The Schwa Was Here

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened with Lexie. I thought you should know I’m not going out with her anymore.”

  “That doesn’t matter either. You can go now. Really.”

  He sat there, waiting for me to leave, but I didn’t. I didn’t say anything else back to him either. They say action speaks louder than words, but so does inaction. Sitting there like a rock was the strongest statement I could make about our friendship.

  The Schwa watched how I didn’t move. I think it made him uncomfortable because he looked away. “You shouldn’t feel sorry for me,” he said. “You know, Buddhists believe the state of nonbeing is the perfect place to be.”

  “You’re not a Buddhist.”

  He looked at me, thinking for a moment. “I’ll tell you something, Antsy. I’ll tell you something you’ve always wanted to know—but if I tell you, you have to promise to believe it.”

  “If that’s what you want, Schwa, sure. I promise.”

  “Okay, then I’ll tell you a story . . .”

  . . .And there, in that darkened room, where I couldn’t see the color of the sky or anything else in his eyes, the Schwa told me his deepest, darkest memory.

  “I learned about the Schwa Effect when I was five,” he said, “although I didn’t have a name for it then. I didn’t have a name for it until you gave it one, Antsy. But I was five when I first realized that something was wrong.

  “I can’t remember what my mother looked like, but I do remember the last time I saw her. We had gone to Kings Plaza, and she bought me clothes. I was about to start kindergarten, and she wanted me to be the best-dressed kid in school. She wanted me noticed.

  “I remember she was sad. She had been sad for a long time, so I didn’t think it was anything unusual. On the way home we stopped at the supermarket to pick up something for dinner. I sat in the little kiddie seat of the shopping cart, and we went down all the aisles. It was this game we played—even when she just had to pick up a few things, she would take me down all the aisles, and I would try to name all the food. Ketchup. Pickles. Spaghetti.

  “We got to the frozen-food aisle. Outside it was a summer day, but in there it felt like winter. I can still feel that chill. Then she took her hands off of the cart. ‘I’ll be right back,’ she said. ‘I forgot the beef.’ She left, and I waited. Peas, corn, broccoli. I started naming all the frozen vegetables. String beans, spinach, carrots—and for a moment—just the tiniest moment, I forgot why I was there. I forgot who I was waiting for. I forgot her. Just for a moment—that’s all. And by the time I remembered, it was too late.

  “But I didn’t know that yet. So I sat there in the little kiddie seat, strapped in, freezing, and kept waiting. Lima beans, cauliflower, asparagus. She wasn’t back yet. Not in five minutes, not in ten. There were no more vegetables left to name.

  “That’s when I started crying. Just whimpering at first, then getting louder. Crying out for anyone to help me. Someone, please find my mommy. She’s just in the next aisle. I cried and cried, and you know what? You know what? No one noticed.

  “There I was, crying my eyes out, alone in a shopping cart, and people just walked on past like I wasn’t there. Not the other mothers, not the stock clerks, not the manager. They didn’t see me, they didn’t hear me. People just grabbed their food and went. And that’s when I knew it would be like that always. Someday there’d come a time for me, too, when no one remembered me—not a soul. And on that day I’d disappear forever, gone without a trace. Just like her.”

  I listened to his story with my heart halfway up my throat. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to sit in a shopping cart, alone in a crowd of people, waiting for a mother that never came back.

  “Schwa,” I said, slowly, “people don’t disappear just because no one remembers them.”

  “If you can’t remember them, how would you know? Think of the tree, Antsy. The tree falling in the forest. If nothing and no one is there to hear it, then it doesn’t really make a sound, and if nothing and no one remembers you, then you were never really there.”

  I couldn’t say anything. In the dim shadows of the room, and with what I already knew about the Schwa, it almost seemed possible.

  “But . . . you were there, Schwa—someone did notice you in that shopping cart, otherwise you’d still be sitting there today, blocking people from getting their lima beans.”

  “I don’t remember that—all the rest of that day is a blur. The next thing I remember for sure, though, was being in the police station with my father, answering questions and watching him fill out papers. I kept quiet mostly. I got the feeling that the cop didn’t even know I was there, and it made me mad. So I took something. Something he wouldn’t notice, but something that would prove I was there. When he picked up the missing persons report, all the pages slipped out and flew all over the ground, and I laughed. The cop didn’t know why the pages had fallen, but I did.”

  “The paper clip!” I said. “You took the paper clip!”

  “When we got home, Dad acted like everything was normal. It was before his accident, but he acted like he couldn’t remember her. From that moment on, he never talked about her. Her pictures disappeared from the walls, and soon everything that reminded me of her was gone. Everything but this.”

  Then he reached beneath his mattress, fished around a bit, and pulled out a little plastic bag. “I don’t keep this one with the others,” he said. He handed me the bag and I held it like it was a diamond. As far as I’m concerned, that paper clip was the most valuable thing I’d ever held in my life.

  “I don’t care what you say, Schwa—you’re not going to disappear.”

  “That’s right, Antsy, I won’t. I’m gonna make sure of it. I’m gonna do something that will make me so visible, no one’ll ever forget.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I couldn’t see if the Schwa was smiling, but somehow, I don’t think he was.

