Only Americans Burn in Hell

by Jarett Kobek

  There’s a way that you, reader, can measure the ways in which the American government had failed its most vulnerable citizens.

  Google!

  Google was a company that’d made more money off advertisements than any other company in the history of the world, but it had been founded by people who were embarrassed by a business model dependent upon advertising lawn chairs, car insurance, and Viagra.

  To deflect the embarrassment, the company cloaked itself in an aura of innovation and some old bullshit about the expansion of human knowledge.

  Google maintained this façade by providing web and mobile services to the masses.

  The most beloved of these services was the near daily alteration of the company’s logo as it appeared on the company’s website.

  Almost every day, the Google logo transformed into cutesy, diminutive cartoons of people who’d done something with their lives other than sell advertisements.

  These cartoons were called Google Doodles.

  They encompassed the whole spectrum of achievement, with a special focus on scientific achievement and the lives of minorities. In its own way, this was a perfect distillation of politics in the San Francisco Bay Area.

  Whenever they appeared, the Google Doodles were beloved and celebrated in meaningless little articles on meaningless little websites.

  They were not met with the obvious emotion, which would be total fucking outrage at a massive multinational corporation co-opting a wide range of human experience into an advertisement for that very same corporation.

  Here was the perversity of Twenty-First-Century AD life: Native-American women had a statistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they did of being hired into a leadership position at Google.

  And no one cared.

  People were delighted!

  They were being honored!

  By a corporation!

  But look, reader, before you assume your bien-pensant righteousness about the tech industry, let me point out that it’s not as if publishing is any better.

  Of the New Yorker’s forty-seven issues published in the Year of the Froward Worm, ten featured a cutesy illustration of a Black woman on the cover.

  By my count, and this may be low because it’s impossible to verify everyone’s identity, the New Yorker published fourteen pieces by Black women.

  If you assume an average contributor count of thirteen people per issue, then that’s 611 contributors across the year, which comes out to exactly 2.29 per cent of the magazine’s 2017 AD contributions being authored by Black women.

  And ten out of forty-seven is 21.28 per cent.

  Anyway.

  In 2007 AD, Google introduced Google Street View.

  Google Street View was a massive invasion of privacy.

  It worked like this: Google bought cameras that could take a full 360-degree image.

  Google strapped these cameras atop cars, and then hired people to drive these cars around America, while the camera took photographs every five feet. Then, using GPS geolocation, Google matched the images taken by the cameras to virtual locations on Google Maps.

  You could put an address into Google Maps and see that location’s real-world appearance at the exact moment when Google committed a privacy violation.

  In 2014 AD, a timeline feature was introduced, which allowed the user to view the full history of Google’s privacy violations.

  In some places, this didn’t mean anything, because Google had only sent a car out once.

  In major cities, like Los Angeles, you could use the Street View timeline to look at a dense archive of imagery.

  Reader, here is a game that you can play.

  Go to Google Maps and search for “5th Street & Crocker Los Angeles.”

  Go to Street View.

  Google will display its most recent invasion of privacy.

  If you’re savvy, you’ll be able to figure out how to use the timeline.

  If you aren’t, ask a friend.

  Go to the earliest image on the timeline, which should be from 2007 AD.

  What you will see is an intersection in Skid Row.

  While not in the best shape, it is not overrun with human misery.

  Now move forward through the timeline.

  Watch as the years pass by and watch as the human misery accumulates. Watch as the tents rise up. Watch as the suffering mounts. Watch as the bullshit con of America fails its most vulnerable citizens. Watch as liberal democracy dies.

  And, yes, reader, it is sad.

  And, yes, it is a shame.

  But here we are.

  You and me.

  Or as they say in Turkish: sen ve ben bebek.

  And we’re still doing nothing.

  Worse than HRH!

  But doing nothing is better than Google, a corporation which has decided that, facing a social cataclysm, the appropriate course of action is to violate the privacy of the homeless and then post the evidence on the Internet.

  The ropey smartphone navigation directed Rose Byrne to turn left from 6th onto Stanford Avenue.

  The women saw their destination before they arrived.

  The strand of magical saliva was wrapped around a two-story building surrounded by single-story warehouses.

  The single-story warehouses were full of companies involved in the importing, exporting, and wholesaling of seafood.

  But the women didn’t need navigational saliva to tell them where they were going.

  There was a line of disheveled people coming out of the two-story building.

  Rose Byrne found a parking spot in front of the TUNA EXPRESS CO.

  The women climbed out of the Jaguar and walked over to the building wrapped in smartphone navigation.

  Celia’s body was resonating with a green feeling.

  Fern was in the building.

  And if this were a book written by someone who still had the ability to build suspense or cared about meaningful plot resolution, there’d be about three-to-four thousand words about how Celia went in the building and found Fern and discovered what Fern was doing in Los Angeles.

  And it would be so dramatic.

  Your heart would be in my hands.

  But this book isn’t being written by that kind of someone.

  I’m burnt out.

  Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency of the United States!

