“We were ‘nesting,’ other dykes would call it,” Nix later told me. “It was shockingly wonderful to have this constant companion. Neither one of us had ever had a girlfriend like this before, someone we basically wanted to fuse with. To attach ourselves to so completely. Everything was very surreal, and we had this idea that maybe when things got ‘back to normal’ we would get torn away from each other. Which seemed overdramatic at the time but was, of course, what happened. So we were smart. We were smart to think our whole world was going to end.”
Some nights, they watched old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Berliner’s Netflix account. Some nights, they played elaborate games of tag.§ Some nights, when the wine had soaked her brain and Nix blurred in front of her tired eyes, Taer almost forgot about the absent pop star and their desperate search for what had happened. Some nights Taer and Nix did nothing but talk for hours. Some nights they lay in bed, not talking to each other, their heads jammed together on the same pillow.
While they worked during the day, Nix, Berliner, and Taer listened to music. Taer put on her favorite bad-mood albums: Elliott Smith’s Either/Or and a single by The Zombies, “Girl Help Me.” Nix and Berliner liked these albums as well. They played them dozens of times while Nix read biographies of Debord, Taer clicked her way through the digital copy of The Ghost Network, and Berliner re-read another L map. They sang along with “Girl Help Me,” and the Either/Or track “Between the Bars” in unison.
Perhaps because of the mood these albums created, Taer developed a vague but constant sense of ill ease. She started working at night, once Berliner had left and Nix had fallen asleep. She obsessively re-read portions of Molly’s notebook, as if trying to crack a code, or uncover a heretofore hidden reference to The Ghost Network or the New Situationists. Occasionally, Molly wrote about the specific maps incorporated into The Ghost Network, but those passages were observations, not conclusions, and littered with her thoughts and emotional responses to the information she was gathering—interesting on first read, but useless to her once she’d read the passages dozens of times. Molly also interrupted her discussions of the maps to make oblique references to her “Eye of Horus,” or “Third Eye,” or “Pyramid Eye,” which had something to do with the reasons she sometimes held one hand over one eye during publicity photo shoots. Taer couldn’t find any connection between these disparate parts of Molly’s notes, nor could she find a connection between The Ghost Network and Molly’s departure. She started to lose hope.
But on a warm April evening, almost seven weeks after Nix and Taer had found Berliner in the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, Taer found something.
* * *
* The Situationist City, 77.
† To explore further, psychogeography is the Situationists’ attempt to marry subjective and objective experiences of the city, the myriad ways that people interact with the cities they live in. From The Situationist City: “On one hand, [psychogeography] recognized that the self can’t be divorced from the urban environment, on the other hand, it had to pertain to more than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be useful in the collective rethinking of the city.”
‡ Situationist International Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007).
§ Which doubled as foreplay. —CD
On April 16, 2010, Taer was drinking red wine alone in Molly Metropolis’s two-story office, trying to focus on a proposed addition to the Purple Line circa 1950, meant to more fully accommodate the expanding western suburbs. (The proposal wasn’t considered cost-efficient and the Transit Committee rejected it.) Taer couldn’t concentrate; she found herself standing in front of Molly’s full-length mirror, experimenting with drugstore eye shadow. With a glass of red wine in her left hand and a makeup brush in her right, she listened to Cause Célèbrety and watched a “smoky-eye tutorial” on YouTube. She then wrote a Tumblr post, complete with selfies, describing her lack of proficiency with eyeliner and comparing the helpfulness of a variety of tutorials.
Half an hour later, her eyes were very smoky and she was significantly more drunk. As she later described to Berliner and Nix, Taer stumbled back to Molly’s desk and, humming along to “Famous Case,” Taer opened the MollyMaps program. She clicked around aimlessly for a while, not researching so much as stumbling through the program, drunkenly ambling from corner to corner of the crowded virtual map.* She turned on the voice recorder on her iPhone and rambled for a bit about wanting to meet Molly, how happy she was to be with Nix, who her Carey Mulligan–inspired character Jenny had been, what she had wanted in life, and what, exactly, Molly meant when she was going on about the “Pyramid Eye.”
