Only Americans Burn in Hell

by Jarett Kobek

  One of the sex workers got up from the bed and waved her hand in front of HRH’s face.

  HRH didn’t respond.

  “He’s out,” said one sex worker to the other sex workers. “Don’t worry. These guys are the easy ones. We give them what they can’t get in Dubai.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The kissing and the cuddling.”

  HRH went on an inner trip.

  There was a psychedelic tunnel.

  HRH went through the psychedelic tunnel.

  Everything looked like a Mandelbrot set transformed into quivering nerves.

  HRH turned back and saw himself in the IKEA chair, surrounded by sex workers.

  HRH continued through the psychedelic tunnel.

  HRH came through on the other side.

  HRH found himself in a mystical land, surrounded by elfin creatures, with fractal trees sprouting forth from the earth. The elfin creatures spoke a strange language that sounded more like buzzing than words.

  HRH tried to talk but his words came out as shattered glass.

  HRH didn’t know it, but the dimethyltryptamine had sent an astral projection of his soul to Fairy Land.

  This happened to every user of dimethyltryptamine, leading to endless reports on Erowid.org and Reddit.com. And some very bad writing by Terence McKenna and Tao Lin.

  Terence McKenna, Tao Lin, and the users of Erowid.org and Reddit.com thought that they had traveled in fourth-dimensional space and held forth with cybernetic elves.

  But really, they were just in Fairy Land, and the astral projection was creating a perceptual filter that prevented full comprehension of the experience.

  The women of Fairy Land could see the spiritual projections of dimethyltryptamine users.

  The souls appeared like flickering lights.

  The women of Fairy Land thought that these lights were ghosts of the People Who Came Before.

  They didn’t know that the flickering lights were just some old assholes on drugs.

  The trip wore off.

  HRH came back into consciousness, back to the watch factory.

  HRH jumped out of the IKEA plush chair.

  “Another entheogenic experience!” said HRH. “Further communion with the divine! I seek knowledge! Soon I shall have the answer!”

  “That wasn’t very long,” said one of the sex workers.

  “As I said, madame,” said HRH. “It is the trip of a businessman.”

  “You must inform me,” said HRH to the sex worker who leased the apartment. “What is your WiFi network and its password?”

  “The network is arcticmonkeys,” said the sex worker. “The password is doiwannaknow. All lower case, no spaces.”

  HRH opened his rattlesnake suitcase and removed an Amazon Echo Dot.

  It was the shape and size of a hockey puck.

  HRH put his hands into his pantaloons.

  HRH fished out his smartphone.

  HRH engaged with his smartphone.

  HRH opened the Amazon Alexa app.

  HRH plugged in the Amazon Echo Dot.

  HRH used the Amazon Alexa app to get the Amazon Echo Dot on the sex worker’s WiFi network.

  Perhaps you are wondering about the exact nature of the Amazon Echo Dot.

  Reader, its nature was two-fold.

  The Amazon Echo Dot was a device that connected to the Internet and responded to voice command. Its users could ask the Amazon Echo Dot to play music, which would emerge from its onboard speaker. If the Amazon Echo Dot was networked with a television, it could be used to play films and television. It could be used to order products through Amazon.com, which was a website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry. And the Amazon Echo Dot could be used to relay information.

  To achieve these tasks, users would say the word, “Alexa,” which was the magic phrase that alerted the Amazon Echo Dot that an instruction was forthcoming. Then the user would say an instruction, which would be something like, “Play Jersey Shore” or “I want to shop for cat food.”

  The Amazon Echo Dot would then respond with the synthesized voice of a woman and attempt to follow the user’s command. This synthesized voice was the personality of the device. It was the ghost in the machine. Its name was Alexa.

  The Amazon Echo Dot was one in a line of Echo products offered by Amazon.com, each offering some variation in shape and size, but retaining the same core functionality.

  Reader, this was the surface nature of the Amazon Echo Dot.

