The Ghost Network

by Catie Disabato

  Sometimes, the drawings showed the sea creatures crushing ships that dared to sail too close to the edge. In one of the maps that lined the hallway below the Racine building, a kraken held ten men in a single tentacle, crushing the life out of them. One particularly inventive mapmaker, Gérard Fournival, the “prodigal son of cartography,” drew two sailors cooking their dinner on the back of long-toothed whale so large they mistook it for an island. Fournival only colored the surface of the sea, so the map’s viewers could see the whale’s submerged tail covered in spikes. The whale’s similarly submerged head twisted as it looked over its monstrous shoulder with unveiled fury. The caption under that drawing, translated from Italian, reads: “In the moments before they realized their terrible mistake.”ǁ Ten of the maps Taer saw in the hallway were originals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The seven at the end of the hallway, near the red door, were colored screen prints signed ANTOINETTE MONSON.

  Taer crept as softly as she could down the hallway, past the Edge of the World Maps, with her back against the wall to protect herself, like she had seen in movies. She tried each of the white doors on the left side of the hallway; each one of them was locked. She didn’t want to move away from the wall to check the ones on the right. At the end of the hallway, she grabbed the brass knob on the red door and pushed it open. Luckily, she didn’t immediately step through the doorway, because the door didn’t open into another room. Instead, it opened into empty space, into nothing. The Edge of the World maps weren’t just decoration; they were a warning.

  Taer cautiously peered through the doorway. The floor was a level below her. In the sunken room, a young man sat at a desk covered in papers and a large Mac desktop monitor. Nicolas Berliner was glaring at her.

  Taer hadn’t often encountered violence outside of a movie screen or television set. She wasn’t well acquainted with action. As Taer teetered on the edge of the trap door, the break-in at her apartment and the gun she got out of it should’ve been at the forefront of her mind. Instead, she stared dumbly at Berliner, until, fuzzily captured by the audio recorder in Taer’s pocket, he shouted at her:

  “Caitlin Taer?”

  With that, she was unstuck.

  “Where’s Molly Metropolis?” Taer shouted into the huge room. Her voice echoed. “Is Molly down here?”

  Berliner laughed. “There’s a staircase to your left, through the door. Come down here.”

  “How do I know you don’t have a gun?”

  “I lost my gun.”

  “Yeah, I know. At my apartment. How do I know you don’t have another one?”

  “This isn’t a gangster movie. Get down here.”

  Curiosity overrode caution. Taer decided to risk descending to the bottom of the big room. She found the door to her left, which opened to a staircase that descended into the office.

  “You’re Nicolas Berliner, right?” Taer said, taking in the giant two-story room, enthralled with the high ceiling and at the huge painting of The Ghost Network on the wall.

  “You’re Caitlin Taer.”

  “Cait.”

  “I’m Nick. What do you mean, ‘at my apartment’?”

  “What?” Taer said.

  “You said I lost my gun at your apartment, but as far as I know I’ve never been to your apartment.”

  “I’m not going to make you pay for, like, my plates or anything. We don’t have to fuck around about this. You left your sketchpad, too.”

  “No, listen, I’ve never been to your apartment,” Berliner said, “Someone took my gun from me. Someone took my gun and my sketchpad weeks ago.”

  “Sure. You just want me to give up her notebook, or something. You can’t have it.”

  “Caitlin—”

  “No one calls me Caitlin.”

  “Cait. I didn’t break into your apartment. Where’s Gina?”

  “I’m not here with anyone.”

  “I talked to Irene, I know you’re with Gina. Where is she?” Berliner asked.

  “She’s at home. Can you just shut up and tell me what happened to Molly?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out, too.”

  “Yeah, right!”

  Their argument continued, until Berliner coaxed Taer over to his computer and showed Taer an e-mail from Molly that had arrived in his inbox a few days after she disappeared:

  My dearest friend,

  I hate to leave you alone in the middle of a battle. I’m writing in the hope that maybe the last thing you’ll remember about me is this e-mail, and not the fact that I abandoned you in the dead of winter (both figuratively and literally).

