Excerpt from Slumberland by Paul Beatty, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Music. My music. Not mine in the sense that backseat lovers have songs or fifties rock ’n’ roll belongs to the devil, but mine in the sense that I own the music. I wrote it. I own the publishing. All rights are reserved. The song is titled “Southbound Traffic Jam.” It opens with a rumbling melody, ten lanes of bumper-tobumper morning rush-hour traffic over a sampled Kokomo Arnold guitar solo. In the background, two exits away and tailgating the guitar riff, is the intermezzo, a Peterbilt eighteenwheeler that merges into the tune with grinding gears and a double blast of its air horn. After sixteen bars of bottleneck guitar and bottlenecked cars (no one ever gets the joke), a Japanese sedan suddenly slams its brakes. The wheels lock. The skid is ominously long and even. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard this track, and yet that high-pitched screech still makes me brace for impact. Steel myself for the sound of sheet metal folding in stereo. A windshield explodes and ten thousand cubes of safety glass fall to the fast-lane pavement with the digitally crisp tinkle of a Brazilian percussion instrument. Sun Ra’s saturnine falsetto bespeaks the urgency.

So rise lightly from the earth.
And try your wings.Try them now.
While the darkness is invisible.

The guitar comes up, the traffic chugs on. Kokomo hums and moans. The knees of the receptionist pop. She’s at the door, peeking through the crack. Staring at the bulge in my Speedo, listening to my music, and wondering why. How does it come to this?

You’d think I’d be used to it by now—this lack of sunshine. But winter in Berlin isn’t so much a season as it is an epoch. Eight months of solid prison-blanket-gray skies that, combined with the smoky nightlife and the brogan solemnity of the Berlin footfall, give the city a black-and-white matinee intrigue. If it weren’t so cold I’d think I was doing a cameo in an old Hollywood melodrama. To shake the leaden Septemberto- April monochrome I find myself colorizing things. Ingrid Bergman’s eyes, the Polish prostitute’s language, the pastry sprinkles on the Schoko-Tale in the Bäckerei window, the patches of sky on a partly cloudy to mostly cloudy afternoon are all a false-memory shade of blue. A blue that doesn’t exist in nature, but resides only in my mind and the twang of Kokomo’s guitar.

On days when the skies are clear and that stark blue I’d long forgotten, I sprint out of the apartment and into the blinding afternoon looking for affection and serotonins. For an instant I forget where I am, then I notice the narrow wheelbases on the cars parked along the street with showroom precision. At the intersection of Schlüterstrasse and Mommenstrasse, dogs, dog owners, and unescorted schoolchildren, all equally well behaved, patiently wait for the walk signal. I look down at my funnylooking shoes and I remember where I am. Berlin, yup, Berlin.

The quirky functionality of the German shoe, like that of Volkswagens and Bauhaus, grows on you. If one is a creationist, the Adam and Eve of German cobblery are the bowling and nursing shoe, respectively. Shoe Darwinists such as myself believe the lungfish of the species is the three-hundred-year-old Birkenstock.

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.

Excerpted from Slumberland by Paul Beatty Copyright © 2006 by Paul Beatty. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.