Only Americans Burn in Hell
Page 20
Rusticano had left Lincoln with the Red-Rose Knight because he’d hated the grotesque meanness of the English. When he returned to the mortal world, to mainland Europe, he found that not much was different.
It’d been 1,000 years and there was still so much evil.
The names had changed but shits were still ruling the world.
Everything was violence. Everything was war.
The poor were still starving.
The only difference now was that Rusticano himself could not die.
And he could not return to his cave by the Babbling Brook of Sorrow.
Rusticano decided to embrace the values of the mortal world.
He married a woman named Evette, a tanner’s daughter, and with her started a family.
The early years were good.
Rusticano was in love.
But it wore off.
After a decade, nothing about Evette or their children could alleviate the hollow feeling.
He didn’t want to see his wife die.
He didn’t want to learn that his children were not immortal.
He didn’t want to pretend that a domestic life had any meaning.
Food, clothes, shelter.
Every fucking day.
Without end.
Faking his own death, Rusticano abandoned his family and made his acquaintance with those who had passed the Cash Horizon. He went to interesting parties, he hoarded money, and he had reckless sex with people who were bored out of their minds.
These antics could amuse for a moment, maybe even for a week, but in the end, everything was empty. The parties and the people were dull as dishwater.
Alcohol helped.
Alcohol always helped.
Thinking that honest labor might give his life some purpose, Rusticano took up a trade.
Rusticano founded his own company.
He had great success with handcrafted luggage. The company expanded and Rusticano experienced even greater success with fashion.
But the rewards of his business were only iterations of the same boring things.
Food, shelter, clothing, sex.
The world moved on and entered the Twentieth Century AD.
Rusticano could see the score.
He watched as liberal democracies consumed themselves with internal divisions about their relative social order, and he watched as these liberal democracies placed the petty squabbles about these internal divisions upon a foundation of ghettos and the foreign dead.
People had stopped arguing about the divine right of kings and now screamed at each other about human rights, about how terrible it was that some inequality in the internal society had made a mockery of that society’s values, and then retreated into their homes and feasted on the mass-murdered flesh of animals while their militaries dropped bombs on distant locales and the mechanisms of their societies destroyed the poor with unfair labor practices.
There was no place for Rusticano’s wordplay and his reason.
Not in the mortal world.
The Twentieth Century AD had only one rule: might made right.
Rusticano was immortal.
He was stronger than everyone else.
He could do anything he wanted.
Rusticano opened his black duffel bag and took out a five-gallon plastic fuel can that he’d purchased from Rite Aid at the corner of Vermont Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.
Rusticano unscrewed the cap on the fuel can.
Rusticano splashed out five gallons of gasoline that he’d purchased from the Shell station at the opposite corner of Vermont Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.
He did it so fast that neither Celia nor Fern nor the Fairy Knight could stop him.
The homeless people were too tripped out on the Fairy Knight’s blood to realize what was going on. And anyway, they were people who America had deemed useless, so they weren’t particularly surprised to be abused by a stranger.
“You may now thank me for my honesty,” said Rusticano.
Rusticano used a lighter that he’d bought at Rite Aid to ignite the gasoline.
Everything burned.
As their flesh caught fire, but they did not die, both the Fairy Knight and Fern said the Lord’s Prayer.
It was for nothing.
They might as well have said a prayer with a proven track record.
They might as well have said this:
Arafat Kazi got into the pit to see Guns N’ Roses at the Staples Center.
The building burned.
Celia burned.
Rusticano burned.
Fern burned.
The Fairy Knight burned.
The homeless burned.
Undying beings came out of the charred wreckage.
Rusticano looked at Celia.
Celia looked at Rusticano.
“Lady,” he said. “Your children are no longer in the building. I would ask that you send me back.”
Celia cast a spell and Rusticano disappeared.
One minute he was there.
Then: blink.
He was in a Coffee Fellows at the northeast corner in the München Hauptbahnhof.
Celia’s magic had not accounted for the difference in time zones and the operating hours of Coffee Fellows.
It was midnight.
Rusticano was trapped behind locked doors.
He threw a table through a plate glass window and walked down Prielmayerstraße towards the former Bürgerbräukeller.
As with the Gray’s Inn play, he had wrecked another narrative.
His actions had precipitated an unsatisfying end to this book, causing its story to dissolve into a hectoring lecture about Christianity divorced from any pretext of plot.
Exeunt Rusticano.
