Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

Imagine the human face abstracted to the furthest degree:

No human face has ever looked like this.

And yet your brain, reader, has interpreted it as a face.

Fern’s spell was intended to scramble Anthony’s ability to apprehend the whole from the presentation of its parts. When the spell took its effect, and Anthony looked at the above, he would see this:

The spell was designed to wear off when they left the Whitney.

Its assumed virtue was this: it would make Anthony stop condescending to Fern about epistemology when really he was telling her she was a slut for sucking so much dick back in the suburbs.

But something went wrong.

For two years, Anthony had been saturated with the radiation of primal magic, and those two spells had sat in and on his body. They had done peculiar things to his biology.

This wasn’t like messing up the mind of a landlady in Udine.

This was magic without precedent.

Anthony’s biology rejected the third spell.

When Anthony’s biology rejected the spell, the feedback caused an invisible magical explosion.

This explosion created a magical avatar of the 1993 AD Biennial.

In its most abstract form.

Here was the abstraction: the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial, focusing on artworks touching on issues of identity and social discord and presenting a critique of how very rich people had constructed the world, existed entirely as the largesse of very rich people.

The Museum and its Biennial were gifts from beyond the Cash Horizon.

All of the bad reviews, all of the upset, all of the guilt, all of the empowerment, all the renewed focus on marginalized voices.

It had happened because some very rich people wanted bragging rights. Through the arcane processes of those who had passed the Cash Horizon, the social capital of these bragging rights would be transformed into an actual capital.

And if you think that’s an exaggeration, reader, then you could always look at the patrons listed in the catalogue of the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial.

The list is this: Emily Fisher Landau, The Greenwall Foundation, Philip Morris Inc., Sony USA Inc., Henry and Elaine Kaufman, The Lauder Foundation, Mrs. William A. Marsteller, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mrs. Donald Petrie, Primerica Foundation, The Samuel and May Rudin Foundation Inc, The Simon Foundation, and Nancy Brown Wellin.

Andrew W. Mellon was a war profiteer. He made a killing during the Spanish-American War, a conflict that was precipitated by an imaginary attack on an American sea vessel.

Primerica Foundation was the philanthropic wing of Primerica, a multi-level marketing operation that targeted lower- and middle-income Americans and got them to buy term-life insurance, as opposed to whole-life insurance, and invest the difference in mutual funds operated by Primerica subsidiaries. Multi-level marketing, by the way, was almost indistinguishable from a pyramid scheme.

Philip Morris Inc. sold a very pleasurable form of suicide.

Nancy Brown Wellin was the daughter of George Brown, who co-founded Brown & Root, which ended up as a Halliburton subsidiary.

Brown & Root supplied almost all of the logistical support for the Vietnam War, a conflict that was precipitated by an imaginary attack on an American sea vessel.

And here’s a funny anecdote, apropos of nothing.

Nancy Brown Wellin was at the Armstrong Ranch on February 11, 2006 AD.

This was the day when, and the place where, then Vice President of the United States Richard B. Cheney, architect of the First and Second American Wars against Iraq, was trying to murder innocent animals and accidently shot a lawyer in the heart.

It was like gladiators before a Roman emperor.

You fight, sure, because otherwise another gladiator would kill you, but ultimately your life and your death and your fighting were interchangeable.

It was all someone else’s entertainment.

You were paying obeisance to the Cash Horizon.

Then Fern’s spell did something funny: it took that abstract representation of the Whitney Biennial and shot it forward through time.

The abstraction landed on the Twenty-First Century AD.

And that abstract representation infected the Internet and all human culture.

Fern doomed everyone in the Twenty-First Century AD to the worst possible fate: rehashing the Cultural Wars of the 1980s AD and 1990s AD, with all of its direct and internecine fighting, and doing it purely for the amusement and enrichment of people who had moved past the Cash Horizon.

When her spell fizzled, Fern took a good look at Anthony.

It was one of those things: when you live with someone, it’s harder to notice subtle changes in their appearance.

Fern had missed it.

But now she could see.

And something was dreadfully wrong.

Fern left New York City.

In the Year of the Speckled Band, which roughly corresponded to 1995 AD, 1415 AH, and 5755 AM, Fern returned to New York City and moved back into Anthony’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place.

Anthony was not well.

It could not be ignored.

Anthony himself seemed unaware of the change.

Anthony kept plugging away at his PhD.

Anthony contributed to a handful of minor academic papers trapped in an arduous process of backbiting peer review.

Anthony kept teaching classes at Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate division of the New School for Social Research.

But his every step was tormented.

Fern cast spells trying to remove the primal magic and its radiation, but these too were repulsed by Anthony’s biological transformation.

Fern left New York City.

In the Year of the Salted Earth, which roughly corresponded with 1997 AD, 1417 AH, and 5757 AM, Fern came back to New York City.

Anthony’s apartment was empty of Anthony.

His possessions were there.

Anthony was not.

There was an eviction notice taped to the apartment’s front door.

Fern cast a spell that handled the pressing issue of outstanding and future rent.

Then she tried to find her boyfriend.

It took some high-grade magic, and a ride on the Long Island Rail Road with a transfer at Jamaica station, but Fern found Anthony in the same state-run institution where his uncle’s useless machine had run out of fuel.

Anthony had his own room.

The useless machine of his body had sprouted wires that were attached to other machines that monitored, and influenced, his weakening vital signs.

Sometimes he was lucid. Sometimes his useless machine would stop processing data.

Fern touched his face.

Anthony woke up. His milky eyes focused on Fern.

“I wondered when you’d show up,” he said. “How was Bloomingdale’s?”

Anthony’s mother was in and out of the room.

His siblings were in and out of the room.

Fern never left.

She cast a spell which made her invisible to Anthony’s family and the state-funded institution’s staff.

When Anthony slipped back into consciousness, he and Fern would speak.

“Oh God,” said his mother. “Now he’s talking to himself!”

Fern tried to remedy Anthony with magic, but his body repulsed the spells.

She stayed in the room and watched as her boyfriend died.

She knew that she was the one who had assassinated him.

A day before Anthony died, he told Fern that he’d managed to complete his PhD dissertation.

“A lot of Maimonides,” he said. “More than I would have thought fucking possible.”