  I’ll leave you with this:

  I promise that leaving now was, in fact, an act of war against the people and things we’ve been fighting (including: Ali and Peaches, the secrecy of the members of the N.S., our own personal failings and foibles). And I’ve left the means for you to pursue a similar act of war—if you choose. I hope you’ll strike as I’ve struck. Do you understand what I’m writing to you?

  Berliner lamented, “Molly always liked a good rhetorical question.”

  Berliner had hired several private detectives and securities experts to trace the e-mail, whose names and numbers he had conveniently forgotten by the time he acquiesced to an interview with me. The experts found that Molly had sent the e-mail from her phone; she had typed it the day she disappeared, and scheduled it to send at a later date.

  “Holy shit,” Cait said several times as she was reading the letter. “I have to text Nix to come over here. She’s next door.”

  “I thought you said she was at home,” Berliner said, with an alarmed tone.

  “She’s searching the building next door, we didn’t know which one you were in.”

  “Shit. Okay. Did you notice if anyone was following you?”

  “No! Who would be following me?” Taer said.

  “Can we go get Gina?”

  “Why? Who was following me?”

  “The people who took my gun.”a

  Taer checked her phone, but didn’t have service in the basement, so she couldn’t call Nix. She scurried back up the stairs with Berliner, back through the long hallway with the Edge of the World maps and screen prints, through the steel door, up the building’s main staircase to the second floor, down the elevator to the lobby, and back out into the cold. Taer tried to zip her coat at the same time as she jogged between the two buildings, and Berliner shouted at her to hurry.

  The door to the second building was again locked. Taer pulled out her cell phone, and called Nix, who answered with a hint of annoyance in her greeting.

  “Stop bitching at me and listen,” Taer said. “Come out of the building. I’m outside. I’m with Nick.”

  Nix appeared a few minutes later and Berliner greeted her.

  “You motherfucker,” Nix said. “You broke into our apartment.”

  “My apartment,” Taer said.

  Berliner said, “I swear to god, that wasn’t me.”

  “Who the fuck else is there?” Nix asked.

  Berliner ushered them back to the other building, to tell them about their real enemy, a pair of young women named Ali and Peaches—who were watching them from the coffee shop across the street.

  * * *

  * Details from this Saturday were pulled from Cyrus’s interviews with Nix, and a close examination of Taer’s belongings—none of her socks or gloves were in matching pairs. —CD

  † While Taer’s behavior exemplifies some of the symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder, she was never formally diagnosed.

  ‡ I retained Cyrus’s digression into the Edge of the World maps here, hoping it ramps up rather than cuts tension. —CD

  § Ziphius was probably invented by the naturalist and cartographer Conrad Gesner (sometimes spelled Konrad Gessner). Steipereidur was invented by the scientist and artist Abraham Ortelius.

  ǁ Ancient Maps and Drawings, Volume 3: The Age of Exploration, ed. Gerard Gumpert (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 269.
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  a It is telling that Berliner and Taer’s first exchange reads like a conversation between people who already know each other. Each had occupied a space in the other’s brain for weeks before they actually met. They very quickly developed a shorthand.

  PART 2

  “Right now I’m a songwriter, and what I do is I perform, and write verses and choruses. But I might not always do that,” Molly said. “I might cross over, not like into another genre, but into another aspect of culture entirely. I don’t like boundaries. Everybody is a complicated character. It’s like that poem from—what’s his bucket?—Walt Whitman. ‘Song of Myself.’ Like, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ ”

