Harrison Jr. hired the architect-designer H.W. Benthom in 1943 to develop a plan to replace the entire elevated system with subways, each fortified. Benthom’s designs were a work of architectural beauty, a system that resembled a great river and its tributaries, with the Loop as a whirlpool at the center. A year later, the city completed construction on the first underground station at State Street. The disused station’s closely spaced support columns are still visible today through train windows when the Blue Line travels between Chicago and Damen.
By the time Benthom finished drawing his plans for the rest of the subway stations, Hitler had been put down and America had already bombed Hiroshima. The war was over. The appeal of underground shelters got lost among the plans for victory parades.
Plans for Benthom’s L underground systems are archived in the Chicago Public Records, along with every other rejected proposal. The Public Records contain every blueprint of every proposed addition, whether the addition was adopted or the proposed stations and lines were built. Since the first steam locomotive pulled its wooden coaches out of the Congress Street Terminal in 1892, the hundreds of proposals that were never adopted have grown into an overlapping maze of alternate L train lines and stations, an “alternate universe transit system,” as the science fiction blog io9 put it.ǁ The train lines that were never constructed are the bastards and doppelgangers of the L that covers the city today.
For reasons I failed to comprehend during my first research trip to Chicago, Molly Metropolis was fascinated enough with the L to dedicate years of her life to designing a map that layered each potential, but never constructed, alternative or expansion to the L on top of a map of all the functioning L lines. She also included train lines and stations that had once been part of the system but had gone out of use. She created the map on a computer and also painted it onto the wall of a secret office she kept in Chicago. This giant, unwieldy map is the project she called The Ghost Network.
Molly’s Ghost Network is a strange piece; it catalogues not only a hypothetical transit system, but also one that would be nearly impossible to build and ridiculous to implement. The Ghost Network has, for example, dual train lines riding side by side for their entire route, save one or two stops; it has places where both elevated and underground trains run the exact same route. The Ghost Network exists in a world without decisions, where every proposal is adopted, where construction isn’t based on the realities of the city.
While The Ghost Network was the most interesting discovery Taer made while reading Molly Metropolis’s notebook, it wasn’t the most immediately useful. Before Taer could begin to put The Ghost Network in its proper context, she had to first act on the simplest note, scrawled on the inside cover: Nicolas Berliner’s name, phone number, and e-mail address.
When Taer showed the number to Nix, Nix immediately recognized Berliner’s name. She knew he was a paid member of the Governing Council (as Molly called her creative team, often shorted to the GC), but Molly had never told Nix exactly what Berliner’s job was. For a little while, Taer and Nix thought Molly and Berliner might’ve been lovers.
Once Taer saw Berliner’s number, it got into her head like an earworm. She couldn’t forget that she had “secret access” to someone deep in Molly’s inner circle; she couldn’t help thinking of Berliner’s number as the light illuminating a path. Nix, on the other hand, remembered a very strange exchange between Berliner and Molly.
Berliner’s number was on all of Molly’s phones and he was a permanent fixture on her “Approved Callers” list. If he called and insisted that the call was important, Molly would interrupt anything except a live performance. For example, during the production of her last music video, for “Apocalypse Dance,” Molly twice halted production for half an hour to accept frantic phone calls from Berliner.a According to Nix, after the second “Apocalypse Dance” call, Molly came back to the set pale and shaking. Nix brought her some water and as the dancers took their places, Molly whispered to Nix something along the lines of, “If you ever need to speak to Nick directly, I would like you to remember that things with him aren’t safe.”
“Do you want me to take him off the call list?” Nix asked.
“No, no, of course not. Nick himself is a good person. He is very special to me. But there are certain … I don’t want you mixed up in certain elements of his life. His girlfriend, Marie-Hélène, is in prison, you know. She killed someone. She says it was an accident. The police thought Nick was involved but they couldn’t prove it—I’m not saying he was but there is really no way of knowing what someone has done.”
