Debord didn’t live long enough to see his work bastardized into violent politics and consumerist trends. He did, however, live to see the Situationists’ relevance turned from active politics into passive academic interest. He even had to suffer through several reputable journals using the word situationism. After he wrote, “There is no such thing as situationism,” for years the word wasn’t used even by the Situationists’ political enemies, as if his writing was a royal decree. Then, when Debord was old and his power was sapped, the academics began using it. In a sense, those few times the word “situationism” was printed were like bells tolling Debord’s death.
This is the unsatisfying end to Debord’s story, to the story of the New Situationists, to Molly’s story, to Berliner’s story, to the New Society’s story, to Taer’s story, and to mine. I can’t satisfy you, so I wish, at least, that I could ease you more gently into an ending. I can’t do that either. I have nothing left for anyone. No one will be reading this, anyway. Why revise? Why edit? Why narrate?
Where is Molly Metropolis?—this question is left unanswered and might never be known. I certainly won’t be able to answer it. I’m content now to drift, like Caitlin Taer must’ve done, clinging to the scraps of a ruined boat in the dark and freezing Lake Michigan water, waiting for my turn to sink and disappear.
* * *
* The Situationist City, 1.
† Michèle Bernstein, All the King’s Horses, trans. John Kelsey (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 22–23.
“We have published several texts … that in thirty years will still be the basis for the creative movement that will not fail to constitute itself.”
—Guy Debord, in a letter to Constant Nieuwenhuys, 1959
Epilogue
by Catie Disabato
July 1, 2014
Maybe this is funny or maybe it isn’t: Cyrus Kinnely Archer did, eventually, disappear. I’m not speaking metaphorically—Cyrus is as gone as Molly Metropolis or Caitlin Taer. His book ended when he reached the end of the story that Taer told him with everything she left behind, but his book also ended before the story ended.
Cyrus was born in Mequon, Wisconsin, outside of Milwaukee. I’ve seen a few pictures of him as a young, blonde child at the water park at Wisconsin Dells: at the top of the waterslide, eating applesauce with his brothers at the family-style themed restaurant Paul Bunyan’s Cook Shanty. He seems at home among the artifice of amusement parks and tourist traps.
When he was a teenager, his parents moved to Hoboken, and he began spending his weekends in New York City, listening to music and sneaking into gay clubs. He read everything he was supposed to read: Isherwood, Rimbaud, and Burroughs. He went to Oberlin, where all the NYC hippies and queers went to smoke pot in the snow, out from under the thumb of the East Coast Ivys with their secret clubs and homosocial boozing. He returned to Oberlin to teach after getting his PhD at Columbia University. I don’t know why he decided to go back to the cold Midwest.
Cyrus dated David Woodyard, formerly of The New Yorker magazine, off and on for nearly twenty-five years; their relationship began when they both attended Columbia University. Cyrus began his first year as Woodyard finished his dissertation. The grad school part of their romance was public and dramatic, with a lot of screaming breakups in front of colleagues, followed by sudden reunions. It might’ve ruined Cyrus’s academic reputation. They evened out as they hit their thirties and lived together for a decade and a half before Cyrus’s book broke them up.
Their spectacular, final break up, and Woodyard’s purchase of an equally spectacular Chelsea townhouse to serve as his new bachelor pad, provided the Gawker bitches with excellent gossip fodder for several months. At the time, I reviled the loose tongues of Woodyard’s assistants and underlings, but I have to admit that I found their lack of discretion helpful while putting together Cyrus’s book.
Cyrus and Woodyard didn’t have to trifle with anything as tiresome as divorce papers and the legal splitting of shared assets, though I did hear that many of their final arguments were over custody of Squiggy, their dog, and that Woodyard won. Squiggy wasn’t equipped to handle Ohio’s winters.
