“I was shouting at Gina and Cait, probably really incoherently, trying to make them understand we needed to take everything or ruin it, so Ali and Peaches couldn’t have it,” Berliner later told me.
“You weren’t incoherent,” Nix said.
Berliner pulled several half-empty cans of white paint out of a cabinet and, standing on Molly’s desk, sloshed paint over The Ghost Network on the wall. Taer threw the desktop computer to the floor and beat it into bits with a chair. Nix stuffed the remaining external hard drives and Molly’s notebook into her messenger bag. Berliner poured paint on the maps. When they heard footsteps and voices in the hallway, they fled through the secret door in the northwest corner of the office. As they raced up the stairs, Taer, Nix, and Berliner heard a scream and a crash—someone had fallen through the trap door.
“I hope it was that bitch,” Nix said, meaning Peaches. They hurried away from the building.
It wasn’t “that bitch” who had fallen; it was Ali. She shattered the bones in her left elbow and left leg; she also cracked three ribs. Two other members of the New Society carried her out of the building and called an ambulance. (They told the EMTs she had climbed to the roof of the alcove in front of the building and fallen off.) The New Society had reached the heart of the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, but their small hunting party of ten had already been diminished by three.
When they saw the wreckage of the computer and the mess on the wall, the members of the New Society frantically tried to mop up the paint with their scarves and sweaters, while Peaches, her arm in a sling, smashed pieces of computer under her snow boots. She got paint all over her clothes and good hand as she tried to find some unsullied documents under a mound of paint-soaked maps. She didn’t find anything. Frustrated, she sent two of her team to find Taer, Berliner, and Nix, and told the rest of them to stop looking for something and run. Peaches set fire to a pile of maps soaked in paint and the Racine building burned.
Taer, Berliner, and Nix moved as fast as they could down Armitage. They didn’t run into anyone, but they couldn’t hide on the sidewalks brightly illuminated by streetlamps. They didn’t know if anyone from the New Society would follow them, but just in case, they took a long, inefficient route to their destination. They walked, looking over their shoulders, to the L station at Armitage and North Sheffield Avenue. They took the Brown Line one stop south, to the Sedgwick station, exiting the car just as the doors closed. They doubled back, taking the Brown Line north to Fullerton, where they switched to the Red Line and rode to the Grand Station. They left the L behind and walked to Berliner’s pied-à-terre.
Berliner offered Taer and Nix the semi-hidden second bedroom, but instead the three of them piled into the main bed and spooned together, trying to feel protected and safe. Berliner slept, Nix slept, but they said Taer’s anxious fervor kept her awake all night. The adrenaline that had surged through her body in the moments after the explosion didn’t dissipate. At 8:30 the next morning, Nix would’ve preferred to stay asleep, but Taer shook her and Berliner awake. She had already made a Dunkin Donuts run. The Old Town Aquarium opened at 9 a.m. and she wanted to get going.
Nancy Franklin was, again, manning the store and the jellyfish, but this time she greeted Berliner warmly, as if she knew him. According to Berliner, she said something like: “Jim and Ian said you are friends with Antoinette Monson. You should’ve mentioned that the other day and I would’ve let you do whatever you wanted.” Franklin led them to the emergency exit, disabled the alarm, and pointed the way to a narrow passage which led to the staircase Berliner had seen on the blueprints of the building. Taer descended into the darkness without a second thought.
The staircase wasn’t very deep but it took them a long time to reach the bottom because it was narrow, unlit, and unstable. At the base of the staircase, Berliner felt around for the breaker box—subway regulations during the year the station was built called for breakers at the foot of every service staircase. Berliner opened his cell phone and shone his light against the wall. He found the breaker and flicked the switches. All of the light fixtures on the ceiling, ornate 1920s-style chandeliers strung with heavy crystals, lit up.* The station stretched out in front of them. In some ways, a subway station is the perfect secret space in Chicago. Even though the L trains run underground for huge distances, everyone in Chicago still thinks of public transit as something hovering above the city rather than creeping below.
Continuing her obsessive self-documentation, Taer turned on her iPhone voice recorder.
“It’s pretty,” Nix said, her voice echoing against the tiled walls. “I mean, like, it looks fancy, like Union Station.”
Berliner sneezed. “I’m allergic to dust.”
Taer said, “This place is so rad!”
A few minutes later, bored and underwhelmed after the first train station she visited produced a train so quickly, Taer had changed her tune, grumbling: “What do we do now?”
The three of them explored the train station from end to end, but besides a few benches and a surprising lack of mold or grime, they didn’t find anything. They sat on the benches and waited. Nix laid her head in Taer’s lap and made weak jokes: “They really need to get more funding so that they can add more trains. This wait is ridiculous. I’ll be late for work.” Berliner ate some trail mix Nix had in her purse and answered some of Taer’s questions about his mother. They played the app version of the board game Life on Taer’s iPhone. Two and a half hours went by. Then, as Taer complained about not being able to nap on a hard tile floor, the crystals on the chandelier started to shake.
