Slumberland (2 page)

I own a highly evolved pair of Birkenstocks, all-season Hush Puppy–hiking boot hybrids that adapt to the ever-changing environment like suede chameleons. It is in these sturdy marvels of natural selection that I traipse around the city frantically searching for the sun in the same panic-stricken manner in which I look for my keys. The deductive clichés run through my head:
When did you last see the sun? Are you sure you had it when you left the house?
I work my way backward from the shadows of the Cinzano umbrellas that front the outdoor cafés and head for the Ku'damm shopping district. The crushed quartz in the sidewalk sparkles. Tourists wave from the tops of the double-decker buses. The sun is indeed “out,” but I can never find it in the sky.

None of the Germanic tribes had a sun god. Pagan as philosophy professors, the Visigoths, the Franks, and the Vandals knew better than to believe in something they couldn't see. Ra, Helios, Huitzilopochtli—my name for the sun is Charlie. I weave in and out of pedestrians imagining that two thousand years ago some Hun idler shod not in Birkenstocks but straw sandals trod the same path looking for solar spoor in these now-concrete wilds. But I catch only glimpses of the yellow deity, the corona shimmering through the leaves of the tree blossoms in Tiergarten Park, the herbalescent shampoo sheen in a tall blonde's hippie-straight locks, maybe a reflection in a skyscraper's glacial façade. My sightings are never more than partial eclipses; castle parapet or church steeple, something is always in the way.

Knowing the Egyptians haven't done anything of note in three thousand years, the Berlin civil engineers must have taken a cue from the ancient ones. Giza's men of science built Cheops's pyramids to align with the celestial pole, and so too did Berlin's urban planners, establishing a zoning code that seemingly stipulates every structure, be it building, billboard, street lamp, or bird's nest, be erected to such a height or in such manner as to prevent any
person of normal stature standing at any point within the city limits from having a clear and unobstructed view of the sun.

I always conveniently abandon the search at Winterfeldtplatz, the bells of Saint Matthias ringing in the dusk and signaling an end to the hunt. The sky darkens. The acrid smell of charred pita bread and shawarma lingers in the air. An old man rides a creaky two-speed. A woman curses her uncooperative daughter. The lights inside the Slumberland bar flicker on. In all the time I've lived here I've seen one sunset. And if it hadn't been for the reunification of Germany it wouldn't be that many.

The buzzer goes off but before I start to climb out the receptionist resets the tanning-bed timer for fifteen more minutes, restarts my song, and beckons me to lie back down. Retaking her seat, she listens to the music, one corner of her mouth raised in a deeply impressed smile. Suddenly that corner lowers into a pensive frown. Her fingers stop dancing. Her feet stop tapping. She wants to know why. Why I tan. Why I came to Germany. I tell her it will take more than fifteen minutes to answer that question. It will take the two of us having one of those good horizontal relationships, the kind that the day-to-day verticality of dating, jogging, and window-shopping eventually destroys after two years. By the time I got to the point where I mailed her postcards with accidental haikus scribbled hastily on their backs . . .

 

In bed we cool. Kiss.
Soon as my feet hit the floor—
The shit go haywire
.

 

...her question would remain unanswered, then I'll call her whining, “I sent you a postcard, please don't read it.” She'd want to break up with me, but wouldn't go through with it because she still hadn't found out why.

She shifts her plump behind in the chair. The chair squeaks. My sphincter tightens. Other than that I don't move. To move would mess up the comfort level, and I haven't been this comfortable in years.

On our way out of the Electric Beach my freshly irradiated face quickly loses its battle against the brick-cold night. Always a clean city, on winter nights Berlin is especially antiseptic. Often, I swear, there's a hint of ammonia in the air. This is not the hermetic sterility of a private Swiss hospital but the damp Mop & Glo slickness of a late-night supermarket aisle that leaves me wondering what historical spills have just been tidied up.

