Nix ran. She didn’t have shoes or a coat but she ran anyway, as far and as fast as she could, into the maze of streets surrounding the New Society’s Michiana house. She threw the gun into a bush. It took her an hour to find her way out of the lakeside area, but none of the New Society members pursued her. She was lucky she was kidnapped in April; if there had been snow on the ground, her feet would have frozen before she could find her way to the main road.
Nix went into the first business she saw, a diner, and told the waitress she had escaped from an abusive boyfriend and needed to call her sister in Chicago. She couldn’t remember Taer’s cell phone number off the top of her head and had to look it up in her e-mail account using the waitress’s iPhone.
Half an hour later, Berliner and Taer arrived at the Michiana diner, where Nix was drinking coffee, eating pie, and listening to the waitress’s own harrowing tales of bad men. Taer almost couldn’t look at Nix, with the ominous bandages on her chin and around her fingers, the fresh bruises on her elbows from banging into the side of the tub while she slept, the bruises forming on the inside of her fingers where she’d gripped the toilet lid.‡ As the Civil War histo rian Fredrick Doyle wrote, “Young soldiers don’t truly believe in the cruelty of war until they see their first casualty.”§ In a burst of public emotion, Taer sobbed. She cried so deeply she choked, while Nix hugged her.
Taer pulled herself together. She awkwardly pulled off her puffy coat and handed it to Nix. Nix was moved by both the crying and the gesture. She took the coat from Taer. Even though it didn’t fit her properly, Nix put it on.
Berliner drove Nix to the nearest hospital, a small emergency-care facility called Franciscan ExpressCare. An attending physician redid Casares’s sutures and prescribed more Vicodin. On the long drive back to Chicago, Taer sat with Nix in the backseat. She put Nix’s head in her lap and ran her fingers through her hair, lightly massaging her scalp and gently working out all the tangles and knots. They didn’t speak. Nix wouldn’t discuss her own experience of the kidnapping while she was still fleeing from it.
Back at the New Situationist headquarters, Taer ran Nix a bath. She helped her undress, then sat next to the tub with her fingertips in the water while Nix soaked and cried a little. After the bath water went cold, they went to bed together and slept.
Nix refused to get out of bed the next day. She curled up in a ball, under a heavy comforter. Though she wouldn’t let Taer get into the cocoon with her, Taer could see she was shuddering from the way the comforter shook. Nix refused to consume anything except water and more Vicodin for her aching fingers. Taking Vicodin on an empty stomach made her nauseated. Berliner visited the bedroom of the apartment Taer and Nix had claimed and spoke softly to Nix about the strength of the steel door.
“But they know where we are,” Nix said.
Berliner assured her that Ali, Peaches, and their New Society couldn’t get through the door. Nix didn’t speak to him again that day.
Taer stayed with Nix all morning and afternoon, writing in her journal, reading about the Situationists, and begging Nix to eat the Kraft Easy Mac she had found in Berliner’s room.
Nix didn’t move or respond until early evening; she was suddenly starving. Taer made her the microwavable macaroni and cheese, which tasted like plastic. Nix threw it all up, perhaps because of the Vicodin, or anxiety, or her body rejecting the chemical mess that flavored the Easy Mac. Taer held her hair as she vomited, then wrapped her arms around Nix’s shoulders while she sat on the bathroom floor, shaking.
Meanwhile, Berliner took the rental car with Michigan plates out for one last spin. He stopped at a Walgreen’s and cobbled together a gift basket of Virginia Slims, M&Ms, and seven different shades of red nail polish. Then he drove to the Dwight Correctional Center. On the way, he received a call from Davis’s father, informing him of her suicide. By the time Berliner reached the wide plastic table where he met Kraus during visitation hours, he was already shaking and crying. He buried his head in the crook of one arm and sobbed into the table, with his other arm stretched toward Kraus. The guards permitted her to hold his hand, so she comforted him that way.
