The Schwa Was Here

"You gotta be dead to be a ghost," I reminded him. "No . . . It's more like he's ..." I search for the right word. "It's like he's functionally invisible"

"The proper term is 'observationally challenged,'" Howie says.

"Whadaya mean 'proper term'? How can there be a proper term for it when I just made it up?"

"Well, if you're gonna make something up, make up the proper term."

I keep trying to think this through. "It's like when he's in a room and doesn't say anything, you could walk in, walk out, and never know he was there."

"Like the tree falling in the forest," says Ira.

"Huh?"

"You know, it's the old question—if a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, does it really make a sound?"

Howie considers this. "Is it a pine forest, or oak?" "What's the difference?"

"Oak is a much denser wood; it's more likely to be heard by someone on the freeway next to the forest where no one is."

I know I'm in over my head here, because Howie's logic is ac­tually starting to make sense. "What does a tree in the forest have to do with the Schwa?" I ask Ira.

And the Schwa says, "I know."

We snapped our heads around so sharply, it's like whiplash. The Schwa was there, leaning up against my backyard fencel It's like we're all too dumbfounded to speak.

"I know what it has to do with me," he said. "I'm like that tree. If I stand in a room and no one sees me, it's like I was never there at all. Sometimes I even wonder if I was there myself."

"Wh-when did you get here?" I asked him.

"I got here before Howie and Ira did. I was hoping you'd notice. You didn't."

"So ... you heard everything?"

He nodded. I tried to run the whole conversation through my mind, to see if I had said anything bad about him. His feel­ings didn't appear hurt, though—like he was used to people talking behind his back in front of his face.

"I've wondered about it myself," he said. "You know—being observationally challenged ... functionally invisible." He paused for a second, then looked at Manny all strung up like a scare­crow. "You ought to find a seam in the plastic, and tape the M-80 there."

"Huh?" It took a few seconds for me to drag my mind back to the reason why we were all here. "OhI Right." I went to Manny, pulled off the duct tape, and felt around his bald head for the plastic seam. I retaped the fat firecracker on the back of his head, relieved not to have to look at the Schwa. Ira fiddled with his camera, and Howie finished up our protective barri­cade.

"How long will it take the fuse to burn?" I asked, as illegal fireworks are not my particular academic strength.

"Twelve point five seconds," says Howie. "But that's just an estimate."

We let the Schwa light the fuse, as he seemed to be the only one not afraid of blowing up, and he quickly joined us behind the barricade.

"You know, there's gotta be a way to quantify it," Howie says while we wait for the fuse to burn down.

"What?"

"The Schwa Effect. It's like Mr. Werthog says: 'For an experi­ment to be valid, the results must be quantifiable and repeat- able (kiss, kiss).'"

"We should experiment on the Schwa?"

"Sounds good to me," said the Schwa.

Then a blast knocks me to the ground. My ears pop and begin to ring. The blast echoes back and forth down the row of brick duplexes. When I look up, Manny's body has flown six feet, and his head is gone again.

Ira zoomed in on the body. "Thus perished Manny Bullpucky." He turned the camera off. Right about now every win­dow in Brooklyn is snapping up as people wonder what morons are setting off fireworks at seven in the morning.

We hurry inside so we don't get caught. Once we're in, I look at the Schwa. "After that, you really want us to experiment on you?"

"Sure," he says. "What's life without excitement?"

I had to hand it to the Schwa. Any other kid would have flipped us off if asked to be a lab rat, but the Schwa was a good sport. Maybe he was just as curious about his own weirdness as we were.

***

LAB JOURNAL The Schwa Effect: Experiment #1

Hypothesis: The Schwa will be functionally invisi­ble in your standard classroom.

Materials: Nine random students, one classroom, the Schwa.

Procedure: We set nine students and the Schwa seated around an otherwise empty classroom (if you don't count the hamsters and the guinea pig in the back). Then we dragged other students into the room, and asked them to do a head count.