Only Americans Burn in Hell Read online

  I had come up with what I thought was a funny contrast between narrative voice and subject matter.

  I was going to write a fantasy novel in the imagined voice of an alcoholic from southeastern New England. It was going to be the The Hobbit as told by a gin-room rummy from Fall River, Massachusetts.

  It was going to go something like this:

  Fuckin’ Bilbo the little midget over here, he crawls into the prickers and what does he see but some fuckin’ trolls sittin’ at a fuckin’ fire.

  “Wow, I says, wow. You tell me, guy, what the fuck am I gonna do with some trolls?” says Bilbo the Dildo. “Who am I, a fuckin’ Terminator? I ain’t gettin’ myself eaten just cause some big shot Poindexter thinks he’s a wizard.”

  But life kept interrupting.

  Things went screwy.

  It’s possible that I had a nervous breakdown.

  Somehow I ended up writing a novel that is not only about whimsical undying characters who live on a magical island called Fairy Land, but is also a book that functions as an accidental allegory for a social media hashtag.

  This state of affairs seems like a perfect statement about the present moment.

  Corey wrote back about a week after I’d sent my email.

  This is what he wrote:

  Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 11:15 AM

  From: Corey

  To: Jarett Kobek

  Subject: RE: Meeting with NYU in LA?

  Dear Mr. Kobek,

  Thank you for your response, your honesty, and your candor.

  Best wishes,

  Corey

  Chapter One

  Certain Facts about Celia, the Queen of Fairy Land

  Here are some things that you should know.

  The first of these things: Celia was an immortal and undying being, possessed of supranatural powers.

  The second: Celia lived on Fairy Land, which was an island in the sea past the sun.

  The third: Celia was Fairy Land’s Regnant Queen.

  The fourth: Celia had become Queen of Fairy Land when she and the other undying women on the island in the sea past the sun had decided to expel or murder all of the men in Fairy Land.

  The fifth: when all of the men were dead or expelled, the women of Fairy Land gathered together and called upon Celia to reign as their Queen.

  The sixth: Celia accepted the women’s call and wore the crown of Fairy Land.

  The seventh: Celia liked to fuck.

  Here’s another thing that you should know: everything is going to be okay.

  It isn’t easy living in a world where every device of mass communication has been designed to tell you that you’re horrible.

  It’s no picnic being taunted by a Greek chorus when your only economic future is feudalism.

  Take a deep breath.

  Make sure your exhale is longer than your inhale.

  You’re on Planet Earth until you’re dead.

  Everything between now and then is survival.

  And survive is what you’ll do until you don’t.

  Calm down.

  For the length of time that it takes you to read this book, everything will be fine.

  Despite her status as an immortal and undying being from Fairy Land, Celia was pretty uptight in her understanding of gender and sexual norms.

  If Celia had not been so rigid in her embrace of gender and sexual norms, Celia could have just fucked some of the other immortal and undying women on the island past the sun.

  It could have been very Wonder Woman.

  But Celia was a hardliner.

  Which meant that Celia was into fucking men.

  And Celia lived on an island where all of the men had been expelled or killed.

  The construction of Celia’s monarchy had screwed up Celia’s sex life.

  So it wasn’t very Wonder Woman.

  It was very Game of Thrones.

  Wonder Woman and Game of Thrones were both literary intellectual properties that had been developed past their humble origins into huge media spectacles.

  Wonder Woman was about an undying woman named Diana who lived on an island in the sea. Diana left her island of lesbians to kill a bunch of Germans.

  Game of Thrones was about unpleasant people in a fantasy medieval world.

  The unpleasant people in Game of Thrones killed and fucked each other while reinforcing a worldwide hegemony that replicated, for no particular reason, the racial, sexual, and cultural prejudices of the British colonial era.

  Both media spectacles were pornography about war.

  This pornography was very popular with people in the United States of America.

  The United States of America was a warrior nation that liked to fuck up the shit of weaker countries through unending battles, through the dropping of bombs, through the wholesale slaughter of the poor.

  The huge media spectacle of Wonder Woman was released in 2017 AD, by which point the United States of America had been at war with the country of Afghanistan for sixteen years.

  It was the longest war in the history of the United States of America.

  It was sixteen years of turning illiterate Muslim peasants into bloody red streaks of chalk.

  Almost everyone in the United States of America pretended that it wasn’t happening.

  But they loved Wonder Woman.

  And they loved Game of Thrones.

  Celia knew a thing or two about being transformed into a media property.

  Back in 1599 AD, a guy from England had written a short book called The Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincoln.

  Some of the book was true, in that it recounted events that had happened to Celia.

  Most of it was bullshit.

  Amongst other nonsense, Tom a Lincoln was about how Celia had met Tom a Lincoln, who was also called the Red-Rose Knight. He was King Arthur’s bastard son.

  Tom a Lincoln was about how Celia had allowed the Red-Rose Knight to enter Fairy Land after his boat had washed up on the island in the sea past the sun.

  Tom a Lincoln was about how Celia had fucked the Red-Rose Knight, and how as a result of that fucking, Celia had birthed a son named the Fairy Knight.

