The Ghost Network
Page 1
Praise for The Ghost Network
“Wrapped in the form of pseudohistorical, multilayered investigative journalism full of footnotes from a skewed world that resembles our own, columnist Disabato’s first novel is a paean to the modern urban landscape … The net effect is simultaneously breathlessly exhilarating and beautifully haunted.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Thrilling … A layered, well-executed story within an inventive story. Artistic ambition, cultural critique, and a revolutionary philosophy drive the mysteries underlying this complex, charismatic novel.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A brilliant, daring and masterful novel about obsession, fame, and the complex mysteries of human existence. It’s a whodunit with footnotes and glitter, and it’s impossible to put down. Catie Disabato is a marvel.”
—EDAN LEPUCKI, New York Times bestselling author of California
“A giddy mash-up of pop culture, genre tropes, conspiracy theories, and dystopian fantasy. Imagine Thomas Pynchon possessed by the spirit of a teenaged girl who is binge-watching TMZ while shrooming out of her mind, and you get some idea of the layered, phantasmagoric effect of this wonderfully trippy book. Catie Disabato is a true original, and a young writer to watch.”
—DAN CHAON, author of Await Your Reply
“Catie Disabato’s prose is as clean as a whistle and as sharp as a tack, and her imagination is wondrous. A smart and exciting debut that plays by its own rules.”
—IVY POCHODA, author of Visitation Street
“Spectacularly original. Meta, ingenious, and totally fun.”
—KATE DURBIN, author of E! Entertainment
“As close as we’ll ever get to Borges filtering Lady Gaga, Calvino analyzing Miley Cyrus, or Cortázar obsessing over FKA Twigs, the supremely talented Disabato gives us a synth-wave pop illuminati fantasy that will make your ears ring.”
—MAXWELL NEELY-COHEN, author of Echo of the Boom
THE GHOST NETWORK
Copyright © 2015 by Catherine Disabato
First Melville House printing: May 2015
Melville House Publishing
46 John Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
&
8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT
mhpbooks.com / facebook.com/mhpbooks / @melvillehouse
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Disabato, Catie.
The ghost network : a novel / Catie Disabato.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-61219-434-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-61219-435-6 (ebook)
1. Lesbians—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Fiction. 3. Lesbians—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.I75G46 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014046529
Design by Adly Elewa
v3.1
For Nancy and Ted
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Note from the Editor
Prologue
Part 1 Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part 2 Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Reading Group Guide
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
I inherited from Cyrus Archer a polished draft of this manuscript, but not a complete one. Cyrus’s research was extensive and the majority of the plotting in the book is based on firsthand accounts of events. Unfortunately, Cyrus did not get a chance to fill in his footnotes, and in a few places, he didn’t relay the source of a story or a quote. I have tried to fill in the gaps in attribution as best I can, using Cyrus’s notes and in a few cases re-interviewing some of his interviewees. Any additions or adjustments from me are noted in the text or via footnotes. For visual distinction, my footnotes will be in italics.
CATIE DISABATO
THE
GHOST NETWORK
THE DISAPPEARANCE AND SEARCH FOR MOLLY METROPOLIS
CYRUS K. ARCHER
EDITED AND WITH AN EPILOGUE BY CATIE DISABATO
Prologue
April 25, 2010
It was the morning after a record-setting rainstorm. Chicago’s mild, dry spring had given way to lighting and thunder. The soil soaked up six inches of rainfall; drowning worms emerged to cover the sidewalks with their squishy bodies and promptly froze to death in the cold spring air. Overworked eaves on rows of townhouses creaked and moaned in the strong morning winds, and streams of water rushed through the gutters. The winds had torn thick branches off the trees, which crushed the hoods of SUVs parked on the lakeside streets and cracked the pavement, causing hundreds of dollars in damages. The water in Lake Michigan was choppy and cold, below freezing; the surface of the lake was covered in fog.
Early that day, once the storm had broken, a baker named Rebecca Parker decided to take an unusual route along the lake on her walk home. Parker worked at Anthony’s Deli on Wabash Street, baking bread from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. On her way home, she usually avoided Lake Shore Drive, with its extra chill from the wind moving over the lake. Instead, she preferred to walk on Rush Street or take public transit, riding the city’s elevated train line, the L. But riding the rickety train in high winds frightened Parker, and the fallen tree branches that covered the sidewalks on Rush Street made for difficult walking, so she zipped her North Face down coat to her throat and walked towards Lake Shore Drive. At East Delaware Place, she crossed the highway and started walking on the Lakeshore Trail—the biking and walking path right along the lake—so she could avoid any sidewalk debris.
The Lakeshore Trail was otherwise deserted. Parker walked briskly through the fog. Just as she was about to turn off the Trail and return to the gridded streets west of Lake Michigan, Parker noticed a dark shape floating a few hundred feet off shore: two bodies clinging to a piece of wood, one completely still and one kicking feebly. The fog thickened and Parker hesitated, questioning whether she had seen anything at all. She waited half a minute for the fog to clear and for the makeshift raft to come into full view again before dialing 911. Both bodies now lay still on the slab of wood, bobbing through the sharp waves. Parker gave the operator her approximate address and blurted, “Both people on the raft look dead now.”