Nix asked Taer not to call Berliner and Taer obliged, for a while, probably because sometime just before or just after finding the notebook, Taer and Nix’s relationship had become sexual. A week after the hotel room excavation, hidden among a transcription of the lyrics of Molly Metropolis’s song “I’ll Find You,” Taer recounts, almost dispassionately, “Gina and I had sex again this morning.” She didn’t note when their first encounter took place.b
Sex in general, like Molly’s notebook, is often hidden, lost, undocumented, and unread, especially sex between two young queer women. The real goings-on between two people are basically unknowable.c It doesn’t matter that we don’t understand the nature of Taer and Nix’s relationship. It’s only important that we know it did happen, because in deference to the girl she was having a sexual relationship with, Taer delayed calling Berliner. But she didn’t wait very long.
* * *
* If Taer had left Molly’s notebook behind that night instead of her own, perhaps Cyrus would have been writing a book only about what Molly did. Instead, Cyrus read what Taer wrote and spent time inside her head rather than Molly’s. According to Cyrus’s notes, by the end of his first day with Taer’s notebook, he decided to do some research of his own. He barely mentioned his interest to his partner, believing Woodyard would disapprove (he discovered, later, that he was right). He waited until their summer together was over before making his first research trip to Chicago, riding the same L lines Taer did, heading south of the Loop to visit the National Archives and delve deep into the fraught history of the trains Cyrus and I—and Taer—rode. —CD
† Boxer is an album by the indie rock band The National, released in 2007. Doolittle is an album by the band The Pixies, released in 1989. They are both highly regarded albums, and two of Taer’s all-time favorites.
‡ The train carried two passengers during its first trip: Mayor Harrison Jr., a proponent of government-owned transit versus privately owned transit, and his wife, Edith Ogden Harrison, a literary celebrity at the time (though her novels are barely read now). She liked hats with huge feathers and threw lavish, controversial séance parties, which the Chicago Evening Journal parodied in a political comic that depicted Edith Ogden as Chicago’s Marie Antoinette.
§ The original article from which that quote was taken was lost in a fire, but the quote survived in an article the New York Post ran several months later.
ǁ “Chicago’s Never-Built Train System Looks Like a Giant Octopus,” io9, last modified January 12, 2011; io9.com/Chicagos-never-built-train-system-looks-like-a-giant-1280648619.
a To apologize for making their day longer, Molly bought lunch for the entire crew. According to Nix, she also told the assembled cast and crew (that included a dancer named Irene Davis), “I am so sorry. I promise I wouldn’t waste your time like this if it wasn’t a matter of extreme importance. Not life or death, but with similar stakes.”
b In my interview with Nix, she maintained that she didn’t remember when, exactly, the sexual element of her relationship with Taer began. “But that’s how Caitlin is,” Nix said. “Once you start fucking her it’s like you’ve always been fucking her. At least, that’s how she treats you. You’ve always been fucking her and you will always be fucking her.” When I asked her what she meant, Nix said: “Oh, you know, she annexes you. She claims you as a territory. You know what I mean.” Nope, I do not. —CD
&nbs
p; c Unknowable, even if Nix had been more forthcoming with me about the details of her romantic relationship with Taer.
On January 24, two weeks after Molly disappeared, three days after Taer and Nix found Molly Metropolis’s notebook, and three days before Taer finally broke down and called Berliner, Nix asked Taer if she could move into her living room temporarily. Taer and her roommate needed help with the rent, so despite the possible romantic complications, Taer agreed. Nix told her mother she was going to stay with a friend in the city, packed some winter clothes in a large suitcase, and proceeded to make camp on Taer’s couch. Occasionally, Nix slept with Taer in her bed, but more often she retreated to the living room after their nighttime trysts. Nix and Taer both enjoyed sleeping alone, and the couch reminded her of narrow tour bus bunks and unfamiliar hotel beds. After months of living on tour with Molly Metropolis, Nix had come to enjoy living like a nomad—just as Molly had enjoyed it.
