by Jarett Kobek
But the spell fizzled.
Rose Byrne stood over HRH.
Rose Byrne ached with the ideated reality of a serial killer.
She moved her hand to her broadsword.
But she could not remove it from its scabbard.
HRH rose from the ground.
“As I imagined,” HRH said to Rose Byrne. “One more disappointment in the litany that is life.”
HRH sat to Celia’s left.
“Sir,” said Celia. “Who are you that you stayed her hand?”
“I am the alpha and the omega,” said HRH.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Celia.
“I will use a metaphor that I hope gives clarity,” said HRH. “Think of yourself as a being of rare luck. You sit in the presence of a superhero. Throughout the livelong day I am a mild-mannered financial wizard and neoliberal philanthropist. By night, I venture forth and make the world sane. I am like nothing you have ever met. Wait until you read my press coverage. As with the faint hopes of a penile inadequate, it is measured not in length but thickness!”
Celia stood.
“Come, Rose,” said Celia. “Enough of this.”
They walked out of Tenant of Trees.
HRH turned to the woman sitting at his left.
She twenty-five years old.
She was an aspiring actress.
She was from Kissimmee, Florida.
She had moved to Los Angeles to follow her dreams.
Her body was filled with the following psychoactive agents: Paxil, Lexapro, and a microdose of LSD.
“My dear,” said HRH to the aspiring actress, “I wonder if you have ever perused the speeches of Cesar Chavez?”
Chapter Fifteen
Until the Wheels Fall Off and Burn
By the way, all of the women in Fairy Land, and the Fairy Knight too, had Afro-textured hair and skin loaded with eumelanin in the stratum basale of their epidermis.
When the women of Fairy Land wandered around Los Angeles in their vintage metal T-shirts, this is what people thought: Hey, there are some Black girls.
This was followed by another thought: Wait, Black girls like Megadeth? How is that possible?
And this wasn’t because the people of Los Angeles were essentializing, which was a crude mental process by which inherent characteristics were attributed to an arbitrary and socially constructed grouping of humans.
The people of Los Angeles weren’t having this thought because they were racist and believed it unlikely that Black girls would enjoy the sounds of Megadeth.
The people of Los Angeles were having this thought because they were shocked at the bad taste of anyone in a Megadeth T-shirt.
Megadeth were awful.
No one’s accusing you, reader, of having read this book with a mental image of lily-white faeries as its main characters.
But let’s be honest.
All of this book’s other readers have done exactly that.
It’s a cruel narrative trick that relies on ingrained cultural assumptions about mythological beings, character names with Celtic origin, and the underlying biases of fantasy literature.
But it’s not as if there weren’t a few clues back in Chapter Four.
Prince Thomas of the Kingdom of Purpoole clearly refers to Celia’s skin as “dusky.”
Also, Prince Thomas suggests that Celia’s a queen of Clerkenwell and a sister of Luce.
And, as everyone knows, Black Luce or Negro Lucy was a woman of Sub-Saharan African descent who ran a brothel in Clerkenwell during the last decade of the Sixteenth Century AD and the first decade of the Seventeenth Century AD.
It’s not you, reader.
It’s everyone else.
But that’s racial prejudice, isn’t it?
And yes, reader, I understand the peril into which I’ve thrust myself by suggesting that Richard Johnson’s made-up characters possess imaginary physical characteristics which group them into an arbitrary social construct.
Nothing could be more controversial.
Someone might get upset!
On the Internet!
Where important things happen!
No one likes to talk about it, but we live in a world where a significant proportion of the population believes that Batman is real.
Batman is a comic-book character.
Here is his origin story: he was born super rich, and his rich parents were murdered in an alley while Batman watched, and then when Batman’s trust fund matured, he used the money to enact a systemized campaign of violence against the poor.
Batman goes out every night and makes the world sane.
Most of Batman’s true believers don’t believe in the physical reality of Batman.
It isn’t that kind of belief.
It’s religious.
But then again, there are always the ones who think they can talk with gods.
In 2014 AD, there was a news story about a pair of twelve-year-old girls who stabbed another twelve-year-old girl. When the girls were apprehended, they were asked why they had tried to murder their BFF. The girls told the cops that they were killing for Slender Man.
Slender Man was an imaginary supranatural character that had been created by someone on the Internet.
Slender Man wore a bad suit and he hung out with children and he inspired tedious academic papers by bottomfeeders.
When the girls were asked why Slender Man wanted them to kill, they said that Slender Man would reward their human sacrifice with a resplendent palace in Hell, where they would rule for eternity amongst the damned.
The bottomfeeders who wrote academic papers about Slender Man weren’t that different from the girls who stabbed their BFF.
