The Schwa Was Here ab-1

by Нил Шустерман

  ***

  At noon I stood at Crawley’s door, taking a few deep breaths. Some dogs were already barking on the other side, sensing me there. One more breath and I pounded on the door over and over, until all the dogs were barking.

  “Mr. Crawley! Mr. Crawley! Hurry, open up!”

  I heard him cursing at the dogs, a few dead bolts slid, and the door cracked open just enough to reveal four chains stretched like iron cobwebs between me and Crawley’s scowling face.

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s Lexie! She fell down the stairs. I think she broke some­thing. Maybe a few things.”

  “I’ll call 911.”

  “No! No, she’s asking for you—you’ve gotta come!”

  He hesitated for a moment. The door closed, I heard the chains sliding open, and he pulled the door open again. Pru­dence and a few of the other dogs got out, but Crawley didn’t seem to care. He just stood there at the door.

  “Mr. Crawley, come on!”

  The look of fear on his face was like someone standing on the edge of a cliff instead of someone on the threshold of an apartment. “Aren’t there people helping her?”

  “Yeah, but she’s asking for you.”

  As if on cue, Lexie wailed from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Mr. Crawley—she’s your granddaughter! Are you just going to stand there?”

  He took the first step, and it seemed the next ones were a lit­tle bit easier. Then, when he got to the top of the stairs and saw her sprawled at the very bottom, he flew to her side like a man half his age.

  “Lexie, honey—it’ll be okay. Tell me where it hurts.” He looked at the gawking waiters and diners. “Didn’t any of you morons call an ambulance?”

  And with that, Lexie stood up. I grabbed Crawley’s left arm, Lexie’s harmonica-playing driver grabbed his right, and we whisked him through the kitchen and out the restaurant’s back door before anyone knew what was happening.

  It was a nasty trick, but there weren’t many things that would get Crawley down those stairs. Lexie had the easy part—lying there pretending to be hurt, but I was the one who had to get him to come out. I’m not much of an actor. In grade school, I usually got roles like “Third Boy”, or “Middle Broccoli,” or in one embarrassing year, “Rear End of Horse.” I had no confi­dence in my ability to pull this off, but the fact that I was so nervous had actually helped.

  By the time Crawley gathered up enough of his wits to real­ize this was a conspiracy, we already had him in the backseat of the Lincoln. When he tried to escape, I got in his way and closed the door—which was protected by child locks so it couldn’t be opened from the inside.

  I won’t repeat the words Crawley shouted at us. Some of them were words I didn’t even know—and I know quite a lot.

  “You’re not getting out of this,” I told him, “so you might as well cooperate.”

  He turned to Lexie. “What is this all about? Did he put you up to this?”

  “It’s my idea, Grandpa.”

  “This is kidnapping!” he squealed. “I’ll press charges.”

  “I can just see the headlines,” Lexie said.

  “Yeah,” I added. “'Rich Kook Presses Charges on Poor Blind Granddaughter.’ The press will eat it up.”

  “You shut up!” he said. “By the time you get out of jail, you’ll have gray hair.”

  “Naah,” I said. “I’ll be bald, more likely. It runs in my family.”

  The fact that I didn’t seem to care made him even more furious.

  By the time we pulled out of the alley we had put a blindfold on him, and he didn’t resist because he didn’t want to see the outside world anyway. He was quiet for a minute, then he said, “What are you going to do to me?” He was truly frightened now. I almost felt sorry for him. The key word here is “almost.”

  “I have no idea,” I told him, which was true—Lexie still hadn’t told me what she had planned. She said I’d chicken out if I knew, and so I didn’t press her, figuring she might be right. We rode to Brooklyn Heights—the part of Brooklyn that faced Manhattan right across the East River. Then we drove onto a pier. That’s when I figured out what Lexie had planned.

  “Oh, wow,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “What!” shouted Crawley. “Kidding about what? What is it?” But he made no attempt to uncover his eyes.

  “You can’t be serious,” I told Lexie. “It’ll kill him.”

  The driver opened the door. “Sorry about this, Mr. Crawley,” said the driver in a heavy accent. “But Lexie say this for your own good.”

  “Is it a boat?” Crawley asked, obviously smelling the stench of the river. “I hate boats!”

  “No boat,” said the driver. He helped Lexie out. “Leave me hold Moxie. You go.”

  No one, not even the driver, was willing to tell Crawley that his next mode of transportation was going to be a helicopter. He’d have to discover that for himself.

  I led him down the pier to the heliport at the very end, and he didn’t fight me. He was broken now. Too scared to run, too scared to do anything but go where we led him. He stumbled a few times on the weed-cracked pavement, but I had a good hold on him. I wasn’t going to let him fall. “Big step up,” I told him.

  “Up to where?”

  I gave him no answer, but once he was seated and I had strapped him in, I think he figured it out.

