Schwa

SCHWA

JOE PANCAKE awoke from unsettling dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic schwa. It could have been worse: He might have been a flap; or a semi-vowel; a glottal stop; or--horror of horrors!--the voiced apico-alveolar lateral with dorso-velar co-articulation: the dark "l." Malted milk; salted silk.
From his place in bed, and with the sunlight streaming in from the window across the room, he looked down on the vast expanse of what only the day before had been his chest to see the long, gentle sweep of the three-quarter arc and cross stroke. A soft "uh" emitted slowly from the cavity.
After the initial shock, Joe collected himself and uttered--or rather, tried to utter--a "Why me?" But only the middle vowel came forth, resonating with a greater intensity and clarity than ever before. This too surprised him--so much so that he did not attempt to speak again. But after awhile--when he had calmed down some--he did reflect on his first thought and, though not attempting to duplicate the earlier utterance, managed to consider the alternative: "Well, then, why not me?"
An hour passed before he tried to move his arms and legs--to see if he could get up--but was met with only partial success: his arms wiggled back and forth, rose and seemed to dangle in mid-air, but had little effect on the rest of his body. His legs too he could raise--the knees high, thighs perpendicular to the bed--but these were held in check by gravity, the relentless force of the natural world. The half-raised legs, the floating hands, his entire body fell back into place, spent. A disrupted current of air swept cross his face.
The morning passed.
As did Joe=s thoughts: He thought of books. And literature. And speech. And of the difference between the written symbol and the pronounced sound. Idea and the representation of idea. And of how idea is often made from those sounds and signs. And he began to wonder about meaning. And meaning=s rebuttal.
Would you rather be blind, or would you rather be deaf?
Or insane, where meaning has no place?
Joe Pancake looked out the window of his room and watched the shadows of the leaves of the maple tree in the yard slide across the glass of the window, as he settled in for the day . . . or the week . . . or whatever it was that awaited him.
Composing himself--if nevertheless still troubled--Joe let his mind wander on past the immediate moment: to matters of practical concern: How long would this being a schwa continue? How long could it last? Looking down across the ink, still wet and oozing like a sore, he began to reflect on those questions of ontology and phonetics--and then wondered (since his reality had been altered to such a degree already) whether his essence now lay in the ink below or in the sound above (or someplace in between--or elsewhere altogether); indeed, whether he was even visible to anyone but himself; whether the steady, non-visible "uh" breathing in and out came into play anywhere outside his own immediate sphere of being.
And this: Is the schwa a deviation or the norm? (Is Joe Pancake a deviation or the norm?) Why is there no evidence of the schwa in the 26-letter alphabet? Is schwa-ness the absence of meaningful sound, or the culmination of it? Either way, is it necessary? Or even desirable? Can language afford the luxury of the schwa? Is the schwa luxury?
Or a yoke?
Suddenly frightened, Joe pushed the idea from his head and turned instead to the more pleasant thought that, since he could not possibly have made it to work in his present condition, he at least had no job from which to be fired. This comforted him for but a moment--until he regarded the difficulty he would now have in keeping up his considerable correspondence, his ambitious reading program, his evening walks around the block to greet the dogs.
The morning became the afternoon.
By the afternoon Joe Pancake had finally come to that point in his life where he could objectively and earnestly consider the very real problems of the middle vowel: not only was there no point of articulation, not only was there the lack of the voiceless option; it was an almost complete relegation to the unstressed position. No matter that he still had length (unlike flaps and stops), no matter that he had virtually and nearly single-handedly taken over the entire unaccented turf of the English language. What now of his other options? It was as if, Joe reflected, through no conscious effort or even decision of his own, he had been reduced to the most insignificant, aescthetically dull phoneme in the entire known linguistic tree.
It could not have been worse, he now realized. Compared to the schwa, the dark "l" was a feat of aesthetic brilliance.
Joe looked deeper and deeper--indeed, more deeply than he had ever looked before--into the enormous cavity of his soul and recalled the words of an old friend, long dead now, who said that people will jump into the nearest cage they can find. He moaned. He fell asleep.

* * * * * * *

The dreams he pursued, laid down one on top of the other and in rapid succession, were uneventful: the closing of a car door; the rolling of dice; trying to decide which pen to buy in an office supply store; a G clef with a quarter note on Middle C; the color blue; the color white; white noise; static noise; outer space; the space shuttle exploding on TV with the volume off.

* * * * * * *

A knock on the door startled him awake. Suddenly he remembered: Good God! I forgot: Lulu's coming over!
He struggled as he had earlier in the morning, his legs moving and kicking, his arms waving frantically. She can't see me like this, he knew.
The doorbell rang.
Joe realized that he could not get up--not to answer the door, but to hide under it.
The knocking continued; the doorbell rang louder.
Joe remained in bed, all of his senses peeled to the world outside his room. His mind whirled: Escape.
Two more knocks, and then everything stopped. Quiet. Followed by: footsteps along the house. Joe detected something of a shadow crossing the window. He saw the form begin to rise above the sill. And then, as Lulu's eyes first peered through the window and met Joe's and moved slowly across the pulsing upside-down lower-case "e," he saw in every detail there was her expression turn from initial recognition (a smile?) to perplexed curiosity (the brow furrowed) to sudden horror (her mouth contorted). Joe Pancake at once wished he could disappear from the face of the earth, but as he heard the pitch of her scream rise and then settle into a deafening roar, he knew that he never would.