About five minutes later, two Chicago Police Department officers arrived on bikes and signaled a police boat with portable high beams. Parker was crying. She thought that by waiting before dialing 911, she had “as good as killed” the people on the raft.
About five minutes after that, the police boat appeared. It puttered slowly around the shallow water before the officers aboard found what they were looking for. The maritime police fished two bodies out of the freezing lake: twenty-three-year-old Regina Nix, called “Gina,” and twenty-seven-year-old Nicolas Berliner, called “Nick.” They were hypothermic, unconscious, and concussed, but alive. They were immediately put into an ambulance and driven to Cook County Hospital.
Berliner regained consciousness in the ambulance and was admitted briefly to the Intensive Care Unit. Nix was taken into surgery immediately upon arriving at the hospital. Two fingers on her left hand, which had been partially severed and reattached approximately one week prior, couldn’t withstand the trauma of hypothermia and had to be amputated.
While the doctors worked on Nix, Berliner gave a statement to the police. He
didn’t remember how he had ended up floating in Lake Michigan. The last thing he recalled was spending a good portion of the previous evening with Nix and her girlfriend at their favorite bar, Rainbo.
The officers on the scene left the hospital and returned to the police station on South Racine, where they found a theft report filed by Randy Hecht. He had reported his boat stolen around 5 a.m. An officer called Hecht and spoke to him briefly:
“That’s a shame about the kids almost drowning and such,” Hecht said. “I filed my report right after it happened. I saw those three kids fly off and I called you right away. Did you find the boat okay?”
To which the stunned police officer replied, “Three kids?”
The third person on the raft was Nix’s girlfriend, Caitlin “Cait” Taer (rhymes with “air”). No one has seen her or heard from her since the police pulled Nix and Berliner from the lake. She disappeared. Her body was not found in Lake Michigan; it didn’t wash ashore anywhere else.
Nix spoke to the officers as she recovered from her surgery. Doped on morphine, she claimed memory loss, like Berliner. Her doctors told the officers Nix’s memory loss was most likely from both head trauma and excessive inebriation. Neither Nix nor Berliner remembered if Taer was on the boat with them when it broke apart, and they couldn’t remember how it broke apart in the first place. None of Taer’s clothes were taken from her home; none of her meager savings were removed from her Bank of America account.
Investigators packed the facts into a neat conclusion: after a night of heavy drinking, Berliner, Nix, and Taer stole the boat for a joyride. Because none of them had any experience driving a boat, they steered themselves too far from shore, and then an early morning fog rolled in. Lost, they drifted until rough waves pushed the boat into a rock on the shoreline, then pulled them back into deep water on a breaking boat. All three passengers hit their heads during the collision, and while Nix and Berliner managed to cling to consciousness and a piece of the boat, Taer lost consciousness and drowned. Or perhaps, after the fog rolled in, they passed out in the boat and when the boat collided with a submerged rock, Nix and Berliner were revived by the suddenness of their head trauma and floated, while Taer drowned. Or perhaps, after the collision with the submerged rock, the rough current pulled parts of the broken boat in two directions. While Nix kicked Berliner to shore, Taer floated toward Canada until she became hypothermic, lost consciousness, and sank.
When I spoke with Officers Holt and Burns, they presented these three theories as only a few of many. While the conditions of their stories changed, the conclusion never did: a drunk girl drowned.
Nix and Berliner were charged with the theft of the boat. After a brief negotiation between Berliner’s lawyer and the state prosecutor, Berliner and Nix agreed to perform one hundred hours of community service each to atone for the theft of the property. The felony was then expunged from their records. They were granted this leniency despite Berliner’s prior legal troubles and his close ties with an incarcerated domestic terrorist named Marie-Hélène Kraus.
Three months later, on July 14, 2010, in response to a petition from her immediate family, the state declared Taer legally dead, and the Chicago Tribune published a short news story/obituary:
Possible drowning victim Caitlyn [sic] Taer, 24, was declared dead yesterday. Taer had disappeared after a boating accident on Lake Michigan in late April. Maritime police were unable to recover a body but investigators concluded that she died in the incident. The District Attorney’s office has no current plans to pursue manslaughter or wrongful death charges on behalf of the deceased. Taer is survived by her parents, Natasha Tenanbaum and Andrew Taer. Taer’s friend Regina Nix remembers her as a “passionate person, who never doubted herself.” Private services will be held.
A coffin filled with keepsakes, sandbags, and her favorite records was buried in place of a body.
Compared to Chicago’s other disappearance that year, Taer’s was small potatoes. Taer was actually a footnote* in the larger disappearance of Miranda Young, better known by her stage name, Molly Metropolis.
