Molly Metropolis’s family graciously allowed me to borrow the screen print during the writing of this book, to facilitate my research. (It also served as a kind of motivational poster for me—like the kitten hanging from the tree with the caption “Hang in there!”—when completing this project seemed like an impossibly daunting task.) Because of the Young family’s generosity, I was able to research the island in Molly’s hot pink map.
The island on the screen print is called Sable from the French île de Sable, or “Sand Island,” though the island’s foundation, while sand-covered, is actually made of solid rock and below that, reef. The island is a narrow sliver of land, 27 miles long but never more than 1.2 miles wide, located in the Atlantic Ocean 109 miles off the southeast coast of Nova Scotia. Discovered by Portuguese explorer Joao Alvares Fagundes, the island was originally named Fagunda.
After thoroughly traversing the waters adjacent to what would become Nova Scotia, Fagundes returned to Portugal and published a map of the coastal area, including the island he called Fagunda. He also published a detailed land map of Fagunda itself. Nearly fifty years later, after Fagundes’s death, an inconsequential trading ship that happened to be carrying a somewhat well regarded cartographer, Lázaro Teixeira, reported that Fagunda wasn’t where Fagundes’s map claimed it should be. Teixeira drew up a new map of the area that excluded Fagunda and spread the story that Fagundes created a false island in order to give something his own name. Several other cartographers and shipmen on the trading vessel corroborated Teixeira’s story.
It was a testament to Fagundes’s lasting popularity in Portugal and Spain that the royal families and academics of each country assumed that Fagundes hadn’t lied but instead that his island had been “lost,” washed away by a storm or sunk into the sea. They called it a “phantom” island and attributed it with ghost-like qualities, such as the ability to appear and disappear. More than one shipman, dying from wounds or delirious from illness, claimed to see “Fagunda, the Island of Dead Seaman” beckoning him from beyond the grave.
A century later, Fagunda is still the poster child for cartographic misconceptions of the early exploratory age. However, Fagundes’s island wasn’t a cartographic misconception; the island actually existed—it was just so narrow, and the cartographic equipment of the time so crude, that it was difficult to find. The island’s extreme thinness makes it difficult for even military-grade radar detection devices to pick it up.
At some point in the late nineteenth century, another sailor found the island, took some measurements of it, and reasserted its validity, but no one publically documented it until the Nova Scotian government commissioned a map of the coastline in 1902, and renamed Fagunda as Sable Island.
Currently, the island officially sits within the Halifax Regional Municipality in Nova Scotia, but as part the 1972 Canada Shipping Agreement between Canada and Nova Scotia, the Canadian Coast Guard is responsible for the island’s safety and security. No one can visit without written permission of Canadian Coast Guard College (CCGC). Approximately five people permanently inhabit the island; they all live and work at the Sable Island Station, an environmental research complex owned by the University of Toronto. The island’s true inhabitants are the wildlife, most prominently several thousand snub-nosed blue seals and over 300 feral horses.
Because the low, thin island is so difficult to see, it’s caused a large number of shipwrecks over the centuries, often illustrated on maps of the island, like Molly Metropolis’s screen print where the shipwrecks are represented with tiny drawings of colonial-era ships. With approximately 350 shipwrecks on its shores between 1583 and 1999, Sable earned the nickname “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
The final shipwreck to date, in 1998, was also the only wreck of a private yacht, called the Merrimac. The yacht possibly belonged to an American family. The CCGC investigated the crash but determined that the causes were “non-criminal.” The records of the investigation, like all records of non-criminal investigations that occurred before the police digitized their files, were trashed ten years after the investigation closed, in 2009, before Molly disappeared. The Canadian aquatic force sent two or three copies of the report to the FBI summarizing the investigation, indicating that they believed the victims were American. Although the FBI was more than willing to provide me with the files under the Freedom of Information Act, they couldn’t find them. Probably misfiled, the records won’t be recovered for years, when the FBI finishes digitizing many decades’ worth of physical, low-priority files. As a result, few verifiable details of the wreck survive.