The ubiquitous commemorative plaques, placed with the utmost care as to be somehow noticeable yet unobtrusive, call out these disasters like weary graveyard shift cashiers.
We have a holocaust in aisle two. Broken shop glass in aisle five. Milli Vanilli in frozen foods
. These metallic Post-it notes aren't religious quotes and self-help affirmations like those pasted onto bathroom mirrors and refrigerator doors, but they are reminders to never forget, moral demarcations welded onto pillars, embedded into sidewalks, etched into granite walls, and hopefully burnished onto our minds.
WAY BACK WHEN, AND PROBABLY TOMORROW, IN THE EXACT PLACE WHERE YOU NOW STAND, SOMETHING HAPPENED. WHATEVER HAPPENED, AT LEAST ONE PERSON GAVE A FUCK, AND AT LEAST ONE PERSON DIDN'T. WHICH ONE WOULD YOU HAVE BEEN? WHICH ONE WILL YOU BE?

At the Nollendorfplatz U-bahn station we catch ourselves staring blankly at a marble plaque memorializing the homosexual victims of National Socialism. People whom the inscription described as having their bodies beaten to death (
totgeschlagen
) and their stories silenced to death (
totgeschwiegen
).

“What did you do last night?”

It's an odd question. One that is usually only asked by a best
friend after a drag on a borrowed cigarette or the pulling of a strange hair from a familiar shoulder. I'm thankful for it, though. She doesn't want to dwell in the not-so-distant past, and neither do I. “Nothing. What about you?”

“Nothing.”

“What about the day before yesterday?” she asks, pulling in close enough to squeeze the air from my down jacket.

“The day before yesterday?” I say, reaching behind my back and breaking her grip. “I was really busy the day before yesterday.”

She's hurt that I refuse to share, but the day before yesterday is too personal. The day before yesterday was the most important day of my life.

On the elevated tracks above us her train brakes to a halt. She's trying to hold my gaze; however, my attention is focused on a place I can't see but know is there. A place two blocks and a left turn behind her—the Slumberland bar. My patronizing good-bye kiss on the forehead is quickly countered with a kiss of her own. A lingering smack on the lips that gives me a glimpse into what could be our future, a long stretch of day after tomorrows that would be soft, impulsive, slightly salty, and an inch and a half taller than me.
Bing-bong
. The two-note electronic chime sounds, the pneumatic doors hiss to a close, and in a sense we've both missed our trains.

Not getting the anticipated response from me, the receptionist quickly folds her arms in disgust, her hands tucked tightly into her armpits. I want to ask her to do it again. Not kiss me, but fold her arms. The sandpapery sound of the linen sleeves of her lab coat rubbing together makes the tip of my penis itch. It's time to say good-bye. I reach out to lift the name tag poorly fastened to the receptionist's lapel. It reads,
Empfangsdame
, German for receptionist.

I begin to backpedal, expecting her figure to recede into the night. It doesn't. Her lab coat is too bright. She stands there like
a stubborn ghost of my satyric past, present and future refusing to disappear.

 

It's a slow Monday night; the Slumberland is gloomy and quiet. Only the jukebox's flickering lights and a Nigerian trying to impress a blonde with his Zippo lighter tricks punctuate the musty stillness. I order a wheat beer, then insert some money into the jukebox. I punch in 4701, “In a Sentimental Mood.” Duke Ellington's languorous legato soft-shoes into the bar and, as advertised, puts me in a sentimental mood about the day before yesterday.

Most languages have a word for the day before yesterday.
Anteayer
in Spanish.
Vorgestern
in German. There is no word for it in English. It's a language that tries to keep the past simple and perfect, free of the subjunctive blurring of memory and mood. I take out a pen, tapping the end impatiently on a bar napkin as I try to think of a English word for “the day before yesterday.”

I consider myself to be a political-linguistic refugee, come to Germany seeking asylum in a country where I don't have to hear people say “nonplussed” when they mean “nonchalant” or have to listen to a military spokesperson euphemistically refer to a helicopter's crashing into a mountainside as a “hard landing,” and I can't begin to explain how liberating it is to live in a place where I can go through an autumn of Sundays without once having to hear someone say, “The only thing the prevent defense does is prevent you from winning.” Listening to America these days is like listening to the fallen King Lear using his royal gibberish to turn field mice and shadows into real enemies. America is always composing empty phrases like “keeping it real,” “intelligent design,” “hip-hop generation,” and “first responders” as a way to disguise the emptiness and the mundanity.

