Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

So there was Francis Fuller’s house on Glendower Avenue, with its low property taxes and its grand view of Los Angeles. It was full of blood and bodies.

Celia examined the headless corpse of Adam Leroux and wondered about the wisdom of bringing Rose Byrne to Los Angeles.

A psychotic sidekick made sense amongst the lawless stupidity of Jacobean London, but in a world dominated by a professionalized police force, it could prove problematic to be accompanied by the supranatural embodiment of genocide.

“You might have waited,” said Celia to Rose Byrne. “I am certain I would have persuaded him with my charms.”

“He was a warrior, lady,” said Rose Byrne. “I could see it in his eyes.”

“I have not bedded with a man in four centuries.”

“We have concerns beyond the bowers of pleasure,” said Rose Byrne.

“As you say.”

Celia walked to the bathroom.

Francis Fuller’s body, impaled on Rose Byrne’s sword, sat on the toilet.

Blood was everywhere.

Because Celia had engaged with the woolen television of Fairy Land, a sense of déjà vu washed over her.

She remembered, vaguely, a scene from the television adaptation of Game of Thrones . It was from the end of Season Four, when the mad dwarf Tyrion Lannister assassinated his own father while the latter sat above a latrine.

Celia’s déjà vu was a common feeling. The world was saturated with media. The memory of unreal things had imposed themselves upon the real. The President was a creation of television. The appearances of things were more important than the things themselves.

Celia returned to the living room and stood above Adam Leroux’s unliving body. She stared out at the forever infinity headlights of Los Angeles.

She cast a spell.

It was a 1970s AD neutron bomb sort of magic, erasing all traces of both Francis Fuller and Adam Leroux while leaving Fuller’s personal property intact.

Celia had no idea how long she would be in Los Angeles.

She needed a place to crash.

Why not keep the house on the hill?

It was the darkest of faery magic, the ancient stuff where children would walk the ferny path and never be seen again, lingering only as memories, leaving behind crying peasant mothers who talked about lost daughters wandering over green hills with the seely folk, until the mother herself died and the missing girl became nothing but a legend, just a name sung in a ballad that had been corrupted by endless performances over decades and then centuries.

It was the total effacement of humanity.

Goodbye, Francis Fuller.

You lasted for one of this book’s longer chapters.

Goodbye, Adam Leroux.

You managed about a thousand words.

An entire segment of obscure film history was rewritten. Fuller’s early experimental efforts disappeared. Handspun Roses never happened. The films produced by Roger Corman evaporated. Myrna Loy’s filmography lost one of its stronger late entries.

The television stuff didn’t change much, because television was the result of an industrialized process in which the people behind the camera were interchangeable. Francis Fuller’s name was struck from the collective credits of Charlie’s Angels and Dynasty , but the episodes themselves were unaltered and lingered in the unpopular consciousness.

Almost all of Fuller’s friends and family were dead, so there were hardly any gaps in individual memories.

Paragraphs disappeared from a few books. Alterations occurred in a handful of sad men’s underwhelming master’s theses. Some very old webpages evaporated. A few torrents stopped being listed on Cinemaggedon and Karagarga.

If he were alive, Francis Fuller would have been astonished at how small his life had been, at how easily the hole was patched.

He was like everyone else.

He thought that he was more important than he actually was.

But no one was any more or any less important than anyone else.

You can beg the Earth to stop turning, but it never listens.

And, please, reader, don’t get amped up on this statement of your relative position of egalitarian non-importance.

You’re still not qualified to review this book on Amazon.com.

The same thing happened with Adam Leroux.

His memory went out.

His family forgot him.

His friends forgot him.

He was struck from the computerized databases of surveillance and corporate marketing that dominated modern life.

Someone else got his car.

Someone else got his apartment.

Someone else got his French bulldog.

Someone else got his vintage 45 Grave T-shirt.

All of the Muslims that Adam Leroux had killed were like the episodes of television directed by Francis Fuller.

Their corpses were the end result of an industrialized process. The person pulling the trigger wasn’t a big deal.

The Muslims were still dead.

The one place where the faery magic didn’t have any effect was Adam Leroux’s Instagram account.

Instagram was a social media platform that existed on telephones and computers. Its users shared pictures of their squalid lives, which fostered the illusion of a human connection while generating revenue for Facebook, which was a publicly traded company headquartered near San Francisco.

Instagram was also history’s single most successful terrorist attack on the self-esteem of women.

Adam Leroux had managed to avoid most of social media.

Facebook, the company that owned Instagram, had another social media platform which was also called Facebook.

The company was named for the platform, which had started out as a student project at Harvard University.

Harvard was where HRH had received his Master’s in Public Policy.

The Harvard version of Facebook, the ur-Facebook, had been designed to rate whether or not the hedge fund’s female students were sexually attractive.

The ur-Facebook evolved into actual Facebook, spreading beyond the hedge fund’s campus, and conquered the world.

Adam Leroux only logged into his Facebook account about once every three years, which gave him a slightly unique perspective when he checked it in the year 2016 AD.

He’d last been a heavy user of Facebook in 2008 AD, when the most annoying thing on the social media platform was people insisting that they were so happy and so in love with their latest semi-monogamous partner.

Things had changed.

By 2016 AD, no one was boasting about how their latest semi-monogamous partner made them so much happier than their previous semi-monogamous partners.

Now Adam Leroux’s friends were bombarding each other with images of murdered bodies and shrieking about the corruptible nature of human beings while they apologized for social privilege which derived from their relative position in the global hierarchy.

“Fuck this shit,” said Adam Leroux, logging out of Facebook for what would be the last time.

Another social media platform called Twitter held even less appeal.

Twitter was a place where people practiced bumper-sticker morality while other people threatened to rape and murder each other for expressing simple sentiments about banal objects.

“I like cats,” a user typed into Twitter.

I will fucking rip your ugly fucking shit face off you fucking jew cuck jew , replied Twitter.

“Crayons are good,” a user typed into Twitter.

Your soul will be mine in hell as you suck molten fire from my demonic warted prick , replied Twitter.

“My grandma wears a knitted hat,” a user typed into Twitter.

I am coming to kill and rape you until you are dead and raped you assfucked pussy , replied Twitter.

Twitter was also where Donald J. Trump ruled over America.