Paul Beatty - Slumberland

“Thanks, man,” we mumbled to each other.

“No, really,” he said, “the wall, the concert, Fatima, I want you to know. . you know.”

“Yeah, man, likewise.”

“Beautiful.”

“Say, can I ask you something?”

“Sure, go ’head.”

“During that last solo, what were you thinking about?”

“I was thinking about the phrase on the banner, ‘Black Passé.’

How being passé is freedom. You can do what you want. No demands. No expectations. The only person I have to please is myself.”

“You’ll never be passé.”

“Shit, you keep spinning like that and neither will you.”

“I don’t know about that. To be passé you have to have been happening at some point in time, and I never was nor never will be happening.”

The Schwa laughed. Doris finally got us outside. Burning cars filled the streets. People crowded around the Schwa and begged for his autograph. Behind him I could see the towheaded boy who years ago had written “Ausländer Raus!” on the dewy Slum-berland window standing in a circle of Sudanese skateboarders. A flash of light and the circle parted, leaving the white kid standing there holding a Molotov cocktail. He tossed it into the church plaza, then stood there transfixed by the spreading flames.

“Lauf!” I shouted at him. Run!

Tyrus, the Slumberland librarian, came out of nowhere, shaking me by the elbow. I expected him to give me a book. And I wanted a book. I needed a gratuitous, multigenerational tale of colored-people woe that would assure the white reader and the aspiring-to-be white reader that everything would be okay despite the preponderance of evidence that nothing is ever okay.

“Dude, do you know what you’ve done?”

“Huh?”

“You’ve turned this motherfucker out. Permanently fucked shit up. Shit is no longer okay, but that’s a good thing.”

“Huh?”

Sensing my confusion, Lars handed me a tampon soaked in absinthe. In the middle of Goltzstrasse I dropped trou, and in the greatest act of love since Juliet tried to drink Romeo’s hemlock backwash, Klaudia took the cottony dagger and rammed it up my ass, thusly. Thank goodness for the gentle-glide design.

The wormwood buzz kicked in immediately, and for the rest of the night any conversation was subtitled in bright pink-and-green variety-show Japanese.

And that was most definitely okay by me.

THEY SAY THE Schwa’s wall sounds different depending upon which side you’re standing on. Experienced from the west, the replay of the concert invokes the West Berlin of thirty years ago. It gives the city a sense of the old intimacy that once made it so special. Standing on that side of the wall the music makes you feel safe. It’s the sound of inspiration, encouragement, and hope. On the other hand, if you walk ten meters east, the same music stirs up a different set of emotions. You’re overcome by a power-ballad wistfulness that leaves one reflecting upon how far the city and its citizens have come. In contrast to those on the west who take from the wall, listeners on the eastern side are moved to give of themselves. They treat this wailing wall like a musical temple. Prayers hang on nearby trees. The ground around the wall is wreathed and strewn with offerings ranging from photos of missing relatives to antiquated East German appliances like the RG-28 Mixing Device.* That’s been the wall’s impact on the city. At least until the speakers get shorted out by the rain and snow, and Christo or some other installation artist decides to dye the Spree river orange and wrap the Reichstag in flypaper.

Apparently my perfect beat has had a far less reverberatory effect. Not that I expected much, though an instant Grammy airmailed to my bedside would’ve been a good start. Is a call from the U.N. secretary-general asking if it’d be okay to commission my track as the anthem for planet Earth too much to ask? A show of appreciation from the sick and crippled children who were healed by the curative powers of my creative cut mastery would’ve been nice. Shit, it was only the day before yesterday that I transformed modern music from this very bar, and no one’s even bought me a drink. I bought my first drink tonight. I’m not buying another.

Doris and Tyrus slip into my side of the booth, squeezing me against the wall, crashing my pity party without so much as putting a three-mark beer on the table. Tyrus can’t contain his excitement. He’s flapping a Guggenheim Fellowship check in my face and insisting that I’m the only one who can do justice to his new musical.

“What’s it called?”

“ Real Recognizes Real . It’s a one-man performance piece about an African-American expat from Los Angeles who returns from Germany with the perfect specimen of white womanhood in tow, a blonde Saxon named the Venus Hot-to-Trot. He and Venus tour the chicken ‘n’ waffle circuit charging sexually frustrated black men to touch her corporeal peculiarity, a completely flat ass. A condition the scientists refer to as noshapeatallpygia.”

“I’ll think about it,” I lie. I’d never score anything titled with black street vernacular. But it’s the only compliment I’ve gotten, so I’ll placate for now. Surely if I string him along long enough there’s a beer or two to be had.

“Hey, we went by the wall today. Sat there for two hours and never heard your beat. What’s up with that?”

“I erased it from the loop. I didn’t want my beat to be just another brick in his wall.”

“So where is it?”

“It’s on top of my refrigerator.”

Doris says nothing. She knows the space atop my icebox is where I keep my most precious valuables. I’d put my dreams up there if I could. Silently she hands me two pieces of paper. One a telegram from DJ Blaze that just says, “NIGGER!”* The other a long list of musicians who’d called the bar asking to get in touch with me. The list smells strangely familiar. I hold it to my nose.

“Your…”

She winks.

Now Lars hurtles himself into the booth. “Black is back, baby!”

Groan.

“Don’t you want to be relevant?”

“No way. Who needs the fucking pressure?”

“That’s the beautiful thing about you people. You stay bitter. I bet when Martin Luther King Junior got on his first integrated bus, he said, ‘C’mon, can’t you make this motherfucker go any faster?’ ”

Thanks to my misguided efforts, blackness is back. The Schwa’s musical munificence hadn’t rendered blackness irrelevant, only darkened it in even further. They say fifty is the new thirty. Iraq is the new Vietnam. Gin is the new vodka. Now that black is the new black, Lars had plans. Big plans.

He’d already conspired with a major computer manufacturer to take the Schwa on a concert tour of cities with a history of being bisected by walls. Tentative dates had already been scheduled in Jerusalem, Baghdad, Belfast, and the Calexico-Mexicali border. The Schwa would play a series of cutting contests against the company’s latest showpiece, Deep Blues. A jazz-playing computer that rumor has it has already beaten Wynton Marsalis three jams to none.

In comparison, my itinerary is rather limited. Apparently I’m booked to appear on Wetten, dass. .? , a German game show whose title best translates as Attention-Starved People with No Discernible Talents Doing Seemingly Amazing Things . I love that show and it’s easy to imagine the prime time course of events.

I’ll be pitted against a man who claims he can distinguish between brands of mineral water from how the carbonation bubbles settle on a spoon placed inside the glass. He can’t. Next week I’ll best a crane operator who brags that while standing in a dark room he can identify any car made after 1978 simply by the brightness and layout of its headlights and the blinking pattern of its left turn signal. He can, but no one will care. Then, in a long-awaited semifinal showdown, I’ll embarrass a blind girl from Bremerhaven who insists she has the ability to identify any bird indigenous to continental Europe by touching a single tail feather. The sympathy vote will be hers until her delicate finger-tips betray her on the plumage of the Bulgarian blue-breasted swamphen.