Despite his success with the baseball team, Berliner’s school record took a turn for the worse. He skipped classes and refused to tell his mother and grandmother where he was going. His relationship with both his mother and grandmother deteriorated as the school year continued. They occasionally spied him walking with a young woman in her twenties, whom they believed he had started dating. They were terrified the relationship had become sexual. Over the course of the next year, Raulson and Dana worked themselves into a frothy moral panic, which boiled over when Raulson happened to see Berliner in a neighborhood park, laying on a blanket under an architectural archway, making out with the young woman who had long red fingernails. Raulson interrupted them, forced Berliner to empty his pockets, and dragged him home in horror when she saw he was carrying a condom.
Raulson contacted an extremist, deviant order of nuns based in Southern Italy, outside of a small town called Ripacandida. The nuns specialized in cures for homosexuality and off-site exorcisms, a kind of “we’ll pray it out of you from afar” program. The matron of the convent was named Sister Ernestina Greco. She diagnosed Berliner with a “second soul,” an infestation of the “Wandering Devil.” Berliner’s walking, Sister Ernestina insisted, was an early symptom of profound religious doubt that would soon overtake every aspect of his life. If it was allowed to stay inside him, he would never be able to settle in one city, town, or country; he would spend thousands of dollars on new material items because his preferences for color and design would change quickly; he would be a fickle lover, and if he ever married, he would leave his spouse without producing any children.
Sister Ernestina reassured Dana and Raulson they were not responsible for Berliner’s infection. The death of a parent, especially a father, leaves the body of a male child very susceptible to demonic infestation. The Sister offered to cut her rate of 60 million lira (approximately $30,000) in half because she was moved by the boy’s story. Raulson and Dana decided to employ Sister Ernestina and her convent’s long-distance exorcism services.
On October 7, 1999, Dana and Raulson added a very small dose of a drug the sisters had provided to the pop Berliner drank with dinner.‡ He passed out and woke up tied to his bed. His grandmother and mother were sitting on folding chairs against the opposite wall of his bedroom. Raulson phoned the sisters and put them on speakerphone; they began the exorcism ceremony, speaking in Latin and Italian. The only phrase they spoke in English was, “Out, demon!” presumably switching languages so Berliner, Raulson, and Dana could understand them. Drugged and held captive, Berliner shouted back.
The ritual took seven hours to complete, from around 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. By the end, Raulson and Dana were dizzy with sleep deprivation. Raulson especially was physically overwhelmed, and could barely stand. Berliner, however, seemed invigorated. His eyes were clear and wide, his breath was even. His body shined with a layer of cooling sweat. He felt like a marathon runner on the last mile of the race; the adrenaline had taken over his body completely, so he felt no pain.
Sister Ernestina, her voice hoarse from exertion, instructed Dana to untie Berliner. She asked Berliner if he felt different. He responded that he did. “He will still feel the urge to walk, at first,” she said, “but the desire will leave him. Remnants of the bad spirit. It can’t live inside a person without having some—harmless, I assure you—lingering effects. But a year from now, your son will have no desire to walk, and he will look back on all the walking he did and wonder, ‘What was it that made me enjoy walking so much?’ The devil is out of him. The devil is out of him.”
According to Sister Ernestina and Berliner’s mother, he was cured. Berliner has a different interpretation of the events: “The nuns and I fought all night, and they thought they won but they didn’t. I won.”
With his mother and grandmother’s fears allayed, Berliner was free to return to his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend, Marie-Hélène Kraus, and their friends, the New Situationists.
Kraus was born in the U.S. but had been conceived in France, so her mother chose to give her a French name. Her parents were both children of Russian Jewish immigrants, but Kraus didn’t identify with her ancestral Jewishness or Russianness. She felt, spiritually, more in common with some semi-fake notion of “the French.” In kindergarten, she spent half the year speaking in an exaggerated French accent and convinced the other students she was European. When she got tired of the accent, she told her classmates that she had finally learned to “speak like an American.” Her best friend believed she was French until their sophomore year of high school. When she was sixteen, she was hit by a car while roller blading and broke her back. She spent a year in a body cast, during which time she memorized the number of casualties of each battle of the Civil War and read a lot of novels.
