Only Americans Burn in Hell Page 3

  Unlike the sojourns of the island’s other women, Fern’s trips abroad were embraced by the residents of Fairy Land.

  There was a simple reason.

  As soon as Fern left the island, her mood stopped influencing their lives.

  During Fern’s seventh trip abroad, which was supposed to be for six months, but lasted about two years, the residents of Fairy Land revised their previous opinion on Fern’s forays away from the island.

  They had noticed a material change in the quality of their life.

  It wasn’t anything that anyone could explain.

  It wasn’t anything that had a definite beginning or end.

  But there was a difference in the air, in the very luster of the trees, in the smell of things, in the crispness of life.

  It was as if the island had entered into a long, flat period of depression.

  People went through the motions, people did what they always did, but something was off. There was a pointlessness that made a mockery of the simplest actions.

  Without Fern, the women of Fairy Land had been stripped of magical charm.

  They were seeing life as it was.

  They were witnessing existence with a dead honest clarity.

  And life was brutal.

  When Fern returned to the island, the depression lifted.

  The magical charm returned.

  Here then was Fern’s version of the bitter twist in the faery stories and folk tales that mortals used to tell each other before the world anesthetized itself with prescription opioids, anal gangbang pornography, and the illusion of individual freedom in the pyramid of global order.

  Without Fern, the taste of the Queen’s honey was neither sweet nor bitter.

  The sacred oak groves went unkempt.

  The birdsong rang hollow.

  The lamps burned less bright.

  The lesbianism evoked orgasms that offered all the dull-eyed joy of being frigged off inside a stripmall swingers’ club.

  A deal was struck.

  Fern would still leave Fairy Land, but for no period longer than it took for Fairy Land to be stripped of its magical charm.

  Which was roughly a year.

  All of which brings us to the Year of the Froward Worm, which roughly corresponded to 2017 AD, 1438 AH, and 5777 AM.

  Fern had left Fairy Land about eighteen months earlier, during the Year of the Misplaced Butter.

  She’d told everyone that she was going to Los Angeles, which was a city on the west coast of the United States of America, the warrior nation that had made a cottage industry of transforming illiterate Muslim peasants into char and bone.

  Los Angeles was responsible for a disproportionate amount of the media produced in the United States of America.

  The women of Fairy Land were well versed in this media.

  They had magicked up an Internet connection and used it to pirate television shows and films produced in Los Angeles, which they then watched on a television they’d magicked up out of some old twigs and a bit of wool.

  Fern had visited Los Angeles on several occasions. None of the other women from the island had visited Los Angeles.

  In the Year of the Misplaced Butter, Fern announced that she was returning to the city.

  It’d been about five years since her last visit.

  “You will leave us for the full year?” asked Celia.

  “Yes,” said Fern. “But worry not, Mother, I shall return as ever.”

  Fern did not return. She was gone well into the Year of the Froward Worm, which roughly corresponded to 2017 AD, 1438 AH, and 5777 AM.

  Flatness settled on Fairy Land.

  Celia looked out at her kingdom. All she saw was the citizenry’s empty faces and the graying of the flora and fauna. The lesbianism was mega-fallow.

  “How long has my daughter been gone?” Celia asked her court advisors.

  “By our counts,” said the Chieftess of Celia’s High Council, “One year, seven months, and six days.”

  “Have efforts been made to contact her?” asked Celia. “There has been no response, my queen,” said the Chieftess. “We must go and find her.”

  Chapter Three

  How Fairy Land Escaped the Clutches of Global Capitalism

  The Twenty-First Century AD was full of people who had filthy hands.

  In some places, like rural Bangladesh, the filthy-handed people were no different than Orson, the imaginative man who’d used early medieval hygiene to assassinate the Red-Rose Knight.

  Their hands were covered with shit.

  The exploitive global hierarchy of capitalism had denied them the basic mechanisms of modern life.

  They had no plumbing.

  The people who exploited the global hierarchy also had filthy hands.

  But their hands weren’t covered with shit.

  Their hands were stained with the blood of the poor, which, like climate change and Islamic-themed terrorism, was a semi-accidental byproduct of exploiting the global hierarchy.

  There were a lot of explanations as to why capitalists liked exploiting the global hierarchy.

  Some of these explanations were purely psychological.

  Some of the explanations were entirely about money.

  Some explanations attributed an innate evil to the global capitalists.

  But the most logical explanation, really, was that people became global capitalists only after they’d entered a secret contest to see who could own the ugliest house.

  Reader, look into your heart.

  Pore through your memories.

  When was the last time you went to a really rich person’s house and found it anything but hideous?

  Another reason why global capitalists kept rural Bangladeshis covered in shit is that keeping rural Bangladeshis covered in shit ensured an unequal distribution of the world’s wealth and resources, with a disproportionate amount of that wealth going to the global capitalists.

  And it was an open secret that the acquisition of vast wealth was the quickest way for a human to become a supranatural being.