  “You’ll see.”

  15. Vortex in Aisle Three—Can Someone Please Clean Up the Ectoplasmic Slime?

  I had no idea what the Schwa had in mind, but I didn’t like his eerily calm tone of voice. It haunted me all the way home. It was what you might call a “blaze of glory” calm. I started to think of that old cartoon where Daffy Duck gets no respect, so, to prove he’s a better act than Bugs Bunny, he swallows a few sticks of dynamite, guzzles a can of gasoline, and then swallows a lighted match.

  “Yeah,” he says as he floats up toward the pearly gates, “but I can only do it once.”

  I conferred with Howie and Ira about it, because I felt I had no one else to talk to.

  “Maybe he’ll paint himself green and run through the school,” says Ira.

  “Naked!” says Howie.

  “Naah,” I said. “If the cat suit and the orange sombrero didn’t get him noticed, no amount of green paint would.”

  “Maybe he’s gonna skydive right into the middle of a Jets game,” says Ira.

  “Naked!” says Howie.

  “Naah,” I said. “People might remember that it happened, but they wouldn’t remember it was him.”

  They were no help, and so, for the Schwa’s sake, I put aside my own feelings of awkwardness and brought my worries to Lexie, because I knew, in spite of everything, she cared about him as much as I did.

  It seemed a kind of poetic justice, or maybe just pathetic justice, that Lexie’s and my relationship now revolved entirely around the Schwa.

  “He won’t disappear,” Lexie said, after I told her the story about his mother. “He won’t because she didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because people just don’t pop out of existence.”

  “Maybe they do,” I said. “Maybe they do all the time, and no one notices.”

  That’s when Crawley rolled into the room. “You’re talking about our friend Mr. Schwa, aren’t you.”

  “Since when was the Schwa your friend?” I asked.


  “I was speaking figuratively.”

  “You should be an expert on being invisible, Grandpa,” Lexie said, a little more biting than she usually was. “With all the years you’ve been cooped up in here.”

  Since nasty looks didn’t work on Lexie, he gave me one instead.

  “Out of sight, but not out of mind.” He wheeled over to the window. I had opened one of the curtains to let some late afternoon light in, but now he tugged the curtain closed, then turned to me. “How many years have you been hearing stories about crazy Old Man Crawley?”

  “For as long as I can remember,” I said. “And then some.”

  “There, you see? There’s a difference between being invisible, and being unseen. No one passes this restaurant without looking at these windows and wondering about me.”

  “So what do you think about the Schwa’s mother?” I asked him. “Which is she, invisible or unseen?”

  “Frankly, I couldn’t care less.” Crawley twirled his wheelchair around and headed for the kitchen. “But, if I did care, I’m sure there would be a way to find out.”

  Around the corner from me lived a guy who worked for the Department of Water and Power, and he claimed to be a dowser. You’ve probably heard of people like this—they use wishbone-shaped twigs to tune into “earth energies” or something, and can find water underground. Anyway, this guy’s name was Ed Neebly, and his job was to look for leaks in the city’s water grid. I don’t know if the Department of Water and Power knew he did his job by dowsing rather than by using the more traditional method, commonly called guessing.

  I saw him work once in a neighbor’s yard, armed with two L-shaped stainless-steel rods instead of a wishbone twig. I guess this was advanced technology for dowsers. With one rod in each hand, he paced back and forth across the yard. Neebly said that when the rods stayed parallel, it meant there was no underground leak. If the rods crossed, then there was water. Walking back and forth across the lawn, he accurately predicted where the leak in the pipe was, and everyone watching was amazed. Of course, he had been standing in a mud puddle when he made the prediction, but he claimed that was just a coincidence. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  Crawley had suggested there were ways to find out about the Schwa’s mother and her vanishing act. Well, the Schwa was convinced it was supernatural, and I wasn’t going to deny the possibility that maybe he was right. Maybe she had a terminal case of the Schwa Effect, and when no one was looking the universe kind of just swallowed her without as much as a burp. Then again, though, maybe there was a burp—and that’s where Ed Neebly came in. According to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, any halfway decent dowser could also go dowsing for spirits and other “paranormal phenomena.” It’s one of those do-not-try-this-at-home kind of things, because if you’re like me, you really don’t want to know how many people died in your bedroom.

  “I do believe in auras and energy fields,” Lexie told me, “but I don’t know if I believe in this.”

  Still, we hired Neebly to bring his dowsing talents to the Waldbaum’s in Canarsie—the alleged supermarket where the Schwa’s alleged mother allegedly vanished. He didn’t charge us anything. “Consider it a community service,” Neebly told us. “When we’re done, pay me what you think it’s worth.”

  For this task, his dowsing rods were made of glass. “Glass resonates with the spirit world more than metal,” Neebly said. “Spirits find metal irritating and head the other way. True.”

  Lexie, Moxie, and I followed him as he wove up and down the aisles of Waldbaum’s like we were some goofy Scooby-Doo ghost hunting squad. I tried to ignore the strange looks of the locals, but it wasn’t easy.

  “I feel like an idiot,” I said.