  Its true nature was this: it represented concrete evidence of the disconnect between issues that journalists believed were of public importance and the swells of indifference that these issues produced in the public.

  Following the election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency, there was a clamor about the manner in which his campaign may have misappropriated the private information of millions of Americans.

  This was all of the media coverage distilled: the users of social media had provided their private information with no intention of it being deployed for anything other than their banal self-expression on platforms owned by megalithic corporations. Its unauthorized use in a political campaign represented a grievous breach of ethics and corporate governance.

  If you took this media coverage at face value, reader, you would believe that most people were outraged about turning their private information over to megalithic corporations.

  But listen to someone who became a minor literary sensation on the basis of a book that critiqued turning over one’s personal information to megalithic American corporations.

  Enthusiastic journalists wrote twenty-seven thousand articles about I Hate the Internet.

  It gave the impression of a book that was all dominant, all powerful, all consuming.

  But I’ve read the only writing about I Hate the Internet that matters.

  Royalty statements.

  And so I speak with the authority of someone who managed to get an obscene amount of press coverage for what was, ultimately, an obscure book: most people do not give a fuck or a tuppence about what happens to their private information.

  A hockey puck that was always listening.

  It was indistinguishable from espionage devices. It sent the inner workings of private homes to a corporation with one of the largest market caps in the world.

  There was no illusion about its purpose.

  Its nature was both its virtue and its advertising hook.

  And at a moment when journalists were producing hundreds of thousands of words about privacy on social media networks, millions of people were buying the Amazon Echo Dot.

  By the end of the Year of the Froward Worm, it was a necessary accoutrement of every middle-class American home.

  HRH disrobed.

  “Please, please, my sweets, you too must remove your store-bought modesty.”

  The sex workers disrobed.

  “I have requested you because of your academic pedigrees. For this evening of transcendence, I want no Masshole curs trapped in the amber of ignorance. Is it true that each of you has received an Ivy League education?”

  “Yes,” said the sex worker with the lease on the apartment.

  “Yes,” said the second sex worker, who was lying. She had an undergraduate degree from Babson.

  “Yes,” said the third sex worker.

  “I believe you to possess what is necessary,” said HRH. “Tonight I demand that you address me only as Enver Hoxha, the former Albanian head of state. Cast back your imaginations to that glorious moment when Hoxha rejected the reforms of Khrushchev as revisionist Leninist–Marxism and took up the cause with Red China. Imagine it! An isolated European country, surrounded by its enemies and the sea, aligning itself with Maoist principles!”

  HRH opened up his rattlesnake suitcase.

  “As I do not doubt that you learned while earning your Ivy League degrees,” said HRH, “a key difference between Stalinist Marxist–Leninism and Maoism is the Maoist belief in reeducation. The Stali
nists would excommunicate the unwanted, while the Maoists enacted programs of reeducation. Why else did the Symbionese Liberation Army bring Patty Hearst into the fold? They demonstrated her to be a fascist insect preying upon the life of the people and through class consciousness reformed her into a revolutionary.”

  HRH removed a device from the suitcase.

  The sex workers couldn’t see what HRH was holding.

  “Tonight,” said HRH, “we shall query Alexa and discover what she knows about the People’s Republic of Albania. When Alexa fails in her knowledge, then your acres of skin will be reeducated. Tonight, the fleshzone is a labor camp and you are its prisoners. Arbeit macht frei, meine Mädchen.”

  One of the sex workers caught a glimpse of what HRH was holding.

  It was a rhino-hide chicotte, restored and recovered from the Congo Free State.

  “Before we embark upon our merriment,” said HRH, “I suggest that we test the ability of Alexa to provide us with information.”

  HRH stood over the Amazon Echo Dot.

  “Alexa,” said HRH. “Why does the caged bird sing?”

  “The caged bird sings,” said the Amazon Echo Dot, “because its heart is still free and using song is an efficient way for birds to communicate over distance.”

  “That’s actually kind of cool,” said one of the sex workers.

