Нил Шустерман - The Schwa Was Here

“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 Station 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.

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.”