Authors: Catie Disabato
At first, she thought she’d accidentally deleted the connection between the dot and the next nearby station. Then Taer noticed that the color of the dot, a pale and almost metallic pink, didn’t match any other dots and lines nearby, nor any other dot she could see. The dot had been placed on the map at the intersection of Armitage and
Racine, at the location of the very building Taer was then sitting inside. Taer scoured the map for any other trace of the distinctive pink. She didn’t see it, but she wasn’t discouraged.
She flipped to a particularly oblique passage in Molly’s notebook:
I found that the [New Situationists] left enough marks to follow, toeing the Party Line but didn’t leave their Pyramid Eye to make an easy path. I can’t tell if they were performing or acting, or if there is a difference between performing or acting, but I will find out and if I find anything, I’ll leave my Third Eye behind to make a map on top of a map on top of a map like I’ve always done. To be fair to them (Debord and my sweet Nick, who answers to a higher power [currently incarcerated]), I won’t leave an A–Zed sort of a guide, will I? Everyone will have to find something in the lattice. Who am I to deny my dearest ones the fun of their own mystery to solve?
Taer copied the passage into her own journal, circled the word “marks” in the first line, and next to it, she wrote: “pink one at A&R.” Taer also wrote several question marks next to the phrase “Party Line,” and wrote: “Why capitalize this?” Next to the words “Third Eye,” Taer wrote: “Third Eye equals a Pyramid Eye equals a triangle, like Jenny’s triangle. We have to find Molly’s triangle.” She thought the errant pink dot was one apex of a secret triangle, not present on any of the historical maps, which Molly had embedded into The Ghost Network.
For the next several hours, Taer searched the map for the second point in Molly’s triangle, and finally found another pink dot outside of Chicago proper, at the Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling, Illinois.
The wine caught up with Taer then. She took off her bra and fell asleep on Molly’s couch. She slept until nine the next morning
when Berliner nudged her awake and playfully flung her bra at her head. Rather than share her discovery with Berliner immediately, Taer decided to investigate the pink dots herself. Berliner and Nix still don’t understand why.
“She’s motivated by emotions rather than thought,” Nix said.
“She
was
,” Berliner corrected, and Nix flinched.
“You don’t think she wanted to find something without you?” I asked Nix.
“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s frustrating to try to guess about it now. I thought maybe she had written something to explain why she would go searching without us, after everything, but there was nothing in her journals.”
“Maybe she was trying to protect you,” Berliner said to Nix.
“Oh yeah,” Nix said sarcastically, raising her hand with two fingers missing, “she did a really good job protecting me. I’m literally scarred for life.”
Berliner didn’t respond.
Nix said, “Can we stop fucking around and just tell him Taer’s story about her Special Secret Investigation of the Secret Pink Dot now?”
“Please do,” I responded, before Berliner could say anything.
That day, Taer told Berliner and Nix she was picking up an extra shift at Rainbo. At about 3 p.m., Taer left the Urban Planning Committee headquarters and rode the Metra Union Pacific Northwest Line to the location of the second pink dot.
†
Taer searched the outermost boarder of the grounds of the Chicago Executive Airport for a full hour. She couldn’t wander the grounds because a security guard chased her off when she tried, but luckily, she didn’t need to go deep into the airfield to find what she was looking for. Just south of the small terminal, near a stretch of
runway running alongside South Milwaukee Avenue, Taer found a small brick building painted almost the same color pink as the dots on the digital version of The Ghost Network. The pink paint, though chipped, stood out against the bleak airport landscape of gray and faded green. Taer stood on the hood of someone’s car, smashed through one of the windows with a branch, cut through a flimsy wire screen with the sharp side of one of her keys, and heaved herself over the window ledge.
Immediately, Taer looked for a staircase to the basement and found another steel door with a little keypad lock. She entered the same combination she used to enter the Urban Planning Committee headquarters and the door opened. She descended into darkness.
