She had to return to Fairy Land.
For two years.
And she couldn’t tell the truth.
Imagine the scene: Fern explains to Anthony, who is focusing on a proposed marriage between rational materialism and strict empiricism, that she is a supranatural creature from Fairy Land and that her father was the bastard son of King Arthur and that her mother is the Regnant Queen, and that, oh yeah, all of this has been the subject of Elizabethan pulp fiction and a Jacobean play, and double oh yeah, Fern could not die and was capable of supernatural feats of magic.
She cast two spells on Anthony.
The first drenched him in the radiation of primal magic, altering his brain so that Fern’s periodic disappearances wouldn’t register as significant events.
Whenever the biochemistry of Anthony’s brain produced a thought like: It’s fucking weird as shit that I haven’t seen Fern in seventeen months, it was replaced by another thought: Fern’s gone to Bloomingdale’s.
The other spell drenched him with a second dose of primal magical radiation and created an energy field that rerouted social inquiries.
If someone asked Anthony why they hadn’t seen his girlfriend, the energy field would mess up their minds. The inquisitor would forget that they hadn’t seen Fern. They’d forget her entire existence until the next time they encountered her in the flesh, at which point their brains would be stuffed with false memories of seeing Fern’s nonexistent paintings at hopeless group shows around SoHo.
The spells sat on, and in, Anthony’s body.
They imbued him with the bitter puissance of Fairy Land.
Fern left New York City.
The affair came in dense clusters of contact and absence: one year on, two years off. It was the ultimate long-distance relationship, minus the benefits of then-contemporary modern communication.
There were no letters, no phone calls, no nothing.
Fern disappeared and reappeared.
And the magic deluded Anthony into thinking that she’d never left.
In the Year of the Mechanized Baptism, which roughly corresponded to 1993 AD, 1413 AH, 5753 AM, Fern was back in New York City.
One night, while Fern’s presence was changing the color of the bedroom, Anthony got on the telephone with his mother.
His mother had been born on Long Island.
She still lived on Long Island.
She told Anthony about his uncle’s various bodily ailments, which included dementia, fecal and urinary incontinence, spontaneous bleeding, a lack of mobility, a loss of skin elasticity, and kidney disease.
Then she suggested that it was only a matter of time before her brother would return home from the state-funded institution in which he convalesced.
“He’s not coming back,” Anthony said to his mother. “No one gets better when they’re suffering full-body failure.”
“You’re talking crazy,” said Anthony’s mother. “He’s still young!”
A few weeks earlier, Anthony had left Fern on Manhattan and returned to Long Island, where he’d visited his uncle in the state-funded institution.
Anthony walked past the recreation room and found his uncle’s room, where his uncle’s useless machine of a body had been positioned in a chair.
The useless machine could not get up from the chair. It needed a functioning machine, in the form of a social worker, to help it stand.
This caused its own problem, because every millimeter of the useless machine was wracked with pain. When it was touched, waves of agony ran through the useless machine.
The useless machine could not talk.
The useless machine had wires coming out of its arms and a wire running through its penis into its bladder.
The useless machine was wearing socks that were stained with an instance of the useless machine’s uncontrollable diarrhea.
So when Anthony’s mother said that her brother was still young, Anthony started screaming.
Fern came out of the bedroom and watched as her lover’s face turned red and watched her lover’s mouth emit violent sounds and inadvertent spittle.
“You don’t understand anything!” cried Anthony into the telephone.
“The body isn’t something you can just fuck around with!” cried Anthony into the telephone.
“You’ve never been sick, you have no idea what it’s like!” cried Anthony into the telephone.
That night, when Fern and Anthony engaged in some bad fictional sex, Anthony sobbed like an infant.
In the Year of the Mechanized Baptism, New York City played host to one of its storied events: the Whitney Biennial.
The Biennial was a display of artworks. It occurred every two years at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Generally speaking, artworks were human-made abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
Anthony wanted to go see a film by the Los Angeles-based artist William E. Jones.
The film was called Massillon and it was included in the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial. Amongst other things, the film was about Jones growing up mega-homosexual in post-industrial Ohio.
“Before we see the film,” Anthony said to Fern, “we should check out the show. The whole thing costs six bucks.”
Everyone who’d come into contact with the energy field residing in Anthony’s body believed that Fern spent most of her time painting. Anthony himself believed this.
When Anthony extended the invitation, Fern couldn’t say no.
The Whitney Biennial was a professional obligation.
They walked uptown to the Biennial, which was housed in the Whitney Museum at the corner of 75th & Madison.
On the way, Anthony and Fern found themselves trapped in an unpleasant discussion.
The topic of this unpleasant discussion was familiar.
It was a reliable source of discord.
This was the topic: Fern’s unwillingness to discuss her past.
Anthony was deeply suspicious that Fern was hiding vital information.
Which, of course, she was.
But Anthony’s body was awash in huge amounts of testosterone and primal magic.
He could not imagine the information that Fern was hiding.
No one could!
Anthony’s body had funneled his suspicion into some serious masculine bullshit. He was fixated on Fern’s sexual history prior to the advent of their rutting congress.
He was convinced that she had a long history of shameful encounters.
From a certain perspective, this was true: Fern had more than her fair share of Fairy Land relationships, and she’d been visiting the mortal world since the Fourteenth Century AD.
But Anthony’s thoughts were more pedestrian.
He was consumed with fleeting images of suburban fingerbanging, semen-smeared threesomes, and an excess of New York City blowjobs.
Don’t forget: he was from Long Island.
“I just want to know the truth!” he shouted. “I can handle it!”
Even in the best of times, the Biennial was notorious for producing a high level of annoyance.
Everyone who visited an iteration of the Biennial left the Whitney Museum and complained about how the abstract representations of three-dimensional reality in the Biennial were the wrong abstract representations of three-dimensional reality to be displayed in a space dedicated to abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
Unlike previous Biennials, the 1993 AD iteration had overthrown the tyranny of certain kinds of abstract representations of three-dimensional reality and replaced them with different abstract representations of three-dimensional reality.
The 1993 AD show was conceived and executed to engage with voices marginalized from the mainstream of the art world and American culture. It included people descended from the indigenous tribes of the Americas, and people descended from people brought in chains to support America’s original economic scheme, and people exploring the subjugation of women.