“There is a website that says pop stars are Illuminati puppets,” Taer said, “which is of course ridiculous until you start thinking about how I’m sitting alone in a secret headquarters basement place, which is so weird, and maybe she was just in the Illuminati and all the rest is bullshit to trap me and trap Jenny in a triangle forever, just walking around in the same terrible triangle her whole life. How sad is that? We’re all trapped all the time aren’t we, except Molly who got out of here. But I bet even Molly had a triangle! I wish I could—”
Taer stopped talking and for nearly ten minutes, her phone’s voice recorder only picked up some faint clicks from the mouse on her computer.
Then she spoke again, one final rejoinder: “Oh holy fuck.”
Maps have never been accurate. The best they can achieve is a high navigability. In the Exploratory Age, during the first big brouhaha over mapmaking, early cartographers with imperfect knowledge of foreign geographies used flawed equipment to draw maps with as many errors as accuracies. Cultural biases, such as those displayed in the Edge of the World maps, created absolutely abysmal conditions for rigorous accuracy. While Christopher Columbus attempted to circumnavigate the globe in search of gold and spice, most of the “rude class” still believed sea monsters filled the boundary waters between the safe continents and the black void of the unknown.
Modern day maps are still full of inaccuracies. They do a terrible job documenting borders, and are a hopeless match for the rural dirt roads that run between corn and sod farms in Ohio. Lazy mapmakers who use blueprints provided by city planners, rather than conducting their own cartographic surveys, accidentally include “paper streets” on their maps: streets that city planners or subdivision developers include on their blueprints but, for a variety of reasons, never get built.
Beyond even these unintentional discrepancies, some maps have inaccuracies deliberately added, those maps offered up as consumer products like London’s ubiquitous street guide, A–Zed. They are called “trap streets,” and they are purposefully fictitious; map publishing companies add them to protect their copyright. If another company sells a map that includes their false trap street, the first company knows their copyright has been violated and can sue. Trap streets are used as a weapon in corporate warfare, but in certain circumstances, trap streets can be used to fight a different kind of battle. Molly Metropolis certainly understood the importance of trap streets, and as she constructed her map of real train lines and paper ones, she included traps of her own.
Molly’s trap street was a train line that didn’t exist on any of the historic maps. By the time Taer was looking through The Ghost Network, it had been reduced to one errant, and tiny, dot. On the digital version of The Ghost Network, each train line was marked in a different color, and every dot that represented a station on the line was the same color as the line. Clicking drunkenly through The Ghost Network, in her digital dérive, Taer got lucky and stumbled upon a dot not connected to any train line.
At first, she thought she’d accidentally deleted the connection between the dot and the next nearby station. Then Taer noticed that the color of the dot, a pale and almost metallic pink, didn’t match any other dots and lines nearby, nor any other dot she could see. The dot had been placed on the map at the intersection of Armitage and Racine, at the location of t
he very building Taer was then sitting inside. Taer scoured the map for any other trace of the distinctive pink. She didn’t see it, but she wasn’t discouraged.
She flipped to a particularly oblique passage in Molly’s notebook:
I found that the [New Situationists] left enough marks to follow, toeing the Party Line but didn’t leave their Pyramid Eye to make an easy path. I can’t tell if they were performing or acting, or if there is a difference between performing or acting, but I will find out and if I find anything, I’ll leave my Third Eye behind to make a map on top of a map on top of a map like I’ve always done. To be fair to them (Debord and my sweet Nick, who answers to a higher power [currently incarcerated]), I won’t leave an A–Zed sort of a guide, will I? Everyone will have to find something in the lattice. Who am I to deny my dearest ones the fun of their own mystery to solve?