Taking pictures with her phone as she went, Taer descended on stairs made of rotting wood. She kept one hand on the brick wall to steady herself, and in the other held her cell phone, with her flashlight app activated. Just before she reached the bottom of the staircase, the stairs changed to concrete and tile. Her hand, moving blindly along the wall, bumped into a light switch. She flicked it, and with a loud hum, the lights turned on. Taer was in a train station in disrepair, decorated with signage from the 1950s, plaques that said in fat, black letters “
NO SMOKING. NO SPITTING
” and “
WATCH OUT: DO NOT LEAN OVER THE PLATFORM.
” She kicked up clouds of dust and she walked across the floor of cracked tile, arranged in a formless white and green mosaic. Coughing from the dust, lighting her way and taking pictures, Taer found a single incongruous item: a plaque made of plastic, lightly backlit by an LED lamp, designed to look like one of the ’50s plaques, but which clearly had been affixed to the wall of the station more recently. It said “
PLAQUES TOURNANTES TROIS
” in the same black lettering.
Taer only spent a minute or two exploring the station before a dim beam of light suddenly broke the darkness, emanating from the tunnel beyond. She froze, then scrambled out of the pathway
of the light. She waited. The light intensified quickly, and she heard the screech and chug of an approaching train. Had Taer stayed, all her mysteries would’ve been solved, but she was terrified. She ran.
On the long ride from the airport back to the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, during which she anxiously transferred between Metra trains and L trains and buses in case someone was following her, Taer tried to call Nix and Berliner several times. Neither of them answered their phones. Taer’s mind reeled with the memory of the unknown train’s bright light, and she spent about an hour in a coffee shop near the headquarters, writing furiously in her journal. Her notes from this writing session were penned so sloppily as to be almost unreadable. As if she was trying to get her hand to move as fast as her racing mind, she neglected to finish sentences and ignored the lines on the paper. As she wrote page after page, she returned several times to a single thought, first expressed as: “I bet Molly got on that train.” By the end of the hour, she had dropped all speculation: “Molly got on that train.”
Taer walked to the headquarters still dazed, where she was surprised to find Berliner in his kitchen, icing a fresh wound on the back of his head. While he and Nix were walking through an alley shortcut between the Urban Planning Committee headquarters and the nearest liquor store, someone jumped them from behind and knocked Berliner unconscious. When he came to, Nix was gone.
Taer panicked. She called Nix’s cell phone about fifty times; Nix never answered. Eventually, the phone stopped ringing and went straight to Nix’s voice mail. Crying in fear and frustration, Taer wanted to call the police and report Nix missing, but Berliner stopped her. He had a different way to help Nix, which involved revealing a secret he’d been keeping from Taer since she had found him.
Because Berliner knew how important Molly’s pop star career was to her and her ideals, when Molly didn’t show up for the sound check on January 9, Berliner immediately assumed she had been taken against her will. He believed nothing would’ve made Molly Metropolis give up her position of power.
Berliner suspected Ali and Peaches had kidnapped her. He stole his grandmother’s gun and quickly found the New Society in a downtown apartment that Zavos owned, on the seventh floor of the Anne De Zoet building in a posh area of Chicago called River North. While Nix frantically searched through boutique clothing stores and Molly’s dancers rehearsed during sound check without her, Berliner stormed the headquarters of the Society of Children of the Atomic Bomb.
Actually, “storming” isn’t the right word to describe Berliner’s actions. It’s not as though he burst through the doors of the apartment complex with a double-barreled shotgun in his arms and a S.W.A.T. team at his back. The doorman, Ray Mitchell, opened the door for him and called up to number seven to see if Ali was in. She told Ray to send Berliner up. Berliner allowed the doorman to put his coat, with his gun and his map sketchpad in the pocket, in the apartment complex’s coat check, where he assumed his items would be safe. He was worried that if he brought them up to the apartment, Ali, Peaches, and their compatriots would overpower him and take them.
Peaches greeted Berliner at the door, checked him for weapons or papers and, finding nothing, invited him inside. Berliner noticed the wooden flooring and the chic, minimalist furnishings and décor. He sat in the living room on a brown leather sofa, a seat which afforded him a great view of the downtown skyline. One of the younger members of the New Society brought them glasses of white wine, then lingered in the corner during Peaches and Berliner’s conversation. Berliner never saw a New Society member
older than Ali; they gave the collective impression of malleable young cult members.
