Bubble and Star
Leota Packard had been born and raised in Georgia, not far from Jimmy Carter’s home town of Plains. But when she was twenty, she left the South and never returned.
Once in her subsequent life – during the Carter presidency – she found her mind wandering like a lost child back to her mother’s porch swing; and there it sat for a few minutes, rocking to and fro, watching the fields. Above the fields, it saw creatures dancing in the air – gnats and fireflies. But this wasn’t its usual habit. If Carter hadn’t become President, it might never have gone back. Because normally it stayed in Canada, where Leota lived after her marriage to Eugene Packard, a Canadian plastics manufacturer. It stayed in the bright and tidy house Packard built for them two miles from Niagara Falls. It was perfectly happy there and seemed to have no need or inclination to remember the past.
But then, when Leota and Packard were old, when the plastics company had made them rich, when they had lived together for fifty years, the subject of Georgia came back suddenly into Packard’s head. Not into Leota’s head, but into Packard’s. He began saying to strangers at parties: ‘Leota is old enough to remember slavery.’ The mouths of the strangers would gape and their eyes turn towards Leota, but she would ignore them and look at Packard through the purple sun visor she wore in all weathers and say: ‘Those people were not slaves, Pack.’ And he would reply: ‘They were not free, neither, Leota. And that’s the truth.’
He was getting angry with the world.
Leota watched him through her visor and wondered when this anger had started.
She decided it had begun the day they went to the unveiling of a painting.
He said to her as they set out: ‘Take off that frigging visor, Leota! You see the world through cough linctus.’
She replied: ‘I like it that way, Pack.’
‘OK,’ he said, ‘but it’s not the way it is!’
‘How can you say what way it is? Everyone sees it differently.’
‘Not me,’ he said, ‘not any more. I see it as IT IS!’
The painting was black. They sat with friends and neighbours in two rows in the town gallery and looked at it and there it was, a black square on a beige background with nothing in it but black, black. The gallery had raised $100,000 to acquire it and yet it looked completely and utterly worthless. Leota had taken off her visor, but as they all sat there in silence she put it on again so that there would be a new kind of magenta colour to the border of the black square.
The artist was introduced to the audience. His name was Pethcot and he wore round black glasses, like pebbles. He smiled and preened and was about to begin to talk about his marvellous square when Packard stood up and said: ‘I guess I always knew your world was hollow. Now I get it; it isn’t only hollow, it’s filled with crap.’
He walked out of the gallery and Leota followed him. For all that day and most of the night, he sat on a chair with a board over his knee, playing Solitaire and mumbling: ‘Cheats and liars! Don’t speak to me . . .’
There was a side of him which had always been down on things, hard on things, including himself and the factory. Asked what the factory made, he had often replied: ‘We make trash and the cans to put it in.’ He knew ‘plastic’ wasn’t a popular word; it was a word Canadians worried about. Leota reminded him: ‘If you manufactured from wood, Pack, they would worry about the trees, but everything has to be made of something.’ He answered that anxiety wasn’t always rational, any more than despair was rational. ‘Who’s talking about despair?’ asked Leota. ‘Everyone,’ said Packard. ‘Every soul alive.’
This didn’t seem rational to Leota. She reminded Packard that one of the products made by the factory was an incubator housing. She said: ‘The parents of those babies in your incubators may have been in despair for a while, but when they see their babies aren’t going to die they’re happy as birds.’
‘Nah,’ said Packard. ‘Wrong. You don’t see to the heart of things, Leota. They’re happy as birds for a while, only until they remember how easily it was going to come.’
‘How easily what was going to come?’
‘Death. The whole vanishing thing.’
‘Pack,’ said Leota, ‘stop it. You’re a normal man, not a poet. Get your mind on something real. Think of the Blue Jays and the great season they’re having!’
‘I don’t give a fly’s arse for the Blue Jays,’ said Pack.
‘Why not? Baseball used to be your craze.’
‘Well, it’s not any more. I’m through with baseball.’
Leota thought: it’s OK to be through with a craze if you can replace it with something else, preferably another craze, even something as trivial as TV game shows. Crazes kept people alive. If you didn’t care one way or another about anything, you died. She reminded Pack that Burt Lancaster had kept birds in Alcatraz and this had helped him to go on living, day after day. But Packard only laughed: ‘That dates you, Leota! You saw that film in black and white. It predates your visor.’