  “Schnell! Schnell!” said HRH. “It is time to make a great leap forward.”

  “Alexa,” said HRH, “who was Enver Hoxha?”

  HRH pronounced Enver Hoxha properly: En-ver Ho-dja.

  “Hmm,” said the Amazon Echo Dot. “I don’t know that one.”

  “Alexa,” said HRH, “who was Enver Hoxha?”

  HRH pronounced Enver Hoxha in phonetic English: En-ver Hox-ha.

  “Here’s something I found on Wikipedia,” said the Amazon Echo Dot. “The Rwandan Genocide also known as the genocide against the Tutsi was a genocide of mass slaughter of Tutsi in Rwanda by members of the Hutu majority government.”

  “Alexa,” said HRH, “who was Enver Hoxha?”

  HRH again pronounced Enver Hoxha in phonetic English: En-ver Hox-ha.

  “I’m not quite sure how to help you with that,” said the Amazon Echo Dot.

  “It should be rather clear that we have long hours of Maoism ahead,” said HRH.

  There was a moment when the labor camp screaming grew so loud that the bodyguard burst into the room.

  He found two of the sex workers on the bed, crying, bleeding.

  The chicotte had offered bitter instruction.

  The third was being forced to hold the Amazon Echo Dot over her head for as long as her arms would allow. She’d been instructed to address the Amazon Echo Dot only as Aten, after the Egyptian Sun disc.

  “What the fuck is going on in here?” asked the bodyguard. “What the fuck is this shit?”

  “My darling patriot,” said HRH. “You have joined us at last. I have waited for your flesh all these long hours. Would you care to act the Gomorrhean? I am your willing receptacle, and if you like, I can ease the path towards priapism with a surfeit of cocaine. Snow is general all over Ireland. It is a dead certainty that a man with your thighs must ache with a clutched need to relieve the vital center. Let rain down your frothing spittle like Agent Orange upon the Vietnamese peasantry!”

  The orgasm occurred.

  The Amazon Echo Dot was playing “Blood of My Enemies.”

  “Blood of My Enemies” was a song by Manowar.

  HRH threw back his head and cried out, “All of my foes shall perish before me! To Asgard the Valkyries fly! 诉苦!”

  The fleshzone decommenced.

  HRH unplugged the Amazon Echo Dot.

  HRH repacked his rattlesnake suitcase.

  HRH left a white envelope on the kitchen granite countertop.

  The white envelope contained a very generous tip.

  Dmitri Huda was waiting in the Bentley.

  HRH climbed into the rear passenger seat.

  “Was it everything you’d hoped?” asked Dmitri Huda.

  “I met a charming fellow named Steve,” said HRH. “He informs me that he was raised in Lowell.”

  “That’s what everyone loves about you, Dennis,” said Dmitri Huda. “You always make friends in new places.”

  HRH vaped sativa.

  “What is my agenda for the morrow, Dmitri?” asked HRH.

  “You’re doing a TEDx at Brandeis,” said Dmitri Huda. “Have you forgotten?”

  “I never forget,” said HRH. “I remember everything.”

  Chapter Nine

  Cleaning up the Mess

  So there was Francis Fuller’s house on Glendower Avenue, with its low property taxes and its grand view of Los Angeles. It was full of blood and bodies.

  Celia examined the headless corpse of Adam Leroux and wondered about the wisdom of bringing Rose Byrne to Los Angeles.

  A psychotic sidekick made sense amongst the lawless stupidity of Jacobean London, but in a world dominated by a professionalized police force, it could prove problematic to be accompanied by the supranatural embodiment of genocide.

  “You might have waited,” said Celia to Rose Byrne. “I am certain I would have persuaded him with my charms.”

  “He was a warrior, lady,” said Rose Byrne. “I could see it in his eyes.”

  “I have not bedded with a man in four centuries.”

  “We have concerns beyond the bowers of pleasure,” said Rose Byrne.

  “As you say.”

