Authors: Catie Disabato
“There are all kinds of people who aren’t taking it well,” I said. “People who don’t know she’s alive. Cait’s mom, for one.”
Molly picked at one of her nails. “I don’t want to lie to you, or argue with you. But, I’d prefer to steer the conversation in another direction.”
“But this is important,” I insisted. “Your parents—”
“That’s enough,” she snapped, her cute little snarl, captured by so many paparazzi, now directed at me. “Do you want me to stop talking?”
“We have to address this,” I said.
“I never like to be rude, especially to people who are interviewing me, I really try not to be. But I’m here at my own discretion and I can drop you off anytime I choose.
People make sacrifices, I made my own and it was a very important learning experience for myself. I will make more, you will make some, many other people will sacrifice, and that isn’t the topic I choose to focus on, so you won’t either. I won’t speak to any questions about my parents.”
So I dropped it, and we moved on, starting with the extent of Berliner and Taer’s lies to Cyrus.
Molly told me that Cyrus’s book (whose ending I’ve preserved in its entirety, despite the lies) is true up until the first time Taer, Nix, and Berliner boarded the train, with Wilson not happy to see them. They rode the train, and Wilson begrudgingly informed Taer, Berliner, and Nix they passed a test by finding it. Having succeeded, they had a choice: they could get off the train at
Plaques Tournantes Deux
, or continue to the final stop, where their journey would continue. The first train ride had metaphorical importance. If they chose to continue, they would have to fake their own deaths. Wilson suggested the drowning in Lake Michigan, during stormy weather and rough waters and a current that hypothetically could pull a lifeless body miles away from shore in a matter of hours. Then they would have to return to the train, travel for many more hours, and they would never be able to return.
“You’re on the Edge of the World,” Wilson had said. “You liked those maps, didn’t you, Nick?”
Ignoring the ominous tone of Wilson’s declaration, Taer had pushed him for more information. “Where would the train take us?” she demanded.
“New Babylon.”
I made a surprised noise.
“Finding the train is like passing a test,” Molly said. “The train has three stops. The first stop is where you get on. And you can get off at the second or third stops. If you get off at the second stop, that means you don’t want to come to New Babylon, you don’t want to build a new world with us. If you get off at the third stop, that means you want to keep moving.”
“And getting off at station two, that’s an acceptable choice?” I wanted to make a joke like
if I tell you, I’d have to kill you
, but I was still a little bit nervous around Molly. It really was exactly like talking to the ghost of someone really, really famous.
“It’s what Gina chose,” she said.
“And Nick Berliner.”
“Well, yes, sort of,” Molly said. She smiled. “For the time being. He’s waiting for Marie-Hélène and then they will come to New Babylon together.”
“Waiting for her to get out of prison, you mean.”
“Yes, that’s my darling Nick, he’s very romantic about her. It’s wonderful to be around two people who are so dramatically fucking in love with each other. It’s been an inspiration to myself.”
As Marie-Hélène Kraus has been in prison since before Molly met Berliner, I’m not sure how she spent time around both of them (did she visit Kraus in prison with Berliner?) or whether it was enough time to adequately understand the depth of their love. I didn’t bring this up.
“Okay, so, New Babylon. Let’s go back to that. I’ve heard of that, it was a city Constant Nieuwenhuys designed, but it wasn’t a real city, it was never built.”
“ ‘Realness’ doesn’t mean it had a zip code. It was a real city then but, no, it was never built. But he didn’t design it to make an art project. It was a city, a potential city. Until now, when its potential has been realized.”
“What does that even mean?”
“We are building New Babylon, and we are living there. Cait is there, and Cyrus.”
“Is that where all the New Situationists went after the bombing?”
“I can’t answer questions about that.”
“But—”
“Stop asking.”
“Had you built the city from Constant’s original design?”
“New Babylon, by its very nature, is never ‘finished,’ always changing based on the desires and pleasure of the inhabitants but—restricted to traditional definitions—one might say that it is built. We have, for example, running water.”