Berliner declined to drink the wine and refused to stay on the couch. He believed Molly was tied up in a closet somewhere. Peaches allowed him to go through every nook and cranny of the apartment. He spent a full hour searching, even looking for secret panic rooms (and later he acquired blueprints from the city, the building’s management, and the building’s security company to make sure he hadn’t missed anything). No Molly to be found.
Instead, resting on a nightstand in the fourth bedroom, he saw the circular purple quartz necklace Davis always wore. This discovery rattled Berliner; he didn’t want to believe that a woman he’d trusted had betrayed him so thoroughly. He decided not to mention his discovery to the New Society and test Davis’s loyalty at another time—a test that, as previously described, ultimately led to Taer’s involvement in his investigation of Molly’s disappearance.
When Berliner was satisfied Molly wasn’t stuffed in a closet somewhere, Peaches asked him to leave. In the lobby, Berliner reclaimed his own jacket in a huff. He was so upset that he didn’t realize until he was out in the snow that both his gun and his sketchpad of maps had been taken out of his pockets. Ray Mitchell, as Berliner should’ve assumed, was on Ali’s payroll. Berliner was unable to reclaim his stolen items.
Once he brought Taer up to speed, they decided to go back to Michigan and talk to Davis. Berliner hoped he could force Davis to reveal where the New Society had taken Nix. Taer stopped weeping and accessed a quiet, aggressive rage. She dressed in her thickest pair of jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and pulled her hair into a tight bun on the top of her head. During those hours after Nix’s abduction, Berliner said Taer was numb and inconsolable.
“She was really freaking out, but silent, which was unlike her,”
Berliner said. “All that intensity she had—she just channeled it into making Gina’s kidnapping into this solvable problem. She’d seem fine, totally in control, then just burst into tears in a second. And yell at me if I tried to comfort her. She was so, so aggressive.”
Berliner and Taer traveled by train to Davis’s parents’ house. Davis’s father George answered the door. He led them to the living room, where the uncomfortable couches and lack of side tables exemplified the house’s overall uninviting quality. Davis was reading, slumped in an armchair. George quickly left for the evening, believing his daughter’s ex-boyfriend had come for a visit with his new girlfriend. George wanted to give his daughter space and avoid overhearing any awkward details.
In Davis, Taer expected to find a conniving operator, a young woman who had only pretended to be sad to deceive her and Nix, like the villain in a fairy tale. Instead, Davis was the same sad girl, mourning her mother and conflicted about her role in the war between the Urban Planning Committee and the New Society. When she saw Berliner, Davis broke down in tears and never quite recovered. Berliner took some whiskey from the kitchen and poured three glasses. After being in Davis’s parents’ house for ten minutes, he decided he hated it.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Berliner said, “but I do think a home can be imbued with a ghost-like presence from the people who’ve been left behind. Irene’s mom’s house definitely had that problem. It was the mostly ghostly house I’ve ever been in. I think Cait expected real horror movie shit to go down while we stayed there.
“It’s the worst feeling. Architectural uncanny. The house wasn’t, like, deep in the woods or on Fear Street
‡
or something, but it had that feeling like when you’re all alone late at night walking down a street and all the windows in the buildings are dark. You feel weird
déjà vu and then you realize why—you’ve seen this before, but it hasn’t happened to you. You’ve seen it on television. You’ve seen it in a movie. You are walking through, like, a pastiche of bad horror movies. You start fumbling with your keys because you expect to be fumbling with your keys and when you can’t find the right key on the key ring, you fully expect the ghost of Jack the Ripper or something to stick his hook-hand in your back. And then you find your key, and it’s behind the keychain card from Jewel-Osco
§
and everything’s fine once you have the lights on.”
Davis gave Berliner the details of her betrayal, speaking directly to him as if Taer wasn’t in the room—Davis had lied to him, spied on him, but most importantly, she had sent Taer and Nix in his direction so the New Society could follow Taer and Nix to the Urban Planning Committee headquarters.