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.
National Public Radio was, in part, radio sponsored by the American state. It was a relic of another era, which is to say the mid-1960s AD, when there was still currency in the idea that civic institutions could serve, and enrich, the lives of the citizenry.
What a jest!
What a jape!
KCRW was broadcasting the afternoon NPR news show, which was called All Things Considered.
As Rose Byrne followed her saliva-based smartphone navigation, the women heard the stories of the day.
The lead story was of some interest to both Celia and Rose Byrne, as it was about a recent Islamic-themed terror attack on London Bridge.
Like all terror attacks, the London Bridge incident had evoked a general aura of stupidity, and like all terror attacks in London, it had produced a plethora of people with silly accents waiting to give interviews to the vultures called reporters.
“Oi, guv, I tell you what, terrorism is bad stuff, innit, hey, guvvy?” said KCRW.
NPR dedicated thirty seconds to the importance of Donald J. Trump’s tweet about the terror attack. He’d insulted the Mayor of London.
What an asshole.
Rose Byrne drove the Jaguar into Hollywood.
Chapter Eleven
Let Slip the Dogs of War
The only good advice that anyone ever gave me about writing came from the author Stephen Prothero.
He said something like this: “If there’s an obvious comment about your book, don’t run from it. Just include the comment in the book itself and make it part of the text. Get there first.”
In the spirit of those words, let’s address the big fat elephant in the room.
Let’s talk about how you can’t write a novel about an island of women who banish and murder all of their male co-citizens and not have everyone think that you’re writing an allegory about #MeToo.
#MeToo was a hashtag.
Hashtags were a method for a bunch of people on social media to comment on the same topic, roughly at the same time.
You took an alphanumeric phrase and put the # symbol in front of that phrase and appended the phrase to a comment on social media.
#FuckTrump was a popular hashtag.
So was #NotMyPresident.
This book is not an allegory.
It was begun in August of 2017 AD.
#MeToo didn’t start until October of 2017 AD.
The first 12,000 words of this book were written before October of 2017 AD.
#MeToo kicked off with an article in the New York Times and a follow-up in the New Yorker. Both articles were about a film producer named Harvey Weinstein.
He had produced nearly every middlebrow American film of the last twenty years, he was a bully, he was a braggart, he was physically repulsive, and he was in deep with the Democratic Party.
And he was also a serial sexual abuser of women and a rapist.
With every news story there is a visible layer, the one that plays out in media coverage, and then there is an unconscious layer, the story serving as a medium through which unspoken social undercurrents are made manifest.
And the unconscious layer of the Harvey Weinstein story was all about Donald J. Trump.
They were both disgusting fat slobs from New York City, they were both from the Celebrity branch of American governance, they were both deep into politics, and it was a barely kept secret that both of them were pigs with women.
Had Donald J. Trump not won the election, #MeToo would not have happened.
The psyche of the haute bourgeoisie would not have bruised.
There would have been no waves of outrage.
And no one would have scrutinized Harvey Weinstein, who had decades of extraordinary access to Donald J. Trump’s opponent.
He would have been on the winning side.
And everyone always falls in line behind a winner.
The election of 2016 AD produced a problem: Donald J. Trump had both won and lost.
He was a beneficiary of the Electoral College, which was a system of proportional representation designed by America’s founders to ensure that no one would ever outlaw owning slaves from Africa.
The Electoral College didn’t stop America from outlawing slavery, but it did seriously screw up the Twenty-First Century AD.
Here’s how the Electoral College worked: the general election, in which the will of the people was expressed, meant nothing.
A candidate could win a majority of votes and still lose the election.
This is exactly what happened in 2016 AD.
Donald J. Trump lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College.
Millions more people voted for Donald J. Trump’s opponent than voted for Donald J. Trump. Way more Americans had decided that his opponent was the appropriate person to turn Muslims into garam masala.
Which made sense.