Though the on-the-road lifestyle suited them both, Nix and Molly grew up with completely different temperaments. Where Molly was bombastic, Nix was reticent. Nix had spent much of her childhood quietly watching Bulls and White Sox games with her father. Victor Nix taught his daughter to value healthy competition, good sportsmanship, and even tempers. His favorite athletes were calm, collected, and professional; he loved Scottie Pippen and hated Dennis Rodman for everything except his rebounding record. Nix easily adopted her father’s favorite characteristics. Prone to moodiness as a child, she learned to carefully control and conceal her emotions from both of her parents, pursuing her passions without ever acting passionately.
Molly, even in college, was the absolute opposite. She was a dramatic personality, a theater nerd who expressed herself aggressively. Molly befriended Nix not because they were opposites but because they were both performing. Nix performed the lack of emotion. Molly performed the excess.
Under Molly’s influence, Nix loosened up. “I changed after college, when I started working for Molly, I know that,” Nix said. “I enjoyed myself more. It helped that I didn’t have anything to live up to, not a team or a GPA, nothing like that. I started painting my nails a lot even though I kept them short.”
Nix worked for Molly during the majority of the pop star’s short career. Her job went from a twenty-hour-per-week, minimum impact position to an eighty-hour-per-week, intense scramble to keep up with Molly’s rising profile. When Molly’s first tour, the Célèbrety Ball, was in full swing, Nix worked about twelve hours a day, every day, with only non-performance days off. The non-performance days were few and far between. Nix was unfazed by the increased hours. Her compensation had swelled accordingly, and with the record label covering most of her expenses while on tour, she managed to save a nice amount of money, a financial cushion that made her father proud. Furthermore, although a professional distance always existed between them, Nix became one of Molly’s friends and confidants.
Nix was unaware of the extent to which Molly hid things from her, because Molly always made it seem like Nix knew all her secrets. They gossiped about the dancers; while she was getting her hair done, Molly told Nix detail-laden stories about her tumultuous romance with her first producer, Davin Karl; in the evenings, they drank wine together and talked about the purpose of art, sometimes just the two of them.
When Molly disappeared, Nix slipped into a depression. Still unwilling to exhibit deep emotions in front of her parents, and without an apartment of her own to run to, Nix escaped to Taer’s. From the moment she moved in, she did nothing to hide the depths of her melancholy. She slept for twelve hours a day, and stayed up half the night. She sometimes paced the short, carpeted hallways in Taer’s apartment, picking at the chipping white paint on the walls. She pulled Taer’s books off her IKEA shelves, read ten pages, then left them on the coffee table. She sat on the couch for hours, scrolling through Tumblr, absorbing nothing but a constant wash of bright colors. In the middle of a conversation, she would stop talking mid-sentence, stand up, and walk away. Bundled in sweatpants and a flannel button-down pajama top, swaddled in a gray fleece blanket with a pattern of yellow ducks, she spent the night staring at the ceiling.
For the first week and a half after Nix moved in, Taer tried to help. She bought Nix presents, like a chocolate bar or a used DVD of Love and Basketball. She cooked Nix meals and brought home bags of bar pretzels from Rainbo. She tried very hard to be good to Nix, becoming more like a girlfriend every day, but according to Nix, Taer got irritated easily over the small annoyances of sharing space with another person. Taer snipped at Nix over leaving towels on the ground or crumbs on the kitchen counter, then got angry because Nix’s apologies seemed forced. They would both snap back and forth, raising the stakes with each rejoinder, until the little bitch sessions turned into proper fights.
When they fought, Taer screamed at Nix, opened the door, and demanded that Nix move out, take the train back to Flossmoor. Nix would try to talk Taer down or, if she was feeling particularly frustrated, she would ice Taer out, refusing to speak to or acknowledge her.
These fights ended when Taer apologized, cranked up the heater, and crawled under Nix’s blanket. “Even though she got mad fast she’d forget about it even faster,” Nix said. “Cait doesn’t hold grudges. Like, fifteen minutes later we could be talking about music or watching Netflix like she’d never been pissed.”
