The Schwa Was Here

It was Tuesday. Crawley was between nurses—they never lasted in his company for more than a few days. It had become a game with him to see how quickly he could send them pack­ing. A new, unsuspecting home-care victim was due that night, but since Lexie had an afternoon meeting of the 4-S Club, I figured I’d hang out with Crawley after I walked the dogs so he wouldn’t be alone. I brought him over some stuffed focaccia my dad made to go with Mom’s veau Marseille last night.

As I brought back the last of the dogs, I caught him in a rare moment. He was petting Charity, and talking to her gently, lov­ingly saying all those sweet, stupid things we say to pets when we think no one’s looking. He caught me watching him and abruptly stopped.

“Don’t you have some dogs to walk?”

“All done.”

“Then why are you still here? It’s not payday.”

I shrugged. “I thought I’d wait until the new nurse got here. Maybe eat some of my dad’s focaccia.”

“It’s gone.”

“You ate it all?”

“It was too good for you anyway,” he said. “You’d just wolf it down without tasting it.”

“Maybe we should call you Gluttony,” I said. At that, Glut­tony came over to me, hope in his eyes.

He laughed. “Now he’s your problem.”

I decided to take a chance. I had seen a moment of tender­ness rise to the surface a few moments ago. I thought that maybe I might be able to ask Crawley something and actually get a thoughtful answer.

“Do you remember him?” I asked.

“Remember who?”

“The Schwa.”

“Why would I want to?”

“Because,” I told him, “I really think he’s starting to disappear.

Crawley just stared at me coldly. I sighed.

“Forget it,” I said. “You probably think I’m an idiot.”

“That’s beside the point,” he said. Then he stood up out of his wheelchair and grabbed a cane that was leaning against the wall. I had never seen him get up from his wheelchair before. It was like watching one of those faith healings. Crawley strode toward me slowly, holding the cane tightly. He was taller than I realized. He took about five or six steps, then stopped right in front of me.

“I don’t recall his face,” Crawley said. “But I do remember him being here.”

He took one more step, and then had me help him sit on the sofa.

“I didn’t know you could walk.”

“As I said when you so rudely broke into my home two months ago, the wheelchair is only temporary.” He got himself comfortable on the sofa, and I sat in the plush chair across from him.

“I’m sure you think it’s a miracle that I can walk,” he said. “Well, I believe we make our own miracles.” He leaned his cane gently against the edge of the sofa. “I also believe we make our own disasters. If your friend is disappearing, as you say, then he’s doing it to himself.”

A pack of Afghans frolicked past, knocking down the cane. I picked it up and gave it to him again. “He’s trying not to. He’s trying to be visible.”

“Then he’s not trying the right way. The universe has no sym­pathy, and we’re never rewarded for doing things the improper way.” Prudence came over for attention, and Crawley began to scratch her behind the neck. “If your friend continues on his path of self-destructive anonymity, you should minimize your own losses. Cut him loose. Forget about him.”

“He’s my friend.”

“Spare me your sentimentality,” said Crawley. “Friends can be replaced.”

“No, they can’t!”

Instead of answering me right away, he looked down at the dog, which was so utterly content to have a fraction of his at­tention. “Four years ago,” he said, “Prudence was hit by a car and killed.”

He said it so bluntly, the news actually made me gasp.

“So,” he continued, “I fired my dog walker, and I contacted a breeder. Prudence was replaced within three weeks, and life went on. As I said, friends can be replaced.”

I was so horrified by this, I couldn’t say a thing.

“All of my dogs are second generation,” he told me. “Some even third. All sins, all virtues. It’s the way I like it.”

“That’s wrong,” I said. It was twisted in some basic way—like those people who have their pets stuffed and stick them in front of the fireplace like a piece of furniture. They don’t even have real eyes anymore. How could you stand looking at a stuffed pet with marbles for eyes? And how could you treat pets and people like objects to be replaced? “More than wrong—it’s kind of sick.”

“Think what you want, but it’s the way the world works.”

“What do you know about the world? You’re not a part of it—you live outside of it, in your own weird little universe.”

He grabbed his cane, reached across the table, and poked me in the chest. “You’re nervy,” he said. “I used to like that about you, but now it’s rubbing me the wrong way.”

I stood up. Suddenly I didn’t feel like being in the same room with him. I didn’t feel like being on the same continent. “Now I know why you’re so afraid of dying,” I told him just be­fore I left. “Because you know when the time comes, you won’t be rewarded for living your life ’the improper way.’”

As I left, I thought about Lexie’s plan to traumatize him for his own good, and took a twisted kind of pleasure knowing that some sort of suffering was in store for him. I had a suspi­cion, though, that Crawley would be a hard egg to crack.

I knew I wasn’t going to sleep much that night, so I didn’t even try. If the Schwa Effect was hereditary, then the key to every­thing was finding out what happened to his mom. The thing is, if the whole problem revolved around not being noticed, how could we find an eyewitness? If the Schwa Effect led to being universally forgotten, how could I hope that anyone would re­member?

Our little dowsing session with Ed Neebly and our conversa­tion with the supermarket manager had been about as helpful as a New Jersey road sign, and if you’ve ever been there, you know the signs don’t tell you the exit you’re coming up to, they only point out the exits you’ve just missed. It puts parents in very foul moods—and since you’re probably there to visit rela­tives, their mood was pretty touch and go to begin with. As for my own parents, I’m sure they would have blown a gasket if they knew what I was about to do.

I had never been the kind of kid to sneak out late at night. I was more the kind of guy who would come home ridiculously late and suffer the consequences, but once I was home for the night, sneaking out was never an option. I’ve got this screen saver that I don’t use very much, on account of how lame it is. It’s a cartoon of a computer wearing a nightcap and snoring. But if you darken the screen so no one can see the picture, and you set the volume just right, you’d swear there was a real per­son sleeping in the room. The pillows I had shoved under my blanket weren’t very convincing, but add the snoring from my computer and suddenly it was like I had a roommate. I quietly slipped out, to catch a bus toward Canarsie.

The butcher had looked away.

At the time I was so involved with what Ed Neebly was do­ing I didn’t think much of it, but my mind kept coming back to that moment. The butcher hadn’t just turned to look at some­thing else, he had purposely avoided my gaze. He knew some­thing. The chances of me finding him at this hour of the night were slim, but then I wouldn’t have much luck during the day either, because of the manager. The manager had gotten so paranoid by the end of our questioning that he sent all the stock clerks to get rid of expired dairy products, in case we were taking notes for some major expose. He had ba

Waldbaum’s was a twenty-four-hour supermarket, I guess so if you had a sudden need for hair gel or Haagen-Dazs at three in the morning, relief was only minutes away. That also meant that I could avoid the manager during the off-hours—and chances were, if the butcher knew something about the Schwa’s mother, other people who worked there knew something, too.