The Schwa Was Here

  The Schwa walked around the huge place, his arms spread wide like it was something to show off. “So what do you think?”

  “I think a room just opened up for you at Bellevue’s mental ward,” I told him. “Do you want me to call or fax in your reservation?”

  “Okay, so maybe it’s not such a great place, but you can’t beat the view.”

  He led me over to one of the broken windows. I looked out. To the left I could see the spires of Manhattan, and below was a stretch of the expressway, which ran right past the building. There were a couple of crumbling industrial streets, and past that, Greenwood Cemetery, the size of a small city itself.

  “What am I supposed to see?”

  The Schwa looked out of the window. The sun was already beneath the horizon, and the twilight was quickly becoming night.

  “Shh,” said the Schwa. “Any second now.”

  Those few minutes of waiting made me worry even more. I started to babble. “Schwa, I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but whatever it is, things aren’t so bad, right?”

  “Here it comes,” he said. “Watch this.”

  I pulled him back from the window, afraid he might be preparing to jump, but he shook me off.

  My heart was pounding a hip-hop beat in my chest as I stared out of the window. That’s when the streetlights began to flicker on.

  “They never come on exactly at sunset,” the Schwa said. “You’d think they’d figure out that the time of sunset is different every day, but they never seem to change the streetlights until daylight savings.”

  More and more lights came on, then spotlights came on, lighting up the billboards overlooking the expressway. One giant billboard advertised a Spanish TV station. A second one advertised an expensive car, and a third one had a big smiling Schwa face staring out at us.

  “Oh, wow!”

  There was no question about it. The huge billboard was covered in Schwa. His face was the size of a hot-air balloon looming over the expressway, and next to his picture were words in red block letters:

  CALVIN

  SCHWA

  WAS

  HERE

  “Oh, wow,” I said again. He was right; the view from the seventh floor was wild.

  “I will be seen,” he proclaimed. “Nobody can make that disappear. I’ve rented it for a whole month!”

  “It must have cost a fortune!”

  “Half a fortune,” he told me. “The company rented me the billboard at half the usual rate. They were really nice about it.”

  “It still must have been a lot.”

  The Schwa shrugged like it didn’t matter. “My dad had money put aside for me. A college fund.”

  “You blew your college fund?!” I didn’t like the sound of this at all, but he still acted like it didn’t matter. “Weren’t they suspicious about a kid renting a billboard?”

  “They never knew! I did the whole thing online!” The Schwa told me how he had done it. First he set up a fake website that made it look like he ran a publicity company, then he hired an advertising agency—again online—telling them his company was promoting a new child star, Calvin Schwa. “They never questioned anything, because they got the money up front,” he said. “And money talks.”

  I looked again at the billboard. With the streetlights on, and all the billboards lit up, the sky suddenly seemed dark. So did the expressway. In fact, the expressway seemed very dark. Then a nasty realization began to dawn on me with the slow but inescapable pain of a swift kick to Middle Earth, if you know what I mean. Something was very wrong with this picture. Not the Schwa’s massive billboard picture, but the bigger picture. I swallowed hard, and my heart started hip-hopping again. I wondered how long it would take the Schwa to notice. He seemed so thrilled as he stared at his own unavoidable face, I wondered if he ever would. I thought about how you’re not supposed to wake sleepwalkers, and wondered if bursting a friend’s bubble was the same thing. Then I realized that I didn’t want to. Let him have his dream. Let him be like his father just this once, and happily sleepwalk through this.

  “It’s getting late—we’d better go,” I told him, trying to lure him away from that window.

  “In a few minutes,” he said, still marveling at the billboard. “Do you know how many thousands of people pass this spot every day?”

  I tried to tug him away from the window. “Yeah, yeah. Let’s just go!”

  “Do you have any idea how many cars are going to drive by and—” That’s where he stopped, and I knew it was all over. His bubble didn’t just burst, it detonated.

  “Where . . . are . . . the cars?” He said it slowly. Just like someone who really was waking up out of a dream.

  “Forget it, Schwa. Let’s just go.”

  I grabbed him and he shook me off. He stuck his whole head so far out of the broken window, I was afraid his throat would get slit on the broken glass.

  He looked to the left, looked to the right, then pulled his head back in and looked at me.

  “Where are all the cars, Antsy?”

  I sighed. “There aren’t any.”

  “What do you mean ‘there aren’t any’?”

  “The Gowanus Expressway is closed for construction.”

  The Schwa gave me an expression so blank, I swear I really could see right through him. “Construction . . .” he echoed.

  We both looked out of the window again. There were no bright pinpoints of headlights rolling toward us, no dim red glow of taillights moving away. There were no cars on the Gowanus Expressway. Not one. It was the reason the street below the expressway was so gridlocked. It was also probably the reason those bastards had rented Schwa the billboard for half price.

  “But . . . but people will see!” the Schwa insisted. “They’ll see. All the buildings around here. People will look out of the buildings!”

  I nodded. I didn’t say what I was thinking. That this whole area was abandoned. Looking out of the window, I saw no lights in any of the other windows around us, and certainly no one looking from Greenwood Cemetery. The Schwa could see that for himself.