In the prison’s visiting room, outfitted with various cameras and recording devices, Kraus and Berliner couldn’t speak freely about Nix’s kidnapping. They could talk for hours about maps and sex apartments and pop stars, but use phrases like “almost cut off her fingers,” and the prison guards would start to take notice. Berliner spoke as freely as he could; he could talk openly about Davis’s death at least, which he did as Kraus stroked the back of his hand.
Berliner was afraid he wouldn’t be able to fight back, he was afraid he wouldn’t find what Molly Metropolis had found, and he was afraid that he, Nix, and Taer wouldn’t be able to protect themselves from the New Society. Kraus wouldn’t let him be afraid. She held his hand and whispered ferociously to him until Berliner no longer had the urge to cry.
Taer didn’t tell Berliner and Nix about the secret train for another day and a half. She waited until she decided Nix was recovered enough—still nervous and jumpy, but able to leave the Urban Planning Committee if she carried the gun with her. Preparing for a dramatic scene, Taer brought Berliner and Nix takeout from their favorite Italian restaurant, turned on her iPhone voice recorder to continue to track the story, and attempted to combine apology and explanation while their mouths were full.
Nix and Berliner were both livid that Taer hadn’t told them sooner. Most people have a particular arguing style, developed through years of familial conflict or friend-group infighting. Taer, Nix, and Berliner all argued differently. Berliner learned from his mother to be quiet during a fight; Dana Berliner didn’t appreciate raised voices. Nix, a veteran of popular girl hierarchies, hated conflict; she made jokes to amuse herself and defuse the tension. Taer, who had three stubborn brothers, immediately became defensive.
“Why didn’t you tell me about it this morning?” Berliner asked.
“I’m not telling you anything until you calm down and listen to me.”
“I’m perfectly calm.”
“Yeah, sure,” Nix said.
“I don’t have to tell you every little thing I do,” Taer said.
“I thought we were working on this together,” Berliner said.
“I think I’ve sacrificed enough to warrant full disclosure at this point,” Nix said.
“You could’ve trusted us, maybe,” Berliner said.
“How did I know you wouldn’t have figured something out from what I found, and not told me about it? How do I know I can trust you when it really comes down to it?” Taer said to Berliner.
“Well, two nights ago, you said to me, ‘I’ve been living in your lair for two months now, and you’ve been the best friend to Nix and me. I totally trust you.’ So there’s that.”
“I meant I trusted you not to make a move on me in the night or something.”
“That place really is like a lair,” Nix said.
“Stop fucking with me,” Berliner said. “This is exactly what Metro did. Leaving cryptic messages and just fucking off.”
“I’m not doing that,” Taer said.
“It feels like you’re doing the exact same thing.”
“I wanted to find what she found. You met her, you knew her.”
“I could’ve hid this whole thing from you, but I didn’t want to do it by myself,” Berliner said. “Is that what you want?”
“No,” Taer said.
“To go at it alone?”
“No, I said,” Taer said. “Okay, okay? Let me tell you! I found some stations on the map, these little pink dots, they were just floating there, all by themselves—”
“This is exactly why you should’ve told me right away,” Berliner interrupted, “We didn’t get a chance to check everything, they might be errors—”
“Well, they’re not errors, and this is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you right away, because you’re not listening—” Taer said.
“I’m listenin
g!”
“No, you are interrupting me when I’m trying to tell you what happened.”
“Guys,” Nix said, firmly.
“Okay, so, I think that when Molly wrote in her notebook about the Pyramid Eye, or the Third Eye, or even all that stuff with Chombart de Lauwe mapping that triangle for that girl, do you remember that?” Taer asked.
“Yeah,” Berliner said.
“When she was writing that, I think she was trying to make us think about triangles, in relation to The Ghost Network. I think she hid a triangle on there somehow, and I think I found two points on the triangle. She marked them as stations on the digital map. One of the marks is on this address, the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, so I think Molly thought of this as a metaphorical station—unless there is a train station under here, I don’t know, I don’t think so, though. Anyway, I found a second dot in the same color, and I went there.”