They were looking for tenure at state-funded universities, which meant that they too were seeking a resplendent palace in Hell, where they too would rule for eternity amongst the damned.
The media played the stabbing for its obvious shock.
Given the character’s origins, which were heavily documented and easily verifiable, how could anyone think that Slender Man was real?
Psychological examinations revealed that one of the assailants was in regular telepathic communication with Mr. Spock from Star Trek, all four of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter books.
The Harry Potter books were a series of fantasy novels about an English boarding school, wherein the most fantastical thing that happened was the complete absence of buggery and same-sex handjobs.
Mr. Spock from Star Trek?
Why not?
Lord Voldemort?
All right.
But the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?
Unless she’d somehow encountered self-published black-and-white comic books from the 1980s AD, the twelve-year-old was presumably receiving communications from the most commonly known versions of these intellectual properties.
And the commonly known versions were characterized by nothing more than their irrepressible hunger for pizza and their use of an American dialect of English that sounded like the media stereotype of California surfers.
They said shit like: “Cowabunga, dude and dudettes! I can’t wait to gnosh on some gnarly pizza and get, like, weirded out! Mondo nutsiness! Time to boogie!”
Imagine that horror beamed into your fucking head.
The right question wasn’t why someone would believe in the reality of Slender Man.
This was the right question: Why wouldn’t they?
America was full of millions of people who posted to the Internet, daily, about the importance of Batman, and insisted on interpreting prevailing social trends through the prism of Batman.
These people believed in Batman, they knew that Batman was real, and they invested Batman with religious faith.
Batman was a new god.
Batman had risen from the rankest nether regions of pop culture, nurtured on the Internet after September 11th, 2001 AD, which was when a bunch of Muslims facefucked the collective psyche of ma
nkind and transformed reality into a shitty disaster movie from the mid-1990s AD.
Life became a cartoon.
A new pantheon was required.
And there was Batman.
And there was Mr. Spock.
And there were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
And there was Harry fucking Potter, still unbuggered, still longing for the strong and nurturing caress of a same-sex handjob.
All of these intellectual properties were no different than Slender Man.
They were just some crap that someone had made up.
And they all had definite, and well-documented, points of origin.
And this is why writers run into terrible peril when they write about supranatural characters that directly, or accidentally, touch upon hot-button issues like race or gender.
The problem is never race or gender.
That’s only the smokescreen.
The problem is the supranatural creatures.
The writer risks profaning a new religion.
Like all religious people, the new religion’s adherents are completely insane.
But they’re not so insane that they’re willing to make a direct argument about their religion.
You can’t say that Batman is real.
Not in public.
Not yet.
So they grasp at the obvious.
And like any zealots, they demand obsequious gestures as retribution for the profane.
One obsequious gesture that emerged around the Year of the Froward Worm was the employment of what were termed sensitivity readers.
Authors hired sensitivity readers, who were apparently of marginalized backgrounds, to read through the authors’ manuscripts and identify issues of bias or grotesque cultural misrepresentation.
Basically, it was a writer hiring someone from the Internet to tell the writer why they were wrong before other Internet people could tell the writer why they were wrong.
Imaginary narratives about fantasy worlds were being fact-checked!
By people who were about ten minutes away from making a sacrifice to Slender Man!
Like most efforts of the liberal intelligentsia to maintain plausible deniability about one’s culpability in the global order of exploitation, the concept of the sensitivity reader dripped with unexamined racism.
It essentialized to an extreme degree, suggesting that there were inalienable qualities specific to arbitrary social constructs, and furthermore, that any one individual could comprehend, and identify, biases against millions of people based on nothing more than the accident of their birth.
Even the name was insane: it suggested that people from arbitrary social constructs had an innate sensitivity that differentiated them from other human beings, and that this sensitivity was based in a unique moral superiority.
And it is this thought—that the arbitrary circumstances of birth give the ability to comment on a slim range of human suffering—which has animated a central motif of the book that you are reading.
The motif in question is the idea that the purpose of the Presidency of the United States of America is the transformation of Muslims into aching piles of ash and steaming puddles of blood.
As the towelheaded son of a dirty fucking immigrant camelfucker, I’ve focused on the most personally applicable aspect of the American War Machine and transformed it into a reccurring joke.
Yet, reader, does not this approach suffer from the sin of narrowness?
It’s not as if the American War Machine has limited itself to the execution of Muslims in the Middle East and North African region.
It’s not as if the American War Machine only fucks up the relatives of people who self-identify on the Internet as #MENA.
Ever since 9/11, the American War Machine has unleashed total chaos upon the world.
By the Year of the Froward Worm, seventy-two sovereign states were involved in its conflicts.