She didn’t mind being teased. Pack was a large man. Large men were often teases. And she’d lived with him for fifty years, just the two of them, no children, no pets, and survived it all and still loved him. But she decided she did mind him getting angry with the world. She minded it for two reasons: 1. she knew that anger takes all the fun and joy out of everything, and 2. it made her feel guilty. It made her wonder whether she shouldn’t start to be angry too – whether anger, when you got old, was the only appropriate emotion left. And she’d always been very accepting of the world, never analysed anything with care. Even in her dreams of Georgia, she saw fireflies, not black workers in the fields with their backs bent. It was shameful when she thought about it. And the people who were angry with everything – like Steve Cairns, the seventeen-year-old son of their neighbours, who fought with his father and stole from local stores and left vomit in the driveway – made her frightened. She couldn’t help it. Steve Cairns terrified her, him and everybody like him, all the angry punks and bullies. She wanted them to leave Canada. She wanted to send them to the frozen moon.
She lay beside Packard and looked at his white hair on the pillow. She’d noticed, at the unveiling of the black square, that his hair had started to stick out crazily from his head, stiff and wild, as if electricity were fizzing through it. She supposed that fury could generate an electrical charge. Electricity could be made by unexpected things, like the left front door handle of her car, which gave her a slight shock each time she touched it. If Packard’s hair got too straight and startling, it might be time to take him away somewhere, to one of the islands in the Hudson Bay, where there was nothing to feel angry about, no charlatan painters, no trash in the water, no TV news of wars and homelessness. Or, she might advise him, simply, to go to the Falls.
Pack had been raised within sight of them and had said all his life that he was ‘proud to know the Niagara’. It was there that he went when something upset him. He frequently reminded Leota, when he returned from these expeditions, that 3,000 tons of water per second went over the lip. He said: ‘Most people in the world live hundreds of miles from any astonishing thing. They don’t feel wonder any more. They don’t know how to feel wonder. And it is wonder, Leota, and that alone that keeps man in check. I’m telling you.’
He didn’t need to tell her, really. She could remember watching the stars over Georgia and everyone on the porch saying they felt small and insignificant. And it wasn’t as though the subject of the Falls didn’t crop up when people visited them from America or England, because it did. One of Packard’s favourite pastimes was to re-tell the stories of the stunters, the people who had tried to defy the Falls in barrels or other contraptions ‘of their own pathetic making’. Packard despised the stunters, ‘the boobies’, as he called them, for trying to make profit from the Falls.
He denied that they were brave. He said: ‘What’s brave about trying to grab notoriety?’
The visitors always listened attentively. They seemed enthralled by the stunts. Leota assured them: ‘You don’t have to take Pack’s view of the matter. He knows it’s not the only view.’
‘Nah,’ he said, ‘but it’s the only sane view. Take that guy, Stephens, from England. You know what that booby did? To try to keep his barrel the right way up, he stuck a hundred-pound anvil in the base of it and tied his feet to the anvil and his arms to the lid of the barrel . . .’
Leota always thought, at this point, that she could see the guests trying to remember what an anvil was. She thought an anvil was a hard kind of thing to picture any more. But Pack had pictured it so many times he had no difficulty and he always went straight on. ‘You can see what’s coming, can’t you?’ he said. ‘That stupid guy! When the barrel went over and hit the water, the anvil dropped out the bottom, wham, in the first second. And Stephens went with it. All except his right arm! And that’s the only bit of him they ever found – his damned arm!’
‘Oh, no!’ the guests would say, ‘Oh, God! Oh, my!’ And Packard would smile. ‘Stephens was the arch booby,’ he’d say, ‘but there were others. You bet.’
Packard always referred to Steve Cairns as ‘The Deli’. The nickname amused him. ‘You get it, Leota? It refers both to the word “delinquent” and to the quantity of Russian salad he and his friends leave on the neighbourhood walkways.’
He’d always sympathised with Mr and Mrs Cairns, said, heavens, if kids are like that, thank God we don’t have any. But now, in his new fury with so many things, he started to invite The Deli into the house for coffee and a smoke. Leota would come into the kitchen and find The Deli sitting with his feet on the table. Occasionally, she made Pack his favourite malted milk and stayed to listen to the conversations. She learned that the Deli’s body was slowly being covered with tattoos; he had a woman’s breast on each knee, a jewel-handled dagger going from his pubic hair to his navel and a raptor on his back. He offered to show them, but Leota said: ‘That’s kind of you, Steve, but no thank you, dear.’
Later, she said: ‘It’s pathetic, Pack. It’s so juvenile.’
‘Sure,’ said Packard, ‘but he’s looked at the grown-up world and he doesn’t like it enough to join it. And who can blame him?’
‘That’s the way young people always were,’ said Leota, ‘but they used to want to do something to change it. Now, they just sit around and do things with needles.’