Taer then told Berliner and Nix the story of finding the station and running from the approaching train. As Nix and Taer discussed the train, Berliner opened MollyMaps, pursuing an idea that had been nagging at him since Taer mentioned she had found some station dots unconnected to any train lines. Berliner checked the revision history of the digital version of The Ghost Network and saw that on January 9, sometime after Molly had left the Museum of Contemporary Art, she had added a map to The Ghost Network and then deleted it. Berliner restored the deleted map. It appeared on The Ghost Network as a narrow, pale pink triangle. One apex landed at the Urban Planning Committee headquarters; the second apex was the Chicago Executive Airport, where Taer had run from the mysterious train; the third apex was at a location neither Berliner nor Taer recognized, but it intersected with a station on a train line that had never been approved by the city.
The non-approved train line would’ve been 154.8 miles long, stretching from the most affluent southern suburbs of Milwaukee all the way down to the country clubs in Chicago’s southern suburban region. The line would’ve sideswept the overcrowded Loop lines meant for businessmen and other commuters. Most of the line’s stations would’ve hugged the waters of Lake Michigan. Once it left the water, it veered into the Theater District.
The Chicago Transit Authority proposed the train line in 1957, in a project co-sponsored by the State Tourism Board. The CTA and Tourism Board designed the line not only to increase tourism to the city’s beaches but also to attract the “right kind” of tourists by stopping only in the wealthiest suburbs.ǁ A Chicago Tribune reporter, writing about the tourism proposal in its entirety, dubbed the train line “The Party Line,” both referring to the leisure-based purpose of the line and mocking the city’s newly elected mayor, Richard J. Daley for ‘toeing the party line’ of his political party.a The Party Line was supposed to be a cost-efficient line because it reused some bomb shelter/underground stations that had gone out of service in the 1940s, but when Daley and the CTA discovered that each of those underground stations would need about a million dollars in renovations before they would be up to code, the Party Line died. The plans for the line were filed with the rest of the city’s transit records. Decades later they were mined from the Public Archives by Peaches. Molly Metropolis added the Party Line to The Ghost Network on August 3, 2009.
Berliner relayed the history of the Party Line to Nix and Taer. They decided to go to the third point in Molly’s triangle the next day, in the early afternoon. They didn’t even have to take the L; the Party Line station was within walking distance of the New Situationist headquarters on North Wells Street, halfway between West North Avenue and West Schiller Street, at the site of the Old Town Aquarium, a boutique tropical fish store. The land had been privately owned by a real estate company called Rind-Grandin Global since the mid-1960s. Jim and Ian Schakowsky, brothers and world-class deep-sea divers, had first rented the property in 1972 and had been running Old Town Aquarium for nearly four decades. Although they didn’t advertise this service, the Schakowsky brothers’ elite clients could hire them to procure any aquatic life-form “physically smaller than Jim,” the taller of the two. A regular customer, who spoke to me on the promise of anonymity, has a secret collection of endangered sea life acquired for him by the Schakowskys.
In the shop, Berliner and Taer pretended to browse while Nix actually did. She watched a tank full of jellyfish, a species colloquially called “moon jellies.” She gazed at their ghostly, translucent bodies until the clerk, a middle-aged woman named Nancy Franklin, noticed her intensity and sidled over to give Nix her sales pitch. With the clerk conveniently distracted, Taer and Berliner searched the small shop for a way into the unused train station below. They didn’t find anything. Nix asked Berliner if they had the money to buy a large tank and jellyfish to swim in it. They didn’t, but Berliner agreed to buy her a bowl of small bioluminescent fish. While filling out the delivery slip with his pied-à-terre’s address, Berliner casually mentioned he might know the Schakowsky brothers from either “a political group” or the Urban Planning Committee, testing the waters. Franklin promised to pass on his greeting to the owners.