“Jurassic Park,” Taer said, referring to the scene where the water ripples from the vibration of the footsteps of an approaching T-Rex. A few seconds later, the voice recorder picked up the unmistakable rattling clank of an approaching train.
The train was two cars long, and old, and green. It had probably been in the underground station since the ’50s, but someone had taken care to repaint it. The sides were a forest green, the window frames a yellowish off-white. On the front was a big beacon-like light, and two stoplight fixtures on either side of a door. Where there would’ve been a sign that displayed the name of the next stop, there was instead a sign with a black triangle painted on it.
On Taer’s recording, mixed in with the clatter of the train and the screech of its brakes, I could hear Berliner speaking quickly, though his words were indiscernible to me. Berliner told me he was giving Taer and Nix a quick history of the train car—vintage 1950s, painted like they would’ve been painted—as well as identifying for them the man who was driving the train.
It was David Wilson, the other publicly known, non-incarcerated member of the New Situationists. He stopped the train and stepped onto the platform.
“Hey!” Taer said.
Wilson ignored her and spoke to Berliner instead. “I suppose Marie-Hélène told you something ridiculous.”
“She didn’t tell me anything, she told me she didn’t know anything,” Berliner said. “This is Cait and this is Gina.”
“Okay.”
“Did she know something?” Berliner asked.
“Marie’s the kind of person who wouldn’t tell me if she’d found something out,” David said. “I assumed—”
“I was the one who found it,” Taer interjected. “It wasn’t him.”
At the same time, Berliner said: “It was kind of a group effort.”
“Okay,” Wilson said. “Good for you.”
“So what now?” Taer asked.
“I guess you might as well get on the train,” Wilson said.
Wilson went to the engine room to start the train car again, while Taer, Nix, and Berliner climbed inside the first car. The seats, some facing forward and some facing back, were covered in decaying red fabric. The white paint on the walls was chipped and the stuffing was coming out of the plush seats. Nix sat, squeezing the fabric of the seat cushions in her fist, feeling the dust on them. She felt uneasy but didn’t speak up. Ber
liner picked at the peeling paint with his fingernails, collecting a handful of millimeter-long paint chips, then pocketing them. Taer, exhilarated, grabbed the metal handrails and walked up and down the center aisle of the car, examining everything she could. When the train started she could barely contain a shout.
“We followed Molly Metropolis’s map,” Taer said, when Wilson walked back into the train car. “Where is she? What is this train? Where are we going?”
“Are we not going back there?” Nix asked. “Because let me off.”
“Seriously?” Taer said.
“I’m not going somewhere random with this dude,” Nix said. “Fuck that.”
Wilson laughed, a dry wheeze. He said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, Caitlin, but this train is nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Taer said. “It’s a train.”
“It’s a toy,” he said. “You found the life-size version of a child’s train set.”
“What do you mean?” Berliner asked.
“But,” Taer said, painfully hopeful, “there’s a train here that’s not on a regular map. That you can only find on Molly Metropolis’s crazy map.”
“Our crazy map,” Berliner said.
Wilson laughed again.
“How did you know we were down here?” Berliner asked.
“There are security cameras. And I come down here a lot,” Wilson admitted sheepishly.
Berliner laughed, perhaps cruelly, but Wilson wasn’t shamed. “You came into the group too late, Nick. And you were still young. Your life wasn’t affected the way our lives were. The rest of my life is going to be about the New Situationists, and I was just some kid who smoked too much pot and read too much about Guy Debord. I didn’t understand what being part of the group was going to mean for the rest of my life.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Taer said, ignoring Berliner and Wilson’s side conversation. “This train has to be something, because Molly’s map—she pointed us right here.”
“She pointed me to the train,” Berliner said.
“She came down here too, in January, big day for me,” Wilson joked. “I’ve had a lot of action recently.”
“So you told her what you told us,” Taer pressed. “And then what?”
“And then I showed her what the train is. The New Situationists restored it as a kind of pet project. There are three stations, restored like the one I picked you up in. The entrances are hidden. Sometimes the higher ups would have little cocktail parties here, or they’d use it as a private way to get around the city, but mostly they just liked that they had a secret train no one else knew about. And like I said, it’s a toy. So, I told Molly all this. I took her to the other two stations, where I’m taking you, and showed her. And then we went back to the Aquarium station—that’s the best one. I dropped her off. She was upset. She was crying and wearing something ridiculous. She left and that was it. I heard she disappeared.”
* * *
* Cyrus didn’t visit this station while he was writing this book; more information on the station to come. —CD
“It is known that initially the situationists wanted at the very least to build cities.”
—Guy Debord, quoted from The Situationist City by Simon Sadler
The Situationists wanted to change the world. They failed.
Molly Metropolis’s situations—her songs, her videos, her albums, all of her insane clothing—did what the Situationists could never achieve. She completed their work; she changed the world; at least, she changed popular culture, a driving force of the world. She shaped pop culture in her image. She achieved global reach, global name recognition. She prepared to continue their work, ready to sacrifice her career in order to do so. What did they give her in return? A toy. No wonder she decided to leave.