Taer copied the passage into her own journal, circled the word “marks” in the first line, and next to it, she wrote: “pink one at A&R.” Taer also wrote several question marks next to the phrase “Party Line,” and wrote: “Why capitalize this?” Next to the words “Third Eye,” Taer wrote: “Third Eye equals a Pyramid Eye equals a triangle, like Jenny’s triangle. We have to find Molly’s triangle.” She thought the errant pink dot was one apex of a secret triangle, not present on any of the historical maps, which Molly had embedded into The Ghost Network.
For the next several hours, Taer searched the map for the second point in Molly’s triangle, and finally found another pink dot outside of Chicago proper, at the Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling, Illinois.
The wine caught up with Taer then. She took off her bra and fell asleep on Molly’s couch. She slept until nine the next morning when Berliner nudged her awake and playfully flung her bra at her head. Rather than share her discovery with Berliner immediately, Taer decided to investigate the pink dots herself. Berliner and Nix still don’t understand why.
“She’s motivated by emotions rather than thought,” Nix said.
“She was,” Berliner corrected, and Nix flinched.
“You don’t think she wanted to find something without you?” I asked Nix.
“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s frustrating to try to guess about it now. I thought maybe she had written something to explain why she would go searching without us, after everything, but there was nothing in her journals.”
“Maybe she was trying to protect you,” Berliner said to Nix.
“Oh yeah,” Nix said sarcastically, raising her hand with two fingers missing, “she did a really good job protecting me. I’m literally scarred for life.”
Berliner didn’t respond.
Nix said, “Can we stop fucking around and just tell him Taer’s story about her Special Secret Investigation of the Secret Pink Dot now?”
“Please do,” I responded, before Berliner could say anything.
That day, Taer told Berliner and Nix she was picking up an extra shift at Rainbo. At about 3 p.m., Taer left the Urban Planning Committee headquarters and rode the Metra Union Pacific Northwest Line to the location of the second pink dot.†
Taer searched the outermost boarder of the grounds of the Chicago Executive Airport for a full hour. She couldn’t wander the grounds because a security guard chased her off when she tried, but luckily, she didn’t need to go deep into the airfield to find what she was looking for. Just south of the small terminal, near a stretch of runway running alongside South Milwaukee Avenue, Taer found a small brick building painted almost the same color pink as the dots on the digital version of The Ghost Network. The pink paint, though chipped, stood out against the bleak airport landscape of gray and faded green. Taer stood on the hood of someone’s car, smashed through one of the windows with a branch, cut through a flimsy wire screen with the sharp side of one of her keys, and heaved herself over the window ledge.
Immediately, Taer looked for a staircase to the basement and found another steel door with a little keypad lock. She entered the same combination she used to enter the Urban Planning Committee headquarters and the door opened. She descended into darkness.
Taking pictures with her phone as she went, Taer descended on stairs made of rotting wood. She kept one hand on the brick wall to steady herself, and in the other held her cell phone, with her flashlight app activated. Just before she reached the bottom of the staircase, the stairs changed to concrete and tile. Her hand, moving blindly along the wall, bumped into a light switch. She flicked it, and with a loud hum, the lights turned on. Taer was in a train station in disrepair, decorated with signage from the 1950s, plaques that said in fat, black letters “NO SMOKING. NO SPITTING” and “WATCH OUT: DO NOT LEAN OVER THE PLATFORM.” She kicked up clouds of dust and she walked across the floor of cracked tile, arranged in a formless white and green mosaic. Coughing from the dust, lighting her way and taking pictures, Taer found a single incongruous item: a plaque made of plastic, lightly backlit by an LED lamp, designed to look like one of the ’50s plaques, but which clearly had been affixed to the wall of the station more recently. It said “PLAQUES TOURNANTES TROIS” in the same black lettering.
Taer only spent a minute or two exploring the station before a dim beam of light suddenly broke the darkness, emanating from the tunnel beyond. She froze, then scrambled out of the pathway of the light. She waited. The light intensified quickly, and she heard the screech and chug of an approaching train. Had Taer stayed, all her mysteries would’ve been solved, but she was terrified. She ran.