In high school, Kraus took great pains to style herself like an old Hollywood movie star, specifically Lauren Bacall, whom she identified with because they both had low voices and small breasts. Kraus smoked cigarettes constantly to emphasize the scratchiness of her voice, and even though she was very tall, she always wore heels to emphasize her height. She was a fashionable dresser with an encyclopedic knowledge of current American politics and popular culture. Perhaps because she spent so much time creating a fantasy around her persona, Kraus had a hard time connecting with people. Although she had many boyfriends during high school and college, she felt that Berliner was the first person to “love her honestly.”
Berliner and Kraus met in a coffee shop in Wicker Park shortly after he began walking. At the time, Kraus worked as the Chief Officer in Charge of Recruitment for the recently formed New Situationists. In contradiction to her intentionally ironic title, Kraus’s job was to dismiss or divert anyone who seemed captivated by the New Situationists, whether the interest was academic, political, or personal. Her job was difficult; she not only had to convince people to give up their curiosity, she had to convince them that there was nothing to be curious about. “The New Situationists can’t exist,” she often reminded Berliner. “That was how Debord would’ve wanted it.”§
Well-suited to her position with the New Situationists, Kraus gave a first impression of cold indifference; she rarely developed sentimental attachments. With David Wilson, she was the exception to the New Situationists’ program of extreme secrecy. While the two of them would have some level of visibility among the members and to the outside world, every other member remained hidden as much as possible. Later, after the New Situationists made themselves known through their act of domestic terrorism, the State Prosecutors and the public conflated the New Situationists’ historic secretiveness with long-term plans for the bombing. However, Kraus always insisted the Chicago Subway Bombings were a flight of fancy, planned in a few months, maximum; the secrecy grew out of an adherence to Situationist principles, plus a flair for theater.
“We were not above some Eyes Wide Shut–esque displays. Not the orgy part, but the masks, the passwords, the secrecy. We were feeling very dramatic at the time. We wore animal masks like in some movie,” Kraus told Anna Kirkpatrick during a 2009 exclusive video interview for Kirkpatrick’s political commentary show on MSNBC. During the same interview, Kirkpatrick asked, “Most of a decade has passed since the New Situationists disbanded. Can you tell us what they were exactly?” Kraus responded, “Anna, what makes you think the New Situationists have disbanded?”ǁ
At the coffee shop where Kraus and Berliner met, the first location of the high-end organic coffee retailer Intelligentsia, Berliner sometimes flirted with a young vegan barista named Anna. He often talked to Anna about his devotion and compulsion to walk. Anna also knew Kraus, a regular at the café, and had seen her reading a book about Debord and psychogeography. When Berliner and Kraus happened to stop in at the same time, Anna suggested Berliner ask Kraus for book recommendations. They spoke for a little while and left separately, but Berliner had already developed a bit of a teenage crush. Berliner walked to the coffee shop when he knew Kraus would be there, acting surprised to see her
, and asking her if he could sit down at her table. After a few weeks of this, Berliner dropped the ruse and planned his run-ins with Kraus; they met several times a week to discuss urban planning philosophies and music.
Kraus didn’t like Berliner at first, but she never liked anybody at first. She slowly warmed to him, then surprised herself by thinking about the strange teenager when he wasn’t around. She broke up with her boyfriend of a year, a non–New Situationist, and a month later realized she’d broken up with him for Berliner. On a Saturday afternoon in August, she invited Berliner back to her mod apartment in the Ukrainian Village, and took his virginity on her maple platform bed.