  He moaned the deep moan of the condemned. The pilot, who I guess was hired by Lexie for our little therapeutic flight, waited until we were all strapped in. Then he started the en­gine. Crawley whimpered. Okay, now I really did feel sorry for him. Lexie just said, “This is going to be fun, Grandpa.”

  “You terrible, terrible girl.”

  I began to wonder if Lexie had gone too far. She did tend to have a blind spot for others’ feelings, and that was one place Moxie couldn’t guide her. The helicopter powered up, the slow foom-foom-foom of the blades speeding into a steady whir. We wobbled for an instant, then went straight up, like an elevator with no cable. Through the large window I saw the strange sight of Lexie’s driver holding on to Moxie and waving good-bye.

  “You can take off your blindfold now, Grandpa.”

  “No, I won’t!” he said, like a child. “You can’t make me.” He clapped his hands tightly over his eyes, keeping the blind­fold firmly in place.

  I had only been in an airplane to Disney World and back— and both times it was at night, so I didn’t get to see much. This flight wasn’t for my benefit, but still it sucked my breath right out of my chest—and I don’t think it was just the altitude. The Schwa would have loved this, I thought, then I pushed the thought away. Thinking of him now would only bring me down, and I didn’t want to be brought down.

  We flew along the East River, Brooklyn to our right, the sky­scrapers of Manhattan to our left. All the while the old man groaned and refused to take his hands from his eyes.

  “Anthony,” yelled Lexie, over the beating of the blades. “Can you describe it to me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t use sight words.”

  By now I’d become good at describing things for four senses instead of five. “Okay. We’re flying right over the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a harp strung across the river, with a frame made of rough stone.”

  The pilot took a left turn, and brought us right into the city.

  “What else?” prompted Lexie.

  “We’re passing downtown now. There’s uh, . . . the Woolworth Building, I think. It’s roof is a cold metal pyramid with a sharp point, but the sun’s hitting it, making it hot. Moving to­ward midtown now. There’s Broadway. It kind of slices a weird angle through all the rest of the streets, and there’s traffic jams where it hits all the other avenues. There’s little bumps of taxis everywhere, like hundreds of lemon candies filling the streets. You could read the streets like Braille.”

  “Ooh, that’s good!” Lexie said.

  I was on a roll. “Uh . . . Grand Central Stati
on ahead of us. Like a Greek temple—lots of pillars and sculptures sticking out of the dry, musty old stonework. And above it, smack in the middle of Park Avenue, like it shouldn’t even be there, is the MetLife Building. This big old cheese grater, like eighty stories high.”

  And then Crawley said “Used to be the Pan Am Building. Pan Am. Now there was a company!”

  Lexie smiled, and I finally understood. The descriptions weren’t for Lexie—they were for her grandfather. “Keep going, Anthony.” Crawley’s hands were still over his face, but they weren’t pressed as tightly as before. I continued, but now I was talking to Crawley instead of to Lexie.

  “The Chrysler Building. Sharp. Icy. The highest point of a Christmas tree star. Okay, the heart of midtown coming up. Rockefeller Center, smooth old granite, in the middle of all these steel-and-glass skyscrapers. Trump Tower. It’s like a jagged crystal that got shoved out of the ground.”

  That did it. Crawley took his hands from his eyes, slipped off the blindfold, and took in the view.

  “Oh ...!” was all he could say. He gripped his seat, like it might accidentally eject him, and he just stared at everything we passed. We flew over Central Park, then over the West Side, and headed downtown again, over the Hudson River.

  Through all of this, Crawley said nothing. His face was pale, his lips were pursed. I thought for sure that he was completely lost in a state of shock, never to shout a foul word again, just staring forever, his mind an absolute blank.

  We took a trip around the Statue of Liberty, and then we came back to where we started. The helicopter dropped us off on the pier, where Lexie’s driver was waiting, playing his har­monica. When we were safe in the Lincoln and on our way home, Crawley finally spoke.

  “You will never be forgiven for this,” he said. “Neither of you. And you will pay.”

  We rode the rest of the way in silence.

  18. Larger Than Life, in Your Face, Undeniable Schwa

  I had made up my mind to tell the Schwa about the Night Butcher the very next day, but he was nowhere to be found. His father was no help—he suggested that he might be at school, and was once more baffled when I told him it was Sunday.

  It was late that afternoon that my dad came to get me in my room. “Hey, Antsy, that kid is here,” he says. “The one who makes your mother nervous.” I knew exactly who he was talk­ing about. We had him over for dinner once, and the Schwa rubbed my mom the wrong way. First because he ate his pasta plain—no sauce, no butter, nothing. That alone made him a suspicious character. Then my mom kept whacking him in the face. Not because she meant to, but he always seemed to be standing right there, where she wasn’t expecting, and she talks with her hands.

  “What are you doing right now?” the Schwa asked the sec­ond he saw me.

  “The usual,” I said.

