“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—all 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 I 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.
“I don’t care what you say, Schwa—you’re not going to disappear.”
“That’s right, Antsy, I won’t. I’m gonna make sure of it. I’m gonna do something that will make me so visible, no one’ll ever forget.”
“What are you going to do?”
I couldn’t see if the Schwa was smiling, but somehow, I don’t think he was.
“You’ll see.”
15. Vortex in Aisle Three – Can Someone Please Clean Up the Ectoplasmic Slime?
I had no idea what the Schwa had in mind, but I didn’t like his eerily calm tone of voice. It haunted me all the way home. It was what you might call a “blaze of glory” calm. I started to think of that old cartoon where Daffy Duck gets no respect, so, to prove he’s a better act than Bugs Bunny, he swallows a few sticks of dynamite, guzzles a can of gasoline, and then swallows a lighted match.
“Yeah,” he says as he floats up toward the pearly gates, “but I can only do it once.”
I conferred with Howie and Ira about it, because I felt I had no one else to talk to.
“Maybe he’ll paint himself green and run through the school,” says Ira.
“Naked!” says Howie.
“Naah,” I said. “If the cat suit and the orange sombrero didn’t get him noticed, no amount of green paint would.”
“Maybe he’s gonna skydive right into the middle of a Jets game,” says Ira.
“Naked!” says Howie.
“Naah,” I said. “People might remember that it happened, but they wouldn’t remember it was him.”
They were no help, and so, for the Schwa’s sake, I put aside my own feelings of awkwardness and brought my worries to Lexie, because I knew, in spite of everything, she cared about him as much as I did.
It seemed a kind of poetic justice, or maybe just pathetic justice, that Lexie’s and my relationship now revolved entirely around the Schwa.
“He won’t disappear,” Lexie said, after I told her the story about his mother. “He won’t because she didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because people just don’t pop out of existence.”
“Maybe they do,” I said. “Maybe they do all the time, and no one notices.”
That’s when Crawley rolled into the room. “You’re talking about our friend Mr. Schwa, aren’t you.”
“Since when was the Schwa your friend?” I asked.
“I was speaking figuratively.”
“You should be an expert on being invisible. Grandpa,” Lexie said, a little more biting than she usually was. “With all the years you’ve been cooped up in here.”
Since nasty looks didn’t work on Lexie, he gave me one instead.
“Out of sight, but not out of mind.” He wheeled over to the window. I had opened one of the curtains to let some late afternoon light in, but now he tugged the curtain closed, then turned to me. “How many years have you been hearing stories about crazy Old Man Crawley?”
“For as long as I can remember,” I said. “And then some.”
“There, you see? There’s a difference between being invisible, and being unseen. No one passes this restaurant without looking at these windows and wondering about me.”
“So what do you think about the Schwa’s mother?” I asked him. “Which is she, invisible or unseen?”
“Frankly, I couldn’t care less.” Crawley twirled his wheelchair around and headed for the kitchen. “But, if I did care, I’m sure there would be a way to find out.”
Around the corner from me lived a guy who worked for the Department of Water and Power, and he claimed to be a dowser. You’ve probably heard of people like this—they use wishbone-shaped twigs to tune into “earth energies” or something, and can find water underground. Anyway, this guy’s name was Ed Neebly, and his job was to look for leaks in the city’s water grid. I don’t know if the Department of Water and Power knew he did his job by dowsing rather than by using the more traditional method, commonly called guessing.
I saw him work once in a neighbor’s yard, armed with two L-shaped stainless-steel rods instead of a wishbone twig. I guess this was advanced technology for dowsers. With one rod in each hand, he paced back and forth across the yard. Neebly said that when the rods stayed parallel, it meant there was no underground leak. If the rods crossed, then there was water. Walking back and forth across the lawn, he accurately predicted where the leak in the pipe was, and everyone watching was amazed. Of course, he had been standing in a mud puddle when he made the prediction, but he claimed that was just a coincidence. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.