Paul Beatty - Slumberland

The Mercedes’s door popped open with a satisfying click.

“Typical,” the faceless man said before sticking his mundane mug underneath the steering column and fiddling with the wires.

“You Americans own the world but never bother to venture into your own backyard. That’s the attitude that allowed us to steal the basketball final in the ’76 Olympics from under your noses, use Leo Strauss to infiltrate the Republican Party with his madcap philosophy of cruelty parading as humanism, convince you that VHS was superior to Betamax, and lure you into the Vietnam, Korean, and cola wars. New Coke? That was Vita Cola, the swill we East Germans have been drinking for forty years. No doubt your president will take credit for the fall of the Wall as signaling the end of Communism, but it’s all part of the master plan. It’s a misdirection maneuver somewhat analogous to your trick plays in American football, a geopolitical Statue of Liberty or fumblerooski, if you will. Soon, my dense Afro-American friend, you’ll be casting invisible digital votes in the name of democracy. Enslaving the vast majority of your work-force with a negligible minimum wage in the name of liberty. Charging mobile-phone users to make and receive calls in the name of free enterprise. Training the very same religious zealots of the desert who’ll. .”

The robust revving of the eight-cylinder engine drowned out the rest of his prognostication and my question about what in hell was a mobile phone.

“Come,” he said, patting the passenger seat. “Come see the breach in the Wall through which the four horsemen of the American apocalypse will ride.”

“Are you some kind of spy or just a well-informed car thief?” I asked, closing the door behind me.

“I’m a spy, though by tomorrow I might be a war criminal.”

“Me too.”

Traveling in four-door, heated-leather-seat luxury, we drove slowly through the masses. The man with the run-of-the-mill face told me he was stealing the Benz to replace his Trabant, a piece-of-shit socialist sedan that could be completely assembled and disassembled with a crescent wrench.

“How do you double the value of your Trabant?” he riddled me rhetorically. “Fill it with gas!”

When we reached the Wall, I turned down his offer of a tour of the bowels of the evil empire. I’m one of those folks who poses for photos standing next to the sign that says, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING SUCH AND SUCH STATE, then sleeps through the windy drive through the majestic Grand Tetons.

Otis Redding’s distinct rhythm ’n’ blues profundo bellowed from the car speakers. I couldn’t figure out if the refrain to “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” was prophetic or not because it seemed as if everything was changing and yet remained the same.

Two East German border guards, hats askew and tunics unbut-toned, sat at their post taking alternating slugs and pulls from a Jack Daniel’s bottle and an American cigarette. The first day-trip sojourners into Western imperialism were just starting to return to their homes. Exhausted families of four and only four walked past the guards, the parents dragging their sluggish, candy-smeared, toy-laden, lumpen proletarian progeny behind them. I half expected to hear an announcement saying, “Disneyland, excuse me, West Germany is now closed. Mickey, Pluto, Helmut, NATO, Japan, the United States of America, and the rest of the G7 thank you for your patronage and servitude. Get home safely.”

The invisible man pressed a button and unlocked my door. “The one thing I regret is that we created the Beatles,” he said apologetically, “then killed Otis Redding.”

“We?”

“Yes, ‘we.’ The dirty Reds killed Otis Redding. Mystery solved, okay. Look, the Beatles had been on top four years in a row, doing the job we gave them, which was to lull the West into a sitar secular stupor, and here comes this majestic black man with a haunting voice knocking them off the charts. We couldn’t have a Negro on top of the pop charts in 1968 blurring the racial hegemony. Bad for propaganda. Everybody — Moscow, Washington, Capitol Records — everybody agreed on that. Otis Redding and Martin Luther King both had to go. Made a two-for-one deal with the FBI.”

“C’mon, he died in a plane crash.”

“Ever notice the talentless, the harmless ones, never die young? Vanilla Ice, Lawrence Welk, the Disco Duck. You know how the monks scour the countryside and choose a small child to be the Dalai Lama? In Memphis there’s a bratty little boy named Justin Timberlake who’s been chosen to be the next King of Pop. He’ll live to be a hundred. It’s all part of the plan to keep you people docile.”

Unable to bear any more achingly plausible conspiracy theories, I moved to leave the car before I was exposed to the pointy, bloodletting half of the Stasi’s shield-and-sword motto. I was too late. The man of a thousand and one faces, each one more bland and forgettable than the one before it, had a Walther PPK pointed at his temple. He held back tears. His face convulsed, yet his hand remained steady. He whistled along with the classic outro of “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” backed up by the sounds of the crashing surf and the giddy laughter of East Berliners returning home from their first day of freedom.

When the song faded out he said, “Before I shoot myself, Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann, isn’t there something you want to know?”

“ ‘Schallplattenunterhalter Dunkelmann?’ It was you who sent the chicken-fucking tape?”

“It was.”

“How did you know I was looking for Charles Stone? And if you knew I was looking for him, why didn’t you just call and tell me where he was? Why fuck with me like that?”

“I fucked with you like that because I’m an East German secret agent and I’m trained to fuck with people like that. I don’t say, ‘Good morning, how are you feeling?’ which is the American way of fucking with you, as if you people really care how someone is feeling. I fuck your mind.”

“So why me?”

“Well, Herr Darky, I first heard your music at a very exclusive stag party I attended. We were watching a film you might be familiar with, a pornographic western called High Poon .”

“Some of my best work.”

“Indeed, personages no less than Heiner Müller, Valeri Borzov, Nicolae Ceauscescu, and Deng Xiaoping commented on how wonderful your score was. It was your work during that final scene that brought home the film’s point that the gang bang is the truest form of existentialism.”

“Thank you.”

“After that I became your biggest fan, which meant that I showed my appreciation not only by smuggling in your films and mix tapes, but I bugged your phone and intercepted your communiqués.”

“Communiqués? I didn’t know black people had communiqués.”

“When I found out you were corresponding with DJs around the world as to Charles Stone’s whereabouts, I decided to help you find him.”

“And you sent the video.”

“I couldn’t just contact you. No way to justify that to the higher-ups. See, we knew this day was coming, and a few of us lower-echelon guys at the agency who are huge Charles Stone fans were afraid that his unreleased masters would be burned along with the rest of the nefarious evidence. We couldn’t take the chance that this great man and his music would be lost to time and capitalism. So we arranged with the pornographers to use his music in their films as a way to preserve it.”

“There’s more music?”

“I’ll send you a coprophagia short entitled Eat Shit and Live ! His playing on that one is so unworldly that when someone puts a spoonful of shit in their mouth, you’d swear they were eating caviar.”