The Ghost Network (33 page)

At the same time, Berliner said: “It was kind of a group effort.”

“Okay,” Wilson said. “Good for you.”

“So what now?” Taer asked.

“I guess you might as well get on the train,” Wilson said.

Wilson went to the engine room to start the train car again, while Taer, Nix, and Berliner climbed inside the first car. The seats,
some facing forward and some facing back, were covered in decaying red fabric. The white paint on the walls was chipped and the stuffing was coming out of the plush seats. Nix sat, squeezing the fabric of the seat cushions in her fist, feeling the dust on them. She felt uneasy but didn’t speak up. Berliner picked at the peeling paint with his fingernails, collecting a handful of millimeter-long paint chips, then pocketing them. Taer, exhilarated, grabbed the metal handrails and walked up and down the center aisle of the car, examining everything she could. When the train started she could barely contain a shout.

“We followed Molly Metropolis’s map,” Taer said, when Wilson walked back into the train car. “Where is she? What is this train? Where are we going?”

“Are we not going back there?” Nix asked. “Because let me off.”

“Seriously?” Taer said.

“I’m not going somewhere random with this dude,” Nix said. “Fuck that.”

Wilson laughed, a dry wheeze. He said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, Caitlin, but this train is nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” Taer said. “It’s a train.”

“It’s a toy,” he said. “You found the life-size version of a child’s train set.”

“What do you mean?” Berliner asked.

“But,” Taer said, painfully hopeful, “there’s a train here that’s not on a regular map. That you can only find on Molly Metropolis’s crazy map.”

“Our crazy map,” Berliner said.

Wilson laughed again.

“How did you know we were down here?” Berliner asked.

“There are security cameras. And I come down here a lot,” Wilson admitted sheepishly.

Berliner laughed, perhaps cruelly, but Wilson wasn’t shamed. “You came into the group too late, Nick. And you were still young.
Your life wasn’t affected the way our lives were. The rest of my life is going to be about the New Situationists, and I was just some kid who smoked too much pot and read too much about Guy Debord. I didn’t understand what being part of the group was going to mean for the rest of my life.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” Taer said, ignoring Berliner and Wilson’s side conversation. “This train has to be something, because Molly’s map—she pointed us right here.”

“She pointed me to the train,” Berliner said.

“She came down here too, in January, big day for me,” Wilson joked. “I’ve had a lot of action recently.”

“So you told her what you told us,” Taer pressed. “And then what?”

“And then I showed her what the train is. The New Situationists restored it as a kind of pet project. There are three stations, restored like the one I picked you up in. The entrances are hidden. Sometimes the higher ups would have little cocktail parties here, or they’d use it as a private way to get around the city, but mostly they just liked that they had a secret train no one else knew about. And like I said, it’s a toy. So, I told Molly all this. I took her to the other two stations, where I’m taking you, and showed her. And then we went back to the Aquarium station—that’s the best one. I dropped her off. She was upset. She was crying and wearing something ridiculous. She left and that was it. I heard she disappeared.”

*
Cyrus didn’t visit this station while he was writing this book; more information on the station to come. —CD

“It is known that initially the situationists wanted at the very least to build cities.”

—Guy Debord, quoted from
The Situationist City
by Simon Sadler

The Situationists wanted to change the world. They failed.

Molly Metropolis’s situations—her songs, her videos, her albums, all of her insane clothing—did what the Situationists could never achieve. She completed their work; she changed the world; at least, she changed popular culture, a driving force of the world. She shaped pop culture in her image. She achieved global reach, global name recognition. She prepared to continue their work, ready to sacrifice her career in order to do so. What did they give her in return? A toy. No wonder she decided to leave.

When I first began researching Molly Metropolis’s and Taer’s disappearances, I immediately contacted Berliner and Nix to request interviews. They declined, as did the members of their and Molly’s
immediate families. After several e-mails, Nix took pity on me and responded with something more than “No, thank you.” She wrote, “I can tell you everything you need to know to write about Caitlin and Molly right now: there is no secret. You are looking for something that doesn’t exist.” Instead of heeding her warning, I plodded on, occasionally e-mailing her and Berliner with a renewed interview request and reports of my steady progress—often overstating the magnitude of my discoveries.

Most people overstate, I told myself at the time. I also told myself that by exaggerating the depth of my progress on discovering either where Molly had gone or what had happened to her, I could somehow will those discoveries into being.

For fifteen months, I researched and wrote, focusing mostly on the historical portions of the narrative. I developed a fondness for Debord’s first wife, Michele Bernstein, and her coquettish novels about the bohemian society lives of the Situationists. Debord had asked her to write them as a source of income, but she liked having her name on something, even if that thing was the period’s equivalent to
Gossip Girl
. I’m proud to report that I retained enough of my French to read the novels in their original language—a lucky thing, as her second novel,
La Nuit
, still hasn’t been translated into English.

Taer’s family gave me her journals and computer files without question, and just as I was coming to terms with relying on them completely for the contemporary portions of the book, Nix and Berliner jointly replied to one of my monthly e-mails, agreeing to speak with me. At the time, I believed I had scored a great victory. I know now that Berliner and Nix agreed to be interviewed to try to kill my book.