‘They see the world’s not susceptible to change any more,’ said Packard. ‘It’s too far gone. Even here in Canada. There’s no decent people any more. So steal from them. Why not? Governments steal. Big Business steals. Packard Plastics steals . . .’
‘Hush,’ said Leota. ‘Stop thinking that way. I can’t endure it. We’ve only got a few years . . .’
‘Exactly. So let’s wise up. Get rid of your visor. Let’s see things as they are.’
Leota stood up and put her hands on her hips the way her mother used to do when she told off the black maid. ‘Packard,’ she said, ‘I am taking you away.’
The travel agent found her a cabin on an island in the Hudson Bay. It had its own landing stage and a sixteen-foot fibreglass boat. Firs surrounded the cabin and came down to the edge of the water. It was beaver country. The light from the north was fierce.
‘OK,’ said Packard, when they arrived on a late afternoon, ‘this is all right’.
Outside their bedroom, which faced south over the water, was a wooden balcony. Packard found two faded deck chairs and set them out side by side. ‘Up here,’ he said, ‘we will really be able to see the stars. And by the way, dear, stars are silver, sometimes yellowish, sometimes quite white, but they are never purple.’
He got two blankets for them and bought a bag of donuts from the only bakery on the island and there they sat, on their second night, eating donuts and staring at the night sky. It was early spring and cold and silent. Packard tucked the blankets round their knees and Leota took off her visor.
Packard said after a while: ‘I read someplace the galaxy’s in the shape of two fried eggs, back to back. We’re in amongst the white.’
Leota said: ‘Astronomers try to simplify everything for us, but the things they ask us to imagine are still pretty darned hard.’
Packard laughed. This was a sound Leota hadn’t heard for a while. Then he said: ‘I like the way the stars mock us. They’re more merciless than the Falls. The Falls are there at least, but up there . . . we think we’re looking at solid worlds, but we’re not, we’re looking at travelling light.’
‘Why does it stop travelling?’ asked Leota.
‘What?’ said Pack.
‘Why does it stop at a fixed point? Why doesn’t it come on and on until it gets so close to us it blinds us?’
‘It wouldn’t blind you, Leota. You’d just be in among a sparkling bilberry soup!’
Pack hadn’t noticed that Leota had taken off the visor, but now he did and he held out his hand, sticky with sugar, for her to hold. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘And for the way I am now. I don’t know why light stops travelling. And I don’t know why I’m so darn mad about everything. I guess I’m just a booby, like all the rest.’
‘No you’re not,’ said Leota.
‘Anyway,’ said Packard, ‘I’ll be up there in a while. The dead turn into interstellar gas, I bet they do. See that very bright, cold star – that one?’
‘Yup. I see it.’
‘Look there for me. It’s a waterfall star, must be. I think it’s called Sirius. My gas particles will be popping somewhere there.’
‘Hush up, sweetheart,’ said Leota, ‘this is a vacation. So why not live for now?’
But he didn’t live another day.
He went out in the fibreglass boat at dawn and a west wind blew in from the Northern Territories and the boat overturned. Packard’s body wasn’t found for seven days. It had been washed ashore on an island so small it was inhabited only by gannets and geese, who pecked at his nose and at his eyes and at his white hair. The police said to Leota: ‘We don’t advise you to see the face, ma’am. Identification from the feet and hands will be sufficient.’
Leota had never known loneliness. She never could have imagined how much time it consumed. She’d sit for hours and hours, with her chin on her hands, doing nothing and being nothing, except lonely.
It was not only her years with Packard that she sat there remembering – the building of their house, the summer parties they used to give, their mall shopping, their trips to Europe and the States, their love of Cajun food, and all their early years of passion – but her long-ago childhood slowly gathered shape and colour in her mind, like a developing photograph. Her former self felt weightless, or else winged, like the gnats she’d seen at the time of Jimmy Carter. It floated above the landscape, but what it saw were all the ways the people round her were anchored to the earth. She saw all their endeavour. It never ceased. They struggled and laboured and fought until they died. She said to her friend, Jane: ‘I may have misunderstood it, but I don’t believe these people were angry with the world. I think they loved it to death. But Pack, in his last years, he was so mad at it all. So now I’m confused as well as heartbroken. I don’t know which of them was right.’
Sometimes, when the nights got warmer, Leota went out into the yard. She sat on a white tin chair and looked at the sky. She was searching for the bright waterfall star Packard had showed her. She moved her head in an arc, like a searchlight. She took off her visor. She ached for Pack to be alive again and by her side, eating donuts, and to show her the star she couldn’t find.