  “You get used to it,” Neebly told me. He led us through the fruits and vegetables, hesitating for a moment by the potatoes before moving on. He thought he found some ectoplasmic slime in the condiment aisle, but it turned out to be relish.

  “I’ve dowsed for spirits lots of times,” he told us. “It’s much more delicate than dowsing for water. Water always flows to the lowest point—not so with spirits!”

  He stopped toward the back of the store, and his rods crossed. “There’s a cold spot here.”

  “We’re in front of the dairy case,” I pointed out.

  “Hmm. Could be that. Could be astral.”

  The look on Lexie’s face was the blind version of an eyeball roll.

  We purposely hadn’t told Neebly where the disappearance had taken place, to see if he found it for himself. We watched him closely as he moved down the frozen-foods aisle and rounded the corner, toward the meat counter. The rods did not cross.

  “I got called out to Jersey a few months ago,” he told us as he passed the chicken, then the pork, then the beef. “A woman had a poltergeist living in her duplex. My rods went crazy when I got to the basement.” He passed the lamb and the seafood. The butcher behind the counter looked away, probably embarrassed for us. “It turns out the Mob had killed a guy and dumped him in the concrete when they poured the foundation. True.” By now he had passed the butcher’s counter and was headed toward the beer case, where he paused thoughtfully, although I don’t think that was because of any supernatural influences.

  In the end, he found no spiritual vortexes, although he did detect three leaks in the supermarket’s plumbing.

  We gave the supernatural angle a rest, but returned the next day and asked to speak to the manager, who said he had worked there for twelve years.

  “We’re doing a report,” I told him, “on the history of Waldbaum’s.”

  He was thrilled to discuss it with us, telling us how Izzy Waldbaum had come over penniless from Russia a hundred years ago and opened a small bread-and-butter store on DeKalb Avenue. I’m sure it was all fascinating to someone who cared.

  “We’re not interested in the whole grocery-store chain,” Lexie told him. “We just want to know about this store.”

  Before he could launch into a presentation about the opening-day ribbon-cutting ceremony, I said, “We’re looking for newsworthy events that have happened since you’ve worked here.”

  Suddenly he got a caged look on his face, like corporate executives get in a 60 Minutes interview. “Why?” he asked. “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing specific,” Lexie said, trying not to tip him off about the real reason for our visit. If he knew we were actually performing an investigation, he’d probably tell us to talk to their lawyers, and that would be the kiss of death. “Has the store had any robberies?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, like every second Tuesday. That’s not news.”

  “How about murders?” I asked.

  “Not since I’ve been here.”

  “What about kidnappings?” Lexie said.

  “Or unexplained disappearances?” I added.

  “No,” he said, then thought for a minute. “A kid got abandoned here once, though.”

  Bingo. “Abandoned?” I said, trying to stay calm. “What happened?”

  “I was working produce then. From my recollection, the mother just left him in the shopping cart. Jeez—I haven’t thought about that in years.”

  “Did they ever find the mother?” Lexie asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Eventually the father showed up for him.”

  “How about the security video?” I asked. “Did it show her leaving the store?”

  “Half the cameras in the store were broken, including the one at the front door.” According to the manager, the camera in the meat section worked, but it was permanently stuck in the wrong position, monitoring a sign that detailed the proper handling of pork instead of the meat counter. The only thing the police were ever able to determine was that the pork sign had not been stolen.

  “Come to think of it, they fired the manager over the broken video cameras. That’s when I got bumped up to assistant manager, and then manager a couple of years later.” He smiled, reliving the memory.

&n
bsp; “So, theoretically,” I said, “she may never have left the store.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, who knows? Maybe she ended up as hamburger.” Then his eyes got all darty and nervous again. “You’re not gonna quote me on that, are you?”

  Even though it was hard to keep the Schwa in my mind, our investigations kept me thinking about his parents a lot. What was it that made a mother disappear between the lines of her shopping list? And what made a father remove every trace of her from the house? I would look at my own father and wonder if there were moments when he forgot I existed, too. I would look at my mom and wonder about her trips to the market.

  At least now we had confirmation that something did actually happen to the Schwa’s mom, although there was still no telling what. When I got home later that afternoon, just Mom and Christina were there. Mom was cooking something called coq au vin in a big frying pan. It was French, and smelled really good. She claimed it had no ingredients we wouldn’t eat by themselves, and she had me taste a spoonful of the sauce. It got my mouth watering. As I watched her cook, I thought about the Schwa’s mother, a woman so unnoticed she could walk into a supermarket, not walk out again, and no one would notice. My mom was anything but invisible, but maybe she didn’t know it.

  “If you’re gonna stand there, then make yourself useful.” She handed me a strainer and poured some boiling string beans through it.

  “Mom, I just want you to know . . . that I know how hard you work.”

  She looked at me like I might have a fever. “Thank you, Anthony. It’s good to hear that from you.”

  “Just promise me you’re never gonna disappear, okay?”

  She chuckled. “Okay, sure. I’ll stay far away from David Copperfield.”

  She returned to her food, and I put the string beans in a serving bowl.

  “So, you like the cooking class?”

  “Love it.”

  “And you’re not mad at Dad anymore?”