Nix was elated with her purchase. She curled her arm around Taer’s as they walked down the street. Taer appreciated the attention but she was frustrated by not finding anything and batted Nix away. They decided to split up; Berliner would go to meet Nina Johnson at the Chicago Archives to try to find a blueprint or a city survey of the building that housed the Old Town Aquarium, while Nix and Taer returned to the Urban Planning Committee headquarters. Taer would look for anything they had missed on The Ghost Network. Nix would tend to her fish.
At the Chicago Archives, Berliner met Johnson. She fetched him the blueprints of the Old Town Aquarium’s building as well as the last architectural survey the city conducted of the unused train station below, when Daley still hoped to build the Party Line. In their examination of the blueprints, Berliner found plans for a hidden staircase, leading into a basement area.
Johnson locked the door of the Archives, took off her dress, and unscrewed the bolts that held one of the benches to the floor. She and Berliner copulated while the bench rocked and scraped across the maple wooden flooring.
Taer and Nix’s return to the Racine building was equally exciting. As they descended into the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, they noticed that the security door had been tampered with. Someone had tried to take the heavy steel door off at its hinges. The New Society was the most likely culprit, and Nix panicked. She insisted that they move out. Taer agreed, and called Berliner to hurry home to help. The plan was to transfer everything to Berliner’s pied-à-terre.
When Berliner arrived, they began packing for their quick move. Taer wrapped the external hard drives that stored The Ghost Network’s data in her heaviest sweaters. She and Nix were transferring them into a backpack when a bomb went off in the Racine building.
* * *
* At some point, Cyrus visited this house. —CD
† During a conversation we had about her and Taer’s sex life, Nix also mentioned to me that she masturbated while she was in this bathtub. I asked her if she had ever thought about Taer while “jerking off” (my words) and she told me the bathtub had reminded her of Taer. Nix said, “I obviously didn’t want Taer to have been kidnapped too, but I wanted her there with me. I thought about her and, yeah, I masturbated. Which I know sounds strange, but she and I, we had this thing about bathtubs and faucets and we were always having sex in the tub. It started out by us kinda making fun of Nick’s thing, and then, I don’t know. It escalated. So, I did jerk off about her that once. And then more lately, you know, since the Lake Michigan thing.” —CD
‡ The waitress forced Nix to pose for cell phone photos to give to the police. Nix used them for her 2010 Christmas card.
§ Fredrick Doyle, Sugar, Cotton, and Boys Fighting Boys (New York: Random House, 2001), 12.
ǁ Incidentally, the man who actually designed the train line, William Alexander Carnevale, Jr., grew up in the South Chicago industrial neighborhood now ca
lled Burnside. Locals refer to the neighborhood as “The Triangle” because it is fenced in by three railroad tracks: the Illinois Central Line on the west, the Rock Island Line on the south, and the New York Central Line at the east. Carnevale’s father was a blue-collar factory worker in the Burnside Steel Mill. W. A. Carnevale, Sr., continued to live in the neighborhood even when the factories closed and white flight reached a fever pitch. W.A. Jr. eventually died in the neighborhood where he was born on December 25, 1981. He was visiting his ailing father and, on his way back to his Wicker Park apartment, caught a stray bullet during a sudden burst of gang violence. He bled to death on the street, calling for help that didn’t come.
a Sal Barbar, “The City of Impossible Trains,” Chicago Tribune, March 3, 1957; 68.
The explosion knocked Taer, Berliner, and Nix across the room, into the wall, as paint chips and wood splinters rained on their heads and the rooms of the Urban Planning Committee shook. Luckily, the small amount of plastic explosive the New Society had planted wasn’t designed to bring down the building, just destroy the steel door, so Taer, Berliner, and Nix suffered only small cuts and bruises. Within a few seconds, the shaking stopped, and they picked themselves up.
Berliner knew they had to leave the Urban Planning Committee to the New Society, to give up the space he’d devoted a decade of his life, but he wouldn’t let them take the small physical archives of the New Situationists and the UPC.
The Ghost Network Page 23