The Schwa Was Here

"Your salary will depend on how well you perform your duties."

"What's the job?"

Sloth came sniffing at Crawley's pocket for treats, and the old man pushed him away. "My granddaughter will be spending the next few months with me. You will spend time with her. You will entertain her. You will pretend to like her."

I was sensing this haircut was going to be one nasty Mohawk. "What's wrong with her?"

"Why does something have to be wrong with her?" he snapped.

"I don't know," I said. "Something in your tone of voice."

Crawley wheeled himself around, banging his knee on a little end table. I knew it must have hurt, but he refused to give me the satisfaction of a groan. "As it happens, my granddaughter does have a handicap."

"So she's in a wheelchair, too?"

"I didn't say that, did I?"

I waited for more details, but Crawley gave none. So now I was moved from walking dogs to babysitting for some spoiled Veruca Salt—ish little girl.

"You will be here at ten o'clock sharp tomorrow. But first you will introduce yourself to the shower in your house, and you will dress in something presentable. You will also refrain from calling me Chuckles in front of her."

"Tomorrow's Saturday. I've got stuff to do on Saturday."

Which was actually just a whole lot of lying around, and I guess he figured that out, because he said: "Don't force me to make your life more miserable than it already is."

I finally realized who he reminded me of: the Emperor in Star Wars. "Fine. But right now I'm gonna walk dogs so the Schwa doesn't have to do all the work."

"You're such a Boy Scout."

"Heyl" I said. "Enough with the insults!" I hooked Gluttony to a leash, and left.

"Maybe she's like the Elephant Man."

Howie, Ira, and I hung out in my unfinished basement later that night, for the first time in a few weeks. We didn't find much to say to one another, so we resorted to our old standby, playing video games. Our current choice was "Three Fisted Fury," in which steroid-pumped opponents, having been ex­posed to radiation, have grown more than the usual number of arms and must battle for ultimate dominance of the world. You know—just like the movie.

It was Howie who suggested the Elephant Man theory. We had all been trying to figure out what condition Crawley's granddaughter suffered from that was bad enough for him to pay me to spend time with her.

"I mean, she's got to be ugly in some basic, unnatural way to make it worth money," says Howie.

"Maybe not," said Ira. "Maybe it's Tourette's syndrome."

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's where you have these little seizures and can't stop curs­ing people out."

"Sounds like most people I know." I swung at his character on the screen with my left and right arms, then caught him off guard with an uppercut from my third arm. He lost ten points of life.

"Hey," says Ira, "what if she's the surviving half of Siamese twins connected at the head, but separated at birth. Only one of them could survive, because there was only one brain be­tween them."

"It sounds logical," says Howie. At this point his screen char­acter sneaks up from behind and nails me with a dropkick from a leg I didn't even know he had.

"Hey, no fair—you took an extra dose of radiation, didn't you?"

I turned from Ira's bruiser, who was still dazed, and began a few roundhouse kicks on Howie's guy. "Maybe it's just some­thing simple," I suggested, "like she's got a peg leg or something."

"Maybe two peg legs," says Howie.

"Or a peg head," says Ira. "I'd pay to see that."

"You're not the one paying—Crawley is." I spun on Ira, gave his character a double-death blow, and he was finished. Ira dropped his controller in frustration. Now it was just Howie and me. I tore into him brutally. It wasn't because I cared about beating him; I just wanted it done. Kind of like the way you finish that last piece of pizza, just because it's there.

It only took a minute for the game to be over, and my charac­ter was raising all three of his arms in triumph to the sound of canned cheers. I sighed and put down my controller. "Hey, is it just me, or is this game less fun than it used to be?"

Ira and Howie don't have an opinion. Somehow I didn't ex­pect them to. "The new version comes out in a month. It'll be tons better," says Howie.

I nodded in agreement because I didn't want to talk about what was really going through my mind. I was thinking about bamboo. Last year, my science teacher said that when a bam­boo plant is established enough, you can actually watch it growing before your eyes. I wondered if it was sometimes the same with humans—because I was feeling this weird vertigo, like I had suddenly sprouted far beyond Howie and Ira. I knew it just like I knew that no future version of "Three Fisted Fury" was going to interest me like it did a year ago.

I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, but at first glance I didn't see anybody there.

"Hey, Schwa," I said.