In her solitude, she found it difficult to eat. It was as if there were interstellar gas in her stomach – Lonely Gas, she called it. And so she began to get smaller and narrower and lighter. Even her head. Jane said to her: ‘It’s not possible that the head of a person can shrink.’ But Leota showed her the band of the visor, which she had had to alter by one notch. She said: ‘If Pack can die in a boat before breakfast, anything is possible.’
She was now seventy-three years old and had no idea what to look for or how to order the world for the remainder of her life. She knew she couldn’t spend it sitting at a table with her chin on her hands or out in the garden in a tin chair. But the fact remained, she was lost without Packard, literally lost. She had difficulty remembering the route to the hairdressers. Driving the car made her anxious, as if it was going to take her some place that she didn’t recognise and didn’t want to go. She didn’t know, at any one moment, what book she was reading or whether she was enjoying it or not. She had to look up the times of the TV game shows she always used to watch. When she stared at the yard, she thought it looked peculiar, as if someone had arrived in the night and moved the shrubs around.
In her kitchen, she listened to the radio. She knew it was important to continue to be told what was going on in the outside world, not least because then she could try to make up her mind about Pack’s anger with it. She learned from a radio programme that tigers were disappearing from India, killed by poachers, who sold the bones, ground to bags of dust, to the Chinese. She forgot what the Chinese used the dust for. She was informed that a growth industry in Russia was the sale of human hair. She found these things both disturbing and reassuring; people would do no matter what to stay alive, to buy another week, another day. But then she thought: it’s a shame to kill a tiger or sell your hair for another day; and I have days and weeks and years already bought and I don’t necessarily want them all. It would be better for those people to be given some of my time.
She knew her thinking was confused. In her narrowing head, her brain was probably getting smaller. Grief for a person or a thing could uncouple the logical part of your mind from the rest of it. In Moscow, there could be women who were going insane, grieving for their hair.
She sighed at all this. Her sighs had become insubstantial and sounded like the whispers of a child. She told herself that she had to make a plan, find a goal, or else her future would be completely and utterly blank and dark like the black square painting in the town gallery.
One afternoon, The Deli came round. Leota hadn’t seen him since Packard’s funeral, where she’d noticed that he had a new tattoo in the shape of a heart on his neck. He brought some limp flowers wrapped in paper and laid them on Leota’s kitchen table.
‘Thank you, Steve,’ she said. ‘Sit down, dear, won’t you?’
It was summer now and The Deli was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and torn shorts, exposing the breasts on his knees. Leota could smell sweat on his skinny body. She didn’t want him there.
He said: ‘I should have come sooner, Mrs Packard. I’m sorry I didn’t.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Leota, ‘there was no need . . .’
There was a long silence. Leota thought: Pack used to keep Cokes in the refrigerator for when he called.
‘Can I get you a drink of water?’ she asked.
‘No thanks,’ said The Deli. ‘My parents told me you didn’t get out much any more, so I came to say . . .’
Leota was staring at the heart on his neck. It seemed to be bordered with lace, like the paper heart of a valentine card.
‘I can drive now,’ he went on. ‘I passed my test. So I thought, if there was any place you wanted to go . . .’
Leota looked up. She felt more surprised by what The Deli had just said than by anything she’d seen or heard since the radio programme about tiger bones.
‘Why . . .’ she said, falling as she sometimes did into her Georgia drawl, ‘that is most kind of you dear, but—’
‘I mean it. I’d like to drive you somewhere.’
‘Well . . .’ she said. ‘Well. You know the place I haven’t been in a long time is the Falls . . .’
‘OK,’ said The Deli. ‘Sure. The Falls. Why not?’
Later, lying in bed, Leota thought: why did I say the Falls? That was Pack’s place. What will I do there except get spray on my visor and fill up with Lonely Gas? The truth was, she didn’t want to go any place with Steve Cairns. He might throw up out of the car window. He might kill her with reckless driving. But she knew she’d had to accept his offer. After so long of wanting to ship him off to the moon, this was the least she could do.
So they went on a bright August day in Mrs Cairns’ Toyota. The Deli drove very fast with one elbow leaning out the window, as if he’d practised driving for fifteen years. Leota examined the lacy heart on his neck and eventually said: ‘Your little heart, dear; it looks very near the jugular vein to me.’
‘Yup,’ said The Deli, ‘it is. It’s called a 3.’
‘A 3?’
‘There are three levels of risk with a tattoo. Most of the body carries level 1 – low risk of any side effect, infection or damage to essential tissue. Level 2 would be, say, medium risk: soles of the feet, which could cause problems through inadvertent reflexology. Then there’s level 3: inside of wrist, genitals and neck, just here.’
‘Do you like danger?’ asked Leota.
The Deli scratched his cropped head. ‘I guess,’ he said. ‘I guess.’