Relying on rumor to guide me towards truth, I discovered that an American family was causing some trouble about Sable a year before the shipwreck. Charles and Margot Pullman, a wealthy couple, both successful architects and cousins to the Daley family on Margot’s side, had a ten-year-old daughter, Elizabeth—a spoiled and precocious child. Elizabeth read about Sable in an Encyclopedia Britannica and developed a strong desire to own one of the island’s feral horses. Charles and Margot, to reward Elizabeth’s inquisitive bookishness, began pursuing legal means to acquire a Sable Island horse for their daughter.
When the Canadian government denied their requests, the Pullmans allegedly threw an epic public tantrum and planned to illegally abduct a horse. They reportedly bribed a young member of the CCGC to allow them unfettered access to the island on an appointed night. Later that year, the Merrimac washed up on the Northeastern shore of Sable, the area of the island that has collected the highest number of shipwrecks. The CCGC aquatic force pulled four bodies out of the water, three adults and one child. The remains were DNA tested but the results are unavailable somehow the reports were never sent to any other U.S. authority other than the FBI, or the bodies were never identified even through testing, or the identities of the dead were never otherwise reported by some other bureaucratic folly. The recovered pieces of the Merrimac had been fitted with animal containment devices a few days before the crash. One week later, the Pullman family and their stable manager, Anthony Perkins, were reported missing. When the family didn’t reappear and were presumed dead, their substantial financial holdings, reportedly in the hundreds of millions, were transferred to an urban renewal charity, the Becker-Ho Foundation, in accordance to Charles and Margot’s last will and testament.
The Pullmans didn’t own a yacht but certainly had the means to buy, rent, or borrow one quickly. In 1999, only three of all the yachts registered in Canada, the United States, and Nova Scotia were called Merrimac. Two of them are still in use today. A Chicago resident named Bruce Adler, a wealthy bachelor in his fifties, owned the third Merrimac. Adler registered the Merrimac with the Chicago Yacht Association and reported that he docked the yacht at the Inner Jackson Harbor until 2001, when he broke the ship down to scrap wood. However, the Inner Jackson Harbor’s longtime Harbor manager, Nancy Gould, remembers that that sailboat, not a yacht, was always tied to Adler’s dock.
Did the Pullman family borrow Adler’s yacht, sail it to Sable with the intent of stealing a horse, and accidentally crash on the shore of the island? If so, what would Alder have to gain by concealing this fact? And why would a twenty-three-year-old pop star have a screen-printed version of a map of the island on her wall? Where would a map like that even come from?
I can only answer the final question. Molly Metropolis commissioned the screen print on her wall, but it was copied almost exactly from a map called “Sable Island: Known Wrecks Since 1583,” drawn by John Fauller and now part of the collection at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History.
For whatever reason, Molly must’ve considered her screen print version of that map one of her most important wall hangings. Besides the place of prominence she gave it above her bed, she also used it as a hiding place. When Taer moved the print, a notebook, which had been wedged between the wooden box frame and the wall, fell onto the bed. Nix recognized it immediately. It was Molly Metropolis’s personal diary.
* * *
* Th
is recording is a harbinger of a fixation Taer developed with her recording device. She zealously recorded most of her conversations about Molly, spurred on early in her investigation by something Molly wrote in her own notebook: “Never work, always document!”—the phrase itself was a cheeky bastardization of a Situationist assertion “Never work!” Molly strove to make the act of living her life its own art. The documentation of her actions was compulsory, so art could be made without work.
† “Brian Slade” refers to Todd Haynes’s 1999 film Velvet Goldmine, about a David Bowie pastiche character who faked his own death onstage.
‡ Molly Metropolis wasn’t the only celebrity who stayed there. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie famously favored the Peninsula whenever they stayed in Chicago with their brood.
§ This is a theory that her family and friends contested to the police as strongly as Nix contested it to Taer. In September 2009, on an unreleased date, Molly Metropolis’s mother, Melissa Young, underwent open heart surgery. Molly stayed with her family at the hospital for a week, and was attentive all through the tour. Molly’s family believed that she never would’ve disappeared purposefully while her mother was still recovering.