* Technically, Byron Crawford shares the title of the Best Writer That You’re Not Reading with Fiona Helmsley.
Chapter Twenty
What Rusticano Didn’t Say
Rusticano was nobody’s fool.
He knew that the best arguments against Christianity were surprisingly terrible, and furthermore that these arguments relied on philological research, observations about historical injustice, scientific empiricism, and the issue of theodicy, which was the fancy way of asking Why does God let bad things happen to good people?
When people asked Why does God let bad things happen to good people? what they really meant was this: “Why does God let bad things happen to me?”
It’s a very Twenty-First-Century AD argument.
Cooked in a base of insipid narcissism.
The strongest of the bad arguments were the ones that relied on scientific empiricism, which pointed out the impossibility of God creating his son in human form.
And the impossibility of that human form rising from the dead.
But appeals to rationality and scientific truth, while making great sense on paper, faced a very significant problem.
The world kept getting weirder.
The everyday lives of everyday people were completely insane.
Roughly 100,000 people controlled the fates and destinies of 7,799,900,000 people, and the 7,799,900,000 let themselves be subject to the whimsies of the 100,000.
But let’s be clear: the madness of everyday life was its own issue.
It didn’t have any relationship to whether or not Christianity was bullshit.
Obviously, Christianity was total bullshit.
It was the most insane bullshit!
But it was impossible to make an argument against superstition and magical nonsense, and have it stick, when that argument was delivered from a society where every citizen was a magician.
And yes, reader, that includes you.
You too are a magician.
Your life is dominated by one of the oldest and most perverse forms of magic, one with less interior cohesion than the Christian faith, and you invest its empty symbolism with a level of belief that far outpaces that of any Christian.
Here are some strips of paper and b
its of metal!
Watch as I transform these strips of paper and bits of metal into: (a) sex (b) food (c) clothing (d) shelter (e) transportation that allows me to acquire strips of paper and bits of money (f) intoxicants that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (g) leisure items that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (h) pointless vacations to exotic locales where I will replicate the brutish behavior that I display in my point of origin as a brief respite from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (i) unfair social advantages that allow my rotten children to undertake their own moronic pursuits of strips of paper and bits of metal.
Humiliate yourself for strips of paper.
Murder for the strips of paper.
Humiliate others for the strips of paper.
Worship the people who’ve accumulated such vast quantities of strips of paper that their strips of paper no longer have any physical existence and are now represented by binary notation.
Treat the vast accumulators like gods.
Free blowies for the moldering corpse of Steve Jobs!
Fawning profile pieces for Jay-Z!
The Presidency for billionaire socialite and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump!
Kill! Kill! Kill!
Work! Work! Work!
Die! Die! Die!
Go on.
Pretend this is not the most magical thing that has ever happened.
Historical arguments against Christianity tended to be delivered in tones of pearl-clutching horror, usually by subpar British intellectuals pimping their accent in America, a country where sounding like an Oxbridge twat conferred an unearned credibility.
Yes, the Crusades were horrible.
Yes, the Inquisition was awful.
Yes, they shouldn’t have burned witches in Salem.
Yes, there is an unfathomable amount of sexually abused walking wounded.
Yes, every Christian country has oriented itself around the rich and done nothing but abuse the fuck out of its poor.
But it’s not like the secular conversion of the industrialized world has alleviated any of the horror. Read the news.
Murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder.
Despair.
All secularism has done, really, is remove a yoke from the rich. They’d always been horrible, but at least when they still paid lip service to Christian virtues, they could be shamed into philanthropy.
Now they use market forces to slide the whole thing into feudalism.
New York University built a campus with slave labor!
In the Twenty-First Century ad!
And has suffered no rebuke!
Applications are at an all-time high!
The historical arguments against Christianity are as facile as reviews on Goodreads.com, and come down to this: Why do you organize around bad people who tell you that a Skyman wants you to be good?
To which the rejoinder is: yes, the clergy sucks, but who cares how normal people are delivered into goodness?
As for philological research.
C’mon, get real.
None of these arguments would’ve worked on Fern or the Fairy Knight.
How does one supranatural creature tell two other supranatural creatures that they shouldn’t believe in a fourth supranatural creature?
Rusticano couldn’t make that argument.
So he made a fire.
You can’t talk people out of religion.
But you can violently assault them and burn down their churches. Or spraypaint MUHAMMAD PROPHET OF BUTCHERS on their masjid.