Kraus was pleased that Berliner didn’t say anything too sentimental after their first time having sex; she was also pleased that he fell asleep with his head on her chest while she smoked a cigarette, drank wine, and thought about him. After a thirty minute post-coital nap, Kraus woke Berliner. She slowly and thoroughly explained that she had what previous lovers had called an “architectural fetish,” which she became aware of during a therapy session when she was sixteen. Under hypnosis, she had remembered her twelve-year-old self, masturbating against certain kinds of doorways because the molding was more beautiful. Kraus told Berliner that while she was pleased with devirginizing him, the two of them couldn’t continue a sexual relationship if he didn’t feel comfortable indulging in her preferred sexual practices. Kraus needn’t have worried. Kraus’s descriptions of her preferences were arousing to Berliner. He happily became her sexual protégé.
They began a secret affair. They talked extensively about their personal histories and the historical architecture of Chicago. Kraus introduced Berliner to Debord and the Situationists and he learned quickly. Even while avoiding Dana and Raulson, the lovers found a way to see each other every day. Sometimes, after Berliner’s mother and grandmother had gone to sleep, Kraus snuck into Berliner’s basement and spent the night in his bed. She attended most of his baseball games, pretending to be the cousin of one of Berliner’s teammates, an outfielder whose parents never came to games. She sat in the bleachers, wearing black high-waist jeans, a white button-down shirt, and one of many colored scarves, heckling like she was at Comiskey Park. She drank beer from the bottle or whiskey from a flask and smoked clove cigarettes until the mothers asked her to stop.
The New Situationists were mostly supportive of Kraus’s relationship. Some of them had known her for many years and were amused that she’d finally become enamored of someone. They weren’t happy, though, when Kraus asked to bring Berliner into the group. Up to this point, Kraus had done a thorough job squashing any scrutiny of the NS and its members. Because of Kraus’s efforts, the group was invisible to the outside world and their identities were secret from her and from each other. Asking to bring Berliner in, the antithesis of her job, surprised the other New Situationists despite the depth of her feelings. But because the New Situationist higher-ups respected Kraus, they agreed to see Berliner. They all met in an empty office in a building in the middle of the Loop. Each member of the New Situationists who interviewed Berliner wore a full-face animal mask and used voice-modulating devices when they spoke. They quizzed Berliner about his school and political beliefs, but the thing that really struck them was Berliner’s story about his grandmother’s attempted exorcism. It convinced a few reluctant members that he was interesting enough to join. At the same time, Kraus staged a test of romantic fidelity, hiring an actress she knew to try seduce Berliner. He didn’t stray.
In early November 1999, Berliner was accepted into the New Situationists as a “junior” member and Kraus’s assistant, specializing in Negative Recruitment. They threw a party for him at the group’s headquarters; all the members attended in masks. Some wore wigs, long gloves, or cowls to hide the color of their hair or skin. Kraus wore a purple mask in the shape of a unicorn head and an elaborate horned headdress. Berliner’s mask was red. The loud and lavish party lasted all night. Kraus pulled Berliner into her personal rooms for a quick tryst, then they rejoined the party to dance and drink champagne.
At the party, Kraus introduced Berliner to David Wilson. Unconcerned about protecting his identity, and lacking Kraus and Berliner’s flair for the theatrical, he didn’t wear a mask. Physically, Wilson was an unimpressive man: short, slightly hunched from years of sitting in front of a computer, and graying early. He was nearsighted but had a face-shape that rejected nearly every style of glasses. Round glasses were too small, rectangular glasses were too long, and the square-ish Wayfarers that had recently come back into style made him look like he was trying too hard. He wore a pair of tortoise-shell Wayfarers anyway. He took a picture with masked Kraus and Berliner. Although the picture from the party doesn’t show it, the three of them oddly look like they could be related: big eyes, dark hair, pale skin, and big smiles with large teeth. Lay pictures of Wilson, Kraus, and Berliner side to side and it will look like you’re assembling a family photo album.