Ironically, though the sound of American rhetoric is one of the reasons I left, it's the last remaining tie I have to the country
of my birth. The only person back home I correspond with is Cutter Pinchbeck III, senior editor for the
Kensington-Merriwether Dictionary of Standard American English
. Our relationship is contentious, and like some exiled word revolutionary I try to improve the linguistic repression from afar. To date I've submitted four words for inclusion in the next edition:
etymolophile
,
Corfunian
,
hiphopera
, and
phonographic memory
. I like my words; they're self-explanatory and, to my mind, much needed. Who'd believe that English is the only Indo-European language without an adjective to describe the inhabitants of the island of Corfu? Cutter Pinchbeck says we don't need
Corfunian
. In his priggish rejection letters he states that the people of Corfu are called Greeks, and that an etymolophile wouldn't be a lover of words, but a lover of the origin of words. He patronizingly says that
hiphopera
almost merited a lemma as an innovative, confluent melding of high and low culture; however, it didn't possess the “straight gully, niggerish perspicuity of this year's new entries, e.g.,
badonkadonk
,
bling
,
bootylicious
,
dead presidents
,
hoodrat
,
peeps
, and
swol
,” just to name a few slang ephemerals. And despite my having enclosed signed affidavits from my mother and a video of me, age twelve, winning twenty-five thousand dollars on
Name That Tune
, Cutter Pinchbeck doesn't believe that I, nor anyone of the hundred billion people who've trodden on earth in the past fifty thousand years, has ever had a phonographic memory—but I do. I remember everything I've ever heard. Every dropped nickel, raindrop drip-drop, sneaker squeak, and sheep bleat. Every jump rope chant, Miss Mary Mack Mack hand clap, and “eenie meanie chili beanie oop bop-bop bellini” method for choosing who's it. I remember every sappy R&B radio lyric and distorted Hendrix riff. Every Itzhak Perlman pluck and squishy backseat contorted make-out session. I can still hear every Hey you, You the man, and John Philip Sousa euphonium toot and every tree rustle and streetcorner
hustle. I remember every sound I've ever heard. It's like my entire life is a song I can't get out of my head.

“Ow.” The Nigerian has burned himself. He's shaking his hand wildly and sucking air through his teeth. His date laughs, seizes his hand, and licks and nuzzles his seared fingers.

The jukebox ballad ends with a note that Ellington lays down with the gentleness of a child setting a wounded bird into a shoe-box lined with tissue paper. A series of English words for “the day before yesterday” dies in the back of my throat—
penultidiem . . . prepretoday . . . yonyesterday
. . .—and like an unwitting Tourette's Syndrome utterance, a word for “the day before yesterday” flies from my mouth. “Retrothence!” The blonde and the Nigerian give me a strange look. I'm going to send that to Cutter Pinchbeck III at
Kensington-Merriwether
.
Retrothence
will look awfully nice on page 1147 of the Fourth College Edition, nestled between
retrospective
and
retroussé
.

“You still have some songs left.”

The Nigerian is standing next to the jukebox.

“Put in 1007. You can play anything you want after that.”

Rock 'n' roll saunters into the room. Overdubbed guitar riffs that don't come off as gimmicky, drums driving the song with the tough staccato love of a caring drill sergeant, and the bass, the bass is above the fray, suspended above the strings, synthesizers and percussion, brimming with a cocksure confidence, always threatening to show off but never doing it.

“Who is this?”

“The Magnum Opus.”
*

They're Southern California, sprawling, hazy, fickle, as underground as a rock group that sold twenty thousand records could
be. The critics hail groups like the Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam as the purveyors of the new rock 'n' roll, choosing heroin vapidity over depth, haircuts over musicianship, head-to-toe white-boy pallor over a Mexican/black/American/
guapo
–politic band whose music has nothing to do with being Mexican, American, black, or handsome. High-pitched and just this side of screechy and that side of cogent, the vocals hydroplane over the melody.

“They're good,” the Nigerian says.

“They are good,” I wanted to say, “but two nights ago, not so far from where you're standing now, me and the greatest musician you've never heard of played two minutes and forty-seven seconds of musical perfection as timeless as the hydrogen atom and
Saturday Night Live
. A beat so perfect as to render musical labels null and void. A melody so transcendental that blackness has officially been declared passé. Finally, us colored folk will be looked upon with blithe indifference, not erotized pity or the disgust of Freudian projection. It's what we've claimed we always wanted, isn't it? To be judged ‘not by the color of our skins, but by the content of our character'? Dude, but what we threw down was the content not of character, but
out
of character. It just happened to be of indeterminate blackness and funkier than a motherfucker.”