The Schwa Was Here

“You’re making that up,” I finally said. “That doesn’t happen.”

“Oh yeah? Come to my house for di

The Schwa hadn’t really meant it as an invitation, but I took it as one. I was curious. I had to know just what kind of home en­vironment could turn out an invisible-ish kid. That, and I wanted to know more about his mysteriously missing mother, but I didn’t dare tell him that. I figured his reluctance to talk about his home life must have been because he was embar­rassed about it—like maybe he lived in a broken-down shack, or something.

The Schwa lived at the edge of our neighborhood, on a street I never had been on before. When I arrived there, I have to say I was disappointed by what I saw. It was a row of small two- story homes, packed in tight, with driveways in between. His house wasn’t invisible. It wasn’t even u

There was a doormat that said: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME RIGHT NOW, AND I’D HAVE NO MORTGAGE. I could hear music playing somewhere inside. Guitar. I rang the bell, and in a mo­ment the door opened and no one appeared to be standing there.

“Hi, Schwa.”

“Hi, Antsy.” The shadows fell just the right way to camouflage him against the rest of the room. I blinked a few times, and he came into focus. He didn’t sound particularly pleased that I was there. It was more like he was resigned to the fact. He showed me in and introduced me to his father.

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but looking at the Schwa and his father, I would say the apple rolled clear into an orange grove. The man was about as un-Schwa-like as could be. He wore white overalls with paint stains all over them—the Schwa had said he was a housepainter. Right now he wasn’t painting, he was sitting in the living room playing a twelve-string guitar—I mean really playing, not just strum­ming. He had a ponytail with a few strands of gray, the same color as his guitar strings.

Not only was he visible, but he actually stood out.

“Are you sure you’re not adopted?” I asked. But I could tell there was enough of a resemblance to make DNA testing un­necessary.

“I look like him,” Schwa said, “but in most other ways I take after my mother.”

At the mention of his mother, I casually looked around for any sign of her, but there were no pictures, no feminine touches.

“Hey, Dad, this is my friend Antsy.”

Mr. Schwa continued to play, not noticing.

“Dad,” said the Schwa, a bit louder this time. Still he just played his guitar. The Schwa sighed.

“Mr. Schwa?” I said.

He stopped playing immediately and looked around, a bit bewildered. “Oh—you must be Calvin’s friend,” he said. “I’ll go get him.”

“I’m right here, Dad.”

“Did you offer your friend something to drink?”

“You want something to drink?” the Schwa asked.

“No.”

“He says no.”

“Is your friend staying for di

“Yeah,” I said, then whispered to the Schwa, “I thought you told him I was coming.”

“I did,” said the Schwa. “Twice.”

It turns out the Schwa’s father was terminally absentminded. There were little notes everywhere to remind him of things. The refrigerator was so full of yellow Post-it notes, it looked like Big Bird. The notes were all written by the Schwa. Half day at school on Wednesday, one said. Back-to-School night on Fri­day, said another, FRIEND COMING OVER FOR DINNER TONIGHT, said one in big bold letters.

“Was he always like that, or was it, like, from breathing paint fumes?” I asked after Mr. Schwa went back to playing guitar.

“He fell off a ladder a few years ago, and suffered head trauma. He’s okay now, but he’s like a little kid in some ways.”

“Wow,” I said. “So who takes care of who?”

“Exactly,” says the Schwa. “But it’s not so bad. And my aunt Peggy comes over a few times a week to help out.”

Apparently this wasn’t one of Aunt Peggy’s nights. There was a raw chicken in a big pan on top of the oven. I poked the chicken. It was room temperature. Who knew how long it had been sitting out.

“Maybe we should call in for pizza.”

“Naah,” said the Schwa, turning on the oven to preheat. “Cooking it should kill any deadly bacteria.”

The Schwa took me on the grand tour. The walls of the house were white, except one wall in each room was painted a differ­ent color. The effect was actually pretty cool. There was one forest green wall in the living room, a red wall in the kitchen, a blue wall in the dining room. The colored wall in the Schwa’s room was beige. I wasn’t surprised.

“So,” I asked about as delicately as I could, “how long have you and your father been ... on your own?”

“Since I was five,” he said. “You wa

I replayed in my mind what he had said, certain I had some­how heard it wrong. “You’re ... kidding me, right?”

Then he reached under his bed and pulled out a box. Inside were little plastic zipper bags—at least a hundred of them— and in each one there was . . . yes, you guessed it, a paper clip.

Little ones, big ones, those fat black ones that hold whole stacks of paper together.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

I just stared, dumbfounded. “Exactly when did they release you from the nuthouse, Schwa?”

He reached into the box and pulled out a little baggie that held a silver clip. “This clip held together pages of the Nuclear Arms Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachew.”

“Noway.”

I looked at it closely. It looked just just like an ordinary paper clip.

He pulled out another one. It was tarnished bronze. “This one held together the original lyric sheets of ’Hey Jude.’” He pulled out another one with a blue plastic coating. “This one was clipped to a mission manual for the space shuttle.”

“You mean it’s been in space?”

The Schwa nodded.

“Wow!”

He showed me clip after clip, each one the last. “Where did you get them?”

“I wrote to famous people, asking them for a paper clip from something important. You’d be amazed how many of them wrote back.”

It was genius! Most of the time people are looking for the letters and documents and people that make history, but no one thinks about the little things that hold history together. Leave it to the Schwa to think of such a thing. It was, at the same time, the dullest and most interesting collection I had ever seen in my life.

Di

“It’s like he doesn’t have a care in the world,” I commented to the Schwa while his dad did the dishes.

“Yeah, brain damage’ll do that to you,” the Schwa said as he went to rewash the dishes his father didn’t quite get clean. “But I wouldn’t advise it.”

The next night I ended up alone with my own father for di