During these early days, the New Situationists focused on entertainment and aesthetics. Like the Situationists before them, they wanted to inject playfulness and fun into their droll, serious lives. Berliner immediately began participating in the New Situationists’ aesthetic activities as they attempted to interact with Chicago psychogeographically, in the style of Debord and the SI.
Because of their secrecy and their (possibly?) relatively small numbers, the New Situationists didn’t spark any musical or visual art movements, even on a local level. They either didn’t make much art or it burned in the fire that eventually destroyed their headquarters. They published a few pamphlets or zines without the words “Situationist” or “New Situationist” on them, with unsigned articles in a style both borrowed from the Situationists and helpful in protecting their identities. Some of the articles were reverent histories of Chicago architectural topics; some were personal essays about the L or a particular building in Chicago. They also wrote scathing diatribes against traffic and urban congestion, which they blamed for most of society’s ills. The contemporary urban architect’s tactics, they argued, hemmed people into capitalism-directed movements through an urban area, with pedestrians and drivers diverted to the routes that would pass the most billboards. This was essentially undiluted Situationist rhetoric. The unsigned, photocopied zines didn’t attract any attention, but were for a short time available for purchase at a local independent bookstore called Quimby’s.
Following the path the Situationists had paved, the New Situationists began focusing on politics rather than aesthetics after a few years of existence. In 2000, without revealing their identities, they helped organize and secretly fund a number of far-left political causes and candidates, mostly focusing on social issues, the politics of intellectual property, and creative freedom as it related to the Internet. However, after the events of September 11, 2001, their politics took a radical turn.
They planned what they believed would be a “low-risk, zero-casualty” act of domestic terrorism, to prove that “domestic terrorism was as much of a threat as foreign terrorism and that terrorism itself wasn’t an act of war between nations, but could be a zero-casualty act of social change within a nation.”a They decided to detonate bombs in eleven L stations across the city. The crippling of the L, which they called the “arms and hands of Chicago,” was intended to mimic the wound New York City received when the Twin Towers fell, to literally stop the city’s movements. In a declaration of intention sent to the Chicago Tribune the night of the bombings, the New Situationists insisted, “We revel in the beauty of this city and her infrastructure, and the destruction of this infrastructure, which we hold so dear, shows how absolutely necessary we believe this demonstration to be.”b
According to Kraus’s testimony, “sometime in May” she and ten other members of the New Situationists were separately informed their involvement was suspected. By the time her compatriots looped in Kraus, every detail had already been planned for 3:15 a.m. on Monday, June 18. The New Situationist leaders had chos
en stations that would be closed at that time.
Sometime after 10 p.m. on June 17, Kraus and the ten other New Situationist bombers met with leaders in the New Situationist headquarters. During this meeting and for the rest of the long night, they all wore ski masks with holes for the eyes and mouth. Kraus’s ski mask was dark pink, which looked black enough in the dark. She hadn’t lost her Situationist instinct that play was as important as politics.
At the headquarters, Kraus received a backpack full of plastic explosives. No one told her where they sourced them. She was told that an “advance team” had been deployed to disable the alarm systems and unlock the doors. She was instructed to enter a particular door at her assigned station, drop her backpack and set the bomb to detonate, then pull the fire alarm to clear out any security guards or stray homeless. According to Kraus, she was told that there wouldn’t be any security guards or homeless people; she was told pulling the fire alarm was just a precaution. The bombers planned to reconvene at the headquarters by no later than 4 a.m.
They believed their plan was simple and in its simplicity, doable.
Kraus’s evening began according to plan. She walked to her station, dropped her bag, and pulled the fire alarm—but then Kraus noticed a security guard passed out at her desk, unmoving despite the noise. Kraus spent several moments trying to wake her, only running at the last moment. Kraus managed to escape the bomb’s blast radius, but only barely. The force of the explosion knocked her to the pavement; she landed on her chin, breaking her front two teeth. The police found her bloody and wailing. They arrested her on the spot. Safe in their headquarters, the rest of the New Situationists escaped notice as police tried to contain the mass chaos.
The Ghost Network Page 10