  About two years after Tom a Lincoln was first published, Celia was given a copy of the book. She discovered something that happens to anyone who becomes the subject of media coverage.

  Celia discovered the people who create media coverage are depraved beasts that will say anything for money.

  The author of Tom a Lincoln was a guy named Richard Johnson. He is described thusly in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

  Richard Johnson was in every sense a derivative writer: his romances synthesize a mass of traditional materials along with some more sophisticated modern texts, The Faerie Queene among them; he retails familiar ballads, songs, and jests under a light disguise of novelty; and his secondhand pamphlets are aimed at the prides and prejudices of a readership of London citizens and their families. His career is a paradigm of popular commercial writing for the press in his time …

  In other words, a total fucking hack.

  May they be with us always!

  Richard Johnson wrote that Celia had killed herself after King Arthur’s bastard son left Fairy Land and didn’t return.

  This lie was presented in a very dramatic fashion, with the Red-Rose Knight trying to return to Fairy Land but facing ill winds which kept his ship from reaching the island.

  Richard Johnson had written out Celia’s suicide note, which he said was inked in her own blood.

  It was very sad.

  It dripped with pathos.

  It was stuffed with treacle.

  It didn’t sound anything like Celia.

  No one in Fairy Land had any idea how Richard Johnson had learned about the Red-Rose Knight and his visit to Fairy Land.

  So many of the details were wrong. Especially the part about the Red-Rose Knight’s valiant resistance to Celia’s sexual advances.

  Especially the suicide.

&nbs
p; How could Celia, an undying being, kill herself?

  And why would she do it for a mortal man?

  Richard Johnson had written a bit about Celia’s son, the Fairy Knight. In Part II of Tom a Lincoln, the Fairy Knight performs all manner of great deeds and wins the world.

  This was sort of true.

  In their sexual congress, Celia and the Red-Rose Knight had indeed created the Fairy Knight. But the Fairy Knight hadn’t performed all manner of great deeds or won the esteem of the world.

  All that happened to the Fairy Knight was that he lived out his early life in Fairy Land until he was banished in his sixteenth year.

  No one from Fairy Land ever saw him again.

  Richard Johnson omitted that Celia and the Red-Rose Knight had a second child.

  When the Red-Rose Knight arrived on the shores of Fairy Land, he and his shipmates had entered the kingdom and never left.

  Why would they?

  They were surrounded by supranatural women. Many of these women were like Celia. They were hardliners when it came to gender and sexual norms.

  And they hadn’t seen any men in a very long time.

  The Red-Rose Knight’s men lived like princes, fucking their tiny brains out in grottos where the flowers sang songs in time with the sexual thrusting while the trees swept their branches along the rutting lovers’ flesh.

  While they fucked out their tiny brains, the Red-Rose Knight and his men were enacting the general bullshit con on women that is heterosexuality.

  The rules of the game go like this: for every thousand remarkable women, the really beautiful ones, the really smart ones, the really smartly beautiful ones and the really beautiful smart ones, there’s about one semi-okay man.

  Heterosexuality is a giant joke played on the women of the world.

  Here’s the punchline: if you’re a woman, and you want to experience the biological imperative of sex with a man, you pretty much have to bed down with a sack of worthless crap.

  And don’t forget: this was back in the early medieval period, so the Red-Rose Knight and his men were no beauties.

  They really were sacks of worthless crap.

  But they were the only dicks in town.

  Richard Johnson wrote that the Red-Rose Knight’s men knocked up most of the women of Fairy Land.

  This isn’t true.

  The only person who got knocked up was Celia.

  She gave birth to the Fairy Knight.

  Then, about a year later, she had her daughter.

  Celia named her daughter Fernstuff Wirethorne, Keeper of the Sacred Flame, Fiery Green Horsetender, and Mistress Magical of Fairy Land and Its Environs.

  No one on Fairy Land could be bothered saying Celia’s daughter’s full name.

  Everyone called Celia’s daughter Fern.

  Not long after the birth of this daughter, the Red-Rose Knight keeled over and died of an ailment that had yet to be named.

  He was murdered by typhoid fever, which meant that he’d been killed by water filled with human shit.

  Unbeknownst to everyone, one of the Red-Rose Knight’s men was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever.

  The carrier’s name was Orson.

  Orson’s hobbies included skipping rocks across ponds, speaking in a high-pitched voice while imitating his mother’s folk wisdom, and pretending that he was a beautiful princess waiting to be rescued by a dashing knight.

  Being an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever meant that although Orson never showed any signs of having the disease, his body was in a state of constant typhoid production.

  Orson was like a factory worker under crony capitalism: he was making something, but he didn’t share in the gains of that production.

  One night, Orson was corralled into helping prepare a feast. This had happened because one of the usual preparers of food was busy fucking out his brains in a shadowy elm grove by the Ancient Rocks of Forever.

  And so Orson helped prepare the feast for the Red-Rose Knight, the Red-Rose Knight’s men, and all the women of Fairy Land.

  Orson placed the Red-Rose Knight’s drinking vessel on the communal table.

  Because it was the early medieval period, Orson hadn’t washed his hands after using the latrine.

