Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

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.”

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:

A rogue engineer, stoned beyond belief on Moroccan hash, had misplaced 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.