When I first began researching Molly Metropolis’s and Taer’s disappearances, I immediately contacted Berliner and Nix to request interviews. They declined, as did the members of their and Molly’s immediate families. After several e-mails, Nix took pity on me and responded with something more than “No, thank you.” She wrote, “I can tell you everything you need to know to write about Caitlin and Molly right now: there is no secret. You are looking for something that doesn’t exist.” Instead of heeding her warning, I plodded on, occasionally e-mailing her and Berliner with a renewed interview request and reports of my steady progress—often overstating the magnitude of my discoveries.
Most people overstate, I told myself at the time. I also told myself that by exaggerating the depth of my progress on discovering either where Molly had gone or what had happened to her, I could somehow will those discoveries into being.
For fifteen months, I researched and wrote, focusing mostly on the historical portions of the narrative. I developed a fondness for Debord’s first wife, Michele Bernstein, and her coquettish novels about the bohemian society lives of the Situationists. Debord had asked her to write them as a source of income, but she liked having her name on something, even if that thing was the period’s equivalent to Gossip Girl. I’m proud to report that I retained enough of my French to read the novels in their original language—a lucky thing, as her second novel, La Nuit, still hasn’t been translated into English.
Taer’s family gave me her journals and computer files without question, and just as I was coming to terms with relying on them completely for the contemporary portions of the book, Nix and Berliner jointly replied to one of my monthly e-mails, agreeing to speak with me. At the time, I believed I had scored a great victory. I know now that Berliner and Nix agreed to be interviewed to try to kill my book.
I spoke with them a combined total of twelve times: seven conversations with Berliner, four with Nix, and one with them together. The final interview was the dual one; in my last meeting with Berliner, I had pissed him off by asking too many questions about his relationship with Kraus, after he repeatedly told me he was “finished with that topic.” Nix had to convince him to talk to me again and finish telling their stories. At that final, joint meeting, Nix described the anticlimactic train ride:
“So, after David gave his speech, he took us on a ride around the whole train track and showed us the other two stations. It took about—what would you say, Nick?—forty-five minutes? An hour? But we couldn’t have been going more than twenty miles per hour the whole time. I mean, the tracks and the train were really old. I’m not good at judging dates of design and architecture and stuff.”
“The train’s infrastructure was just worn out. Really unsafe, actually. It kind of groaned along,” Berliner said.
“That’s true. It was, like, rickety, I don’t know.”
“That’s accurate.”
“Sort of rocking all the time,” Nix said. “I guess the L does that too, but you trust the regular L trains to hold you up and you didn’t trust this train. Anyway, we saw the other stations, then he dropped us off back where we started. We left. There was really nothing else. Cait still thought he might be lying to us, she was a little bit crazed. She kept talking about breaking back in, but I believed [Wilson]. He seemed really tired.”
“So, that’s it?” I asked. “That’s the end?”
“I guess,” Nix said.
After their hour-long train ride, Nix, Taer, and Berliner returned to the Racine building. They found it half burned and swarming with firemen. Antoinette Monson still officially owned the building, and Berliner was also still officially an employee of Monson and legally authorized to speak on her behalf. The security footage from the building was backed up offsite. The footage showed Ali, Peaches, and a crowd of their young supporters going into the building. (“We don’t put cameras in the basement because there’s nothing down there,” Berliner explained to the investigating detectives.) A few minutes later, the video showed Casares and another boy carrying Ali out of the building. Twenty minutes after that, the rest of the group fled the fire. Berliner and the CPD detectives watched the security footage until the flames destroyed the cameras. Most of the members
of the New Society were convicted of arson. They served short prison sentences.
The night after the fire, Berliner, Nix, and Taer went to Rainbo and got very drunk together. They took the L to the Loop and walked to the beach. They stole a boat.
“We were very upset,” Nix said. She cried a little, recounting the evening’s events. “I don’t remember everything that happened. It’s a little bit blurry. But we didn’t mean to make it so mysterious. Cait really drowned. We just. I mean. I didn’t even know to look for her in the water, I didn’t think about anything except getting to shore and I saw Nick was kicking with me. He passed out at some point. It was cold.
“She died and it was a stupid death.”
In the introduction to The Situationist City, Simon Sadler wrote, “This book searches for the situationist city … I rummage with a sense of guilt: situationists didn’t want to be just another avant-garde, but the last avant-garde, overturning current practices of history, theory, politics, art, architecture, and everyday life.”* The Situationist International wasn’t the last of the avant-gardes. It isn’t even the best remembered avant-garde—that distinction goes to the Surrealists. The Situationists thought Surrealist thinking was old, dead, and boring. In All the King’s Horses, Bernstein parodies a Surrealist dinner party: “His friends paraded out—in the usual order—all the ideas from thirty years ago, which was amusing. People from those times allow so much room for sick humor that even their stupidities can come off with a certain ambiguity.”†
The Situationists still aren’t widely known by name, but psychogeography has become fashionable again. Everyone likes to decorate with old maps; they fetishize the idea of transcending their borders. The Situationists have been assimilated into a commodities culture, the Spectacle, which would kill Debord if he were still alive. For the Situationists, this is a fate worse than death.
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