Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

“What?” asked the sex worker.

“You have taken that child and thrust her into a higher tax bracket,” said HRH. “Do you believe that a peasant can handle a sudden influx of filthy lucre? Like yourself, she too is ignorant of the difference between money and wealth. She will spend this sum on clothes, on a new car, on trinkets and baubles, and when she has drained the swamp, there awaits the taxman. She will have no hope of paying. She will travel on, haunted by ever increasing debt. Her best chance will be bankruptcy after seven years. She will murder her credit and she will have learned nothing and she will own nothing. All of this because of a random act of violence perpetuated by a stranger while she was dressed in a unicorn costume that emphasized her heaving bosom. It will be your fault. You did this to that child. You have destroyed her.”

HRH vaped indica.

While Fern’s body burned with gasoline, and shrieks of human agony assaulted her ears, she had a thought.

Here was her thought: This is not how I imagined things would turn out.

To fathom Fern’s disappointment, you’ll have to cast your mind back to the Year of the Salted Earth, which roughly corresponded with 1997 AD, 1417 AH, and 5757 AM.

Fern spent that year out of Fairy Land.

Her existence was a minor cultural stereotype.

She was living as a pretend artist in a St. Mark’s Place apartment between Avenue A & First Avenue on the island of Manhattan, which was a borough of New York City.

Fern had been in and out of New York City for almost a decade, starting in the Year of the Unquenched Longing, which roughly corresponded to 1989 AD, 1407 AH, and 5747 AM.

It that year, Fern met a young woman named Denise. They dated for a short time, but it was fleeting. Denise had to move to Boston.

Before she left New York, Denise introduced Fern to the demimondes of Manhattan’s East Village and the Lower East Side, two overlapping ethnic ghettos that had transformed into cesspools of petty crime and cheap drugs and were gentrifying into cesspools of international money laundering and the expensive drugs required to fuel international money laundering.

It was in the East Village, where people were wearing terrible leather jackets and even worse denim jeans, that Fern met a boy named Anthony.

Anthony was from Long Island, which was an island next to Manhattan.

The western part of Long Island encompassed Queens and Brooklyn, two of New York City’s boroughs.

At its eastern end, farthest from New York City, Long Island was full of property soon to be the exclusive domain of the ultra-wealthy, where the ruling class would throw parties that commingled the Celebrity branch of American politics with the people who really ruled the world, namely its international merchant bankers.

In the space between the boroughs and the money, there was a heaping mass of vast suburbs.

Anthony was from the middle. He’d grown up in the heaping mass.

Fern met Anthony in a bar on Second Avenue.

The bar was full of ersatz punk rockers and old drunks from the Ukraine.

Their attraction was so obvious, and so apparent, that it made an audible noise.

All of the bar’s drunks heard the noise.

The ersatz punk rockers heard the noise.

Because the bar was full of brains pickled in alcohol, and because its patrons were sitting in a relative darkness designed to hide the shame of their existences, neither the drunks nor the punk rockers could identify the sound’s origin.

The noise sounded like this:

“What the fuck?” asked one of the ersatz punk rockers.

“Hи хуя́ себе́” said one of the drunks.

Then she went back to her drink.

Fern met Anthony in the Year of the Baroque Promise, which roughly corresponded to 1990 AD, 1411 AH, and 5751 AM.

After the love connection made its audible sound, Anthony talked to Fern about the Krautrock band Amon Düül II.

He said stupid shit like: “I found Yeti at Bleecker Bob’s and I had no idea what it was. ‘Archangels Thunderbird’ was one of those moments, you know? It fucking changed my whole fucking life. My God, those drums, that guitar.”

This was the surface babbling of a human being who knew, on the cellular level, that he stood before the firestorm which would consume years of his life.

As his mouth spoke, so too did his subatomic particulars cry out: Fuck me fuck fuck me fuck me love me love me I am yours fuck me fuck me flesh of my flesh burn me burn me my soul is boring a hole this second hole is penetrating the hole of your face the skull of your bone look at me here I am yours and yours alone and you are mine touch me I am the one for whom you have been waiting please please please please please. Kiss me, my darling, for I too am like you, I am a kinder from Bahnhof Zoo.

Unlike the love connection, the crying out of Anthony’s subatomic particulars happened on a level of quantum physics that was inaudible to human ears.

Not even people who had passed the Cash Horizon would have heard.

But in their case, the inaudibility was irrelevant: the rich are incapable of love or its recognition.

Fern was neither human nor past the Cash Horizon.

She was from Fairy Land.

She heard every word.

They talked, they hung around the East Village, they fell into bed, they wandered through the city, and because they’d both consumed endless amounts of media, they were imbued with the photogenic qualities of New York City, and these qualities freighted their wanderings with cultural weight.

Everything was ridiculously romantic.

On their third date, Anthony and Fern were walking in Washington Square Park. They were in the park because they were headed to Jones Street. Anthony had talked Fern into seeing some folk singers at Caffe Vivaldi.

The folk singers in question were absurd historical anachronisms. They were as bad as the people who wrote novels and poetry in the Twenty-First Century AD.

One of the folk singers was a woman named Bianca.

She was in Anthony’s Philosophy program at the New School for Social Research, and she was doing a doctoral dissertation on Spinoza.

“Why don’t you ever talk about your family?” Anthony asked Fern as they passed the statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi.

“What do you mean?” asked Fern. “You don’t talk about your family,” said Anthony. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

At Caffe Vivaldi, they sat through an assortment of folk singers who sang 1930s AD ballads about the coming wave of international socialism. Then Bianca got on at the microphone against the back wall.

“Hi,” she said into the microphone. “My name’s Bianca. I’m going to sing a few songs, but while I’m setting up I thought my friend James could do a song. James is a folk singer. He moved to New York last week. I don’t think he wants to do this, but if you give him a round of applause, I’m sure he’ll come up. Let’s have a warm welcome for James.”

Bianca handed James her guitar. He put his mouth too close to the microphone.

“Uhm, hello people,” James said, popping his p, “I’m, uh, I’m pretty nervous. This is the, uh, the first time I’ve ever performed in New York. I’ve never been in the city before, not before Thursday. I’m from Columbus, Ohio. Don’t judge. We all, uh, have to be from somewhere and Columbus is pretty much just as good as pretty much anywhere. Well, kinda. Uhm, you know, sometimes back in Columbus my stuff doesn’t really go over. I thought I’d play a classic from 1935, maybe one you haven’t heard before. Someone played it for me last night on reel-to-reel. So, uhm, can you please be gentle? Kindness never killed anyone.”