On the long ride from the airport back to the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, during which she anxiously transferred between Metra trains and L trains and buses in case someone was following her, Taer tried to call Nix and Berliner several times. Neither of them answered their phones. Taer’s mind reeled with the memory of the unknown train’s bright light, and she spent about an hour in a coffee shop near the headquarters, writing furiously in her journal. Her notes from this writing session were penned so sloppily as to be almost unreadable. As if she was trying to get her hand to move as fast as her racing mind, she neglected to finish sentences and ignored the lines on the paper. As she wrote page after page, she returned several times to a single thought, first expressed as: “I bet Molly got on that train.” By the end of the hour, she had dropped all speculation: “Molly got on that train.”
Taer walked to the headquarters still dazed, where she was surprised to find Berliner in his kitchen, icing a fresh wound on the back of his head. While he and Nix were walking through an alley shortcut between the Urban Planning Committee headquarters and the nearest liquor store, someone jumped them from behind and knocked Berliner unconscious. When he came to, Nix was gone.
Taer panicked. She called Nix’s cell phone about fifty times; Nix never answered. Eventually, the phone stopped ringing and went straight to Nix’s voice mail. Crying in fear and frustration, Taer wanted to call the police and report Nix missing, but Berliner stopped her. He had a different way to help Nix, which involved revealing a secret he’d been keeping from Taer since she had found him.
Because Berliner knew how important Molly’s pop star career was to her and her ideals, when Molly didn’t show up for the sound check on January 9, Berliner immediately assumed she had been taken against her will. He believed nothing would’ve made Molly Metropolis give up her position of power.
Berliner suspected Ali and Peaches had kidnapped her. He stole his grandmother’s gun and quickly found the New Society in a downtown apartment that Zavos owned, on the seventh floor of the Anne De Zoet building in a posh area of Chicago called River North. While Nix frantically searched through boutique clothing stores and Molly’s dancers rehearsed during sound check without her, Berliner stormed the headquarters of the Society of Children of the Atomic Bomb.
Actually, “storming” isn’t the right word to describe Berliner’s actions. It’s not as though he burst through the doors of the apartment complex with a double-barreled shotgun in his arms and a S.W.A.T. team at his back. The doorman, Ray Mitch
ell, opened the door for him and called up to number seven to see if Ali was in. She told Ray to send Berliner up. Berliner allowed the doorman to put his coat, with his gun and his map sketchpad in the pocket, in the apartment complex’s coat check, where he assumed his items would be safe. He was worried that if he brought them up to the apartment, Ali, Peaches, and their compatriots would overpower him and take them.
Peaches greeted Berliner at the door, checked him for weapons or papers and, finding nothing, invited him inside. Berliner noticed the wooden flooring and the chic, minimalist furnishings and décor. He sat in the living room on a brown leather sofa, a seat which afforded him a great view of the downtown skyline. One of the younger members of the New Society brought them glasses of white wine, then lingered in the corner during Peaches and Berliner’s conversation. Berliner never saw a New Society member older than Ali; they gave the collective impression of malleable young cult members.
Berliner declined to drink the wine and refused to stay on the couch. He believed Molly was tied up in a closet somewhere. Peaches allowed him to go through every nook and cranny of the apartment. He spent a full hour searching, even looking for secret panic rooms (and later he acquired blueprints from the city, the building’s management, and the building’s security company to make sure he hadn’t missed anything). No Molly to be found.
Instead, resting on a nightstand in the fourth bedroom, he saw the circular purple quartz necklace Davis always wore. This discovery rattled Berliner; he didn’t want to believe that a woman he’d trusted had betrayed him so thoroughly. He decided not to mention his discovery to the New Society and test Davis’s loyalty at another time—a test that, as previously described, ultimately led to Taer’s involvement in his investigation of Molly’s disappearance.
The Ghost Network Page 21