  It was a documented scientific fact that, after an individual had accumulated vast wealth, then they reached what was called the Cash Horizon.

  Beyond the Cash Horizon, the wealth-accumulating individual was transformed into a supranatural being.

  In other words: the rich were not human.

  If you’re wondering why the rich felt the need to become supranatural creatures, then good for you!

  It’s the obvious question.

  And here’s the answer: there was a sense that by becoming supranatural creatures, the rich could conquer death and thus avoid their certain destination of Hell.

  But even with the Cash Horizon, the rich still died.

  Death remained unconquered.

  And Hell was filled with the rich.

  So don’t say that this book lacks a happy ending.

  In addition to owning unspeakably ugly homes and being able to withstand mephedrone psychosis while attending black-tie galas, those who passed the Cash Horizon were granted the ability to hear the rare Lou Reed outtake “Doin’ the Dookie.”

  Written for the Velvet Underground in 1965 AD but not recorded until sessions for Reed’s 1973 AD masterpiece Berlin, “Doin’ the Dookie” had been sequenced to appear on that album’s A-side, but was swapped out at the last minute in favor of “Oh Jim.”

  The lyrics of “Doin’ the Dookie” were what anyone’d expect, Dylanesque nonsense about hip gender-bending junkies punctuated, loosely, by exclamations:

  Oooohhh, fleet-foot Sam had his can of jam,

  Bertha Mason was feeling kinda kooky, huh,

  And her girl Will, yeah,

  He was looking pretty spooky,

  And they was all Doin’ the Dookie,

  Oh whoa, they was Doin’ the Dookie,

  For you and me.

  Doin’ the Dookie!

  Oh wee.

  A rogue engineer, stoned beyond belief on Moroccan hash, had mi
splaced the master tape of “Doin’ the Dookie” inside an aquarium.

  Ten years later, when the tape was fished out, it was discovered that the aquarium’s chemical-soaked water had enacted an alchemical corruption, transforming Reed’s recording into high-frequency sound beyond the range of normal human hearing.

  The music was still there.

  The lyrics were still there.

  They simply could not be heard by human beings.

  But if a person’s net worth had passed the Cash Horizon, then their enhanced senses allowed them to hear “Doin’ the Dookie.”

  And if you’re wondering, reader, what it’s like to be a superhuman being whose money has pushed you well past the Cash Horizon, you’d do worse than to consider a character who’ll show up in later chapters of this book.

  This character is named His Royal Highness Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

  HRH was a son of the House of Saud, which was the monarchy that ruled much of the Arabian Peninsula and owned the world’s second-largest oil reserve.

  HRH was from serious money.

  HRH never even had a chance to be human.

  HRH came screaming into this world and the money made him into a supranatural creature.

  “Doin’ the Dookie” was a lot like Fairy Land.

  It was both there and not there, invisible to 99.9999 per cent of the world’s population.

  But Fairy Land hadn’t gone invisible by being lost in an aquarium.

  Fairy Land had become invisible when the women of Celia’s realm used magic to align the island with an unconquered principle of everyday deception.

  The principle worked like this: the physical appearance of any given object, be it animal or mineral, arrived with a series of common expectations.

  As long as the appearance of that object was maintained, the vast majority of human beings would never notice any deviation from common expectations, and, in fact, people would go out of their way to ignore those deviations.

  The most obvious place where this principle operated was within the publishing industry of the United States of America.

  Despite decades of effort, and thousands of Internet thinkpieces about the inclusion of marginalized voices, publishing was a dirty business that had done nothing to alleviate a system of ghettoizing its authors based on their physical appearances and socio-economic points of origins.

  The books of the publishing industry rested on a cheap shorthand, with each of its marketing demographics defined by the implicit prejudices of the American upper middle class.

  And if you think that’s an exaggeration, ask yourself this: how many well-received books of Literary Fiction published over the last thirty years do you remember being written by a poor person?

  In the unlikely event that a person was allowed to publish a book which spoke beyond the simple facts of their socio-economic origins, then the message of that book was ignored.

  Consider The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor, a novel about several African-American women who all live in the same urban development.

  The text explicitly states that the titular Brewster Place, the urban development itself, is a machine that manufactures the lives of its women.

  The book is an exploration of the way by which the machine crafts, structures, and demolishes its product.

  It’s a dark, mechanistic text about the nature of urban living, about the secret lines of power, and about the way that Twentieth-Century AD architecture created new perversions and desires.

  Remember when J.G. Ballard, a white English colonial, wrote the exact same shit?

  You thought it was genius!

  You gave him his own adjective!

  When Naylor wrote the same thing, no one even noticed.

  But The Women of Brewster Place was authored by someone whose points of origin fulfilled the paltry expectations of America’s upper middle class, a group of people who wanted little more from Black women writers than triumph over individual adversity, folksy homespun wisdom, sexual suffering, and horrible deaths.

  And before anyone suggests that this is revisionist thinking about Naylor, cramming some weird bullshit into her work, go and read 1996.

