The Grin of the Dark

making sure she wasn't.'

'In case she was looking for company, you mean?'

'Not at all,' I repeat as a memory of Nicholas barring the way to her flares up in my head. 'We don't do that kind of thing.'

'Gee, you Brits. You can have too much control, you know.' Willie types her grandfather's name in the search box on the database. 'Okay, what's the son of a bitch been saying?'

I let Smilemime's comments speak for themselves. Willie gazes longest at the claim that Fool for a Day helped destroy Charley Chase's career, and I reflect that an administrator must have edited the comments somewhat, since they aren't misspelled. Willie is silent until she has read back as far as Crazy Capaldi, Orville Hart's first sound film, and then she says 'So what am I meant to be seeing?'

'Inaccuracies, I should think.'

'I don't see any. Where are they?'

'You aren't saying you can confirm everything this person wrote.'

'Sure, that's what I'm saying.'

The mirth I was affecting dies in my throat and deserts my face, leaving it almost too stiff for me to ask 'How could he know about your grandfather's last film when it was never released?'

'Read about it, I guess. There's always advance publicity. I don't understand what your problem is with this guy.'

I mustn't treat her as a spokeswoman for Smilemime. 'Take a look at the other titles.'

She checks the next three, starting with the unreleased Tubby Tells the Truth. 'I'm still not seeing it.'

'The clown's making it up. I promise you the one I've watched is nothing like his description.'

'Maybe you should see some more,' she says and stands up. 'Whenever you're ready.'

When I smile eagerly she motions me towards the middle of the house. 'Unless you'd like something else first,' she says.

I could imagine that the girls are giggling at her suggestion or in anticipation of its outcome. 'We're making sandwiches,' one of them tells me.

'We can make you,' says her colleague, 'anything you fancy if we have it.'

They're standing by a monumental white refrigerator, and both have turned to me. Each torso puts me in mind of an amused face, an impression hardly counteracted by the memory of one girl tugging her friend ajar. I feel as if they've linked too many of my appetites – as if my brain is close to overloading with them. 'Thanks,' I say, 'but I'd better start work.'

'Don't you like our sandwiches?' Julia says, if she isn't Mona.

How would I know? Are we talking about food, or have they a different arrangement in mind? I'm not here to prove myself. Even if Natalie never knew what I'd done, that would only aggravate my guilt. I won't use Nicholas as an excuse. Nevertheless I'm absurdly abashed to admit 'I couldn't say.'

'Never tasted an American sandwich?'

'You don't know what you're missing.'

Perhaps we're discussing food after all. I'm distracted from reading the girls' faces by the rest of them, and Willie's is unhelpfully neutral. I have to gaze at her to make her say 'It can be sent out if you're raring to get started.'

'Whatever you're having will be fine. There isn't much I won't put in my mouth.'

This earns me a disconcerting burst of applause from the girls. 'And a drink?' Willie says.

'Something soft.' When the girls sigh at this I feel bound to explain 'I don't want to risk nodding off in a film.'

'I've left you the fixings if you need to take notes.' Willie unlocks the back door beside a granite kitchen counter and pauses with her hand on the doorknob. 'Can you operate a projector?'

'I'd better not try.'

'You bet if you don't know what you're doing with these films. I'll send Guillermo.' Willie hands me a key from a hook beside the door. 'Don't catch cold,' she says and shuts the door behind me at once.

Is the desert always so cold at night? It makes me feel as if I wasn't previously awake. A bare dusty path leads to the solitary other building, a long brick shed about a hundred yards away. As far as I can see, it's windowless. I glance back to see the naked girls selecting items from the refrigerator, a sight that seems close to impossibly unreal. Am I hearing a low vibration in the air? It intensifies, fluttering against my eardrums, as I hurry between cacti ashen with dimness to the shed. When I unlock the door the pulsation seems to lurch to meet me. I could feel that my senses aren't to be trusted – that I can't see two bulky shapes waiting for me in the dark.

I grope around the doorframe, over the chilly bricks, and locate a switch. The harsh light of an unshaded bulb shows me two projectors, which are trained on apertures in the far wall of a room about half the length of the shed. Both side walls are occupied by shelves full of film canisters. A clipboard fat with paper and dangling a pen on a string leans against the foot of the left-hand shelves. ORVILLE HART MOVIES, the topmost sheet announces in large enthusiastic capitals.

My first thought is that Willie doesn't write the way she emails. I shut the door and pick up the clipboard. The canisters aren't labelled, and there are far too many of them even if the shelves contain Orville's entire filmography. I take a can at random and lay it on the table next to the projectors. The reel inside it bears a peeling yellowed label with a title in a vintage typescript: Tubby's Tremendous Teeth.

I'm so overwhelmed to be looking at an actual film of his, and perhaps distracted by the well-nigh subsonic throbbing of the hidden generator, that I've no idea how long I fail to notice someone else is in the room. When he sets down his burden on the table, my start almost knocks the canister onto the floor. I don't know how he managed to stay unheard as he entered the shed and closed the door, especially since he's at least twice my width. His round swarthy face, which is topped with oily black curls, appears to protrude from his poncho without the intervention of a neck. 'You'll be Guillermo,' I tell him.

The nostrils of his broad nose flare, but his disproportionately small eyes and little mouth don't stir. 'I'll take this in the screening room,' I decide, picking up the tray that's loaded with a plastic litre bottle of water and a crusty ham and avocado roll too big for its plate. 'Could you run this film for me?'

I have to leave the tray on the table while I open the inner door. Three rows of three extravagantly padded cinema seats, all black, face a screen not much bigger than the largest television monitor. Behind it the generator continues to throb. I prop the tray on the arms of the rightmost seat in the back row and sit next to it just as the lights, which the projectionist turned on, go down. At least he seems efficient, but he's as silent as a Tubby film.

TWENTY-EIGHT - NOTES ON

SILENTS

Tubby's Tremendous Teeth is one of his less unsettling films.

We first see him in the street, where people are startled by the sight of him. A shopgirl falls backwards into a display of hats on grinning heads. A billsticker topples off his ladder and ends up wrapped in a section of a film poster – an image of a mirthful mouth that appears to be consuming him. Passers-by dodge into the traffic to avoid Tubby, so that by the time he arrives at the dentist's he has left a trail of pile-ups. The cause of all this is his fixed grin, an extreme version of the one I've seen elsewhere. It's so relentlessly wide that the teeth look close to bursting out of his mouth. The more desperately he points at it, the harder the dentist's receptionist laughs, but I wonder if audiences would have. Presumably the intertitles are meant to convey his struggle to make himself understood, but I'm not sure if they're simply nonsense; none of them is onscreen quite long enough. At last the receptionist regains enough control to summon the dentist, who is played by Tubby too. I suppose this is designed to render the treatment more comical, but as he pulls tooth after random tooth and shies them in all directions I'm preoccupied with how the stand-in's face may look. Eventually the patient makes his escape, pursued by the dentist