While Berliner certainly experienced fewer of Taer’s mood swings, he was more blunt in his discussions of Taer’s relationship with Nix. He said, “Nix always said, all Taer needed to forget she was upset was a back rub and a blow job.”
While Nix wallowed in depression, Taer descended into her own crushing obsession with Molly Metropolis and her notebook, a fixation that demanded more of her focus every day and sometimes took precedence over Nix’s emotional well-being. Even though Taer could see that Nix was falling apart, she prodded her for details about Molly’s day-to-day life, her hobbies, her proclivities, anything that could give Taer a clearer picture of what might’ve happened to Molly. Nix gritted her teeth and obliged. She also tolerated Taer’s compulsive listening and re-listening to Molly Metropolis’s posthumous album.
The day after Nix moved into Taer’s apartment, SDFC released Molly’s last album, Cause Apocalyptic. The album debuted at number one, while all eight songs battled over the top spot on iTunes’ digital singles chart. SDFC sent a complimentary copy of the CD to Nix, who gave it to Taer. Taer played Cause Apocalyptic dozens of times while she read Molly’s notebook.
Taer’s reading and research brought her to a series of dead ends, which brought her again to Berliner’s phone number, her only remaining unwalked avenue. Unable to contain herself, Taer decided to call Berliner without telling Nix—her first betrayal. Taer also stole Nix’s cell phone to make the call, assuming Berliner might recognize Nix’s number and pick up the phone. Berliner did answer and after an awkward introduction, Taer told Berliner she had Molly Metropolis’s notebook.
Berliner refused to discuss the notebook over the phone. He instead asked Taer to meet him at a soul food restaurant in the Loop called Redfish—“neutral territory.” As Taer agreed, Nix walked into Taer’s bedroom, still dressed in her pajamas at 4 p.m., and overheard the end of the conversation. Taer said goodbye to Berliner staring directly into Nix’s eyes, guilty but unwavering. After Taer hung up, Nix snatched the phone out of her hands, checked the number and, recognizing it as Berliner’s, asked, according to Taer’s notes, “What the fuck have you done?”
Nix and Taer had another screaming match. Nix fought with the moral high ground; she had been dismissed and deceived, her desires had been ignored, and so on. Taer cut deep and low; she dismissed Nix’s depression as self-indulgence, and questioned her devotion to Molly, shouting something like: “Why is it that I, who never fucking met her once, give a shit about where she is, and all you can do is sit on your ass all day?”
Eventually, they calmed down. Taer cried a little. Nix swept up shards of a glass Taer had thrown on the floor in an
ger. Taer apologized for calling Berliner behind Nix’s back and for saying terrible things. Nix didn’t apologize for anything, but told Taer the reason she was reluctant to call Berliner: Molly’s strange insistence that Nix not trust him, and the several strange encounters Nix’d had with him. When he visited Molly on tour or on the set of the “Never Work, Only Party” music video, he either ignored Nix completely or spoke animatedly about his time working in a vintage map store as if Nix had asked him questions about it. Berliner had been sleeping with one of the dancers, Irene Davis, and the whole tour crew gossiped about his weird sexual proclivities, some kind of architectural fetish Nix never really understood. “I guess he likes to rub his dick against sconces or something,” Nix told Taer. Taer thought that was so funny, she posted it on her Facebook page.*
Nix didn’t want to give Molly’s notebook to Berliner, and thought he might be capable of overpowering them and taking it out of Taer’s purse. Taer suggested they rent a safety deposit box to stash the notebook in, and despite the theatricality of the idea, Nix agreed. Before going to Redfish, they took the L to the Chicago First National Bank and Trust. They locked up the notebook, then took the train downtown.
Berliner never met them at Redfish. Taer and Nix ate fried green tomatoes, chicken gumbo, and jalapeño cornbread as they glanced around the dark restaurant, mostly empty except for a few overworked businessmen and tired assistants picking up carry-out for the office. They sat for two hours, quickly working their way through several beers, watching the door. Taer tried calling Berliner, but he didn’t answer his phone.†
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