The Ghost Network

by Catie Disabato

When they met me at my apartment, to talk to me about Taer, Molly, Kraus, the New Situationists and the old, they refused my offer of beer or wine, but ate any snacks I offered them. Sometimes their answers were candid. Other times, they sounded rehearsed. Together, they could be quite intimidating.

  After months of dodging my calls and threatening to sue me, after Berliner finally agreed to be interviewed, the first question on my list was “How did you become involved with Caitlin Taer and Regina Nix?” When he explained how he heard about them from Davis and waited to see if they would find him, a much more interesting question arose: “You and Molly never trusted anyone. Why did you trust Taer on that first evening you met?”

  When I asked him this question, Berliner’s attitude toward me changed. For the first time in our long, frustrating interaction, he really opened up and spoke honestly. Later, he would open up again about Molly, but when I asked about Taer I saw for the first time Berliner as the charismatic figure who could attract the attention of both compulsively secretive political groups and enigmatic, budding pop stars.

  “God, I don’t know why I trusted her,” he said, “Very often, when you meet a person for the first time, their emotions are really turned off. Even people who are really open, I’m not just talking about closed-off people. Most of the time, people don’t show you their heaviest, deepest emotions the first time you meet them. I mean, they don’t want to show you that vulnerable part of themselves and you don’t want to see it. You don’t want them to see yours either. There’s a social contract between people who have never met before, to be some diminished version of yourself.

  “Until I met Cait, that was par for the course. But with Cait, I saw the intensity of her emotions so instantly. It was like I could just look inside of her and see all her emotional junk, all her fear, all her love. And it was like she was letting me see it. And when you see that in someone, when I saw that in her, I began to feel that I knew her deeply before I really did. I felt that very quickly. That would’ve been dangerous, had Cait not been basically good.

  “On top of that, because Irene had told me Cait was coming, and I had been waiting for her to arrive, I’d done a lot of research on her. I had this parasocial relationship with Cait before I ever met her. All of those factors came together. And I just knew I should just …”

  Berliner trailed off without completing his thought, and let the silence stretch to an uncomfortable length. Then he continued: “Molly always said to act on instinct, and trusting Cait felt like what Molly would’ve wanted me to do. Molly was deeply important to me and I wanted to find her. Then I met this person, and she wanted to find Molly, too. I’d been alone. I’d been looking for Molly alone for a long time.”

  On that Saturday morning when Taer found Berliner, he took Nix and Taer back into the Urban Planning Committee headquarters. Taer showed Nix the trick door. Berliner offered them wine—they took it—and he told them a little bit about himself and his history with Molly. Taer reminded Berliner she was in possession of Molly Metropolis’s personal notebook and would only show it to him if Berliner let her help look for Molly. He agreed.

  Berliner called the taxi, and the three of them rode to the Chicago First National Bank and Trust. Taer retrieved Molly’s notebook from her safety deposit box, then they returned to the Urban Planning Committee by L, checking over their shoulders as they rode.

  Taer expected Berliner to recognize the notebook and to know how to unlock its secrets, but he had never seen it before.

  Unlike Berliner, Ali and Peaches had seen inside Molly’s notebook. Because Molly used the notebook for both her New Situationist research and her ideas for her pop career, she had shown Ali and Peaches selected pages, while carefully concealing others—and they wanted to see inside it again. One of the New Society’s young members had followed Taer to and from the bank, but she didn’t know about the notebook and didn’t understand its value to the leaders of the New Society. When the spy reported Taer’s activity to Ali, the dancers finally knew where the notebook was: behind a steel door they couldn’t yet breach. They refocused their energies on finding a way through the door.

  Back at the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, Berliner scoured the pages of the notebook for anything he would understand but Taer would’ve missed. He didn’t find any secret codes, any words with double meanings that only he could understand. All he found were the same exclamations of Molly having “found something,” which Taer had read before; nothing he knew about Molly added a new and revealing context to the words.

