by Jarett Kobek
Harvard was where HRH had received his Master’s in Public Policy.
The Harvard version of Facebook, the ur-Facebook, had been designed to rate whether or not the hedge fund’s female students were sexually attractive.
The ur-Facebook evolved into actual Facebook, spreading beyond the hedge fund’s campus, and conquered the world.
Adam Leroux only logged into his Facebook account about once every three years, which gave him a slightly unique perspective when he checked it in the year 2016 AD.
He’d last been a heavy user of Facebook in 2008 AD, when the most annoying thing on the social media platform was people insisting that they were so happy and so in love with their latest semi-monogamous partner.
Things had changed.
By 2016 AD, no one was boasting about how their latest semi-monogamous partner made them so much happier than their previous semi-monogamous partners.
Now Adam Leroux’s friends were bombarding each other with images of murdered bodies and shrieking about the corruptible nature of human beings while they apologized for social privilege which derived from their relative position in the global hierarchy.
“Fuck this shit,” said Adam Leroux, logging out of Facebook for what would be the last time.
Another social media platform called Twitter held even less appeal.
Twitter was a place where people practiced bumper-sticker morality while other people threatened to rape and murder each other for expressing simple sentiments about banal objects.
“I like cats,” a user typed into Twitter.
I will fucking rip your ugly fucking shit face off you fucking jew cuck jew, replied Twitter.
“Crayons are good,” a user typed into Twitter.
Your soul will be mine in hell as you suck molten fire from my demonic warted prick, replied Twitter.
“My grandma wears a knitted hat,” a user typed into Twitter.
I am coming to kill and rape you until you are dead and raped you assfucked pussy, replied Twitter.
Twitter was also where Donald J. Trump ruled over America.
Donald J. Trump on Twitter was the ultimate tool of distraction.
Each day of Donald J. Trump’s Presidency, his administration dismantled some aspect of the federal government, terraforming America into a dystopian misery, but no one talked about it and very few media outlets gave it any coverage.
All anyone paid attention to was Donald J. Trump’s activity on Twitter, where he issued mean-spirited and stupid opinions about nonsense.
Concerned about Donald J. Trump stacking the federal bench with crypto-conservatives who believe that dinosaurs were made of chocolate pudding?
Shut the fuck up!
The President is upset about professional sports!
On Twitter!
Worried about nuclear war?
Who fucking cares?
The President called an actress ugly!
On Twitter!
Adam Leroux stayed away from Twitter.
But the multi-tentacled hivemind of global capitalism was nothing if not adaptable.
It had become necessary to enchain every human being with some form of social media. New platforms were being developed every minute of every day, attempting to unlock each individual mind.
In Adam Leroux’s case, it turned out that Instagram was the key.
And I could easily write some very long and possibly pithy descriptions of Instagram’s terrorist attack on female self-esteem, explaining how it had become the #1 destination on the Internet for plastic surgery disasters, for a plethora of fake asses, fake tits, hair removal, skin lightening, lip enhancements and Botox, and how female celebrities with certain physical features used their Instagram followers to advertise products that they’d been paid to hawk, and how the products were inevitably chemical warfare on the natural beauty of women, and how all of this was a sustained spiritual attack and how I myself know a handful of amazing people who’d gone haywire with plastic surgery inspired by Instagram.
But why bother with that?
Here is the simplest way to describe how awful Instagram was for women: it had weaponized yoga.
Instagram had created an environment where ridiculously blonde women from the ridiculous upper classes could flaunt their ridiculous lifestyles comprised of samosas and endless Caribbean vacations and could, somehow, wrap this excess of capitalism in a blanket of spirituality, photographs of Downward Dogs and Warrior Poses, the language of body-positive affirmation, and cloying truisms about the ability of anyone to achieve their dreams if they put enough effort and faith into the achievement of those dreams.
Yoga was one of the many weapons of mass destruction employed in Instagram’s terrorist war on women’s self-esteem.
A tool to bludgeon people with the things that they couldn’t have.
Impossible bodies, impossible wealth, impossible life.
If anything could have resisted, it was yoga.
Yoga was as old as the hills.
It was ancient technology. It was almost as old as Fairy Land. And it too had fallen.
It was like everything else on Instagram.
Just another weapon in a long war.
So don’t even ask about the fucking Kardashians.
Because heterosexuality is a bullshit con on women, the accidental byproduct of Instagram’s remorseless terrorist war was the even more remorseless arousal of Adam Leroux’s sexual desire.
His particular demesne was Instagram accounts belonging to women who were strippers in the city of Philadelphia.
Adam Leroux liked their fake asses, he liked their fake tits, he liked their fake lips, he liked their fake hair.
Say what you will about the strippers of Philadelphia, but they had a leg up when it came to Instagram. They’d done something nearly impossible.
They’d monetized their participation in Instagram’s terrorist war on women’s self-esteem.
Their primary motivation for using Instagram was to advertise to potential customers.
They posted pictures of themselves and alerted the world about which nights they’d be working the clubs.