ǁ The Transit Subcommittee chose plans designed by Savoy’s rival, Ronald Mansfield, but those plans weren’t implemented either because the Commercial Transport Committee eventually chose to divert the L restoration funds to building another Metra line, the Metra Electric South Shore Line that Taer and Nix used to travel between the city and Flossmoor.
After packing the rest of Molly Metropolis’s belongings into boxes and ferrying them to the hotel’s mailroom, Nix and Taer left the Peninsula, taking Molly’s notebook with them. When I spoke with Nix, she told me they stole the notebook out of “simple curiosity.” However, in an interview with Berliner, when I asked him if he could provide an outside perspective on Nix’s comment, Berliner said: “Their curiosity wasn’t simple.”
Nix and Taer didn’t examine the notebook’s contents until they got back to Taer’s apartment and Taer’s roommate had gone out for the evening, leaving dirty dishes in the sink. For half an hour, they thumbed through the pages together, reading passages out loud and examining Molly’s sketches of outfits and accessories. After this brief examination, Nix decided not to delve any deeper into Molly; she felt done with the notebook. Reading it felt like a betrayal, or like “grave-robbing your grandmother,” as Nix told me.
Taer had the opposite reaction. She wanted to read every word and look for clues in the sketches of costumes and half-finished song lyrics. Although Taer and Nix found the notebook together, and Nix arguably had more claim to it as Molly’s ex-assistant, Taer treated the notebook like it was her property. Unfortunately, she had it with her when she vanished into Lake Michigan. The final written words of a figure about to become an icon sank to the bottom of a lake. Only ghostly secondhand information about Molly Metropolis’s notebook survives.*
Although I would’ve preferred to examine Molly’s notebook firsthand, I enjoyed Taer’s tour of the contents via her own writing. Taer’s personality enticed me from the first moment I picked up her diary. She lacked self-awareness, but occasionally had a sharp critical eye. Just after “Apocalypse Dance” was released, she wrote:
Metro started out as a stand-in for the listener, someone as obsessed with fame as the listener (me? us?) is. With “Cause Apocalyptic,” she appears to be going in a different direction. Fame is inside her (infected her?) and she can no longer be a stand-in for me, or a version of me, but that sense—of her having once been me—lingers …
Taer liked the idea of being an obsessive as much as she liked obsessing:
So I can do a deep criticism here, on the lyric level, about love and revenge being the same thing, because they are both about obsessive attention, but then it gets all twisted because of course I’m obsessing. Like, would my time really be more valuable if I was just listening to Boxer or Doolittle for the billionth time?† Would my time be more “legitimate?” Is the level of fame important in determining the quality of the obsession? Is the type of fame important?
Most of Taer’s notes on Molly’s notebook are somewhat muddled, even big direct quotes—except one note, dated a few days before she disappeared, written with sloppy and hurried handwriting: “It was all in her notebook, in some form or another, it was all in there!”
Nix remembers some of what Molly wrote, but she never examined it as closely as Taer. Berliner was with Molly when she wrote some of the entries, so he can make good guesses at what was inside. Combined with Taer’s notes, this allowed me to partially reconstruct the contents.
According to all my sources, Molly Metropolis had written in the notebook during the nine months prior to her disappearance. Scattered throughout the notebook were sketches, lyrics, and plans pertaining to her music career, but a significant number of pages were given over to Molly’s other pursuits. She had divided the notebook, roughly, into thirds. The first third was written in April, May, and parts of June 2008. Molly spent the majority of this first portion discussing the work of Antoinette Monson, a fifteenth-century cartographer, who Molly describes as a “cartographer of the potential.” Because Taer gave Molly’s hot pink screen print of Sable Island only the most cursory of examinations, she didn’t immediately realize that this “cartographer of the potential,” has a nearly identical name to the one signed on the screen print: Antoine Monson.
