EMERGING WRITERS, 2009
Congratulations to David Feinstein, Abe Frank, and Peter Schmidt-Nowara, Selected as Emerging Writers for 2009 by DUCR.
David FeinsteinPeter Schmidt-Nowara
Abe Frank
12/24/07, 4:12 am: “The Danish Flag”
It’s almost empty now. Our greatest city, once din-crashing and fatuous, is now almost empty. A strange thing. The streets blow with an unfamiliar cold wind, and the rare trucks that pass only hum or grumble aimlessly along. I write this as I sit alone in the window. We have no mirrors, no clocks. Certain kinds of information have lapsed. It has to be understood.
There are only a few of us, and none of us the kind that should be here. Most of us only know how to look out for ourselves in the old world. But there’s a recognition among us, a dark comedy we share. Or that shares us. There is no brawling or insanity. At least none that I know of. I don’t know exactly how far it goes.
When you read this, try to understand, as we are trying to understand what has happened here, how soft this problem actually is. How delicate, like prying your finger from a baby’s grasp. And then you feel the cold wind on an empty street, the signs still aglow, the billboards still flashing, and you try to remember how it used to be.
Horns were blaring in midtown traffic. That was far away. I was sitting in a window, smoking a red. Abdullah, the cab driver, told me all the way home how he fucked this french woman on the train to L.A., how this other french woman gave some guy a blowjob in a restaurant he worked in on the beach in Israel. How french women loved “to suck, to suck.” It was late at night, I was going home, I had money in my pocket. I felt like talking.
We listened to the radio. They were playing an Arabic song without the lyrics. He said he knew them anyway, it was a Syrian song. He said it was about beautiful women by the water. I pictured a restaurant with a battered Coca-Cola sign creeping down onto the sand. A patio filled with people dressed in white. A warm, fresh breeze.
None of that crap that hits you in the face when the wind blows around here. Squinting against the dust like prospectors in the gold rush. Then again, I suppose that makes sense. The cab ride cost fifteen dollars and I tipped him three. I knew the fare was supposed to be twelve, but I had money in my pocket, and I felt like talking. Abdullah sang off-key the whole way back to Brooklyn.
We do try to remember what used to be important to us. It gets harder all the time. I used to walk around places I wouldn’t have been able to go before. Empty museums. Those at first because they were still familiar and had the same tone everything had now. At first I didn’t cross velvet ropes, or security signs, or walk through doors marked “private” or “no trespassing” or with somebody else’s name written on them.
One day at the history museum I found a video projector projecting onto the wall of a dark room. I don’t even remember what was playing on it. I was standing there, watching it. Trying to remember what it was about. It was a sign from the past, something from my own life. I couldn’t understand it, I got frustrated. Without realizing what I was doing, I reached over and switched it off.
At first, I was shocked at my own audacity. I glanced around the room. My heart was racing. Nothing happened. I was surprised nobody came out to reprimand me. I waited a few more moments, then I fled from the scene of the crime. The heels of my shoes seemed to boom in the marble hallway. I tried to remember the last person I had seen.
I’d come out of my apartment about three this afternoon. I saw a bus driving by, and flagged it down. An older man was driving it, and there was one other person on the bus, a lady in a red and white dress, looking out the window. Her dress looked like the Danish flag. She was sitting about halfway back on the left. I nodded hello at the busdriver, who wasn’t watching anyway and just cranked a lever to close the door. He pushed the bus into gear.
As I walked down the aisle, the women in the Danish flag turned her head from looking out the window. She was wearing dark sunglasses that covered much of her face. I thought she might have smiled, only a hint of a smile. I went past her and sat down on the other side of the bus. I felt stupid for not saying anything to her. When we got near the museum, I pushed the “stop” button and got off the bus.
The museum steps were hard and old and looked cleanly swept. They were framed by the brown, bare arms of pin oaks. The building itself was broad and grey. I felt very small as I walked up the stairs. I tried hard not to catch any glimpses of myself as I walked. Not my shoes, not my arms swinging, not even my own coat if I reached into my pocket. Something seemed to be pulling at my back, pulling me backward, away from the museum. I did not want to be noticed. I pushed through the brass rotating doors and into the lobby.
A guy who worked at the coat rack was still there, sitting behind his bench. He looked at me blankly. Without making any particular face or gesture he indicated to me that it was all right to go inside. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be. So I did.