  –“LIVING IN MOLLY’S METROPOLIS,” The New York Times Magazine

  On June 18, 2002, just after 4 a.m., every member of the New Situationists received an emergency text message. The group often used text messaging for mass or personal communications. They all had burner cell phones, the same type that drug dealers used, which didn’t require that they disclose any personal information when signing up for service. Twice a month, they destroyed their old phones and bought new ones. Every member of the group used a generic nickname, like Jane or Joe or Nick, as their “phone name,” and they developed a series of simple code words to cloak the meanings of their messages. A text that began with “911,” for example, was personal or low priority. The message on June 18 began with the word “hey” which meant there was some kind of emergency that required immediate attention. The rest of the June 18 text was written in a biliteral cipher: a code where each letter of the intended message was replaced by a group of five A’s and B’s; for example, ‘m’ could be represented by ABAAA and ‘o’ could be represented by BBBAA, so ‘Mom’ would be spelled ‘ABAAA-BBBAA-ABAAA.’ David Wilson had adopted the simple code as a way for the New Situationists to communicate covertly but easily.

  Although the group had scattered after planting their bombs, they were all awake when the message came in and they quickly decoded it: “M-H was arrested. Come to the headquarters now.” Before Kraus’s arrest report had even been filed, the New Situationists had sheltered themselves in their headquarters, the secret basement level of an office building at 2356 North Racine Avenue, at the corner of Armitage.*

  The New Situationist headquarters was modeled on a building designed by Constant, but never built. Constant called the building La Maison Astuce or The Trick House. When he was young, Constant hoped to build La Maison Astuce as a personal residence to retire to, but by the time he reached the end of his life he was more concerned with painting than building. In 1992, he published the blueprints for anyone to use.

  La Maison Astuce has seventeen rooms that branch off one central hallway. The first sixteen rooms, identical squares, are only accessible from the top floor. Inside each room is a little world onto itself, not unlike individual apartments in an apartment building, though with a markedly different ambiance. Each “room” has two levels, the top floor with a foyer, living room, public bathroom, and office. Connected by a staircase, the bottom floor has a bedroom, kitchenette, private library, and private office. These sixteen rooms are, as Constant put it, “like their own little worlds.”†

  The seventeenth room, at the back of the house, is the trick that gives the Trick House its name. Although it is the same size as the other sixteen rooms, it’s not split into two levels. Instead, the ceilings are two stories high. The door at the end of the second floor hallway opens into empty air; from inside the seventeenth room, the door blends seamlessly into the high wall. Any visitor that doesn’t know the trick to the room could, according to Constant, “fall to their death.”‡ The seventeenth room is safely accessed from the second floor hallway’s obscured eighteenth door, which has no doorknob. To open the door, you must push “in the spot where the doorknob would be”§; the door then opens to a spiral staircase.

  The New Situationists also added a “back door” to the office, which wasn’t on Constant’s original plan. This secondary or emergency exit led to the underground garage of the building next door, through an entrance labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY, though no employee of the second building had a key. Although Constant didn’t design the back door, he condoned its creation. In an explanation of the space published in Potlatch, a proto-Situationist publication, he wrote, “A hidden exit, or several, placed somewhere in the building could provide additional opportunities for spatial play. Design at will, according to the landscape.”ǁ

  When the New Situationists built The Trick House, they imagined that members could occupy the sixteen apartments, but most New Situationists never got around to moving in. Before the bombings, only Kraus, David Wilson, and the president of the New Situationists lived in the headquarters. Everyone else rented separate apartments. Berliner visited the headquarters often, but he was never given a room of his own to use; instead, he stayed with Kraus. There they could be alone to talk pop philosophy and have sex. According to Kraus, she let him sleep naked in her bedroom while she attended strategy meetings “above his clearance level” in the president’s office.

  After the bombings, all of the New Situationists hid themselves on the lower floor of their quarters. Only Berliner and Wilson came and went. Perhaps all sixteen rooms were full; perhaps some people had to share rooms. Because I don’t know how many members the New Situationists actually had, and because Berliner and Kraus refuse to talk about that period of time in any detail, I don’t know what hiding out was actually like. It could’ve been lonely, isolated, and spacious, or cramped and frustrating. I do know that all of their supplies came in from a security guard who worked in the office building. Berliner warned me not to look for that person, laboriously switching between gender pronouns as he always did when protecting the identity of someone associated with the New Situationists: “If you look, you won’t find him. If you do find her, he won’t have any useful information.” I did search for the security guard but, as Berliner had predicted, I didn’t find anything of use.

