The Schwa Was Here

Silence on the other end. I could almost hear the wheels turning in her little realtor’s brain.

“Do you really want to be responsible for him not getting his medication. Miss Josephson?”

More silence. I heard her clicking on her computer, then flip­ping pages in a notebook. “It says here the property is being sold by a Mrs. Margaret Taylor. The address is in Queens, but I can’t quite read my assistant’s writing.”

“That can’t be right. What about Schwa? Somebody named Schwa should be selling it.”

“Sorry, it’s Taylor.” I heard more flipping pages. “And my as­sistant’s notes seem to indicate it has been vacant for months, so you obviously have the wrong house.”

Now it was my turn to be silent. I could hear the gears turn­ing in my own brain, and I didn’t like it at all.

A recording broke in, a

“Hello, are you there?” asked Rona Josephson, million-dollar seller.

“No,” I said. “I’m not.” And hung up.

At first I was freaked, then I was mad. So the Schwa finally did it. He not only disappeared, but he became like a black hole, sucking in his father, too, and everything they owned. I was going to call Lexie, but I didn’t have any more change. What was the point anyway—she would just tell me what she always told me: “There’s got to be a rational explanation.” But what if there wasn’t? And what if when I called Lexie, she said, “Calvin who?” What if I was the only person left who remembered him—and what if I woke up tomorrow morning and didn’t remember him either?

No! It wouldn’t happen. I would not allow it to happen, but I didn’t see how I had any choice in the matter. If the Schwa was right, and he was destined to disappear from memory, what could I do to change that?

As for what I did next, it came, as most of the world’s great ideas do, while I was on the can. Maybe the shock of the Schwa’s vanishing act did something to my insides, but what­ever it was, there was no way I was making it home on a bicycle without a pit stop. So there I am in the stall at Fuggettaburger, trying not to look at the Pisher toilet-paper dispenser, and I catch sight of the things people have scrawled into the wall. The stuff you usually find on the walls of a bathroom is about as Neanderthal as you can get—which is why we often call the boys’ bathroom at school the Wendell Tiggor Reading Room. The Fuggettaburger bathroom had its share of unreadable phone numbers, and poems that started. Here I sit, broken­hearted. Then, suddenly, as I’m looking at all this drivel, I get an uncontrollable urge to put something up there myself. I take a pen from my jacket pocket, and I start scratching a picture onto the wall. I’m not on the short list when it comes to artistic tal­ent, but I can do faces okay. So I draw this face. Just a few sim­ple lines, wispy hair. Then beneath it I write. The Schwa Was Here. And, for a final touch, right on his forehead, I draw an upside down e—you know, like a schwa in the dictionary.

Just like that.

By the time I leave Fuggettaburger, I’m a man with a mission. I went down the street to the pharmacy and bought myself one of those black permanent markers. Not the ski

That day I must have put up maybe a hundred Schwas all over Brooklyn, and when I finally got home, my hand was cov­ered in black ink. I felt like I had run a marathon—that feeling of exhaustion and incredible accomplishment all rolled to­gether.

It was past eleven, and my mother was waiting at the door. “Where were you?” she yelled. “We almost called the police.”

“I was vandalizing bus stops and public restrooms,” I said. She grounded me until the fall of civilization, and I took it like a man.

Dad was sitting in the living room watching TV, with Christina dozing in his lap. Frankie was asleep after a day of community service. I told my dad he should give Old Man Crawley a call. I told him it was important. He gave me that “what?” expression, and I gave him that “don’t ask me” look.

When I got to my room, I didn’t go to sleep. I knew what

I had to do. I got online and pulled up the Queens phone book. Margaret Taylor. She was the person selling the house. There were fifty-six Margaret Taylors in Queens, and two hun­dred sixty-seven M. Taylors. The next morning, I began making calls.

22. My Anonymous Contribution to Popular Culture and to My Parents’ Phone Bill

“Hello, is this Margaret Taylor?”

“Yes, this is she.”

“Are you selling a house in Brooklyn?”

“Brooklyn? No, I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Thanks anyway.”

The Schwa didn’t show up the next week, or the next, or the next. I wasn’t surprised. I went to the attendance office to check if his school records had been transferred, but someone had misplaced his entire file. That didn’t surprise me either. What surprised me was the Schwa face I saw drawn in the Wendell Tiggor Reading Room. It looked like the faces I had drawn around town, but I hadn’t drawn one in this bathroom. Plus, The Schwa Was Here was written in a handwriting that didn’t look like mine at all.

“Hello, I’m calling for Margaret Taylor.”

“You found her. What can I do for you?”

“I hear you’re selling a house in Brooklyn.”

“Honey, if I owned a house anywhere, I wouldn’t be selling it.”

I dreamed about the Schwa one night. In the dream I was standing in the middle of Times Square. A bus goes by, and on the side of the bus, instead of an advertisement for a Broadway show, it’s a picture of the Schwa. I look at a bus stop—there he is again. I look up in the sky, he’s on the Goodyear Blimp—and finally the giant electronic billboard overlooking Times Square has him on a live video feed.

“Antsy!” the Schwa yells down from the giant screen. “Antsy—tell them to look! Make them look at me, Antsy!” I glance around, and even though there’s like fourteen thousand people hurrying by, not one of them is looking at the bill­boards. “Make them look, Antsy! Make them look!”

Then suddenly I’m standing inside the gondola of the Goodyear Blimp, and the New York Jets are there. So’s Darth Vader. You know how dreams are.

I rode the bus to school that day, thinking about the dream. There were no advertisements featuring the Schwa on the bus to school, or on the bus home. But on the way home, I caught sight of something strange. It was snowing. Just a dusting, really. The kind of stuff that sticks, but doesn’t hang around till morning. You might be able to scrape a snowball or two off a cold car hood, but it’s not worth the effort.

So I’m looking out of the window of the bus, thinking about Lexie, and how her parents were due home any day, and won­dering if they might send her to some private school on an un­charted island to get her away from me, when all of a sudden I see a schwa drawn in the thin layer of snow on the back win­dow of a parked Chevy. I get out at the next stop and go back to find it, but by the time I get there, the car’s gone.