  He got his left index finger in the Red-Rose Knight’s water.

  The women of Fairy Land were immune to typhoid fever.

  When the Red-Rose Knight died from drinking too much water filled with Orson’s shit, he resolved an ethical dilemma.

  The dilemma was this: despite liking to fuck, Celia also believed in and embodied the organizational principles of Fairy Land, and the preeminent organizational principle of the Realm was that all men had to be killed or banished.

  Celia had stretched this rule for a very long time. For years, she’d let the Red-Rose Knight and his men stay on Fairy Land.

  Her citizenry had started to complain.

  At the very moment when the Red-Rose Knight died from consuming too much of Orson’s shit, Celia had been trying to figure out how to tell the father of her children that he was to be banished from her island.

  After the Red-Rose Knight died, the women of Fairy Land killed all of the Red-Rose Knight’s men who’d survived their encounter with Orson’s shit.

  With one exception.

  Rusticano was allowed to live.

  Orson was the first to lose his head.

  Unlike in his fantasies of being a princess, no one saved him from death.

  His hands were filthy.

  Chapter Two

  Some Facts about Fern

  A magical bullshit thing had happened when Fern was born. Maybe it was because she was the Queen’s daughter, maybe it was because she was King Arthur’s granddaughter. Maybe it was because she was the first and only woman born in Fairy Land after the expulsion and murder of its men.

  Whatever the cause, the effect of this magical bullshit was that the health of the Realm of Fairy Land was tied, directly, to Fern.

  She was its living avatar.

  In the times when Fern was happy, Fairy Land was a paradise, full of joy and pleasure. The harvests were incredible, the livestock flourished, and the lesbianism was euphoric and multi-orgasmic.

  When Fern was angry, Fairy Land was miserable. The harvests were pathetic, the animals all perished, and the lesbianism drifted into a mythical bed death.

  In the times when Fern experienced feelings of vulgar existentialism, wondering about the purpose of her or any other life, the whole of Fairy Land entered a state of paralysis, of grinding malaise without discernible beginning or end.

  In the five days before Fern ovulated, Fairy Land was hell on Earth.

  One of the ways by which Fern dealt with being the living avatar of Fairy Land was to go on vacation.

  Most women on Fairy Land never left the island. There was no rule against travel, but enormous social pressure kept the citizenry from venturing into the wider world.

  Some people went on trips, sometimes, but it was always awkward.

  No one left as much as Fern.

  Fern’s first departure from Fairy Land was in the Year of the Silken Cutthroat, which roughly corresponded to 1349 AD, 749 AH, and 5109 AM.

  Fern set off on a little boat, with no crew, and sailed across the sea to France.

  Once she had landed, she made her way by horse to Paris.

  Are you wondering how Fern managed to do all of this?

  Don’t forget: Fern’s mother was Celia, the Queen of Fairy Land. Fern was the daughter of an undying being possessed of supranatural abilities, and Fern herself was the living avatar of a magic realm.

  Money and horses and boats and all of that?

  Fern waved her hand.

  Fern performed magic.

  And if you’re like the Los Angeles-based artist William E. Jones, when you read about Fern performing her magic, you thought to yourself: “Every time that the supernatural enters fiction, it’s a cheap shortcut around the craft of storytelling.”
r />   And you’re right.

  Fern’s bullshit magic really was a cheap shortcut around the craft of storytelling.

  But take a deep breath.

  Calm down.

  Everything is going to be fine.

  Just remember: this level of unprofessionalism has been positively reviewed by the New York Times.

  When Fern got to Paris, the French capital was not what she had imagined.

  It was 1349 AD.

  The Black Death had arrived.

  Tumors were sprouting from people’s skin and then bursting open into fireworks of wretched fluid.

  The Black Death was rotting people’s flesh with gangrene until the people died.

  They were living beings and they had lives and loves and hates and cares and worries and now they were lifeless matter.

  Food for worms.

  Trash scattered around the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

  Stinking to high heaven.

  It was a pretty shitty vacation.

  When she traveled around Paris in 1349 AD, stepping over the bodies of the tortured urban poor, Fern collected news and information about the outside world.

  It’d been about a century since the people of Fairy Land had learned much about what men were doing to the planet.

  The news was not good.

  It never was.

  Fern was nothing if not resolute.

  When she returned to Fairy Land, she decided to rest, but also decided that she would go again into the wider world.

  And so she went on more vacations.

  It was the late medieval and early modern periods. Fern saw unfathomable amounts of human suffering, but other than the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 AD, nothing was ever as bad as Paris in 1349 AD.

  Fern became a seasoned traveler.

  She learned to put up with a lot of crap, as long as she got the manic contact high and psychic relief that comes with being far from home.

  And as she moved around the world, she collected more news.

  Fern brought back this news in physical formats.

  At first it was books, which eventually turned into other forms of media. Newsbooks, broadsides, wire recordings, shellac and vinyl records, audio cassettes, magazines, newspapers, reel-to-reel recordings, LaserDiscs, CDs, VHS tapes, DVDs, HD DVDs, Blu-ray Discs.

  This is how Celia learned about Richard Johnson and Tom a Lincoln.