The Schwa Was Here

“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 per­ sons 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.