When they got to the Falls, The Deli parked neatly and said: ‘Shall I wait in the car, Mrs Packard? Do you want to be alone?’
‘No,’ said Leota, ‘I certainly do not want to be alone. I never would go to the Falls alone.’
They got out of the car and Leota, who felt as frail as a bird, took The Deli’s arm. The day was windy, but the roar of the cataract was still huge above the wind. Walking towards it, Leota told The Deli that Packard used to stand on the far right, where the grassy bank of the Niagara River tapers towards the precipice. She remembered that he used to lean far out over the rail and gaze at the translucent jade of the lip where, for an instant, the water still reflects the light before it foams white and is gone. She led The Deli to this exact spot and the two of them looked down. Leota let go of the boy’s arm and held tightly to the rail. She thought the wind might easily snatch at her and hold her on an eddy above the spray, before letting her fall.
After only a few moments, The Deli said: ‘When you get here, when you see it again, you have to admire those stunters, don’t you, Mrs Packard? Imagine going over the edge in a barrel? Holy shit!’
Leota said: ‘The first person to try it was a woman. Did you know that, Steve? She was called Annie Taylor and she’d been a schoolteacher.’
‘Did she make it? Did she survive?’
‘Yes, she did. I think it was in about 1901. She was a heroine for a while, till people just forgot about her. And that’s the trouble with stunts. People’s memory for them is short.’
‘Well, I admire those stunters. I couldn’t do it. Could you, Mrs Packard?’
Leota stared for a long time at the great spectacle that Packard had been so proud to know and which had comforted him with its grandeur. Eventually, she said: ‘I don’t know, but if I did I wouldn’t want to be locked in a barrel in darkness. I’d want to go over in something transparent – like a giant bubble – so that I could see everything and know what was happening to me every second of the trip.’
That evening when the stars came out, Leota made herself a Martini and took it out into the yard, where she sat down on the tin chair. She’d given up looking for the waterfall star, but she chose a black space in the sky and imagined Packard as a cloud of Lonely Gas within it. The Martini tasted fine. ‘Pack,’ said Leota, ‘you were wrong about Steve Cairns. I do believe you were – and so was I. Steve was just going through a craze for hating the world, as anyone could, but it’s lessening.’
Leota finished the Martini. She didn’t know why Martini glasses had to be so small.
She took off her visor and looked at Packard’s invisible gas cloud with an unprotected eye. ‘He’s learned to drive,’ she continued. ‘That takes application and you wouldn’t bother with driving lessons – that’s what I think, anyway – unless you planned to go someplace and see some sights. And then, Pack, he told me he admired the stunters. He doesn’t see them as boobies. Not at all. He sees them as brave people. So there you are. You thought you had an ally in Steve and I thought I had an enemy and both of us were wrong.’
As she went back into the house and made herself a second Martini, she felt defiant, as if something had at last been resolved. But when she woke up the next morning, she didn’t know why she’d felt this. Nothing was resolved. She’d seen another side to The Deli’s character, that was all. She was relieved of the burden of referring to him as The Deli and of wanting to send him off to the moon. But the fact of Packard’s anger still remained. And now she saw, for the first time, that it may have had a dimension to it that she’d never acknowledged: in coming to despise so much in human endeavour, he must also have come to despise her. He’d seen how inadequate and false was her vision of her Southern childhood, how unenquiring her Georgia mind. He’d nagged and nagged at her to take off her visor. He’d told her a hundred times that she failed to see things as they are, Leota.
She felt bleak. She wanted to say to Pack: I disapprove of killing something as beautiful as a tiger, to grind its bones to some dust or other, of course I do. And a world where women have to sell their blood or their hair or their bodies to buy bread can’t be ajust place. Even I can see this. And I’ve always seen it.
No, says Pack’s voice. Don’t lie. Even now, when you should see the past as it was, you see gnats and fireflies and golden light. You’ve insulated yourself, with the money I made from trash, with your house in a good clean neighbourhood, with the sweet shade of purple you’ve coloured all the seasons . . .
The word ‘trash’, among all the vexing words of Packard’s, was the one that started to haunt Leota most. She looked round her house. It was orderly and warm and comfortable, with quite a few objects of beauty in it. And it was built on a plastics fortune. It was built on products Packard had found worthless.
Leota went into the kitchen. She stared at all the plastic appliances, each with its one and only function of saving her labour and time. And she thought: if I could just see what all the time had been saved for, then I would know what to do with the rest of my life.
She couldn’t see. She sighed her child-like sigh and began putting her dirty washing into the machine. These mundane things had to be done, even though a person felt bewildered and lost. In a Moscow kitchen, a young woman ties a scarf round her head and puts bones into water for a soup. She does it because she has to go on.
