The Schwa Was Here

I went in to find he wasn’t in his bedroom at all.

“Hmm,” said his father brightly. “Maybe he’s not home after all.”

“Don’t you even know when your own son is home?!”

“Yes,” he said, not so brightly this time. “Mostly.”

I looked in every room, trying to figure out where he might have gone. Then the guitar started up again, and that was the last straw. I went to the living room, to see Mr. Schwa playing and humming to himself like he didn’t have a care in the world. Well, he needed to have some cares.

“Do you even know if Calvin came home last night?”

He looked at me confused. “Calvin always comes home. Why wouldn’t he come home?”

“For all you know, he could be floating facedown in Sheepshead Bay!”

He stopped playing, but didn’t look at me.

“Or maybe he’s with his mother,” I said. “What do you think? You think maybe that’s where he is?”

“That’s enough, Antsy,” said the Schwa. “Leave him alone.”

He stood in front of the brick fireplace, wearing a dark red sweater. Blending in. Always blending in.

“There’s Calvin,” said Mr. Schwa. “He’s standing over there. No worries.”

“Where’ve you been?” I asked.

“Here and there,” he said. “Mostly here.”

His father returned to playing guitar.

“Dad,” said the Schwa, “Marco and Sam will be here at noon to pick you up. You have a painting job in Mill Basin.”

“Okay,” he said.

I went with the Schwa into his room, and he closed the door. The curtains were drawn, and the only light was what little spilled over the edges of the closed blinds.

“It looks like you’re turning into Old Man Crawley.”

“I quit yesterday,” the Schwa said. “Crawley made a big stink, threatened to get my dad fired and all, but I didn’t care. My dad’s friends would never fire him anyway.”

“I thought you might quit,” I said.

“I’m quitting you, too, Antsy.” “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you can stop pretending to be my friend now. You don’t have to feel sorry for me.”

“I don’t! Well . . . actually I do, but only because I’m your friend. I’m not pretending about that.”

“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 di

“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—ail 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 1 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.