The Last Reel

Walter threaded the last reel the way he'd threaded the first one, in 1979, which was to say with the lights off in the booth and his tongue between his teeth. Downstairs the Regal was full. Not full the way it used to be, four hundred seats on a Saturday and a queue round the corner, but full for now: a hundred and eighty people, the manager had said, and most of them older, and most of them here because they'd read the piece in the local paper about the last 35mm screening in the county before the place went digital or went dark, nobody was quite sure which. The film was an old one. The owner had let Walter choose, and Walter had chosen the one he'd shown on his first night, a musical, big and silly and in colour, with a print that had been sitting in the vault for thirty years and smelled, when he'd opened the can, faintly of vinegar. "It'll go," he'd said to the manager. "Somewhere in the fourth reel it'll go." "Can you fix it?" "I can splice it. Takes a minute." "Then splice it." He fed the leader through the gate. Sprockets, loop, sprockets, loop. His hands knew it. His hands would know it long after the rest of him had forgotten, he suspected, the way his mother had forgotten his name but not how to knit. At the window, the little square of glass that looked down over the audience, he could see the manager's daughter, Kim, who was thirty and had been trained on the digital system in a day, standing at the back with her arms folded. She'd asked him last week what the point was. Not unkindly. She'd genuinely wanted to know. "It's the same film," she'd said. "Same picture. Better, on digital. No scratches." "No scratches," Walter had agreed. "So?" He hadn't been able to say. He'd tried. Something about the light going through a thing, an actual thing, a strip of pictures that had been in that can since before she was born, and the picture on the screen being the shadow of the thing, not a copy of the thing. He'd heard himself and stopped.

The lights went down. He hit the motor and the lamp and the reel began to turn, that sound, the clatter, and on the screen the studio logo came up, scratched, a little green at the edges, and a hundred and eighty people made a sound that wasn't quite a cheer. More like a sigh with a smile in it. Reel one. Reel two. He changed over on the cue marks, the little circles in the top right corner that nobody in the audience had ever noticed in sixty years, and the changeover was clean. Reel four, eleven minutes in, the film snapped. The screen went white. There was a groan from downstairs, then a laugh. Walter had the lamp off and the loose end in his hands before the groan had finished. Splicer, tape, trim. Forty seconds. He'd done it in thirty once, 1986, but he'd been younger. He threaded it back, lamp on, motor on, and the musical came back mid-song, a woman on a staircase belting something about the moon, and downstairs they actually applauded. Kim was at the booth door. He hadn't heard her come up. "They clapped the splice," she said. "They always clap the splice." She stood and watched the reel turn for a while. The light came through the little window and moved on her face. "Okay," she said finally. "I think I get it." Walter didn't answer. Reel five was coming up. He had his hands full.