But why go on? Why?
Leota didn’t hear Steve knocking at her back door. Or perhaps she heard? Perhaps she said ‘Come in, Steve’? She didn’t remember. All she knew was that Steve was suddenly there in her kitchen. He was leaning against the washing machine, talking about Japanese cars. Then Leota said: ‘Steve, fill the powder dispenser for me, will you, dear?’
‘Sure,’ he said. But he didn’t fill it. He held the round plastic powder dispenser in his hand and showed it to her.
‘Look,’ he said.
‘At what?’ said Leota.
‘At this,’ said Steve. ‘You’ve got the perfect blueprint here – for your Niagara bubble.’
She hardly wanted to let Steve out of her sight after that. She said: ‘I know you have to attend school, dear, and smoke and play music and so forth, but you’ve masterminded the rest of my life and I want you to supervise the plan every step of the way.’
He said: ‘You’re not serious, are you, Mrs Packard?’
‘Call me Leota,’ she said, ‘from now on. And, yes, of course I’m serious.’
They sat at her kitchen table, drinking Martinis and making drawings. She said: ‘We have to remember, Steve, the priority is visibility.’
‘And strength,’ he said. Leota said nothing.
He was good at calculations. He said the only thing he could do at school was Math.
‘What about History?’ asked Leota.
‘Trash,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’
They measured Leota and weighed her. Her head had shrunk another notch on her visor and her weight was down to 101 pounds. She was the size, Steve said, of a twelve-year-old person.
It was autumn already – six months since Packard’s death – when Leota and Steve drove in Mrs Cairns’ Toyota to the plastics factory and Leota asked to see the manager, Ron Blatch.
‘Ron comes on breezy,’ said Leota to Steve, while they waited on imitation-leather chairs for Ron to appear, ‘but his home life’s a mess.’
He came in smiling and shook Leota’s hand and said it was always a pleasure to see her. She introduced him to Steve and he was, as she knew he would be, courteous to him. She was glad, nevertheless, that Steve was wearing a polo neck that day and that Ron couldn’t see his tattooed heart so close to the jugular.
She told Ron Blatch that she was funding a stunt, an attempt to shoot the Falls in a plastic bubble, and that she wanted the factory to make the bubble according to a preliminary design.
Steve produced the drawings that now showed a contraption five feet in diameter and built of transparent air-filled tubing, laid in a circular coil and encased in a clear plastic ball. At its top was a watertight escape hatch that could be opened from both inside and out. Bolted to the ball was a harness made of plastic fibre.
Ron Blatch took out his glasses and put them on. He stared at the drawings. Then he smiled and took his glasses off again and shook his head.
‘Stunting’s illegal now, the whole length of the Niagara,’ he said. ‘It’s banned absolutely.’
‘We know that, Ron,’ said Leota. ‘We know that . . .’
Ron looked at Steve. ‘So who’s planning on breaking the law?’
‘Well . . .’ said Leota.
‘No one,’ said Steve. ‘This is not for personal gain or glory. It’s gonna be for charity and charity stunts can be allowed.’
‘Ah-huh?’ said Ron. ‘Like which charity?’
‘The aim,’ said Leota firmly, ‘is to do something in memory of Packard. He was a good man. He minded about the world and Packard Plastics have made life better for thousands of people.’
‘Sure,’ said Ron.
‘But he was unquiet,’ continued Leota. ‘He was afraid that Canadians had lost their reverence for the natural world, for the things they can’t contain and control . . .’
‘The Falls are contained OK,’ said Ron, smiling. ‘Seventy-five per cent of their power is taken by the hydro-electric companies.’
‘I know that,’ said Leota, ‘but still they’re not quite tamed, are they? And, to Pack, they came to symbolise all the things he was afraid we’d lost.’
‘I know he loved the Falls,’ said Ron, ‘but I can’t break the law for him and you haven’t mentioned which charity you’re doing this for.’
Leota looked at Steve. She hoped his mathematical mind was working on a formula. After a moment’s silence, he said: ‘It’s to help the old, Mr Blatch. The old are a despised group these days. It’s to benefit them.’
Ron rubbed his eyes. He said nothing, but put his glasses on again and stared at the drawings in his hands. Leota thought that he wasn’t really looking at them, but only pretending to look at them while he decided what to say and do.
‘Ron,’ she said, ‘Pack was good to you, wasn’t he? Fair to you all, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘So build this for him. Will you? And don’t ask any more questions?’
