looked for it. Two discolored dots needed a tool, a special tool, one I used to carry in the box but somewhere over the decades I'd stopped. It had become as useful to me as a plastic sewing machine.

I went inside and up the stairs to the medicine cabinet and sure enough I found what I was looking for hiding flat under other boxes. I grabbed one and returned to the bench, pulled the electronic points apart, and sanded them clean and perfectly flat with an emery board - like I used to do on the points of an auto's distributor.

Then I reattached the important bits, plugged it in, flipped the switch and a blue glow began to emit from the lower housing. There was a hiss-snap, one low crackle, and the machine came to life. I took down the antenna, unplugged it all, set the oil can within reach and began cleaning as I put it all back right.

I still don't know. I may never be able to say how exactly how this thing works except to suggest that it's powered by blue light. I can't even swear with any authority that this Kenmore 116.531 isn't the same exact machine in that online video. There may be just the one of them... an oddity passed from hand to hand even though there's a sales receipt of sorts. It was tucked casually into the pocket of the suitcase as if no one would notice: a plain white envelope holding a tri-folded warranty dated 1956.  It claims to have been sold to a lady named Gatts in Palmer Mass. It suggests she bought a model 235.... and the agents number was 2024... or was it?

I'm still skeptical,
but at least I can pass it on now
maybe wait for the next low voice on the phone
and another clandestine meeting
on a deserted street
on a dark night...
in a city that always sews.