  “Schwa, I’m sorry.”

  He took a deep breath, then another, then another. Then he said, “It’s okay, Antsy. It’s okay. Not a problem.”

  We went down the stairs in silence, no sounds but the shards of glass crunching beneath our feet and the impatient honks of horns coming from the traffic-packed street below the expressway. It was still bumper-to-bumper when we got out into the street.

  “Bus?” I asked him.

  “Later,” he answered.

  I followed him five blocks to a ramp that led up to the elevated roadway. It was blocked by a barricade and lined with yellow caution flashers. He squeezed through, and I went up with him.

  It’s weird being on a major roadway built for six lanes of traffic but carrying none. It made me feel like I was in one of those end-of-the-world movies where there’s no one left but you and a bunch of evil motorcycle maniacs. I would have welcomed some motorcycle maniacs right now, to take my mind off of this billboard mess.

  The Schwa doubled back in the direction we had come, walking right down the middle of the expressway. We passed in and out of little pools of light made by the billboards up above, advertising their wares to no one. Finally we reached the Schwa’s billboard. This close, it loomed so much larger than life that the perspective was all off. His smile was big and fat.

  He sat cross-legged in the middle of the road, looking up at himself. “It’s a good picture,” he said. “I smiled right. People don’t always smile right when you take their picture. Usually it’s fake.”

  “I suck at smiling,” I told him. “At least when it matters.” He looked at me, and I forced a lame smile, proving it.

  “It cost more than just my college fund,” he admitted.

  “Maybe you can get your money back . . . I mean, renting you a billboard over a closed road—that’s fraud.”

  “My fraud came first,” he said. “And what go
es around comes around, right?” He turned his eyes back to the billboard. “You were right, Antsy,” he said. “I’m the tree.”

  “What?”

  “The tree. The one that falls in the forest. The one that no one’s there to hear.”

  “I hear you!” I told him. “I’m in the forest!”

  “You won’t be tomorrow.”

  I clenched my fists and growled. He was making me so angry, so frustrated. “What do you think—you’re gonna wake up one morning and not exist? Are you really so crazy that you actually think that?”

  He remained calm, like a monk in meditation, as he sat there cross-legged on the road. “I don’t know how it will happen,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go to sleep and just won’t be there anymore when the sun comes up. Or maybe I’ll turn a corner in school and vanish into the crowd, the way my mother vanished into the crowds at the supermarket.”

  “Your mother!” I had almost forgotten about Gunther the butcher. I clenched my fists and kicked a clump of asphalt out of a pothole. This wasn’t the time or place to talk to him about it. In his current state of mind, he wouldn’t hear it anyway.

  “You know, this kind of makes sense,” he said. “I see that now. It didn’t work because I’m not supposed to be visible. If I bought a full-page ad in the New York Times, there would have been a newspaper strike. If I made one of those dumb infomercials, the communications satellite would get hit by a meteor.”

  “What, do you think God has nothing better to do than mess with you?”

  “He’s all-powerful; it’s not a problem for Him.”

  I was about to open my mouth and tell him how stupid that was, but I thought back to what Crawley had said. Although I didn’t agree with the old man’s jaded point of view of how the world worked, there was one thing Crawley said that had made sense. We don’t get rewarded for going about things the wrong way.

  “Are you just gonna sit there all night?”

  “You go,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

  “You’ll get mugged.”

  “How could I get mugged? There’s no one here.”

  And so he stayed there, sitting in the middle of that lonely road, staring up at his own giant face, which no one else was going to see.

  He would not have moved for me alone. I was his friend, sure, but I was also the yardstick by which he measured his invisibility. I was “the control”—that’s what Mr. Werthog would call me. That’s the part of an experiment that’s not supposed to change. It’s like when you plant seeds for a science project, giving one batch plant food and a second batch Pepsi—or something bogus like that—to see if one grows better than the other. There’s always a third batch you just give water so you have something to measure the other two against. The control.

  No wonder the Schwa was going off the deep end—he was looking to me as the stable one.

  Anyway, like I said, it would take more than me to move the Schwa from the road . . . So as soon as I left, I hunted down the closest working pay phone, dropped in some change and dialed.

  “Hello, Mr. Crawley. Could you please put Lexie on?”

  “If you want to talk to her, you get your irresponsible self down here and walk my dogs.”

  “Please. It’s important.”

  Maybe he heard in my voice how important it was, or maybe he was just too disgusted with me to argue, but he gave Lexie the phone.

  “Lexie, I need you to get your driver and meet me at the Gowanus Expressway, near the Twenty-ninth Street entrance.”

  “But the Gowanus Expressway is closed.”

  Great, I thought. She’s blind, and even she knows it’s closed. How could the Schwa have missed it? “I know. I’ll be waiting by the ramp. And dress warm, it’s a long walk.”

  “To where?”

  “To Calvin,” I said. I guess that was the magic word.

  “Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  As I hung up, I realized that this was the first time I had ever called him Calvin.

  19. The Schwa Gets Radiation Therapy in a Room That Doesn’t Smell Too Good No Matter How Much It’s Disinfected

  When he saw me approaching with Lexie, half an hour after I had left him in the road, I saw his shoulders sag.