Ron Blatch looked up. His expression was blank and dumb and Leota felt suddenly sorry for him. He might have liked to go home and talk this over with his wife and get her opinion on whether or not he was about to break the law, but his wife had run off with her fencing teacher and that was that.
‘OK,’ said Ron.
Leota knew that it would take the company some time to manufacture the bubble. Special moulds would have to be made; Steve’s calculations would have to be fed into the firm’s computers. So she also knew that she had time to think carefully about what she was planning.
The nights were getting cold. She laid her light-boned body on the couch and listened to a little light Schubert and tried to weigh her own death against the sweetness and beauty of the music.
She decided there must be some sort of balance between wanting to live on and wanting to leave the world in a bubble. Yet what I see is the bubble. Only that. I don’t see any future at all. The future of Leota Packard is as empty of everything as a Pethcot square. The future is a chair and me on it and my head on my hands.
She dozed and dreamed. The lighter her frame was becoming, the more she floated on sudden little currents of sleep.
One evening, she woke to find Steve in her living room. He was sitting on her Persian rug, rolling a cigarette. When she focused on him, she saw that he looked pale and anxious.
‘Leota,’ he said. ‘Something terrible’s happened.’
‘All right, dear,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’
She went to the kitchen and made two Martinis. She came back into the room and gave one of them to Steve. She sat down opposite him and the two of them sipped the drinks in silence for a moment.
Then Steve said: ‘They’re sending me away.’
‘Away?’ said Leota. ‘Who is and where?’
‘My parents. To some frozen school up near Alaska. My dad says he can’t stand the sight of me another day. I think it’s my knees that freak him out. The tits expand when I sit down. I guess you noticed?’
‘Yes, I did, dear. And your mother?’
‘She doesn’t say anything. She clings on to Dad’s arm. He says every line that’s on her face I’ve put there.’
‘I haven’t noticed many lines. She’s a good-looking woman.’
‘I know. But that’s what Dad says.’
‘When are you leaving, Steve?’
‘Next week.’
‘Well, I’m very, very sorry. A frozen school near Alaska sounds like an awful place. And you’re very thin. I’d better give you some of Pack’s old woollen sweaters to take with you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Steve, ‘but what about the bubble?’
Leota sat very still and looked around her room and then out of the window, where a November rain was falling.
‘I don’t know, dear,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. But you’re the one we must worry about.’
That night, Leota couldn’t sleep. She blamed herself for what was happening. For so long, she’d wanted to send Steve to an icy place outside her world and now he was going there. She’d willed it, out of fear and loathing, and now that all her fear and loathing had gone her will had started to prevail. ‘Leota,’ she whispered aloud, ‘you see everything too late.’
Pointless to cry, she thought. Crying’s for the boobies. So she decided to get up. It was two in the morning and cold in the house. She put on her peignoir and her satin slippers frayed at the heels and went out into the yard. She looked up at the sky and there, in the south, was the waterfall star. She remembered its name: Sirius.
It seemed almost blue, the coldest, bluest star in the galaxy. And it was large, as if it were nearer by hundreds of years than all the stars that surrounded it. Leota felt amazed that she could have searched for it for so long and not found it. It blinked at her – light refracted through time and the thousand imaginary cataracts of Packard’s mind. And then she heard Packard’s laugh exploding up there in its swirl of gas. ‘Stars move,’ he said, ‘and the world moves. You’ve never understood how each and every damn thing in the universe is changing every second of time. So from where you stand, Leota, this is a winter star.’
‘OK, Pack,’ she heard herself say, ‘I see it now.’
She’d always been an impatient person. As a child, when she woke before dawn, she used to yell at the sun to come up. And once she’d decided on a thing, she wanted to make it happen straightaway.
At eight, she called Steve and asked him to come by. He arrived at nine with his roller skates round his neck. Leota made coffee.
‘Steve,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen everything all wrong.’
‘What do you mean, Leota?’
‘Well. I don’t need the bubble after all. You see? It was typical of me to think about a bubble, to think about plastic protection, just like my old visor, but I don’t need it.’
‘What are you going to use, then? A barrel?’
‘No. I’m going to use nothing.’
‘Come on . . .’
‘It’s what I want to do. You won’t be able to put me off, so don’t try. I’m a Georgia girl and stubborn. But I need one last favour from you, dear.’
‘Leota . . .’
‘I want you to drive me there. If I went alone, I could lose my nerve. And I want to do it tonight. It has to be night, because I don’t want to petrify any Japanese or French tourist. And tonight feels good to me. So if your mother would very kindly lend you the Toyota . . .’
Steve got up. He put his roller skates on the floor and lit a cigarette. He walked to the window and smoked silently for a moment, then he turned and said: ‘I want to be absolutely clear what you’re telling me.’