I spoke with them a combined total of twelve times: seven conversations with Berliner, four with Nix, and one with them
together. The final interview was the dual one; in my last meeting with Berliner, I had pissed him off by asking too many questions about his relationship with Kraus, after he repeatedly told me he was “finished with that topic.” Nix had to convince him to talk to me again and finish telling their stories. At that final, joint meeting, Nix described the anticlimactic train ride:

“So, after David gave his speech, he took us on a ride around the whole train track and showed us the other two stations. It took about—what would you say, Nick?—forty-five minutes? An hour? But we couldn’t have been going more than twenty miles per hour the whole time. I mean, the tracks and the train were really old. I’m not good at judging dates of design and architecture and stuff.”

“The train’s infrastructure was just worn out. Really unsafe, actually. It kind of groaned along,” Berliner said.

“That’s true. It was, like, rickety, I don’t know.”

“That’s accurate.”

“Sort of rocking all the time,” Nix said. “I guess the L does that too, but you trust the regular L trains to hold you up and you didn’t trust this train. Anyway, we saw the other stations, then he dropped us off back where we started. We left. There was really nothing else. Cait still thought he might be lying to us, she was a little bit crazed. She kept talking about breaking back in, but I believed [Wilson]. He seemed really tired.”

“So, that’s it?” I asked. “That’s the end?”

“I guess,” Nix said.

After their hour-long train ride, Nix, Taer, and Berliner returned to the Racine building. They found it half burned and swarming with firemen. Antoinette Monson still officially owned the building, and Berliner was also still officially an employee of Monson and legally authorized to speak on her behalf. The security footage from the
building was backed up offsite. The footage showed Ali, Peaches, and a crowd of their young supporters going into the building. (“We don’t put cameras in the basement because there’s nothing down there,” Berliner explained to the investigating detectives.) A few minutes later, the video showed Casares and another boy carrying Ali out of the building. Twenty minutes after that, the rest of the group fled the fire. Berliner and the CPD detectives watched the security footage until the flames destroyed the cameras. Most of the members of the New Society were convicted of arson. They served short prison sentences.

The night after the fire, Berliner, Nix, and Taer went to Rainbo and got very drunk together. They took the L to the Loop and walked to the beach. They stole a boat.

“We were very upset,” Nix said. She cried a little, recounting the evening’s events. “I don’t remember everything that happened. It’s a little bit blurry. But we didn’t mean to make it so mysterious. Cait really drowned. We just. I mean. I didn’t even know to look for her in the water, I didn’t think about anything except getting to shore and I saw Nick was kicking with me. He passed out at some point. It was cold.

“She died and it was a stupid death.”

In the introduction to
The Situationist City
, Simon Sadler wrote, “This book searches for the situationist city … I rummage with a sense of guilt: situationists didn’t want to be just another avant-garde, but the last avant-garde, overturning current practices of history, theory, politics, art, architecture, and everyday life.”
*
The Situationist International wasn’t the last of the avant-gardes. It isn’t even the best remembered avant-garde—that distinction goes to the
Surrealists. The Situationists thought Surrealist thinking was old, dead, and boring. In
All the King’s Horses
, Bernstein parodies a Surrealist dinner party: “His friends paraded out—in the usual order—all the ideas from thirty years ago, which was amusing. People from those times allow so much room for sick humor that even their stupidities can come off with a certain ambiguity.”
^†

The Situationists still aren’t widely known by name, but psychogeography has become fashionable again. Everyone likes to decorate with old maps; they fetishize the idea of transcending their borders. The Situationists have been assimilated into a commodities culture, the Spectacle, which would kill Debord if he were still alive. For the Situationists, this is a fate worse than death.

Debord didn’t live long enough to see his work bastardized into violent politics and consumerist trends. He did, however, live to see the Situationists’ relevance turned from active politics into passive academic interest. He even had to suffer through several reputable journals using the word
situationism
. After he wrote, “There is no such thing as situationism,” for years the word wasn’t used even by the Situationists’ political enemies, as if his writing was a royal decree. Then, when Debord was old and his power was sapped, the academics began using it. In a sense, those few times the word “situationism” was printed were like bells tolling Debord’s death.

This is the unsatisfying end to Debord’s story, to the story of the New Situationists, to Molly’s story, to Berliner’s story, to the New Society’s story, to Taer’s story, and to mine. I can’t satisfy you, so I wish, at least, that I could ease you more gently into an ending. I can’t do that either. I have nothing left for anyone. No one will be reading this, anyway. Why revise? Why edit? Why narrate?

Where is Molly Metropolis?—this question is left unanswered and might never be known. I certainly won’t be able to answer it. I’m content now to drift, like Caitlin Taer must’ve done, clinging to the scraps of a ruined boat in the dark and freezing Lake Michigan water, waiting for my turn to sink and disappear.

*
The Situationist City
, 1.

†
Michèle Bernstein,
All the King’s Horses
, trans. John Kelsey (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 22–23.

“We have published several texts … that in thirty years will still be the basis for the creative movement that will not fail to constitute itself.”

—Guy Debord, in a letter to Constant Nieuwenhuys, 1959

Epilogue

by Catie Disabato

July 1, 2014

Maybe this is funny or maybe it isn’t: Cyrus Kinnely Archer did, eventually, disappear. I’m not speaking metaphorically—Cyrus is as gone as Molly Metropolis or Caitlin Taer. His book ended when he reached the end of the story that Taer told him with everything she left behind, but his book also ended before the story ended.

Cyrus was born in Mequon, Wisconsin, outside of Milwaukee. I’ve seen a few pictures of him as a young, blonde child at the water park at Wisconsin Dells: at the top of the waterslide, eating applesauce with his brothers at the family-style themed restaurant Paul Bunyan’s Cook Shanty. He seems at home among the artifice of amusement parks and tourist traps.