Adam Leroux’s attention was an accidental byproduct of this monetization.
Adam Leroux had discovered these women in 2015 AD.
Using his own Instagram account, he had spent almost two years commenting on their photos.
Here are some of the choicer comments that Adam Leroux had posted to Instagram:
(1) bae i wanna crawl up in that a$$ like a small wood land animal and die
(2) would lick that pussy until u exploded just one taste its all im asking
(3) beautiful face bootiful body y wont u let me touch
(4) girl u got wot i need and wot i need is a$$ lol
(5) wont u let me show u a good time my hand to god above ill come to philly and teach u bout brotherly love and u can buy whatever u like
Adam Leroux had left thousands of these comments.
For some inexplicable reason, the dark magic of Fairly Land had left them unaffected.
The comments remained long after Leroux’s death.
He’d spent the last year of his life imagining that his literary output would be as the co-writer of Fuller’s memoir.
But the old man’s life and memory was gone.
This was Adam Leroux’s legacy.
Comments on Instagram that expressed his infinite and endless thirst for the surgically inflated buttocks of Philadelphia’s strippers.
Welcome to the future.
Chapter Ten
On the Streets of Los Angeles, There the Wild Beast Slumbers
Being a serial killer, Rose Byrne was in her post-murder cool-down phase.
She was sleeping in the master bedroom.
Celia watched television.
The content that she saw was different than what had played on the woolen television of Fairy Land, where all of the programs had been pre-selected and pirated by the island’s more knowledgeable women.
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The television on Fairy Land had focused on what the American liberal intelligentsia suggested was worth watching: shows from Netflix, from HBO, a select peppering of BBC, the Amazon.com adaptation of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, and some basic cable like Mad Men or Breaking Bad.
By contrast, sitting in the living room of the former Francis Fuller, there was no pre-selection. There was only what aired on television in the middle of an average day.
It was what Los Angeles produced for the 99.5 per cent of Americans who weren’t part of the country’s liberal intelligentsia.
Celia saw an episode of Judge Judy, in which a multimillionaire fake judge ritually abused the poor while adjudicating their small claims court cases.
She saw an episode of Dr. Phil, in which a multimillionaire fake therapist ritually abused the poor while oozing a synthetic variant of empathy.
She saw an episode of Family Feud, in which a multimillionaire comedian asked the poor to produce sexual innuendo in exchange for the promise of money.
She saw an episode of Laura Luke’s Paternity Court, in which a multimillionaire fake judge humiliated poor African-American women for engaging in the biological imperative of sex.
She saw an episode of Divorce Court, in which a multimillionaire fake judge convinced poor African-Americans that they should embrace the global hegemony by creating two consumer households where there had originally been one.
She saw an episode of Dr. Oz, in which a multimillionaire Turkish-American doctor hawked pseudoscience to the poor while embarrassing the fuck out of the five other Turkish people who lived in America.
She saw an episode of The Real, in which a group of multi-millionaire women from marginalized backgrounds pretended that their money hadn’t taken them past the Cash Horizon.
She saw an episode of TMZ Live, in which a multimillionaire lawyer/feudal lord encouraged his cow-eyed millennial vassals to explain the sexual dysfunction of Twitter celebrities.
She saw an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, in which a family of multimillionaires proved that the biggest existential threat to the African-American male was not the Ku Klux Klan or the organized brutality of law enforcement or the school-to-prison pipeline but, in fact, the family themselves.
She saw an episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, in which a multimillionaire comedian excreted a synthetic variant of sisterhood.
She saw an episode of My 600-lb Life, in which a multimillionaire doctor ritualistically abused poor people who’d destroyed their bodies with a toxic diet of repressed homosexuality, junk food, and prescription painkillers.
She watched CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, which were 24-hour news channels dedicated to obsessive, and non-stop, coverage of Donald J. Trump.
These television networks were watched by the elderly and the insane.
These networks served a valuable social function.
They were voluntary euthanasia through informational poison.
Celia shut off the television.
She wanted to go home.
The next day, Celia stood in the living room of the house on the hill.
She looked out over the infinite vastness of Los Angeles.
She cast a spell.
It was some bullshit magic that was intended to solve an intra-narrative problem while moving forward the storytelling.
The spell was supposed to create a direct line of smartphone navigation to Fern. It was supposed to be another bullshit tendril of ropey saliva.
But Celia’s spell did nothing.
It fizzled.
Here is why Celia’s spell fizzled: Fern was nobody’s fool.
Fern knew that her mother would try to find her.
Months before Celia took possession of the house on the hill, Fern had cast her own spell, which blocked any attempts to establish a ropey strand of smartphone navigation.
As Celia’s spell fizzled, Rose Byrne watched from the alpine-blue couch. She looked like a teenager who’s been told by her parents that the whole family is going on a sea cruise themed around an intellectual property geared towards children.
Celia tried to recast her magical bullshit spell.
It fizzled for a second time.
The two women from Fairy Land conferenced as to what was wrong.