“You built it since you were gone, a whole city?”
“Oh no.” She laughed. “You shouldn’t attribute the building of this city to me just because I’m famous. I’m not the builder of New Babylon, merely one of its most prominent citizens.”
“Who is the builder?”
“To explain that, let’s go back for a moment to the nature of New Babylon and Constant, because if you’ve studied his documents—we have a lot of the originals, actually—you’ll notice that he wasn’t very specific in regards to the practicalities involved in building his city. Their city, the Situationist city. So we’ve had to be very innovative. A lot of that innovation originated before I arrived. I’m not an engineer, though I’m becoming one, which is very exciting for me. I think every citizen of New Babylon will be able to self-identify as an engineer, that will be part of our national identity.”
“National identity?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “In terms of intent, has that remained the same, from Constant’s drawings?”
“For the most part.”
“So who is the mastermind? The guy who decided, fuck it, fuck America, I’m moving to New Babylon even if I have to build it myself?”
Molly looked at me. “You’re not as imaginative as Caitlin. Or perhaps, that’s not fair, just less well-read. The architect of New Babylon is Guy Debord.”
You might remember, as I remembered at the moment, that Guy Debord committed suicide in 1994 when he shot himself in the heart.
“Obviously he didn’t,” Molly said, when I pointed that out.
According to Molly, the manifestation of New Babylon began in 1984, with the murder of Gérard Lebovici, Debord’s friend and fellow filmmaker. Debord was investigated as the French equivalent of a “person of interest” in Lebovici’s death, though never arrested or
even officially labeled a suspect. The murder reminded Debord of his own impending demise and his lack of impact on the world. When he was young, he had wanted to change everything, but he had changed nothing and while he grew old, the Society of the Spectacle only strengthened and spread. Debord felt he had failed. Rather than give up, he decided to carve out a new space for himself, a true Situationist space. He decided to build the Situationist city.
Quietly, with a few of his closest friends (all male), he began planning the construction of New Babylon. They found a location and developed strategies for how to actualize, how to “manifest,” Constant’s fictional city. Debord simultaneously began planning his final film
Guy Debord: son art et son temps
, that is,
Guy Debord: His Art and His Times
(which, despite the title, isn’t a biopic) as a cover story, to keep his acquaintances and wife, Alice Becker-Ho, in the dark about the New Babylon project.
Over the next decade, Debord supervised the building of the city from afar. In 1994, the city was inhabitable enough to accommodate even an aging man like Debord. To remove himself from the Society of the Spectacle and become a full citizen of the Situationist city, Debord faked his own death by suicide on December 1, 1994. Molly wouldn’t tell me the methods he used to fake shooting himself through the heart (perhaps he paid off the cops, coroner, etc.?) and maybe he never told. His two co-conspirators, publisher Gérard Voitey and writer Roger Stéphane, followed him on December 3 and December 4. Their deaths were called “copycat” suicides.
Debord, Voitey, and Stéphane, all old men in 1994, didn’t build and inhabit the Situationist city alone.
“Lots of young French men and women, people in their twenties, psychogeographists, went missing in 1994 as well.”
I must’ve looked startled.
Molly laughed. “I didn’t mean to make that sound so nefarious!
Nothing untoward happened. I merely meant to imply …” She paused again, laughed again, exuding such warmth and vivacity, was so familiarly herself, so much the woman I remembered from MTV and the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” music video, that I shuddered.
She said, “My aim was to soften the blow of explaining that Guy and many of his contemporaries, while geniuses, can’t do the heavy lifting. At the time they were doing a lot of building. We are still doing a lot of building. Our building will never end.”
Molly held her arm above the table and flexed her bicep.
“You see how strong my arms are getting. We have a number of manufacturers but there is still some heavy lifting to do. I’m speaking both metaphorically and literally.”
“So you are designing and building, both.”
“Yes!”
“Can you explain the city to me?” I asked. I realized, the moment after I asked the question, that I was interested not out of journalistic impulse, but because I wanted to picture where she and Cait were living.
