“Oh, wow!”
There was no question about it. The huge billboard was covered in Schwa. His face was the size of a hot-air balloon looming over the expressway, and next to his picture were words in red block letters:
“Oh, wow,” I said again. He was right; the view from the seventh floor was wild.
“I will be seen,” he proclaimed. “Nobody can make that disappear. I’ve rented it for a whole month!”
“It must have cost a fortune!”
“Half a fortune,” he told me. “The company rented me the billboard at half the usual rate. They were really nice about it.”
“It still must have been a lot.”
The Schwa shrugged like it didn’t matter. “My dad had money put aside for me. A college fund.”
“You blew your college fund?!” I didn’t like the sound of this at all, but he still acted like it didn’t matter. “Weren’t they suspicious about a kid renting a billboard?”
“They never knew! I did the whole thing online!” The Schwa told me how he had done it. First he set up a fake website that made it look like he ran a publicity company, then he hired an advertising agency—again online—telling them his company was promoting a new child star, Calvin Schwa. “They never questioned anything, because they got the money up front,” he said. “And money talks.”
I looked again at the billboard. With the streetlights on, and all the billboards lit up, the sky suddenly seemed dark. So did the expressway. In fact, the expressway seemed very dark. Then a nasty realization began to dawn on me with the slow but inescapable pain of a swift kick to Middle Earth, if you know what I mean. Something was very wrong with this picture. Not the Schwa’s massive billboard picture, but the bigger picture. I swallowed hard, and my heart started hip-hopping again. I wondered how long it would take the Schwa to notice. He seemed so thrilled as he stared at his own unavoidable face, I wondered if he ever would. I thought about how you’re not supposed to wake sleepwalkers, and wondered if bursting a friend’s bubble was the same thing. Then I realized that I didn’t want to. Let him have his dream. Let him be like his father just this once, and happily sleepwalk through this.
“It’s getting late—we’d better go,” I told him, trying to lure him away from that window.
“In a few minutes,” he said, still marveling at the billboard. “Do you know how many thousands of people pass this spot every day?”
I tried to tug him away from the window. “Yeah, yeah. Let’s just go!”
“Do you have any idea how many cars are going to drive by and—” That’s where he stopped, and I knew it was all over. His bubble didn’t just burst, it detonated.
“Where ... are ... the cars?” He said it slowly. Just like someone who really was waking up out of a dream.
“Forget it, Schwa. Let’s just go.”
I grabbed him and he shook me off. He stuck his whole head so far out of the broken window, I was afraid his throat would get slit on the broken glass.
He looked to the left, looked to the right, then pulled his head back in and looked at me.
“Where are all the cars, Antsy?”
I sighed. “There aren’t any.”
“What do you mean ’there aren’t any’?”
“The Gowanus Expressway is closed for construction.”
The Schwa gave me an expression so blank, I swear I really could see right through him. “Construction.. .” he echoed.
We both looked out of the window again. There were no bright pinpoints of headlights rolling toward us, no dim red glow of taillights moving away. There were no cars on the Gowanus Expressway. Not one. It was the reason the street below the expressway was so gridlocked. It was also probably the reason those bastards had rented Schwa the billboard for half price.
“But . . . but people will see!” the Schwa insisted. “They’ll see. All the buildings around here. People will look out of the buildings!”
I nodded. I didn’t say what I was thinking. That this whole area was abandoned. Looking out of the window, I saw no lights in any of the other windows around us, and certainly no one looking from Greenwood Cemetery. The Schwa could see that for himself.
“Schwa, I’m sorry.”
He took a deep breath, then another, then another. Then he said, “It’s okay, Antsy. It’s okay. Not a problem.”
We went down the stairs in silence, no sounds but the shards of glass crunching beneath our feet and the impatient honks of horns coming from the traffic-packed street below the expressway. It was still bumper-to-bumper when we got out into the street.
“Bus?” I asked him.
“Later,” he answered.
I followed him five blocks to a ramp that led up to the elevated roadway. It was blocked by a barricade and lined with yellow caution flashers. He squeezed through, and I went up with him.
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 gonna wake up one morning and not exist? Are you really so crazy that you actually think that?”
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.”