Paul Beatty - Slumberland

On drums, Sandra Irrawaddy. Despite holding the sticks as if she had the palsy, she could do things on a drum set Philly Joe Jones could only dream about. The Schwa, stealing a Duke Ellington line, called her an “exponent of drum-stickery,” but her footwork was no joke either. Once during a cigarette break Sandra played a more-than-reasonable facsimile of John Bonham’s infamous “Moby Dick” drum solo with no hands. Instead of using drumsticks she kicked out the jam on the bass drums and spit tangerine seeds at the cymbals.

And then there’s Yong Sook Rhee. Ever wonder whatever happened to that stuck-up-looking Korean kid with the slicked-down hair who was known as the world’s smartest boy? The one who at age five had an IQ of 210, could speak nine languages, program in five, recite pi to ten thousand places, and composed poetry?* I’ll tell you what happened to young Yong Sook, he plays trumpet in the Schwa’s band. Not much of a musician, he plays with a shameless naïveté reminiscent of Halle Berry trying to act. Just as the starlet’s insufferable overacting is about to drive you insane, she flashes a perfectly parabolic expanse of flesh and all is forgiven; and when you listen to Yong Sook play he’ll miss ten thousand notes, but the one he hits is crazy beautiful.

My role in the band was undefined. There were always turntables and a mixer in the studio, but I never touched them and no one ever asked me to sit in. In the days leading up to the concert someone asked if I was in the band.

“Yes,” the Schwa said.

“Well, what the hell does he do?”

“He’s our secret weapon. The grand finale that’ll bring down the house.”

Then he strolled over to Fatima’s melted radio, which he always kept nearby, turned it “on,” and began to dance a tango with an invisible partner.

As the Schwa caminata’d around the room, Soulemané tapped me on the shoulder and said, “ Brow tron lo, eta ne a ne won oh gike . The world is too large, that’s why we do not hear everything.”

The concert couldn’t come fast enough. The African proverbs were starting to make sense.

IT TOOK THE EAST GERMAN GOVERNMENT more than three years to build the Berlin Wall. Once we got the approval, it took us only three days to rebuild it. The idea was to bisect the heart of the city from Treptow to Pankow with a wall of sound ten meters thick and five meters high, a sound that, if everything went according to plan, would be a continuous loop of the Schwa’s upcoming concert. The music would be so real that anyone within earshot would feel as if they could reach out and touch it. They’d have to figure out for themselves if the wall of sound was confinement, exclusion, or protection.

Given Germany’s reputation for being a bureaucratic quagmire where one needs a stamp of approval in order to get the stamp of approval, we walked into the Senate for Urban Redevelopment fully expecting to get the infamous civic runaround. To be, as the Germans say, sent from Pontius to Pilatus.

The Schwa handed the clerk his proposal, a tersely worded, one-sentence document written in English on a sheet of notebook paper wrinkled as an elephant’s ass. Herr Müller calmly spread it over the counter, ironed it out with his forearm, and read it aloud. “I want to rebuild the Berlin Wall with music instead of concrete, barbed wire, and machine guns ’n’ shit.”

Without so much as a snicker, Herr Müller put a bearded chin in his hand and said, “In some ways that’s not a bad idea.”

His muted enthusiasm shouldn’t have been a complete surprise. Berlin newspapers often poll their readerships as to whether or not they want the Wall back. At least 20 percent of the respondents answer yes. So we had Herr Müller’s tacit approval, but surely that wouldn’t be nearly enough. True to form, he slapped a small stack of various pastel-colored application forms on the counter, rattling off in very official German which ones had to be sent where and addressed to whom. It didn’t take long for Müller to see that his Byzantine bullshit wasn’t registering with Herr Stone, so he tried English.

“Excuse me, sir. If you aren’t a German citizen and lawful resident of Berlin, this is going to be a problem. I need to see your papers.”

At the mention of papers, both Klaudia and I panicked, thinking that at any second a squad of crew-cut Polizei would come barreling in and escort the Schwa to the border. The Schwa, sensing he was at some bureaucratic impasse, coolly took out the same frayed piece of paper he showed the motorcycle cop the day I first discovered him. Herr Müller scanned it, skeptically at first, then he lifted the pair of librarian glasses from his chest and placed them over his slowly unwrinkling nose. Suddenly he was handling the paper by the edges like it was the fucking Magna Carta.

“Udo!”

Udo, an eager boy of about eighteen, appeared at his side, straightening his rayon tie and his unruly forelock at the same time.

“Yes, sir?”

“I want you to make a copy of this document and bring it back to me straight away.”

Udo reached for the paper, Herr Müller slapped his hand away.

“Gloves!”

When Udo returned with his identification papers they were encased in a plastic cover. A buzzer sounded and Herr Müller beckoned us to join him on the other side of the counter. Briskly, he escorted us into the bowels of the system, marching us down a cavernous hallway until we reached the frosted glass door to Frau Richter’s office. We could see a short, insanely busy woman who, judging by his trepidatious knock and newfound stammer, was Herr Müller’s superior.

Frau Richter was on the phone yelling something to the effect of, “Tell I. M. Pei that Potsdamer Platz makes the architect, not the other way around!” when Herr Müller passed the proposal and the mysterious paper under her pug nose.

“Das ist eine geniale Idee,” she said, hanging up the phone. She fingered her pearl necklace for a moment and made another phone call.

For the next two hours we were shuttled up the chain of command, marched from building to building until we finally found ourselves in a Reichstag sitting room, waiting to be seen along with an elderly and very dapper gentleman. The antechamber of the elected federal official, whom I am legally barred from naming, was ornate. Interspersed between historical tapestries were exquisitely framed portraits of high-ranking politicians whom I’m also not allowed to identify, but as a hint of the echelon of portraiture facing us, think “unsinkable” World War II battleship.

Now that we had time to rest, we asked Stone to see his identification. He removed it from the protective sheath and flung the plastic into the barrel chest of a bespectacled leader whose German surname in English means “cabbage.”

The ID paper was written in that interlocking old-German script that looks like a wrought iron fence. I barely managed to decipher the letterhead, “Verfolgte des Naziregimes,” a bold declarative that had been embossed with the screaming red insignia of the German Democratic Republic.

“No, it’s not possible,” Klaudia said, absentmindedly slipping into the Saxony accent she always tried so hard to hide. “There’s no way.”

The nameless politician stepped through the tall, walnut doors accompanied by a man with a suitcase handcuffed to his wrist. If the Chinese had attacked Germany at that very moment I could tell you the color of the proverbial “panic button” that unleashes unholy hell.

But Germany doesn’t have nuclear arms .

Sure they don’t.

Anyway, since China didn’t attack, I can’t tell you what color the “button” is, but suffice it to say the suitcase is brown. Yeah, I would’ve thought black too.