That’s 39 per cent of the world’s countries.
By the Year of the Froward Worm, about 13,486,400 refugees came from five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia.
All five of these places had been touched by the American War Machine.
Five had been fucked with by the Central Intelligence Agency, the major intelligence agency of the American War Machine.
Four had hosted members of the American War Machine’s military.
Three had been bombed by the American War Machine.
Two had hosted major American War Machine military operations.
One had hosted the longest war in the history of the American War Machine.
As I write this, America wages a secret war in Sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the best available information, this secret war is taking place in the following twenty countries: Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Botswana.
The secret war is conducted under an American combatant command named AFRICOM.
Much like the multinational conglomerate that owns Penguin Random House, AFRICOM is headquartered in Germany.
If I had to guess, I’d suggest that about 0.5 per cent of the American population knows that AFRICOM exists.
Even that estimate is wild in its optimism, as it would mean that around 1.6 million people in the United States know their country is waging a secret war against Sub-Saharan Africa.
And based on the evidence, I find this to be impossible.
Here is that evidence: if fifty people freak out on Twitter about issues of racial misrepresentation in a cultural product about supra-natural creatures, it generates coverage in the house organs of the American liberal intelligentsia.
Oh, the articles they’ll write!
There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored!
There are games to be won!
Fifty people is nothing.
Which means that the threshold for generating media interest is very low.
So if 1.6 million people know about the secret war in Sub-Saharan Africa, wouldn’t this topic receive endless media coverage?
Insert your own joke here.
Chapter Sixteen
Drink of Me, Eat of Me
At the end of September in the Year of the Froward Worm, the women of Fairy Land left the house on the hill and followed the last strand.
Saliva-based navigation was responsive to changes in traffic patterns, and while the shortest route to their destination would have been to take Los Feliz Boulevard to the 5 onto the 10 and then come in through 4th Street, a traffic accident had made the 5 a complete horror show.
The saliva-based navigation directed the women on to Vermont to the 101 to the 110 and had them come in through 6th Street.
Because their destination was in Skid Row, and because they were on 6th Street, Rose Byrne drove the Jaguar XJ-S through the most abject scene of American cruelty.
What you have to realize about America is that America was a mug’s game, it was a bullshit con, and nothing proved how fucked the country was more than Los Angeles’s homeless population.
Official estimates in the Year of the Froward Worm, based on nothing, were 58,000 people.
Unofficial?
More like 100,000.
More people than had won Donald J. Trump his Electoral College victory!
And even that number might be low.
It was impossible to say.
There’d always been homeless people in Los Angeles, but the first decade of the Twenty-First Century AD hosted two events which pushed the situation into overdrive.
The first event was when nineteen Muslims attacked the United States with airplanes on September 11th, 2001 AD.
This provided the pretext for a series of unending wars in the Middle East.
Lots of Americans, like the former Adam Leroux, went over to foreign count
ries and killed a huge number of Muslims, and had the process fuck up their heads and bodies.
And unlike depictions of PTSD in cultural products made by Hollywood professionals, the consequences of this damage were more severe than flashback montages after someone mistook a traffic sign for a Shi’ite.
The other event was in 2007/8 AD, when predatory banking practices had collapsed the economy and obliterated the homes and wealth of a disproportionate number of African-American and Latino peoples.
So there were a bunch of former soldiers, who’d been given a glimpse of humanity at its worst, and as a result had been rendered unfit for society.
And there were a bunch of people without any money or homes.
And don’t forget: the weather in Los Angeles was tolerable in every month of the year, which was untrue of almost every other place in the country.
And also don’t forget: the Twentieth Century AD was about the ruthless exploitation of peoples’ natural weaknesses for mind-altering chemicals, and this exploitation had been legitimized by every rung of society.
Despite best efforts by the money laundering of the international capitalist class, the neighborhood of Skid Row had not changed that much, and because the Jaguar XJ-S was on 6th Street, the women of Fairy Land had a perfect view.
The streets were lined with canvas tents and human bodies.
There were about fifty tents on each side of every block.
The women passed SROs, which were single-room-occupancy hotels that catered to the homeless. The women passed missions, which were Christian charities that attempted to feed and clothe the homeless. The women passed the Skid Row building of the Los Angeles Police Department, which was a state-funded apparatus that, amongst other tasks, kicked the shit out of homeless people.
What none of this conveys, really, is the squalor.
And, hey, it’s mildly fucked up to write about the most destitute people in the country and say that they were living in filth.
It’s not as if they don’t know.
But at the same time, it’s a fact.
The filth was off the charts.
There was trash and piss and shit and it was everywhere and it had been there for so long that it had changed the color of the sidewalks and the streets.