Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

Fern thought about the simplicity of music on Fairy Land. Music without filter, music as in ancient times, the voice and the instrument, a holy sound in supplication to the divine.

The purity of what humanity had lost in its era of machines and computers and cars and airplanes. The lost society, the fallen dream, the missing kindness.

James looked so innocent, begging for mercy.

I know how he feels , thought Fern. Oh, please, please, please, let him be good.

James cleared his throat. He checked the guitar’s tuning.

He played his song. This is what he sang:

Long before the Year of the Unspoken Promise, Fern’d concluded that there was nothing new to experience, that all her future years would feature repeats of previous days.

She was like a sexy vampire in a novel by Anne Rice. She was bored by eternal life.

And then, in a bar in the East Village, surrounded by Ukrainian drunks and terrible black leather jackets, she discovered something new.

Meeting Anthony was like being in San Francisco in 1965 AD prior to America’s construction of received drug experiences and dosing with high-grade Owsley lysergic acid diethylamide.

Unexplored territory.

It was insane love, l’amour fou , sex magick, the post-coital sparkle of two souls in unison wandering through a fluorescent-lit grocery store at 11:30PM, stoned, drunk, lunacy born of a shared experience, tongue in the mouth as guns fire overhead.

More Bad Sex in Fiction!

Nomination forthcoming!

The vast suburbs of Long Island were built with a specific and exact purpose: to isolate their residents from the perceived chaos of New York City, which was conceptualized as the presence of racial minorities.

In Anthony’s youth, he’d sensed vibrations beyond the vast suburbs, and grasped on an intuitive level that the very experience of the suburbs, and their pretense of isolation, were the byproducts of an economic scheme over which he, and everyone he knew, had no control.

America was a prison for the young: a person either went runaway and threw themselves on the lusts of strangers, or they integrated into the sorting mechanisms of the haute bourgeoisie and hoped that a natural gift would carry them into one of the economic scheme’s higher echelons.

Anthony chose the latter.

He smoked too much pot, he read too many books, he drank too much beer.

He dated a vegetarian girl who wore Malcolm X glasses, had a Siouxsie and the Banshees poster above her bed, and owned an ill-tempered ferret named Pumpkin.

He did well in high school.

After earning an undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, Anthony ended up in New York City, on the island of Manhattan, doing a Philosophy PhD at the New School for Social Research.

Which is where he met Fern.

During those ridiculously romantic wanderings around New York City, Fern’s thoughts were haunted.

She’d met Anthony at an inopportune time.

She had to return to Fairy Land.

For two years.

And she couldn’t tell the truth.

Imagine the scene: Fern explains to Anthony, who is focusing on a proposed marriage between rational materialism and strict empiricism, that she is a supranatural creature from Fairy Land and that her father was the bastard son of King Arthur and that her mother is the Regnant Queen, and that, oh yeah, all of this has been the subject of Elizabethan pulp fiction and a Jacobean play, and double oh yeah, Fern could not die and was capable of supernatural feats of magic.

She cast two spells on Anthony.

The first drenched him in the radiation of primal magic, altering his brain so that Fern’s periodic disappearances wouldn’t register as significant events.

Whenever the biochemistry of Anthony’s brain produced a thought like: It’s fucking weird as shit that I haven’t seen Fern in seventeen months , it was replaced by another thought: Fern’s gone to Bloomingdale’s .

The other spell drenched him with a second dose of primal magical radiation and created an energy field that rerouted social inquiries.

If someone asked Anthony why they hadn’t seen his girlfriend, the energy field would mess up their minds. The inquisitor would forget that they hadn’t seen Fern. They’d forget her entire existence until the next time they encountered her in the flesh, at which point their brains would be stuffed with false memories of seeing Fern’s nonexistent paintings at hopeless group shows around SoHo.

The spells sat on, and in, Anthony’s body.

They imbued him with the bitter puissance of Fairy Land.

Fern left New York City.

The affair came in dense clusters of contact and absence: one year on, two years off. It was the ultimate long-distance relationship, minus the benefits of then-contemporary modern communication.

There were no letters, no phone calls, no nothing.

Fern disappeared and reappeared.

And the magic deluded Anthony into thinking that she’d never left.

In the Year of the Mechanized Baptism, which roughly corresponded to 1993 AD, 1413 AH, 5753 AM, Fern was back in New York City.

One night, while Fern’s presence was changing the color of the bedroom, Anthony got on the telephone with his mother.

His mother had been born on Long Island.

She still lived on Long Island.

She told Anthony about his uncle’s various bodily ailments, which included dementia, fecal and urinary incontinence, spontaneous bleeding, a lack of mobility, a loss of skin elasticity, and kidney disease.

Then she suggested that it was only a matter of time before her brother would return home from the state-funded institution in which he convalesced.

“He’s not coming back,” Anthony said to his mother. “No one gets better when they’re suffering full-body failure.”

“You’re talking crazy,” said Anthony’s mother. “He’s still young!”

A few weeks earlier, Anthony had left Fern on Manhattan and returned to Long Island, where he’d visited his uncle in the state-funded institution.

Anthony walked past the recreation room and found his uncle’s room, where his uncle’s useless machine of a body had been positioned in a chair.

The useless machine could not get up from the chair. It needed a functioning machine, in the form of a social worker, to help it stand.

This caused its own problem, because every millimeter of the useless machine was wracked with pain. When it was touched, waves of agony ran through the useless machine.

The useless machine could not talk.

The useless machine had wires coming out of its arms and a wire running through its penis into its bladder.

The useless machine was wearing socks that were stained with an instance of the useless machine’s uncontrollable diarrhea.

So when Anthony’s mother said that her brother was still young, Anthony started screaming.

Fern came out of the bedroom and watched as her lover’s face turned red and watched her lover’s mouth emit violent sounds and inadvertent spittle.

“You don’t understand anything!” cried Anthony into the telephone.

“The body isn’t something you can just fuck around with!” cried Anthony into the telephone.

“You’ve never been sick, you have no idea what it’s like!” cried Anthony into the telephone.