  After two days of reading and re-reading Molly’s notebook, Berliner concluded that if Metro had written down anything important, they didn’t have the context to understand it yet. This was very optimistic of him; he said it for Taer’s benefit, mostly. Privately, he thought Metro had probably never put anything on paper that could point them to something in The Ghost Network. Molly was too tied to the old New Situationist ways, protecting herself by never writing anything down.

  Berliner put the notebook aside and spent his days with The Ghost Network, re-examining the hundreds of historical documents and maps he and Molly had used to build the mega-map. He also returned to the Situationist texts—which he hadn’t read in years, not since he first met Kraus. In his return to the Situationist books, letters, and journals, Berliner focused on two prominent Situationist concepts: psychogeography and dérive, or the “drift.”

  Dérive was walking without destination, moving through urban space without a specific purpose, changing course based on feeling rather than on traffic signals, breaking the boundaries implicit in the inflexible confines of roadways, sidewalks, and other route designators. On their dérives, Debord and the Situationists searched for new routes through the familiar neighborhoods of their city, seeking to make the familiar seem unfamiliar.

  They left graffiti on the streets, claiming them as their own space through Situationist markings. Asger Jorn painted, “If we don’t die here, will we carry on further?” on the Rue du Sauvage, just across the river from one of the Situationists’ favorite buildings, a nearby morgue. Ivan Chtcheglov linked sex to the city, painting, “I came in the cobblestones,” with white paint on some cobblestone streets.

  The Situationists had fun during their dérive, and fun was one of their goals, but enjoyment wasn’t the only thing they were after. In defying how city planners wanted them to move through the cities, the Situationists also considered the dérive a serious tool for remaking the city and a cornerstone of the way of life in their potential Situationist city, New Babylon.

  Debord described how the dérive could be used to both destroy the modern city and build New Babylon, by discovering boundaries defined by the psychological feel of the city, rather than by arbitrary lines on a map. Debord wrote: “From a dérive point of view, cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”* The Situationists drifted in order to discover the “contours” that create boundaries, and they called the ethereal, intellectual tool they use while drifting to find those contours psychogeography.†

  While Berliner studied New Babylon and The Ghost Network, Taer stayed with Molly’s notebook, trying to follow Molly’s logical paths and retrace her research steps from the days just before Molly disappeared. Though they were consuming different texts, Taer and Berliner’s research was linked, as demonstrated by a passage in Molly’s notebook that Taer often returned to, quoted from the opening of Debord’s Theory of Dérive. Debord was interested in a sociological study performed by Chombart de Lauwe in 1952, where de Lauwe strove to show that the average Parisian doesn’t live in a neighborhood so much as a small swath of the city determined by her own habits and preferences. Debord liked the description of a student living in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, whose movements de Lauwe tracked for a full year. Molly was also fascinated by this student, copying the details into her notebook: “Her itinerary forms a small triangle wit
h no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.”‡

  Taer copied this paragraph into her own journal and also asked Berliner to make a quick black-and-white screen print of the paragraph to hang above the bathtub in her room at the Urban Planning Committee headquarters. On the screen print, the quote was attributed to Debord, but in the bottom left-hand corner, Berliner included a version of the signature Molly gave him, SCREEN PRINT BY ANTOINE MONSON.

  Taer’s fondness for the passage developed into something like a personal gospel. Although Debord was the author, the paragraph consists almost entirely of quotations from another man. Taer liked quotations, moments pulled from longer expression or ideas.

  “The tone of a moment can be spoiled by its context,” Taer wrote. “A single moment creates a mood.”