  Read 1996 and then try convincing yourself that Naylor wasn’t a writer obsessed with the world of secret persuaders.

  And, hey!

  Speaking of publishing, let’s talk turkey!

  It’s inevitable that this book will draw comparisons to writings by the late Kurt Vonnegut, who was an American novelist from the Twentieth Century AD.

  I couldn’t escape the comparisons with I Hate the Internet!

  At least one question from the audience at every book event!

  And I won’t escape them with this book!

  Total theft from Breakfast of Champions!

  Even down to Fairy Land!

  Most of the comparisons between this book and the writings of the late Kurt Vonnegut will occur in cheap little reviews on Goodreads.com and Amazon.com, which are Internet websites owned by a guy named Jeff Bezos.

  These websites are where the American readership makes sure that American authors know their fucking place, and further ensures American authors know that their place is the equivalent to that of a moon-faced kid being shoved into some mud by a bully.

  “How do you like that mud, you little shit?” asks the American readership. “This is what happens when you try to do anything! Fucking eat it, you pig!”

  “Mgjhasdhashfs fdasmmmppfkjjsad,” reply American authors, their pie-holes crushed into a mélange of star-rankings, facile two-sentence comparisons, and moronic assumptions about authorial motivation.

  Quick!

  Here’s how to murder a culture: create a system in which every fucking thing, no matter how small or tedious, is smothered in bullshit instant commentary and hot takes by the stupidest people on the planet.

  Good luck.

  You’re gonna need it.

  But who the fuck are the dinosaurs reviewing books on websites?

  Losers!

  Who reads books?

  Nobody!

  Who uses a website?

  Nobody!

  It’s all smartphones now.

  Here’s a text message that a well-known Hollywood screenwriter sent me, unbidden, on December 25th, 2017 AD, while I was trying to watch the 1981 AD film Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo:

  That shit is disgusting.

  But it’s also brilliant, an entirely new kind of writing that’s unfathomable in its complexity and immediacy.

  The screenwriter didn’t write it.

  It comes from nowhere. It’s a chaintext that people were sending each other in the days before Christmas. This was how the world talked to itself.

  And by any measurable standard, it’s much more interesting than reading a book.

  Despite the notions thrown about whenever a prestigious novelist gives birth to another tedious narrative bound in paper, the actual function of novels in American society was very different than anyone liked to admit.

  Yes, reader, you could shit in some high cotton and talk to your friends about how reading ennobled the human spirit, and how literature connected people to one another, and how the whole enterprise promoted a humanistic understanding of Life in Our Time.

  But then, of course, you would be no different from the Xanax-addled Brooklynites who earn small amounts of money by writing crap articles critiquing the implicit racial and gender politics of television dramas about werewolves and vampires.

  And, reader, you are many things.

  Some good, some bad.

  But you’re better than the children who pretend, for money, that they’re upset about the latest episode of Supernatural.

  You’re not that kind of liar.

  I can think of one reason why I can’t escape comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut.

  And it ain’t because my work is so indebted to his own.

  It’s because Vonnegut was the same as me: an
other con artist ripping off the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

  A bunch of people have talked shit about Céline.

  I don’t blame them!

  Besides being one of the best writers of the Twentieth Century AD, he was also a rabid anti-Semite who collaborated with the Nazis.

  But I can’t judge!

  I too have collaborated with Nazis!

  I was published by Penguin Random House!

  But the real reason why I can’t escape the Vonnegut comparisons is not because our books are rip-offs of the same anti-Semite, but rather that the entire conception of the Serious Novel is a hideous stew of baked-in prejudices.

  These prejudices are so omnipresent that they’re invisible.

  Whenever someone writes a work of incandescent prose about privileged people whose artistic, cultural, and familial foibles result in a plot-and-character-driven catharsis, no one goes on Goodreads.com and accuses them of ripping off Henry James.

  But they should!

  All of that crap, all of the good writing, the well-structured paragraphs, the emphasis on plot, the unexpected quirks of prose, the pretend lives of pretend people which resolve into a reflection of Our Time and Our Selves!

  It’s all technique!

  Henry James was doing that shit before your parents were fertilized zygotes!

  It’s older than old hat.

  Ancient technology!

  And that’s how we’ve defined the Serious Novel.

  By pretending that technique from the Nineteenth Century AD can encompass the horror of the Twenty-First Century AD.

  And because of that definition, most Serious Novels are so fucking boring that they have zero hope of competing with smartphones. Imagine a very cranky human being who, while riding public transit, gets upset when they witness other people using smartphones.

  “No one reads anymore,” laments the very cranky human being. “Look at all these kids using smartphones!”

  And you nod your head in agreement, don’t you, reader?

  You think it’s ever such a shame that the public is no longer willing to engage with long tedious narratives bound in paper. How terrible you find it that smartphones have killed literacy!

  You agree with that crank!

  But the problem isn’t the smartphone!