Given that this chapter occurs at this book’s rough three-fifths mark, it’s pretty obvious that Fern isn’t in the Fontenoy.
Neither of the women know that.
Which is shameful ignorance and demonstrates the limits of their preternatural powers.
If the women of Fairy Land are really supranatural beings, unbound by the laws of nature and capable of casting spells that alleviate issues of plotting and characterization, you’d think that they’d have the resources to check the page number.
Anyway.
They’re in the elevator and they’re looking at the buttons which lead to the Fontenoy’s other twelve floors. If Fern is in the building, they have no idea what floor she’s occupying.
The women of Fairy Land don’t have any choice.
They’re going to have to explore each apartment in the building, one by one, until they can determine whether or not Fern is present within the structure.
Which she obviously isn’t, if for no other reason than the fact that this chapter, like almost every chapter in this book, isn’t really about anyone finding Fern. This chapter is a poorly fleshed-out fictional pretense to write about something that isn’t fictitious.
This is, after all, a novel written in an era when the entire purpose of fiction has been outmoded and destroyed by vast social changes.
Another thing that the women of Fairy Land don’t know is that they’re in the most magical place in Los Angeles.
The Fontenoy is where the American Twenty-First Century AD was invented.
They started on the second floor, bursting into the apartment nearest the elevator.
No one was home, but Rose Byrne did have an interesting conversation with a yellow parakeet.
They burst into the next apartment, where three young men were smoking marijuana and watching television.
In anticipation of the Season Seven premiere of Game of Thrones, the three young men had entered into a covenant.
After the June 26th, 2016 AD finale of Season Six, each of the young men had gone to the source material and read every published volume of George R.R. Martin’s magnum opus.
1,736,054 words of pure shit!
But reading the books had not slaked their thirst, and in anticipation of the approaching Season Seven premiere on July 16th, 2017 AD, the young men had agreed to spend the summer rewatching every extant episode of the televised adaptation.
As the women of Fairy Land burst into the apartment, the young men were watching the eighth episode of Season Three.
The television was displaying a scene in which the mad dwarf Tyrion Lannister is in a boudoir with his unwilling wife Sansa Stark. They’ve just been married and Tyrion’s father has ordered Tyrion to break his bride’s maidenhead.
The dwarf, in anticipation of this horror, has gotten ridiculously drunk.
With great reluctance, his bride sheds her clothing.
He stops her. If she does not want to sleep with him, he shall never force her.
Then the dwarf passes out.
This scene is of some interest because both the televised adaptation, and its source material, feature a character who’s drunk himself silly and refuses to sleep with someone on moral grounds, rather than the obvious explanation of too much alcohol rendering him unfit for the congruous act.
This scene, in both book and television formats, points to the place where George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones is a divergent universe from the one in which we live.
It ain’t the elves.
It ain’t the fucking dragons.
It ain’t the kid who can see the future.
It ain’t the snow zombies who function as an obvious insult to the people of Scotland.
What makes Game of Thrones diverge from our universe is one very special magical rule.
This is the magical rule which creates the divergent universe: no male character in Games of Thrones ever experiences erectile dysfunction.
The three young men were stoned enough that they all imagined someone had left the front door unlocked. They thought that the women of Fairy Land had the wrong apartment.
One of the young men chatted up Celia while Rose Byrne demanded to know about Fern.
Another of the young men made a joke about the absurdity of inquiring about ferns when clearly another green plant was the apartment’s dominant spirit animal.
The women of Fairy Land didn’t get the joke.
And this wasn’t because the language of the joke was slightly mixed in its metaphors.
The joke was like all jokes about marijuana.
Terminally unfunny.
On it went, apartment by apartment, floor by floor.
They burst into apartment #403 and found a woman named Ashley Lopez sitting on her living-room floor.
She was practicing Transcendental Meditation, a technique in which the practitioner repeated a mantra, in the silence of their own mind, after having blown about $1,000 on a seven-day course to learn an easy trick that any old asshole can Google in about five minutes.
With her mindfulness practice disrupted, Ashley opened her eyes and saw the women standing over her.
She didn’t question their presence.
It was one of those faery things, a biochemical process. The supranatural entities were emitting pheromones that calmed the human psyche.
“Can I help you?” asked Ashley Lopez.
“We are looking for my daughter,” said Celia. “Have you seen her?”
“What’s her name?” asked Ashley Lopez.
“Her name is Fern,” said Celia.
Rose Byrne looked at the decorations on Ashley Lopez’s living-room walls.
It was some witchy nonsense: a reproduction of The Tower from the Thoth tarot, the hieroglyphic monad of John Dee, a banker’s cheque endorsed by Austin Osman Spare, a Stele of Revealing, a mural of Tiamat, a painting by Steffi Grant, the logo of the Builders of Adytum, and other bullshit.
Ashley Lopez was locked into a ceremonial magick groove.
Ashley still believed in things like gods and primal magic and art nouveau and the manifestations of expression that dominated human consciousness before the psychic cataclysm of World War One.
What can you do?
Everyone’s got something.
Ashley Lopez was confronted by the women of Fairy Land, who were actual magic.
All of her ceremonial magick was of no use.
On those lonely evenings when Ashley Lopez crossed the Abyss and went on the Dark Pilgrimage to Chorazin, the whole thing was about psychological insight into her own self and the limits of identity.
Which was a real change from the old days.
In the old days, magick used to be goofy shit like necromancy, which was the art of raising the dead, and demonology, which was the art of making the Spirits of Hell do your bidding.
The defining aspect of demonology was the bathetic juxtaposition of its methods and its aims.
The Spirits of Hell, who were supranatural beings capable of unimaginable feats, were summoned by the demonologist and asked to perform silly little tasks like facilitating intercontinental travel, or making another person have sex with the demonologist, or causing the reputation of a demonologist’s enemy to suffer grievous ruin.
By the Year of the Froward Worm, no one needed the Spirits of Hell to help them travel to Asia or get fucked or ruin an enemy.
Now people just owned smartphones.
Ashley Lopez’s tenancy in the Fontenoy was foreordained by a lifetime of practicing ceremonial magick.
In addition to challenging the limits of her identity, the ceremonies had blasted open her seven chakras and made her susceptible to the unseen but very real magical currents running throughout Los Angeles.