Paul Beatty - Slumberland

Klaudia believes that all vibrant energy, from the human heartbeat to music, emanates from the earth’s core. Though she’s never been in an earthquake, she theorizes my deep sense of foreboding comes from always waiting for the big one to hit. There’s some sense to that. Anyone who’s grown up in the ring of fire never crosses a high suspension bridge or reaches the apex on the Ferris wheel without thinking, “What if an earthquake hits right now?” Supposedly I’ve got it all wrong. An earthquake isn’t a catastrophe, but is simply stress leaving the planet. A 5.5 on the Richter scale that spills the dishes from the cupboards and topples thatch huts in Micronesia is just the earth cracking its knuckles after a long day. The 7.7 tremor that derails Japanese bullet trains and levels the business district of a major city? That’s the earth arching its back and popping its vertebrae.

Making love to Klaudia was like having sex with a snooker player: No matter how contorted the position, she had to have at least one foot on the ground. Her orgasms were loud, rumbling moans, quivering pelvic seismic temblors often in the same growling key as Coleman Hawkins’s tenor. Sometimes I’d ask where a certain passionate grunt came from and she’d say, “That was an earthquake epicentered in the seas off the coast of Sumatra,” then she’d close her eyes and announce, “Now I take a short sleep.”

I enjoyed watching her sleep, her face resting on her powerful arms, her feet smooth, almost white, and as sculpted as a Parthenon Athena’s hanging off the futon and resting gently on the floor. But I liked listening to her sleep even more. She snored loud and sharp as if some miniature salsero were stuck inside her throat, scraping her larynx like a guiro. If I pressed my ear to her heaving chest I could hear the beat of her arrhythmic heart. A rapid baboompbaboomp baboompba that sounded exactly like the conga riff that starts “Manteca.” While the snoring and the heartbeat were most-satisfying aural pleasures, listening to her nighttime farts was damn near orchestral. Hers were a cool-jazz modal flatulence that featured all the measured vibrato and impeccable intonation of a Ray Draper tuba solo. Sometimes after a hearty meal of cabbage stew and an especially passionate session of lovemaking, Klaudia’s irritable bowels would rumble and the nocturnal flatus welled up inside her intestines would be jettisoned with a force loud enough to wake her up. And when that happened, she’d sit up, inhale deeply like a proud farmer at daybreak, and exclaim, “Ah, a fresh wind is blowing.”

ONE OF THE BEST THINGS about Europe is that you can cruise the streets pedaling a turquoise women’s three-speed with a purple plastic basket attached to the handlebars and not feel effeminate. Secure in my sexuality and prospects of finding Charles Stone, I biked along the route of the old Wall.

About a month before my little bike trek, I was at the Slum-berland doing routine maintenance on the jukebox. To fill the void I pumped some of my own music through the in-house speakers. As I replaced the amplifier capacitors and installed a new stylus, a regular or two would stop by to compliment my taste. They liked the music, but their inability to categorize it made them nervous. They needed music that told them in no uncertain terms how to feel, how to behave. My music never ordered the listener to “Dance! Think! Wash the Dishes!” It simply said, “Be! or Don’t Be, I Couldn’t Care Less!” and the Slumberland couldn’t handle that kind of freedom.

“Hey, Dark.”

“Yeah.”

“Doris says this is your music.”

“It is.”

“It’s really fucking good, man. I mean that.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s too good, really. Like a plum so sweet you can’t eat it because it makes your heart beat too quick and you end up throwing it away.”

“Okay.”

“So when’s the jukebox gonna be fixed?”

“In a few minutes.”

“Cool.”

“Later.”

“Late.”

I had my head buried in the machine’s belly and was delicately soldering in a few replacement chips when I heard the squishing of someone walking across the sandy floor. That same someone kicked the sole of my foot.

“What? I’m busy.”

No response.

I never bothered to look to see who it was. At first I figured it was Doris wanting to play a quick game of backgammon, or an impatient and feverish regular in bad need of a Teena Marie fix. But the grainy sloshing was too deep, too leaden. I reran the squishy footfalls in my head. Matching them up against the hundreds of different Slumberland steps I’d had filed away in my head. It hit me. They belonged to the crazy-looking black guy who asked for donations to rebuild the Wall.

Ten seconds later I heard the voice on my answering machine coming from the bar: “For the nigger, it niggereth every day.”

The Schwa.

Finally.

As long as I’d been looking for him, there he was, around a corner, no more than twenty feet away from me, and I couldn’t chase him down or shout him out. Not with the jukebox doors open wide, exposing its antiquated circuitry to the piles of sand I’d kick up scrambling to greet him. Not with the white-hot tip of the soldering iron clenched between my teeth, precariously close to melting an irreplaceable quartz crystal.

I heard him lift his squeaky wheelbarrow and head out the door. After I finished my work I started up the jukebox and asked Doris what happened.

She didn’t answer right away. She was holding me hostage. Waiting for me to pay the ransom. If I wanted her to set Charles Stone free I’d have to confess my undying love for her. Tell her that our breaking up was the dumbest separation since Frankie killed Johnny.

The jukebox buzzed and flickered to life. Van Morrison began to serenade the barflies. Two lovers standing beneath the overgrown banana tree kissed. I knew when the Irishman hit the chorus she’d cave. Crazy Love. Doris sang softly to herself and I pounced.

“What happened?”

“I give him some money. He bows and says, ‘For the nigger it niggereth every day.’ And that’s it. He didn’t say anything else.”

“But it was Berlin Wall Guy?”

“Yes.”

“But there was a pause between him talking to you and him leaving.”

“He was listening to your music. Smiling.”

I got light-headed. Smoking-California-homegrown-and-drinking-Hennessy-at-the-beach-my-God-look-at-that-fucking-sunset-how-come-nobody-ever-talks-about-Zen-anymore light-headed.

Not wanting to alarm me, she ran her thumbnail down the length of my sideburns and softly said, “His wheelbarrow was filled with brand-new bricks. I think Mister Stone readies to build his wall.”

I cupped Doris’s pretty face in my hands.

“Yes?” she asked expectantly.

“Can I borrow your bike?”

They say the Berlin Wall no longer exists on the street but in the mind. When it was extant, the Wall didn’t meander through the city, it bogarted. Its inexorable ghost is just as belligerent. It cuts uninvited through vacant lots and pricey new condominiums, rattling its hammer and sickle, spooking the tourists and locals who travel along this invisible barrier.

With one eye out for the chickenfucker, who I knew was somewhere watching me, I cycled through the Berlin spring looking for the Schwa. I popped wheelies as I ran red lights, fish-tailed into clouds of mosquitoes breeding over pools of stagnant water, bunny hopped over long-haired subway buskers who didn’t need the money, laid down senseless skid marks in historic plazas, rode no-hands down wide thoroughfares whose street names read like places on a Communist board game called Class Struggle: Paul-Robeson-strasse, Ho-Chi-Minh-strasse, Paris-Commune-Brücke. You’ve been accused of Left Opportunism. Go back three spaces .