It won’t work, you won’t disabuse people of their belief.
But anything’s better than subjecting the world to another lecture about atheism.
Chapter Twenty-One
καταδυσόμεθ᾽ εἰς Ἀΐδαο δόμους
The 2016 AD Aston Martin Vanquish made its way up Sunset Boulevard.
Dmitri Huda had the night off.
HRH was in the driver’s seat.
HRH turned left onto Silver Lake Boulevard.
A sex worker was in the passenger seat.
She looked out of the passenger-side window at the Silversun liquor store.
HRH followed Silver Lake Boulevard to the 2016 AD Aston Martin Vanquish’s final destination, which was HRH’s mid-century Los Angeles home overlooking the Silver Lake Reservoir.
HRH’s personal breaking point with Beverly Hills had come in the autumn of 2015 AD, when the media turned its attention to HRH’s cousin HRH Majed bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
HRH Majed had, allegedly, thrown a party over three days.
The party had, allegedly, spanned from September 21, 2015 AD to September 23, 2015 AD.
On September 25th, 2015 AD, three women, who’d been employed by HRH Majed to provide housekeeping services during the party, filed a civil lawsuit with the Superior Court of Los Angeles.
In the complaint, the women were anonymous. They were listed as JANE DOES 1 through 3.
On October 22nd, 2015 AD, the three JANE DOES filed an amended complaint. And this second complaint caught media attention.
In the complaint, it was alleged that over the alleged three nights of alleged drug abuse, HRH Majed bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud had: (1) allegedly attempted to urinate on or around JANE DOES 1 through 3 while saying, allegedly, “I want to pee pee!” (2) allegedly threatened to kill JANE DOE 1, allegedly saying, “Tomorrow I will have a party with you and you will do everything I want, otherwise I will kill you” (3) allegedly jumped on top of JANE DOE 2 while she was seated and allegedly started rubbing his body against her body in a sexual manner and then, allegedly, shouted: “I am a prince and I do what I want! You are a nobody” followed by, allegedly, “You’re not a woman! You’re nobody! I’m a prince and I’ll do what I want and nobody will do anything to me!” (4) allegedly grabbed JANE DOE 2’s arm and allegedly kicked her on the knee while maintaining his grasp, allegedly leaving nail marks on her wrist and bruise marks on her thigh (5) allegedly instructed JANE DOE 3 as follows: “You’re going to go upstairs. I’ll be up there in two minutes and you’ll do whatever I want. If not, then I’ll kill you” (6) allegedly forced JANE DOE 1 and JANE DOE 2 to watch as his penis was stroked, allegedly, by a male employee who was allegedly on his knees before HRH Majed (7) allegedly forced JANE DOE 1 to watch as a different man, by request, allegedly farted in HRH Majed’s face (8) allegedly told JANE DOE 1: “I will pay you to lick my entire body. If you make me feel good, you’ll feel good too.”
The complaint said very little of HRH Majed’s subsequent arrest for alleged forced oral copulation, brought after a neighbor saw a woman smeared with blood, shouting for help, and trying to climb an eight-foot wall.
But the media reports said quite a bit.
To be fair to HRH Majed Majed bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud: he never faced a criminal trial stemming from his arrest at the hands of the LAPD.
The Los Angel
es District Attorney’s office declined to press charges.
And, through his representatives, HRH Majed denied everything stemming from both the arrest and the civil trial. A representative said: “I will not dignify these salacious allegations – which the District attorney found to be unsupported by evidence … The decision by the D.A.’s office not to file charges shows that the accuser’s stories cannot be substantiated … The sheikh is very happy to put it behind him and move on with his life.”
And, it must be said: the lawsuit was filed anonymously and never went to trial.
None of its claims were even proven in a court of law.
And on December 12, 2017 AD, all parties filed for dismissal.
“Can you conceive of how difficult it is for an Arabian prince to be arrested in Beverly Hills?” HRH had asked Dmitri Huda after the media descended. “Even with these false charges and obvious calumnies, how does one achieve such a miracle?”
“His father died in January,” said Dmitri Huda. “Maybe he’s distraught.”
“I wish that my father would die in January! Or any other month! You would never find myself dismantling an equitable arrangement with law enforcement! If one cannot trust the LAPD, then one can trust nothing. The heat is on, Dmitri.”
And so HRH escaped to Silver Lake.
The 2016 AD Aston Martin Vanquish pulled into HRH’s driveway.