  Buried in their own architectural creation, the New Situationists were forced to take stock of themselves and their organization. They were disillusioned. At first they held an official meeting every day during their sequester and argued constantly about the future of the movement. Eventually they stopped meeting and stopped talking to each other at all. No one tried to save the New Situationists except Berliner, who gave a passionate speech about courage and idealism. When another member stopped him in the middle of his rant to call him an ignorant and senseless child, Berliner punched him in the face. The conflict between Berliner and the other members ended only when he was incarcerated. By virtue of their forced cohabitation, the New Situationists limped along into the New Year, as their isolation stretched into its tenth month.

  By the time Kraus’s trial started in March, the police were spending less time investigating of the members of the New Situationists, for good reason. In 2003, six hundred and one people were murdered in Chicago, and about half of the homicides were related to gang or drug violence. The CPD had their hands full and a bombing suspect on trial; the newspaper headlines had shifted back to President Bush’s war in Iraq. The New Situationists and Kraus were buried on the second page of the Metro section. Though the Federal Investigation continued, and indeed remains an open case to this day, the New Situationists felt safer, and the group slowly disbanded.

  After his stint in juvenile detention, Berliner didn’t return to the New Situationist headquarters. He had probably been the most emotionally affected by the collapse of the group; he had treated their goals like religion and Kraus like a priest. Heartbroken, he moved back into his mother’s house and sat in the courtroom every day to watch the proceedings of Kraus’s trial. He wore a pair of gray suit pants and a rotating set of pale blue button-down shirts. At the end of each day in court, the bailiff led Kraus through the small band of courtroom reporters allowed to attend the trail. They didn’t shout at her like on television, but the photographers took hundreds of pictures. Ber
liner followed in the wake of the reporters. He watched as Kraus stepped into the windowless van that transported her back to the Dwight Correctional Center, and then he walked all the way from the courthouse in the Loop to his mother’s brownstone in Lincoln Park. He ruined his shiny black loafers with weeks of that kind of walking. He stayed in every evening; he never socialized or watched TV. Instead, he read fiction: the collected stories of Borges, Drown by Junot Díaz, several novels by Italo Calvino, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

  The trial ended on April 30; a week later, Kraus received her sentence. Berliner sat in the back of the courtroom during the sentencing and Kraus turned around to look at him three times. Kraus had refused to see Berliner when he tried to visit her in jail, so during the sentencing he wouldn’t sit close enough to Kraus to touch her. When the judge read her sentence, Kraus didn’t react, but Berliner burst into tears and ran out of the courtroom when the reporters took his picture.

  “She’s not the kind of girl that wanted some kind of protection from me or from any boyfriend—and, anyway, our dynamic wasn’t like that. She hated having me in the courtroom in general,” Berliner said during our third interview.

  “When I visited her in prison, later, she was always saying to me, ‘you shouldn’t have had to see my trial’—that was the kind of relationship we had. So, [sitting in the back of the courtroom] was a teenage defiant thing like, ‘Fuck you, you won’t see me? I’ll sit in the back. If we’re going to end, let’s end it dramatically. You’ll miss me.’ Of course, it wasn’t like that. I cried. I went to visit her the next week and made sure she was still my girlfriend. She was, she still is, no matter who I’m with she will always be, but in the courtroom everything feels dramatic. Everything in my life at that point had a very heightened sense of drama, and that was the apex. I started watching Law and Order with my mother, and I always wished they would keep up with the characters after the trials, just so I could have a guide for how to act. My mother told me to pray, but of course I didn’t have anything to pray to.”