  So there’s really no point.

  Stop hoping that books will save you.

  Stop pretending.

  Everyone else has.

  You aren’t getting your three-to-four thousand words.

  You’re getting about four hundred and fifty.

  The women of Fairy Land went into the building and found Fern on the top floor.

  She was bringing homeless people into a backroom.

  There was a tense reunion.

  Celia demanded that Fern come home.

  Fern refused.

  Celia asked Fern what was so important about staying in Los Angeles.

  Fern brought Celia into the backroom.

  Fern showed Celia what the homeless people were doing in the backroom.

  They were drinking the blood of the Fairy Knight, who was sitting in a plastic chair and had a tube coming out of a vein in his left arm.

  The homeless guzzled his blood from the tube.

  Fern said that she had found her brother nine months earlier.

  He was hopelessly insane and haunting the boardwalk at Venice Beach.

  Fern used magic to bring the Fairy Knight out of his insanity.

  He awoke into sanity and said that he had been wandering the world for centuries.

  The Fairy Knight said that while he was insane, he had converted to Christianity.

  It’d happened in Avignon.

  But then he’d gone so mad that he’d forgotten about everything.

  Now that he was sane, he wanted to emulate one of the most basic Christian ideas, which was to give of himself to the poor.

>   As a magical being, his blood could serve as endless succor and would flow without end.

  He wanted Fern to serve his magical blood to the homeless.

  Fern cast some spells.

  Fern found the building on Stanford Avenue.

  The Fairy Knight opened shop.

  The Fairy Knight gave succor to the most rejected people in America.

  His blood nourished the poor and healed the sick.

  Fern wanted to be with the Fairy Knight.

  She wasn’t going home.

  She didn’t care if the women of Fairy Land had to live without any charm in their lives.

  Everyone else in the world lived without charmed lives.

  If the worst thing that happened to the women of Fairy Land was a loss of charm in their lives, then they were doing better than the rest of the planet.

  She too had converted to Christianity.

  It had happened long before she rescued the Fairy Knight.

  And now her brother’s blood had given her life meaning.

  Chapter Seventeen

  How It All Went Down

  Celia sent Rose Byrne back to Fairy Land.

  There was much protestation, but the Queen is the Queen.

  That’s it.

  Rose Byrne’s gone from the book.

  Celia spent the next few months in Los Angeles.

  She cast a spell that taught her how to drive, and because she had a decent internal map from her forays into saliva navigation, she found her way around the city.

  Sometimes she went to Hollywood Boulevard and strolled atop the Walk of Fame, dodging the tourists, and doing a supra-natural trick where she saw the whole history, the layers of time superimposed on one another, going back to the beginning, to the Hadean.

  And other times she went to Stanford Avenue and talked with her children as the homeless drank the blood of her son.

  Her children proselytized to their mother.

  They told her about Jesus Christ and his redemptive powers that would give mortals life after death and wash away their sins.

  Celia’s children kept talking about Heaven and the crucifixion and eternal life and the Epistles of Paul.

  They wanted Celia to convert to Christianity.

  Celia couldn’t get on that trip.

  Celia could smell the bullshit.

  One Sunday morning, Celia went for a walk.

  She took the precarious route down Glendower Ave, which had been built for the rich and thus didn’t have usable sidewalks, and went to Vermont Ave.

  She walked past gigantic Moreton Bay figs.

  The trees reminded her of Fairy Land.

  She traveled west on Los Feliz Boulevard and then south for several blocks on Edgemont, passing into a significantly poorer area with the crossing of every east–west boulevard.

  At the corner of Fountain, she heard singing.

  The voices were coming from a white building on the northwest corner.

  The sound reminded Celia of the Ceremony of the Grunting Skyrock, a recent addition to Fairy Land’s festival calendar.

  The Ceremony of the Grunting Skyrock had been instituted in the Year of the Pleasurable Caravan, which roughly corresponded to 1000 AD, 390 AH, and 4760 AM.

  In the Year of the Unmemorable Salt, which directly preceded the Year of the Pleasurable Caravan, a rock had fallen from the sky and smashed into Fairy Land.

  Somehow the magic of Fairy Land had prevented any property damage, but the meteorite did leave one hell of a hole.

  The women of Fairy Land kept the meteorite in its hole until someone realized that a giant rock from the sky was as good excuse as any to throw a party.

  The Ceremony of the Grunting Skyrock involved a lot of choral singing.

  For reasons that were always mysterious, the songs that the women sang were filthy tavern ballads about sex and human beings who couldn’t stop pissing their own pants.

  One of the songs, which was old Turkic-Roma magic, went like this:

  Bu kimin donu

  Kaynanamin donu

  Ben yikamam onu

  Bok kokuyor donu

  Despite their lyrical subjects, the songs sounded beautiful. When a hundred voices rise up as one, all individual imperfections disappear into a flawless unity.

  And that’s what Celia heard coming out of the white building.

  Celia went into the white building. It turned out to be the HOPE International Bible Fellowship, housed in what had once been the Fountain Avenue Baptist Church.