Molly wrote the second third of the notebook in late June and early July. In this section, Metro wrote a number of song lyrics and concept notes about her third album, which she had tentatively titled Cause Oceanic, and which, of course, was never recorded. Taer didn’t quote from this section at all in her journal, Nix had to describe it to me. Nix doesn’t remember any of the final lyrics Molly wrote, much to my chagrin as a converted fan of Molly Metropolis’s music.
The most significant portion of Metro’s notebook was the final third, which she wrote from July to December. In those pages, Molly described an ambitious project called The Ghost Network, which had to do with the Chicago L system. Molly planned to design a gigantic map which would catalogue every single L train line ever built in Chicago and combine them with every single L train line not built—that is, every train line proposed but never incorporated into the system.
Molly Metropolis wrote, and Taer quoted: “What is a public transit system consisting of elevated trains? It’s not just a transport for bodies. It’s a system to transport systems (digestive, nervous, etc.), a series of tracks that transport ideas. It’s not the accessories of a city, lying on top of the skin, but the veins and arteries within the body.”
Calling Chicago’s public train system an elevated train line is a lie—many of the train tracks aren’t elevated—though it hasn’t always been so. In 1898, when the Chicago Transit Authority approved the plan for the train line in conjunction with Democratic mayor Carter Harrison, Jr., they planned a completely elevated train system and envisioned a glistening, futuristic track with trains whizzing between the tops of Chicago’s towers. The Chicago Tribune referred to the upcoming train system as the “Alley Elevated” or the “Alley L.” By the time the inaugural train took its twenty-mile-per-hour journey around the short, looping track,‡ the two most prominent Chi cago newspapers were using “the L” to refer to the train and the nickname became part of the urban nomenclature.
The owners of the Trib and the Evening Journal (which later became the Chicago Sun Times), Mayor Harrison Jr. and prominent Republican politician Conrad Kelsey, put aside their long-standing rivalry to mutually use the L to wage a propaganda war against New York and its mayor William L. Strong. Prominent regional historian Albert Whitfeld asserts that both Harrison Jr. and Kelsey prompted their reporters to trump up or instigate some kind of competitive feeling between New York City’s underground subway and Chicago’s new elevated train line. From the September 17, 1899, issue of the Tribune:
Indeed, New York City’s train system runs below their s
treets, shaking automobiles and pedestrians alike when a train passes below, and forcing the families and professional men who use the train lines to crowd into dark tunnels. In contrast, Chicago’s glorious Elevated Train Line will hang above the city like some silver necklace on the neck of a comely heiress, rising above our shining city like a jewel.§
In the decades that followed Chicago’s first train ride, private companies started building and running elevated train lines, and the city let the corporate world take on the burden of building public transit.
In 1939, as countries in Europe began fighting among themselves for the second time in a century, a savvy but generally disliked businessman named Samuel Insull owned two-thirds of the train lines, cars, and stations. Insull treated Chicago utilities like a game of Monopoly, and because he controlled much of the L plus the Edison Electric Company and half of the Port of Chicago, Insull was winning.
Mayor Harrison Jr. dreamed of a publicly owned transit system. He wanted the city to buy all the existing train lines, then build new ones underground to serve as bomb shelters. Should the Blitzkrieg terrorizing London ever come to the United States, the ruling body of Chicago wanted a safe space to hide and convene a war council. To both gain control of the L and build his safe underground shelters, Harrison Jr. waged a publicity war against Insull. The Trib called him an Anglophile and a homosexual. Several of Insull’s male lovers, who may or may not have been well-paid actors, gave interviews with both of the city’s major newspapers, describing not only their “lewd lifestyle,” but also Insull’s plans to defraud major stakeholders in his company. Insull’s CFO implicated Insull in criminal activities, and Chicago detectives arrested Insull on charges of profiteering, racketeering, electioneering, and bribery. The state seized his business holdings, including all of his L lines. The city held him without bail and he died in prison before his trial began, succumbing to stab wounds accidentally inflicted as a bystander to a yard fight.
The Ghost Network Page 5