“It’s not hard to explain. In the early days of the Situationist International, especially then, they were basically declaring that architecture would revolutionize all lives, everyone’s everyday lives. People could be released from ordinary activities—wake up, drink coffee, go to work, drink wine, fuck somebody, sleep—and become citizens of a city in a world of experiment and play. Possibly this would mean some kind of anarchy, but most likely not, order comes out of chaos, that’s what happens. It happens inevitably, I think. Several millions of years ago, we were hunting bison with our hands and teeth and now there are magazines that are designed only to report on the music business—how many peoples’ lives are supported by just one of those magazines, even now, when print media is falling apart? I’m not sure Guy would agree with me on this point, but he chose not to visit with you.
“So they promised this new way of living to the whole world,
but when you promise something to the world, the first person you promise it to is yourself.”
She put her hands on her heart, and continued speaking while holding that pose:
“And the second and third people that you promise it to are your comrades, the ones who are helping you make that promise. The Situationists failed the world but mostly they failed themselves. They wanted to keep their promises, even belatedly, to as many people as they could.”
“It’s a compromise,” I said.
“No.”
“They said—I researched this—they said they didn’t want to create, what did they call it? ‘Holiday Resorts.’ ”
“New Babylon is not a Holiday Resort.”
“No this—this is a Holiday Resort that you’re describing. You’re selling me a timeshare in New Babylon.”
“No. For one thing, you don’t get to go and come back to your ‘regular life.’ A Holiday Resort is something you can visit on the weekend, and when the season is over, you can leave. And when the resort becomes unfashionable, you can move on to the next one. But not for us. It’s either old world or New Babylon. The only reason I disappeared rather than fake my own death was because we were aware my body would be more highly scrutinized than the average citizen of New Babylon. To live there, you must renounce your citizenship of this ‘Society of the Spectacle,’ to quote Guy.”
“Some people would say that, by becoming a famous pop star, you were actively upholding the Society of the Spectacle.”
“I was trying to change what pop culture was, what it meant—”
“You did that.”
“—until I discovered I didn’t have to. We have large plans. We won’t stay a secret place for very much longer.”
“That’s why you let Cyrus give me his work? And why you came to talk to me?”
“Guy and everybody didn’t want me to come,” she said, running her fingers through her thick mane of messy blondish hair, so long that the ends still retain some of the blue dye I recognized from her “Apocalypse Dance” music video. “But I thought it would make a good end to the book.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it will make a very good reveal, I think.”
“Cyrus showed me his draft and I thought it lacked narrative symmetry and I realized that I was the only one who would be able to provide it. So I made a decision, even though there are people who won’t believe that this is actually happening. They will dismiss you.” She spoke slowly and firmly, enunciating every word—her style from a life of giving interviews.
“You’ll let me take your picture?”
“Sure. That will make some people believe it. Some people will always think you faked it. I hope the right people believe you.”
I must’ve looked deflated. She was right, of course. Before visiting the train station, I had begun to face the reality that putting my name on this book would be the end of something for me, but it was disconcerting to hear it so assuredly confirmed.
“I understand that it might be a bit frightening, but we all have to put a bullet through our hearts. Even you, in your own way. You’ll be killing your
credibility
, which is a version of yourself. Your death will be as metaphoric as Caitlin Taer’s.”
I told her I agreed, even though she sounded a little insane to me. I also refrained from mentioning how much she liked to talk about metaphors.
“Don’t worry about what they will think of you,” Molly coached. “We should always try to be our best selves. And our best selves are always moving forward.” Then she slipped into her pop star pout, and threw half her hair in front of one eye as she had in so many red carpet pictures. “Haters gonna hate,” she said.
“ ‘Don’t worry what they think of you,’ ” I repeated. “So that’s
why you’re letting this book happen? To come out of the closet, so to speak.”
“That will happen with or without the book. Debord has been negotiating politically for years, we will be an independent nation eventually.”
“Then why did Cyrus have to fake his death? If I wanted to come, would I still have to ‘die’?”