Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

All of which creates an atmosphere that makes it very fucking hard to write a book about an island of women and not have everyone think you’re allegorizing a hashtag.

The whole thing’s ruined before it even started!

And, reader, trust me, I can imagine the responses to this chapter before they’re typed by dullards into social media, and they all boil down to something like this: “Who the fuck does this guy think that he is?”

To which I reply in advance: on the topic of #MeToo, I have more innate moral authority than most people in America.

And this isn’t because of inborn privilege.

There’s a simple explanation as to why I have innate moral authority on the topic.

I’m almost certainly the only person alive who was sexually harassed in front of a crowd of 280 people by a woman who pens New York Times opinion pieces about sexual harassment, and I’m absolutely certain that I’m the only person alive who experienced this sexual harassment several years after winning a $1.2-million judgment in a lawsuit against an Internet stalker who libeled me as a rapist.

Smartphone saliva brought the Jaguar XJ-S to Hollywood, a neighborhood that was being victimized by the international capitalist class’s money laundering.

The money laundering took the form of cruddy new apartment buildings and ugly hotels.

Hollywood was also a neighborhood that had become a hotspot of nightclubs, places where people went to dance, get high, and challenge the received sexual wisdom of the upper middle class.

Several blocks before their arrival, the women of Fairy Land knew their final destination.

They knew this because the navigation rope had wrapped itself around its target, which was the thirteen-story Fontenoy Apartments on Whitley Avenue.

From a distance of several blocks, the women of Fairy Land could see the building glowing.

The Fontenoy was an early Los Angeles folly, from back in the 1920s AD, dressed up in nouveau-riche ornamentation and a French-Norman roof.

When they arrived on Whitley Avenue, Rose Byrne parked the Jaguar in the Fontenoy’s underground parking structure, right after Rose Byrne used magic to blast open the structure’s automatic gate.

She took a parking spot that was reserved for someone on the tenth floor.

Celia cast a spell on the car, creating a glamor that caused human beings’ eyes to malfunction.

When human beings looked at the Jaguar, they didn’t see a vintage car designed by the British.

They saw a series of orange construction cones and were surprised by neither the appearance of the cones nor the implication that a parking spot, an inert piece of concrete demarcated by lines of paint, was out of order.

Oh , they thought. Here’s something else that’s broken.

Everyone in America possessed an unconscious, and sometimes conscious, acknowledgement that their empire was in decline.

But gone were the halcyon days when one could expect the whole thing to end through an invasion of the Mongols or the Ottomans or the Huns.

Gone were the sweet moments when barbarian hordes would pull down the walls of your capital city and murder all of your cousins.

Now an empire died of a thousand tiny wounds.

Postal carriers stopped delivering mail.

Air travel became a horror.

Infrastructure went to shit.

Trains crashed.

And parking spots went out of order.

Because the women of Fairy Land were traditionalists, they didn’t ride the elevator from the basement, but rather walked out of the underground parking structure.

They emerged back on Whitley Avenue.

Several years earlier, the faceless entity that owned the Fontenoy had installed a security gate. Rose Byrne blasted it open with magic and then did the same thing with the front door, which was also locked.

In the lobby, they passed through a small room that looked like a bordello, and walked to the elevators opposite the front entrance.

Celia pressed the call button.

The doors opened.

They got into the elevator.

Ropey strands of salvia could bring Fairy Land’s women to a generalized magical destination, but it could not indicate why that destination was magical or what they should do when they got there.

Given that this chapter occurs at this book’s rough three-fifths mark, it’s pretty obvious that Fern isn’t in the Fontenoy.

Neither of the women know that.

Which is shameful ignorance and demonstrates the limits of their preternatural powers.

If the women of Fairy Land are really supranatural beings, unbound by the laws of nature and capable of casting spells that alleviate issues of plotting and characterization, you’d think that they’d have the resources to check the page number.

Anyway.

They’re in the elevator and they’re looking at the buttons which lead to the Fontenoy’s other twelve floors. If Fern is in the building, they have no idea what floor she’s occupying.

The women of Fairy Land don’t have any choice.

They’re going to have to explore each apartment in the building, one by one, until they can determine whether or not Fern is present within the structure.

Which she obviously isn’t, if for no other reason than the fact that this chapter, like almost every chapter in this book, isn’t really about anyone finding Fern. This chapter is a poorly fleshed-out fictional pretense to write about something that isn’t fictitious.

This is, after all, a novel written in an era when the entire purpose of fiction has been outmoded and destroyed by vast social changes.

Another thing that the women of Fairy Land don’t know is that they’re in the most magical place in Los Angeles.

The Fontenoy is where the American Twenty-First Century AD was invented.

They started on the second floor, bursting into the apartment nearest the elevator.

No one was home, but Rose Byrne did have an interesting conversation with a yellow parakeet.

They burst into the next apartment, where three young men were smoking marijuana and watching television.

In anticipation of the Season Seven premiere of Game of Thrones , the three young men had entered into a covenant.

After the June 26th, 2016 AD finale of Season Six, each of the young men had gone to the source material and read every published volume of George R.R. Martin’s magnum opus.

1,736,054 words of pure shit!

But reading the books had not slaked their thirst, and in anticipation of the approaching Season Seven premiere on July 16th, 2017 AD, the young men had agreed to spend the summer rewatching every extant episode of the televised adaptation.

As the women of Fairy Land burst into the apartment, the young men were watching the eighth episode of Season Three.

The television was displaying a scene in which the mad dwarf Tyrion Lannister is in a boudoir with his unwilling wife Sansa Stark. They’ve just been married and Tyrion’s father has ordered Tyrion to break his bride’s maidenhead.

The dwarf, in anticipation of this horror, has gotten ridiculously drunk.

With great reluctance, his bride sheds her clothing.

He stops her. If she does not want to sleep with him, he shall never force her.

Then the dwarf passes out.

This scene is of some interest because both the televised adaptation, and its source material, feature a character who’s drunk himself silly and refuses to sleep with someone on moral grounds, rather than the obvious explanation of too much alcohol rendering him unfit for the congruous act.

This scene, in both book and television formats, points to the place where George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones is a divergent universe from the one in which we live.