Neither of them suspected Fern of blocking Celia’s spells.
Rose Byrne said that perhaps Fern was no longer in Los Angeles, but it was pointed out that this wouldn’t block the ropey smartphone navigation.
Besides, Celia could sense Fern’s presence in Los Angeles. It was one of those fucked-up faery things, just a green feeling that her daughter was present in the same rough geographical locale.
Rose Byrne suggested that as they were in the United States, they could emulate the practices of the American security apparatus.
She proposed that they track where Fern had spent her money and then triangulate her location based on clusters of purchases in a localized region.
Celia cast a spell.
It did nothing.
Fern was from Fairy Land.
She was using an older, weirder form of magical bullshit than money.
Rose Byrne suggested summoning Rusticano.
But no one wanted that.
The women of Fairy Land were stumped.
Then Celia remembered something Maeveen Licksweet had told her.
There’d been a period, back in the Nineteenth Century AD, when Maeveen Licksweet had spent a great deal of time away from Fairy Land. She’d traveled around the world for reasons that she never shared with anyone.
But she did talk about something that she’d noticed in Udine, where she’d spent three weeks.
Maeveen’s landlady in Udine was a widow who’d convinced herself that whenever she slept, she went on a spiritual journey into barren fields where she did battle with witches.
In her dreams, the widow would beat the witches with bundles of fennel and the witches would beat the widow with stalks of sorghum.
One day, after Maeveen returned to her lodgings, the widow asked if Maeveen’s room had been painted.
Of course not, said Maeveen. Why would I paint a room? And what is paint, really?
Then why is the room the color of wolves? asked the widow.
Maeveen thought this was more witch nonsense, but she followed the landlady into the room.
At first, Maeveen couldn’t see what the widow was talking about. But then she caught it out of the corner of her eye. A faint glow permeated everything.
If Maeveen acknowledged the glow, the widow would chatter on for ages about the color of wolves.
Maeveen cast a spell that messed up her landlady’s mind.
The widow shut the fuck up.
The rest of Maeveen’s time in Udine was quiet.
As Maeveen traveled throughout the Italian peninsula, she kept looking out of the corner of her eye. In each of her quarters, in each new city, the glow appeared after she’d been in residence for roughly a week.
Maeveen spent some time thinking about the glow’s cause.
She realized that it was herself, in her magical puissance, having an effect on her lodgings.
It was a byproduct of being a citizen of Fairy Land in the mortal world.
After Maeveen reported this story to the women of Fairy Land, the few who did leave the island noticed that they too had the same effect on their lodgings.
Celia recalled Maeveen’s story and realized that although she was unable to find Fern, she could seek out the radiation traces of her daughter’s puissance.
Celia cast a spell, with as broad a mandate as possible, to look for sources of preternatural power in Los Angeles.
But Los Angeles was as bad as Fairy Land.
It was full of magical bullshit.
It had been built on magical bullshit.
It was nothing but magical bullshit.
About fifty ropes of smartphone navigation saliva emerged from the living room of the house on the hill and stretched out
into Los Angeles County.
“We have little choice,” said Celia. “We shall follow each until we find the one that brings us to Fern.”
Two practical matters arose.
Celia pointed out that their clothes, the haute couture of Fairy Land, were going to attract attention.
She cast a spell.
Celia wasn’t well versed enough in contemporary American fashion to pick clothes, so she let the magic do the work of a personal stylist.
The magic made the women look like recent transplants to Echo Park, which was a traditionally Latino neighborhood that had gentrified into a fashionable enclave of upscale dining and high-level annoyance.
The women’s fur-clad haute couture transformed into designer denim, vintage metal T-shirts, Balenciaga sneakers, and Marni handbags.
Rose Byrne’s T-shirt said: EMPEROR.
Celia’s T-shirt said: SAVATAGE.
Neither of the women knew it, but the magic had failed in its job as a personal stylist.
Vintage metal T-shirts were the hot look of the previous summer.
The other practical matter was one of transportation.
Los Angeles was too big for the women to walk, and the smart-phone saliva didn’t interface with magic windows, so teleportation was prevented.
Celia remembered the former Francis Fuller’s vintage black Jaguar XJ-S, which was parked in the driveway.
The women went outside and looked at the car.
Neither of them knew how to drive.
Celia suggested that she cast a bullshit spell of knowledge which would teach Rose Byrne how to drive.
For the first time in her life, Rose Byrne was about to find a natural place for her ingrained psychosis. She had become a driver in the hellscape of Los Angeles, just another murderous freak steering several thousand pounds of death machine.
Celia got in on the passenger’s side.
Rose Byrne got behind the wheel.
Her bullshit magical training took over. Her psychosis flowed into the machine and then back into her own body. She was ready.
She backed out of the driveway.
She followed one of the ropey strands of smartphone navigation.
Celia fiddled with the Jaguar’s radio until sound came through the car’s paltry speakers. The radio was tuned to 89.9FM, KCRW, one of Los Angeles County’s several stations affiliated with National Public Radio.