I listened to his story with my heart halfway up my throat. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to sit in a shopping cart, alone in a crowd of people, waiting for a mother that never came back.

“Schwa,” I said, slowly, “people don’t disappear just because no one remembers them.”

“If you can’t remember them, how would you know? Think of the tree, Antsy. The tree falling in the forest. If nothing and no one is there to hear it, then it doesn’t really make a sound, and if nothing and no one remembers you, then you were never really there.”

I couldn’t say anything. In the dim shadows of the room, and with what I already knew about the Schwa, it almost seemed possible.

“But . . . you were there, Schwa—someone did notice you in that shopping cart, otherwise you’d still be sitting there today, blocking people from getting their lima beans.”

“I don’t remember that—all the rest of that day is a blur. The next thing I remember for sure, though, was being in the police station with my father, answering questions and watching him fill out papers. I kept quiet mostly. I got the feeling that the cop didn’t even know I was there, and it made me mad. So I took something. Something he wouldn’t notice, but something that would prove I was there. When he picked up the missing persons report, all the pages slipped out and flew all over the ground, and I laughed. The cop didn’t know why the pages had fallen, but I did.”

“The paper clip!” I said. “You took the paper clip!”

“When we got home, Dad acted like everything was normal. It was before his accident, but he acted like he couldn’t remember her. From that moment on, he never talked about her. Her pictures disappeared from the walls, and soon everything that reminded me of her was gone. Everything but this.”

Then he reached beneath his mattress, fished around a bit, and pulled out a little plastic bag. “I don’t keep this one with the others,” he said. He handed me the bag and I held it like it was a diamond. As far as I’m concerned, that paper clip was the most valuable thing I’d ever held in my life.

“I don’t care what you say, Schwa—you’re not going to disappear.”

“That’s right, Antsy, I won’t. I’m gonna make sure of it. I’m gonna do something that will make me so visible, no one’ll ever forget.”

“What are you going to do?”

I couldn’t see if the Schwa was smiling, but somehow, I don’t think he was.

“You’ll see.”

15. Vortex in Aisle Three—Can Someone Please Clean Up the Ectoplasmic Slime?