  Celia walked to the bathroom.

  Francis Fuller’s body, impaled on Rose Byrne’s sword, sat on the toilet.

  Blood was everywhere.

  Because Celia had engaged with the woolen television of Fairy Land, a sense of déjà vu washed over her.

  She remembered, vaguely, a scene from the television adaptation of Game of Thrones. It was from the end of Season Four, when the mad dwarf Tyrion Lannister assassinated his own father while the latter sat above a latrine.

  Celia’s déjà vu was a common feeling. The world was saturated with media. The memory of unreal things had imposed themselves upon the real. The President was a creation of television. The appearances of things were more important than the things themselves.

  Celia returned to the living room and stood above Adam Leroux’s unliving body. She stared out at the forever infinity headlights of Los Angeles.

  She cast a spell.

  It was a 1970s AD neutron bomb sort of magic, erasing all traces of both Francis Fuller and Adam Leroux while leaving Fuller’s personal property intact.

  Celia had no idea how long she would be in Los Angeles.

  She needed a place to crash.

  Why not keep the house on the hill?

  It was the darkest of faery magic, the ancient stuff where children would walk the ferny path and never be seen again, lingering only as memories, leaving behind crying peasant mothers who talked about lost daughters wandering over green hills with the seely folk, until the mother herself died and the missing girl became nothing but a legend, just a name sung in a ballad that had been corrupted by endless performances over decades and then centuries.

  It was the total effacement of humanity.

  Goodbye, Francis Fuller.

  You lasted for one of this book’s longer chapters.

  Goodbye, Adam Leroux.

  You managed about a thousand words.

  An entire segment of obscure film history was rewritten. Fuller’s early experimental efforts disappeared. Handspun Roses never happened. The films produced by Roger Corman evaporated. Myrna Loy’s filmography lost one of its stronger late entries.

  The television stuff didn’t change much, because television was the result of an industrialized process in which the people behind the camera were interchangeable. Francis Fuller’s name was struck from the collective credits of Charlie’s Angels and Dynasty, but the episodes themselves were unaltered and lingered in the unpopular consciousness.

  Almost all of F
uller’s friends and family were dead, so there were hardly any gaps in individual memories.

  Paragraphs disappeared from a few books. Alterations occurred in a handful of sad men’s underwhelming master’s theses. Some very old webpages evaporated. A few torrents stopped being listed on Cinemaggedon and Karagarga.

  If he were alive, Francis Fuller would have been astonished at how small his life had been, at how easily the hole was patched.

  He was like everyone else.

  He thought that he was more important than he actually was.

  But no one was any more or any less important than anyone else.

  You can beg the Earth to stop turning, but it never listens.

  And, please, reader, don’t get amped up on this statement of your relative position of egalitarian non-importance.

  You’re still not qualified to review this book on Amazon.com.

  The same thing happened with Adam Leroux.

  His memory went out.

  His family forgot him.

  His friends forgot him.

  He was struck from the computerized databases of surveillance and corporate marketing that dominated modern life.

  Someone else got his car.

  Someone else got his apartment.

  Someone else got his French bulldog.

  Someone else got his vintage 45 Grave T-shirt.

  All of the Muslims that Adam Leroux had killed were like the episodes of television directed by Francis Fuller.

  Their corpses were the end result of an industrialized process. The person pulling the trigger wasn’t a big deal.

  The Muslims were still dead.

  The one place where the faery magic didn’t have any effect was Adam Leroux’s Instagram account.

  Instagram was a social media platform that existed on telephones and computers. Its users shared pictures of their squalid lives, which fostered the illusion of a human connection while generating revenue for Facebook, which was a publicly traded company headquartered near San Francisco.

  Instagram was also history’s single most successful terrorist attack on the self-esteem of women.

  Adam Leroux had managed to avoid most of social media.

  Facebook, the company that owned Instagram, had another social media platform which was also called Facebook.

  The company was named for the platform, which had started out as a student project at Harvard University.