  Taer also latched on to the character of the female student—both a strangely vivid and maddeningly vague figure. Sometime in the late 1940s or 1950s, there was a girl, probably between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, walking through Paris in a narrow triangle. From those bare bones, Taer created a person. Taer imagined she looked and dressed like the actress Carey Mulligan in the movie An Education, even though An Education takes place in the ’60s. Taer started calling the unnamed student Jenny, after Mulligan’s character. Taer wrote:

  How shocking is the image of the piano teacher at the end after everything else? Suddenly, we know something about Jenny. She took piano lessons, often enough that the lessons formed one of the three apexes on her triangle. She was probably very good at piano. She was probably very passionate about her piano playing. She went to her piano teacher’s house more often than she went to the grocery store to buy food! She rarely went to the grocery store, her triangle tells us. Not to mention, the piano lessons imply a person in her life, a piano teacher. Another person.

  After thinking about the piano teacher for a little while, I started looking back at the rest of the paragraph. She was a poli-sci student. Did she want to be a diplomat? In the early 1950s? Could she have even done that: run for office, be in politics? Or maybe she was the kind of girl that was looking for a husband that would become a Member of Parliament (MP) or something, did she want to live through him? She was living in the 16th arrondissement which probably means something about her, like the way living in Logan Square means you’re a different person than someone who lives in Wicker Park. Also, the way Jenny thought about her neighborhood, she built up some idea of the 16th arrondissement in her mind, and that helped create the neighborhood. It seems like a never-ending cycle of living and thinking about living and drifting into a precise triangle. It’s a kind of drifting, I think, because Jenny didn’t consider her life to be contained inside of one triangle until one man came along and showed her where she really was.

  How did he diagram her movements? Was he a professor at her School of Political Sciences? Did he ask for paid volunteers? Was Jenny the only one, or did he diagram the movements of many students over the course of one year? How could he do this? Did he just follow her around all day? Did he ask her to document her own movements? Maybe he did and she didn’t report things—she went to the same student bar a lot and didn’t mention it because she often picked up men there and brought them back to her residence-apex. She would leave that out, wouldn’t she? It would be considered slutty. She’d want to present herself as this Student of Political Sciences and Student of Piano. She’d want to keep her dirty deeds to herself. Perhaps she was picking up women, not men. Ponytailed girls in blazers, also poli-sci students, named Joan, or Jeanne en français. Perhaps she masturbated at night to thoughts of someone recording her movements from the bar and home again, night after night with Jeanne. She imagined de Lauwe reading about her movements and she gasped, shocked and turned on at once, and that’s what made her cum, revealing herself to this older man and his stupid study.

  Taer’s own life morphed into Jenny’s; the three apexes of her own triangle were Rainbo, where she still worked, the headquarters of the Urban Planning Committee, and the closest coffee shop. She went to the grocery store less, living off organic peeled baby carrots, clementines, red wine, and bacon.

  Taer and Nix moved out of Taer’s apartment and into one of the unused rooms in the headquarters on Racine. With Berliner, they fell into a comfortable routine. Their days began when Berliner arrived at the Urban Planning Committee headquarters with three Americanos and three chocolate croissants in hand. Berliner and Taer opened their laptops and spent a few minutes checking the Internet for any news about Molly.

  In the late morning, Berliner turned his attention to the vast quantities of information he, Ali, Peaches, and Molly had collected during the Urban Planning Committee’s most productive months. Taer spent her time with Molly’s notebook, or the assembled Ghost Network. Molly had actually thought of The Ghost Network as a three-part system. The first part was the collection of maps and blueprints Molly and Berliner had used to build the map. The second was the huge wall mural Berliner had painted at Molly’s behest. Berliner painted the two-story wall of Molly’s office using hundreds of shades of paint, one for each L train line, against a pearly, eggshell white. This copy of The Ghost Network was beautiful, but not practical.

  The third version of The Ghost Network was digital. Molly’s programmer had designed the visual base of MollyMaps as a detailed road map of Chicago and the surrounding area, pilfered from Google Maps. Over the base, Molly added the train lines and stations by typing in the address of a station, or never-built station, and connecting the address to another address, where the next station would be, had been, or was. The digital version of The Ghost Network also contained a well-designed search function. The user could search for any train line or train station by name or location. MollyMaps also recorded every revision to the map in a searchable archive.