Their “divorce” occurred during the spring of 2011, while I was finishing my senior honors project in Creative Writing (a series of personal essays that were supposed be the first half of a memoir about my adolescence in suburban Illinois, but which I have put in the proverbial drawer). After three years nurturing my “budding talent”—he called my writing promising and my personal voice nearly developed (“nearly there” is a state I will remain in eternally)—Cyrus agreed to be my honors advisor. Although his own work and the details of his personal life distracted him, he managed to eke out of me the best work I could manage at that age. I graduated with honors in May, though not with high honors, which I would’ve preferred.
I spent the next two years living in Chicago, writing freelance articles for various not-so-prestigious websites without being paid. I would’ve been jealous of Taer’s career, had I known about her at the time, and despite her own frustration with her writing life. I lived in a carpeted, occasionally mold-infested apartment, probably not unlike Taer’s walk-up. My sister, whose name you might’ve heard because she is the only American to be accepted at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Russia in fifty years, sent me videos of her and her schoolmates performing the Small Swans’ pas de quatre from Swan Lake—who do you think my parents talk about when they are at dinner with their friends? I posted my sister’s videos on Tumblr. I remained frustratingly anonymous.
Sometime in early August 2013, Cyrus stopped answering my e-mails. I thought he was finally tired of my depressing life. Then I found out that he had disappeared. On August 9, his sister, Francesca, filed a missing persons report with the police. On August 12, the Chicago Police Department found Archer’s car in an abandoned train yard near Pullman, Illinois. The car had been completely incinerated; there was a body inside, burned so severely that they couldn’t even take dental imprints. Archer was declared dead. His meager assets, and all of his books, went to his sister. He bequeathed all of his research for this book—his manuscript, Taer’s recordings, her journal, transcripts from all his interviews including the ones with Berliner and Nix—to me.
I’m absolutely certain of the reasons why Cyrus chose me to complete his book. I had stayed in contact with him after I left school, while his colleagues and peers shunned him; I liked Molly Metropolis, a weird cyborgian fantasy pop star, and talked about her to Cyrus. Also, I went to the same high school as Regina Nix and Caitlin Taer. They were older than me, but I saw them around. Although Taer had attended Oberlin, and had taken Creative Writing classes, she had never studied with Cyrus and he didn’t remember her. I did, and he wanted to borrow that memory.
So, to continue Cyrus’s story, here is the first revelation:
The last chapter of this book (before this epilogue) is a pack of lies. Nix and Berliner lied to Cyrus and he wrote the lies down. What I’m saying is, his intentions were good, and he failed. He finished his draft of this book, then he sat down on the couch, watched a lot of reruns of Law and Order, took a sabbatical from Oberlin College, and, for some reason, decided he must’ve been lied to. He began searching for the truth, for himself.
When Nicolas Berliner and Regina Nix agreed to meet with Archer, they insisted on a number of conditions. If Cyrus refused to honor them, they refused to speak to him. Cyrus agreed to their conditions.
Cyrus wasn’t allowed to ask any questions about the identity of the other New Situationists. The most important stipulation for the interview was, as Cyrus jokingly called it, the Provision Against Real Place Names. Before meeting with Cyrus, Berliner and Nix agreed on a litany of made-up street names to stand in for the real locations of, for example, the underground headquarters of the New Situationists/Urban Planning Committee and the entrance to the subway station where they caught David Wilson’s train. Cyrus agreed never to investigate or print the actual location names. He actual
ly signed a few legal documents assuring he never would, non-disclosure agreements. Berliner knew that anyone who wanted to look could find the location of the Urban Planning Committee, but there is nothing left there now. You can look if you want, but you will be disappointed.
I’m not sure how long Cyrus believed Berliner and Nix were telling him the truth about the train ride. I don’t know when he realized that they were lying to him—that the train wasn’t a dead end. But when he did realize, he broke his word and searched for the real location of the Urban Planning Committee underground headquarters. It wasn’t difficult for him to find, he just looked through the fire department’s publicly available incident records for the month during which the Urban Planning Committee burned. From Armitage and Racine, Cryus traced his way to the Old Town Aquarium, and from there he descended into the train station. Once something hidden has been found, it’s much harder to re-hide.