  “Why did you have to bring her here?” he said with nasty accusation in his eyes. “I don’t feel bad enough about this already? You had to tell her, too?”

  “All I told her is that you’re sitting here like an idiot in the middle of road construction.”

  “I don’t like being talked about in the third person,” said Lexie.

  “You chose him,” he grumbled at her, “so why don’t you both just go.”

  “Calvin Schwa, I am so sick of you feeling sorry for yourself,” Lexie said. “Stand up.”

  “I’m comfortable where I am.”

  “I said, ‘STAND UP!’”

  Lexie had a pretty commanding voice. It made him leap to his feet. I jumped, too.

  “We’ve got a car waiting,” I told him. “You’re coming with us, and we’re not taking no for an answer.”

  “What am I going to do when I get home?” he asked. “What do I tell my father about the money? Can’t I just stay here, close my eyes, and disappear?”

  “You can’t because you won’t,” I said. “You won’t disappear, I mean. I don’t know what kind of cosmic weirdness the Schwa Effect is, but it can’t be terminal.”

  “Prove it.”

  “If you want proof, you have to come with us.”

  Lexie turned her head slightly, angling an ear to me, as if she could catch my meaning if she could hear me better. What proof are you talking about? her body language asked me. I didn’t answer her with my voice or body, so she turned her attention back to the Schwa. Reaching toward the sound of his voice, she gently touched his face. He pulled away.

  “Don’t touch me if you don’t mean it.”

  A look of hurt, maybe even insult, fell across Lexie’s face. “I always mean it when I touch. It just may not mean what you think it does.” She reached forward again, touching him, and this time the Schwa allowed it. Cupping his face in both of her hands, she moved her thumbs across his cold, red cheeks. It was her way of looking him in the eye.

  “Antsy is not your only friend. And you have never once slipped my mind.”

  I could see the Schwa trying to blink away tears. I don’t know exactly what he felt at that moment, but I did know that he was done with sitting in the road, feeling sorry for himself.

  “Come on, Calvin,” I said. “There’s someplace we need to go.”

  “Where?”

  I took a deep breath. It was time he had his own dose of trauma therapy.

  “We’re paying a visit to the Night Butcher.”

  “I’m not getting out of the car,” he told me when we pulled to a stop in the parking lot of Waldbaum’s supermarket.

  “If you don’t get out, you’ll never know what happened.”

  “Well, I’m getting out,” said Lexie, irritated that I had kept what little I knew from her. “Even if you don’t want to hear, Calvin, I do.”

  In the end, he got out with us, and the three of us walked to the supermarket with the grave determination of my mother on double-coupon day.

  We passed the checkers, who were complaining about the stock boys; we passed the stock boys, who were making jokes about the checkers; and we pushed our way into the room behind the meat counter without anyone noticing or caring that we were there.

  Gunther was blasting the meat-cutting room with a steam hose to disinfect the stainless-steel instruments. It was a frightening noise to walk in on. A screeching hiss filled the air, which was stifling and humid. When he saw us, he stopped. He didn’t yell at me this time, or make accusations. He didn’t demand that we leave. He just studied us for a moment, the hose now silent in his hand.

  “This is him, then? The friend?”

  “This is him,” I answered.

  “His name is Calvin,” Lexie add
ed.

  Gunther took a look at Lexie, opened his mouth as if to ask something stupid like, “This one is blind?,” but thought better of it. He put down his hose and pulled up a few chairs, the chair legs squeaking on the sweating tile floor. We all sat in silence, which was somehow worse than the awful hiss.

  “You have to understand it was none of my business,” Gunther began. “None of my business at all. This is why I don’t speak sooner. Other people, they talk, talk, talk until words mean nothing. There is no truth.” He pointed to his chest. “I keep truth here. Not in other people’s ears. So you know what I say is true.”

  The Schwa hung on his every word, clutching the edge of his chair just like Crawley did in the helicopter. Gunther didn’t speak again for a while. Maybe he wanted us to drag it out of him. Maybe he thought it was a game of twenty questions.

  “Tell me what happened to my mother,” the Schwa said. It turns out all Gunther was waiting for was the proper invitation—and although he claimed that his memory wasn’t what it used to be, it didn’t stop him from remembering things with the detail of a police report.

  “The woman—your mother. She would come here all the time. Those were the days that I worked the swing shift usually. Four to midnight. Busy time. Always busy time. People rushing home from work. Dinners to make. So I always come early. Help out the day butcher. Half an hour, maybe an hour early. Your mother—I remember she came. I don’t remember her face. Isn’t that strange? I can’t remember her face.”

  I looked to the Schwa to see how he would react. He didn’t flinch.

  “I do remember that she was not a happy woman,” Gunther continued. “No joy in her eyes, or in her voice. The way she would reach for meat. It was as if just the reaching was a burden. As if to lift her arm took all the strength of her soul. I see many people like this, but few as unhappy as her.”

  “Does this sound right, Calvin?” Lexie asked.

  The Schwa shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Go on,” I said. “Tell us about that day.”