Four months before Taer’s disastrous boat trip, Molly Metropolis disappeared in Chicago during her Apocalypse Ball tour. She performed to a sold-out crowd on January 8 and was gone before sound check on January 9. As of this writing, she hasn’t yet publicly reemerged. Her disappearance and Taer’s are inextricably linked.
Why begin to write a book about an unfortunate girl who probably drowned and a gone-but-not-forgotten pop star?†
Social associations helped jump-start the process of writing this book; if my partner at the time, David Woodyard, hadn’t written an article about Molly Metropolis and Taer, my reciprocal interest wouldn’t have developed. At the time of Taer’s disappearance,Woodyard wrote for The New Yorker, often focusing on topics at the intersection of popular culture and politics. He noticed that both of the people pulled out of Lake Michigan on the morning of Taer’s disappearance were connected to Molly Metropolis. Nix, the eight-fingered hypothermic, was Molly Metropolis’s former assistant; Berliner had been friends with the pop star since before her rise to fame in 2008. Woodyard conceived of a piece about cultural obsession with mystery stories and disappearing women, critiquing the morbid curiosity in the tenor of the national response to Molly Metropolis’s disappearance, as well as the anemic Chicago-area broadcast news coverage of Taer’s story. The New Yorker wanted to publish the article the same week as the U.S. release of a new novel by Haruki Murakami, whose work frequently features disappearing women. Though in the original concept for his piece, Woodyard planned to use Taer’s disappearance as a persistent metaphor for the dangers of “mystery-mongering,” Woodyard’s final article mentioned Taer only briefly:
In Chicago, over 200 missing persons reports are filed every year. Any number of these disappearances are runaways or murders quickly solved. Very few missing persons are actual disappearances. In Chicago, we are surprised to have two so far this year. The pop star Molly Metropolis disappeared halfway through her concert tour. Then a girl named Caitlin Taer, who was friends with Molly Metropolis’s former personal assistant, vanished a few months later. No one outside of Chicago talks about Taer’s disappearance because no one knew her name before she disappeared, but they still talk about Molly.
There, Woodyard’s investigation into Taer’s disappearance stopped. If he had pushed harder, he might’ve been the one writing this book.
During Woodyard’s relatively brief period writing about Taer and Molly Metropolis’s cases, he noticed that in Nix’s statement to the police, she mentioned Taer had kept journals with detailed notes on her day-to-day life for more than a year before the incident in Lake Michigan. Intrigued, Woodyard attempted to acquire Taer’s journals; he sent requests to the investigating police officers and Taer’s immediate family. Unfortunately, he didn’t receive the journals before his deadline.
A few weeks after Woodyard’s article ran, a small but heavy Fed-Ex box arrived at our door with a polite note from Taer’s mother apologizing for the delay. Inside, we found the journals, neatly stacked. Woodyard no longer had any interest in Taer’s journals but he had always been lazy about getting to the post office, so instead of sending them back immediately, he left the box in the corner of the living room, where they briefly became an unfortunate fixture of our decorating scheme. One evening, succumbing to a mild curiosity, I picked up a journal began to read.
The first entry was dated almost a year before Molly Metropolis (sometimes “Molly,” “Metro,” or “Molly Metro,” to her dearest friends and her closest fans) disappeared. The prose was neither stirring nor poised:
I’m totally disgusted with this carpet, and basically my whole life. I know I’m using the carpet as a metaphor for my whole life, but I can’t help it. It’s so gross. I can’t afford a steam cleaner. Maybe I’ll save up. Charles [Taer’s landlord] won’t do it, but he’s a fucktard. Listening to “New Vogue Riche,” and it’s cheering me up. I could use a dance partner.
Along with rave reviews of Molly’s songs, Taer filled her journals with actual notes, grocery lists, and snippets of half-baked ideas or half-remembered conversations, alongside more traditional diary writing. I flipped through the pages, mostly bored and barely noticing when the text changed from Taer’s usual disjointed lists to actual accounts of her day-to-day. I did pause, however, over a single phrase near the middle of the journal, written twice the size of her regular handwriting and underlined several times:
I found the fucking secret headquarters and now we’re going to find Molly.
I stopped flipping through the pages, perhaps because of the whimsical nature of the phrase “secret headquarters.” I found the first entries Taer wrote about Molly Metropolis’s disappearance, and began reading Taer’s story. It is dramatic to the point of being almost unbelievable.‡
Taer’s journals mix fiction, diary-style writings, drafts of articles, and those grocery lists—a hodge-podge of styles with no system of transition or separation, making the truth and the context of the writing difficult for an outside reader to ascertain. Though I acknowledge that Taer’s journals are tangled and scattered, and that the truth and context of Taer’s writing is sometimes hard to establish, there is a profound semantic difference between “difficult” and “impossible.” Having thoroughly studied Taer’s journals, I developed a knack for deciphering her idiolect and an ear for her style. When she was writing something that would eventually become a newspaper article, she’d affect an authoritative tone, which never sounded natural. These paragraphs would then appear, in edited forms, in her published criticism.