To kick off proceedings for the month, here’s a short story from my current work-in-progress, a “novel of sorts” called A Book of Changes. This particular novel is a strange hybrid of a beast—in part a selection of stories, in part a series of travel and memoir pieces and in part a kind of philosophy performed slantwise—and it is built up of sixty-four chapters, each one based upon one of the hexagrams of that magnet for the quixotic, the deranged and the otherwise doomed: the Chinese divinatory text, the Yijing (or I Ching) 易經. Each of the chapters of the Yijing consists of a hexagram, or six-line figure, and a series of attached verses; and the following story comes from hexagram no. 21, which is called shi ke 噬嗑. The story takes its lead in particular from the following section of the text: “Bites on dried gristly meat. / Receives metal arrows. / It furthers one to be mindful of difficulties. / And to be persevering.”

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In a land where good teeth mattered, where the snaggle-toothed, tombstone-mouthed were unwelcome, he had always been a paragon. His smile appeared everywhere. Not his eyes, for his eyes were a little too far apart, but his mouth, indeed the whole lower part of his face, was perfect. His lips were shapely but not too sensual; his chin was square, capable of growing well-distributed stubble, slightly tanned, dependable. But it was his teeth that were the true wonder: perfectly ordered, neither protruding nor uneven, large enough to be assertive without being flashy, a colour of white that, were it not a cliché to do so, one might compare to the white of pearls. These were teeth that when they met did so as if they were destined to meet just so, as if God had ordained it thus. It was the lower face of a man, that is to say, with whom you could do business. If anybody wanted a smile with the power to reassure, his was the mouth: toothpaste, life insurance, airlines, he had advertised them all.

He was sent on an assignment to Irian Jaya, in West New Guinea, to advertise breath freshening mints. This was something he was confident in doing, the kind of thing he had done one hundred times before. As it was breath mints, in the final advertisement, they might add a little starlike flash of light to his smile. They often did that, although he felt that his perfect smile did not require it, that this somewhat diminished the seriousness of his talent. Whilst he often had engagements overseas, this one made him feel somewhat apprehensive. He looked at the map. Irian Jaya: it was a long way from home.

The filming went well. They filmed the bottom half of his face, just to the right of the screen. His script was not difficult: “Different folks get fresh in different ways,” he had to say, “but for me, I use…” And whilst he said this, over his right shoulder against a suitably jungly backdrop some well-paid West Papuans, Irian Jayans — he wasn’t sure of the correct terminology — could be seen leaping around wearing nothing but head-dresses made from birds of paradise, and penis sheaths.

They filmed for most of the day, in various kinds of light; and when they had done, the locals invited the film crew to a meal, a pig that they had shot themselves out in the forest. Recognising that the man with the smile was some kind of star, some kind of Big Man, they treated him with special courtesy, giving him the prime rump cut. It was dark, and he was drunk on palm-wine, surrounded by the racket of the rainforest; and it was at this moment that, biting into the meat, he felt something crunch. He put his hand to his mouth. He tasted salt: blood or sweat, he wasn’t sure. He reached inside his mouth and pulled out the remnants of two shattered teeth, from the left side at the bottom, and a metal arrowhead that had become lodged in the rump of the pig.

They flew him out that evening. The insurance company paid compensation and they covered the costs of reconstruction. The smile artist took three months off, to recover, and then he telephoned his agent. “Any work on the horizon?” he asked.

“Condoms,” his agent said.

“Condoms are fine,” he replied.

The slogan went like this: “Maybe you can’t protect the ladies from your smile, but you can protect yourself.” It was not the best campaign he had been assigned to, but he had done worse. At least it did not involve travel to Irian Jaya.

And yet, when the filming started, it became apparent that there was something not quite right. The smile artist was famous in the business for attaining perfection in a single take, a true professional; but this time, they filmed take after take. It was as if he could not settle back into his smile, as if something about the smile didn’t fit.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “it’s these damned teeth.”

“No, no,” said the director. “The teeth are fine. Just try smiling a little differently. The script says…”

“I know what the script says”, he snapped, and they filmed another take.

The condom commercial never aired. As the months went on, business began to dry up. The smile artist hired a lawyer who sued the breath mint manufacturers for negligence. After some haggling, they agreed a compensation package.
He was rich enough not to need to work again. It could have been a life of ease for the man with perfect teeth and with an almost perfect smile: but somehow all joy had deserted him, and for those days and nights that remained to him, the smile artist sat alone, night after night, drinking whiskey out of a bottle and looking in the mirror at the reflection of his mouth, its corners downturned.