‘I’m telling you that I’m sorry,’ said Leota. ‘Sorry for everything. Sorry for all the things I didn’t properly understand and sorry, in particular, that you’re being sent away to the moon.’
‘It’s not the moon,’ said Steve.
‘Near,’ said Leota.
‘It’s not enough,’ said Steve. ‘It doesn’t explain it.’
‘Well, it’s too bad,’ said Leota. ‘That’s all I can say. That’s it.’
He arrived in a pick-up truck. He said: ‘The days when I can borrow the Toyota are gone.’ He told Leota that the pick-up belonged to the father of a bass guitarist.
Leota had chosen her outfit carefully: clean white underwear and white socks; blue-pants, bought at Queens Quay, Toronto; a white silk blouse and a pale-blue wool jacket with a little silver monogram on the pocket; white shoes she normally only wore in summer. She’d washed and combed her short white hair and fixed two jade earrings to her still soft ear lobes.
‘You look nice,’ said Steve.
‘Thank you, dear,’ said Leota.
When they left, towards midnight Leota didn’t look back at the house that Packard had built for her and where, she had to admit, she’d been foolishly happy. She kept her eyes straight ahead on the moonlit road and all her mind was on the tiny particle of the future that remained. She and Steve didn’t speak until they turned off the main highway leading to the Falls and started down an old track that led nowhere but in amongst some trees and stopped at a barbed-wire fence. A hundred yards beyond the fence was the Niagara River. ‘I know this,’ said Steve, out of the darkness, ‘it’s a place where I’ve been.’
Leota didn’t ask what he’d been here for. Instead, she said: ‘It’s so very kind of you, dear, to help me in this way. I hope you won’t get into any kind of trouble on my account.’
‘Don’t think about that,’ said Steve.
He stopped the car and they both got out. They were some way upstream from the Falls, but they could hear them, even feel their nearness in the ground underneath them. They stood very still, holding onto the truck. It was a cold, cloudy night with no stars.
Leota had been precise about the arrangements she wanted. She would walk on her own through the trees to the water’s edge. She would wait there a few minutes. Meanwhile, Steve would drive back onto the highway and park up in the Falls parking lot. Then he would go and stand at the rail – exactly where they had stood on their visit – a few feet from the lip of the waterfall. He was to carry a strong flashlight. With the flashlight, he was to scan the water, looking for Leota’s bobbing head, and, when he found it, he was to fix the light on her. ‘Your light,’ she’d said, ‘will be the last thing I see and it will be like a star. You must be certain to follow me all the way, till I’m over and gone.’
They hung back by the truck, getting cold, because neither of them knew how to say goodbye. So then Leota just started to walk forwards, without a word. She was at the fence and climbing through when Steve called out: ‘Wait! Leota, wait a minute!’
She was on the other side of the fence now. Steve ran towards her and, with the barbed wire between them, put his arms round her. She was much smaller than him. She reached up and put a kiss on his tattooed heart.
At the water’s edge, she took off her shoes. She felt no fear at all. ‘None, Pack,’ she said. ‘So there you are.’
She was impatient, in fact, to get into the surging green river. Her only worry was that her body was too light to fall straight down under the guillotine of water. She thought it might reach the lip and go flying outwards – as once had happened to a young boy – and arrive in the pool below still alive. But this was a small risk. No one else had survived the Falls without the protection of a barrel.
She let time pass, but then she didn’t know how much of it had gone. She’d heard Steve drive away in the truck, but she couldn’t tell whether he would have taken up his position at the lip yet and switched on the flashlight.
She waited five more minutes, gauging the time by counting. Then, she put her white shoes side by side and got into the water.
It was so cold, it took her thoughts away. And the current was far stronger and wilder than she’d imagined. She was like flotsam in it, being whirled round like a fairground car. Waves broke over her and her mouth filled with water. She choked and spat. She tried to hold her head high, to swim properly, to grab her thoughts back. She’d believed that the green river would be easy and lead her gently to the edge, but it fought her, as if jealous of her destination, as if it wanted to claim her before she reached the fall.
With her bony hands, with her legs in blue pants, with her neck and chin, she fought its intention. Each time she surfaced, she could see, to her delight, the yellow beam of Steve’s flashlight directed at her from the bank. As long as that light was there, she believed the river wouldn’t take her. And when she knew at last that she was there; when, in the final second, she felt the water become calm before it slid her over and hurled her down, she found a voice to raise against the thunder. ‘Hey!’ she yelled. And it was to Leota as if all the world could hear her and would remember this moment of hers for years and years to come: ‘Watch this! The last booby!’