  Taer used MollyMaps’ search function to cross-check an L map or blueprint or L expansion proposal plan with The Ghost Network, but her favorite way to interact with The Ghost Network was to zoom in on the first station of a train line and examine the details of the area around each train station. Because MollyMaps’ core map had been stolen from Google, Taer could see the restaurants or parks or office buildings that had been built on land once considered a place for transport. When Taer picked a train line to examine in such detail, she rarely did so for a concrete reason. She chose her train lines impressionistically, because a color caught her eye or a particular curve in the line seemed interesting to trace. She moved between lines based on feeling; she was conducting her own virtual dérive through the fake train city that Molly had built.

  While Taer and Berliner spent their days researching, Nix read about the Situationists, trying to come up with theories about what the New Situationists might’ve been hiding. She searched for various Situationist keywords in MollyMaps. She compared a collage called “The Naked City”—which Debord and Constant made using map fragments—to the painting of The Ghost Network on the wall, looking for repeated patterns.

  At 5:30 p.m., Berliner insisted the working day was over. He worried the three of them would go insane if he didn’t impose some kind of forced down time. They ate dinner together every night. They frequented the nearby Italian and Mexican restaurants or picked up Chinese or Thai carryout. When they ate Chinese, they drank beer. At the Italian restaurant, they split two bottles of wine between the three of them, always red. They all ordered spicy dishes or passed a bottle of hot sauce around the table.

  At dinner, they caught up on each other’s personal histories. Berliner told them about his exorcism; Taer tried to explain the way her drive to be a successful writer had shaped all of her emotional experiences since she was sixteen. Nix talked about being best friends in high school with another latent lesbian, watching Mulholland Drive and fast-forwarding through the sex scenes.

  A few nights a week, Taer worked at Rainbo. On those nights, Berliner walked Nix back to the Urban Plan
ning Committee’s headquarters and stayed with her until Taer returned. They watched movies: Videodrome, the Wachowskis’ lesbian heist movie Bound, and Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire movie Near Dark. They drank more. Sometimes, Berliner told her stories about Kraus. Nix wanted to hear everything about the strict regulations Berliner had to follow when he visited Kraus at the Dwight Correctional Center.

  When Taer didn’t have to work, Berliner sometimes walked home alone, Taser in his pocket just in case. He was living in his Molly-built pied-à-terre at the time, occasionally entertaining his archive girlfriend, Johnson. Sometimes Berliner and Taer spent a few hours hanging out alone in a nearby beer bar, Local Option, Nix at home in the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, drinking and reading alone. Perched at the bar in front of a row of taps, sipping on tulip glasses full of highly alcoholic craft beers, Taer and Berliner debated the utility of psychogeography and détournement.

  During our interviews, Berliner likened his friendships with Taer and Nix to an adolescent summer camp friendship. “Each hour in summer camp is the social equivalent of, basically, a week,” Berliner explained to me. “Romantic relationships that are eight hours old are practically marriages. Intense bonds form, clique loyalties are basically immobile once they coalesce. Then they’re over, just as fast.”

  Berliner also told Taer his stories about Kraus, but Taer didn’t ask for more detail the way Nix did, preferring to debate at length whether Constant’s New Babylon could ever be built, and if it was built, if it could thrive. Berliner and Taer agreed it could somehow be built, but Berliner thought New Babylon would implode and Taer thought it could work. When Berliner asked Taer about her own relationship, she never said much, though more than once Taer told Berliner she was in love with Nix. Except for Taer’s one-on-one drinking sessions with Berliner and her nights at Rainbo, the young women spent all their time together, comfortable now in extreme geographical and physical closeness. They no longer knew what it was like to spend more than a few hours apart.