  The building wasn’t much changed from when it opened in 1929 AD. It was the same shape and it still had people sitting in its pews and they were still listening to bullshit about how to worship Jesus Christ.

  Celia took a seat in a back pew, next to a small woman.

  The Queen of Fairy Land watched as the humans went through the motions, none of which made any sense, and she sat through the sermon, which she couldn’t quite understand.

  This wasn’t because Celia didn’t have a firm theological basis in Bible study.

  Celia couldn’t follow the sermon because it relied on two conflicting cultural shorthands that were presented as if they were in harmony.

  Christian sermons in American life were always more about America than Christianity, and America was the ideological enemy of Christianity.

  When the service was over and the Christians had stopped singing and shaking hands, Celia wondered what the hell she’d just seen.

  The woman sitting beside Celia noticed the Fairy Queen’s confusion.

  “You are new here?” asked the woman.

  “Is this a church?” asked Celia. “I have read about churches but I have never been inside a church.”

  “Yes, this is a church,” said the woman.

  “My children have become Christians,” said Celia. “My son and my daughter.”

  “My children,” said the woman, “they are not so good about church. You are lucky.”

  “Am I?” asked Celia.

  “Yes,” said the woman. “I wish my children they were thinking about Jesus.”

  “My children will not stop,” said Celia.

  “Beautiful,” said the woman.

  “I am not certain,” said Celia. “It has been very painful.”

  The woman reached into her purse. She pulled out a book. She put the book in Celia’s hands.

  “Read this,” said the woman. “You will make sense of your children.”

  Celia looked down at the book.

  On its black cover, there were gold foil letters that said:

  The pre-Internet library of Fairy Land had never included a copy of the Bible.

  Not in any of its forms or translations.

  This was an oversight, particularly as the Bible was one of the three most influential literary works ever published. The other two were القرآن and the seven volumes of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.

  The King James Version of the Bible was a 1611 AD English translation of the Christian Bible, which was originally put together in the Fourth Century AD, and was comprised of two parts, the Old Testament and the New Testament.

  The Old Testament was a collection of documents that’d emerged from the Jewish faith.

  There existed another version of the texts, used by Jewish people in a very different way than Christians, called the תַּנ"ַּךְ.

  There were a lot of stories in the Old Testament, but the underlying Christian interpretation suggested that it was a book about YHWH, a divinity who had created the world and all of the living beings on the planet, and then spent thousands of years torturing his creations.

  The New Testament was primarily about the life of Jesus Christ, his disciples, and the implications of his message as it carried through the world.

  Despite having never read the Christian Bible, Celia was the one person on Earth who had an innate critical apparatus for comprehending the disjunction between the Old and New Testaments.

  She’d spent about four hundred years
reading and thinking about Tom a Lincoln, which was another book split into two parts.

  Of this structure, Richard S.M. Hirsch writes: “[Richard Johnson] … had early on decided … to organize his matter in two parts, in this case showing heroic exploits in Part I, and the moral retribution for them in Part II.”

  In other words, Part I of Tom a Lincoln was about a father who did some weird shit, and Part II was about the father’s son paying the price for that weird shit.

  Which was the Christian Bible in a nutshell.

  Celia brought the King James back to the house on the hill.

  She read.

  It took several weeks.

  The King James wasn’t Game of Thrones long, but it was pretty close.

  The Old Testament was ancient, and other than the Song of Solomon, which induced at least one meat-market visit to Tenants of Trees, reading it felt like being back in Fairy Land, like inhabiting a universe of unclear moral rules, where the brutality of magic could break your spirit on nothing more than a whim.

  The New Testament was different.

  Celia couldn’t grasp the epistles.

  The Revelation of St. John the Divine was a bore.

  Even Acts of the Apostles was difficult.

  But she understood the gospels, which were four narratives about Jesus Christ and his life.

  And because Celia’d developed that critical faculty, she could weed out an author’s made-up bullshit from the reality upon which he’d built his narrative.

  For centuries, she’d been doing this with Tom a Lincoln, seeing where the fictional account of herself differed from the reality, and comparing the Red-Rose Knight’s pillow talk about his childhood with Richard Johnson’s early chapters.

  Here was Celia’s conclusion: Jesus was weird as fuck.

  This was the actual Jesus, Jesus without the Christ, not the totemic icon used as justification for a thousand awful wars and for millions of deaths.

  This was not the Jesus of Fern and the Fairy Knight.

  This was not Jesus of the Church or the churches.

  This was not the Jesus of the mean-spirited American, the smiling face that blessed slavery and indigenous genocide, the impetus behind KILL A QUEER FOR CHRIST.

  This was the real Jesus.

  Until his advent, the ancient world had never placed any intellectual premium on kindness or mercy.

  Even good people like Diogenes of Sinope or Epicurus had the habit of talking about virtue as a thing that could be developed by the self for the self. If people wrote or thought about sacrifice, it was in the service of the state or the dominant group.