The Schwa Was Here

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 goes 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 go

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 go

“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 I 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.”