  “Good. I’ve got something to show you.”

  Right away I knew this was it. The visibility play.

  “How long will it take?” I asked, “because I gotta go walk the sins and virtues . . . and besides, I’ve got something important to talk to you about, too.”

  “Not long,” he said. “Go get your bus pass.” And then he added. “You’re going to love this!”

  But I wasn’t so sure.

  ***

  That chilly afternoon, we took a bus past Bensonhurst, past Bay Ridge, past all the civilized sections of Brooklyn, to a place they would have called the Edge of the Earth in the days before Columbus. This was an old part of Brooklyn, where the shore curved back toward Manhattan. It was full of docks that hadn’t been used since before my parents were born, and old ware­houses ten stories high, with windows that were all broken, boarded up, or covered with fifty years of New York grime. Peo­ple pass by this place all the time but never stop, because they’re on the Gowanus Expressway—the elevated highway that cuts right through this dead place. There’s a street that runs right underneath the elevated road. I figured it would be just as abandoned as the rest of the area, but today there was traffic like you couldn’t believe.

  “Could you tell me what we’re doing here?” I asked him on the bus ride.

  “Nope.” The Schwa was as serious as I’d ever seen him. “You’ll have to wait and see.”

  The bus made only three intersections in twenty minutes, riding beneath the girders that held up the expressway. Frus­trated drivers leaned on their horns, like the gridlock was the fault of the person in front of them.

  The Schwa stood up and looked out of the window. “C’mon, we’ll walk.”

  “Are you kidding me? The people around here look like ex­tras from Night of the Living Dead—and those are just the peo­ple on the bus!” Across the aisle, a living-dead guy gave me a dirty look.

  “If you’re worried,” the Schwa said, “hide behind me. They won’t notice you if you’re behind me.”

  It was half past four in the afternoon when we got off the bus. It was already getting dark, and I was quaking at the thought of having to wait for a bus back from this rank corner of the world. I hoped the street ahead stayed crowded with cars so at least our bodies would be recovered quickly.

  We walked for four blocks underneath the Gowanus Ex­pressway, passing identical warehouses, all of which had been condemned by the city, with big signs, like it was something the city was proud of. Then the Schwa went to one of the ware­house entrances and pushed open a door that almost snapped off its rusted hinges.

  “In there?” I asked. “What’s in there?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “You’re annoying.”

  “Not for much longer.”

  I stepped in, against my survival instinct. The building was no warmer than the street outside, and it smelled like some­thing died in there from smelling something else that died in there. That mixed with some weird solvent fumes made me gag.

  I heard the scurry of rats, which I hoped were cats, and tin-flutter of bats, which I hoped were pigeons. I was just glad it was too dark to tell. The Schwa pressed a tiny flashlight on his key chain and led me up a staircase littered with wood chips and broken glass.

  “The elevator doesn’t work,” the Schwa said. “And even if it did, I wouldn’t trust it.”

  I tried to imagine what he could possibly be up to here, and none of it was good. I just let him lead me, hoping that I would eventually understand.

  He pushed open the seventh-floor door to reveal a huge con­crete expanse with nothing breaking up the space except peel­ing pillars holding up the ceiling above. The rot-and-solvent smell was gone, but the mustiness of the place caught in the back of my throat, making my mouth taste bitter, like juice after toothpaste.

  The Schwa walked around the huge place, his arms spread wide like it was something to show off. “So what do you think?”

  “I think a room just opened up for you at Bellevue’s mental ward,” I told him. “Do you want me to call or fax in your reser­vation?”

  “Okay, so maybe it’s not such a great place, but you can’t beat the view.”

  He led me over to one of the broken windows. I looked out. To the left I could see the spires of Manhattan, and below was a stretch of the expressway, which ran right past the building. There were a couple of crumbling industrial streets, and past that, Greenwood Cemetery, the size of a small city itself.

  “What am I supposed to see?”

  The Schwa looked out of the window. The sun was already beneath the horizon, and the twilight was quickly becoming night.

  “Shh,” said the Schwa. “Any second now.”

  Those few minutes of waiting made me worry even more. I started to babble. “Schwa, I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but whatever it is, things aren’t so bad, right?”

  “Here it comes,” he said. “Watch this.”

  I pulled him back from the window, afraid he might be preparing to jump, but he shook me off.

  My heart was pounding a hip-hop beat in my chest as I stared out of the window. That’s when the streetlights b
egan to flicker on.

  “They never come on exactly at sunset,” the Schwa said. “You’d think they’d figure out that the time of sunset is differ­ent every day, but they never seem to change the streetlights until daylight savings.”

  More and more lights came on, then spotlights came on, lighting up the billboards overlooking the expressway. One giant billboard advertised a Spanish TV station. A second one advertised an expensive car, and a third one had a big smiling Schwa face staring out at us.

  “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:

  CALVIN

  SCHWA

  WAS

  HERE

  “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.