He left me his discoveries; I lightly edited Cyrus’s original manuscript to reflect the actual locations of all the events of this book. I made a trip to the train station hidden below the Old Town Aquarium (that trip is chronicled below), and following my visit to the train, all of the infrastructure has since been destroyed or concealed completely. With me, the chain was broken.
To visit the train, I didn’t have to study any maps or even make a long commute to find the hidden train station. Archer had left me instructions and I followed them: David Wilson would be waiting for me at 3 p.m. on Thursday, every Thursday for a year, until I showed up. I live within walking distance of the Old Town Aquarium.
On Thursday, May 16, 2014, 2:34 p.m., I descended the southwest staircase of the Old Town Aquarium and made my way to the train station platform below. Near the breaker box where I turned on the light, someone had written on the wallpaper in chalk: “If we don’t die here will we carry on further?”* How the phrase showed up on the wall of the New Situationists’ train station, I don’t know. Maybe Nix and Berliner saw it but didn’t mention it to Archer. Maybe Archer left it there for me.
The wall of the train platform was made of faded blue tiles. Little chunks of white tile, among the blue, neatly and largely spelled the French words PLAQUES TOURNANTES UN. Plaques tournantes is another old Situationist term, associated with the dérive: while wandering, the Situationists would identify areas they believed were linked together through some kind of shared ambiance, subdivisions of the city that didn’t follow the same neighborhood boundaries the city government set. They called the areas unities of ambiance instead of neighborhoods. Some of the unities served as “stations” during the drift, or “junctions in the psychogeographic flow of Paris.” They called the junctions or stations plaques tournantes, a pun in French with so many subtleties of meaning and so many connections to cultural conditions of the time that it is difficult to satisfactorily translate the phrase into English. In a certain sense, a plaque tournantes is a railway turnstile; the phrase can also refer to the center of something or a place of exchange.
With a few minutes to spare before the train was supposed to arrive, I walked the length of the train station a few times, fidgeting, taking pictures with my phone, and listening to the DJ Shadow track “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt,” from the album Endtroducing..… I felt anxious. I switched from “Building Steam” to “Apocalypse Dance,” and I felt better.
I peered into the dark tunnels on either side of the station until I saw the bright light that meant the train was approaching. I sat down on the bench to give the impression I had been waiting patiently the whole time. When the train stopped, I expected David Wilson to be alone, but he wasn’t. The woman beside him has been called Miranda Young, has taken the name Antoinette Monson, and was the world’s biggest pop star. Molly Metropolis.
She was dressed simply, as is her modus operandi now. She wore a pair of high-wasted beige pants, a white T-shirt with a very low V down to her belly button, showing off a triangle of skin, and a pair of black boots with a huge wedge heel, which she said she built herself. Her fingernails were bare and she wasn’t wearing much makeup. She wore sunglasses with small, round, very dark lenses, but took them off when we talked. She seemed pleased to see me. She made me feel nervous.
She introduced me to Wilson and after a word or two of greeting (he called her “Molls”), he disappeared into the control room to get the thing chugging. I didn’t see him again. Molly gave me a quick tour of the train. She explained that they had made some changes to the original design. She personally had ripped the seats out of the front car to make room for a table. The second car retained its traditional seats—slightly more legroom than L trains have today. She apologized for the noise, the rattle of the train. I drank water, she drank red wine, and we both ate from a bag of walnuts.
“Thanks for the water,” I said. “I’m a little starstruck.”
It was hard to talk to Molly. Her voice was familiar, her face was familiar, but it felt like if I had reached out to grab her, my hand would pass right through her body like a ghost on a TV show. In other words, Molly was unreal. She spoke to me like she was speaking to Barbara Walters, which was fitting. Molly has so many interviews left ungiven.
“I’m so glad to have you here,” she said. “But we have limited time. Unless you’re interested in staying on the train.”
“I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but that seems like a dangerous choice. After all, Caitlin stayed, didn’t she?”
“Oh my goodness, of course you’re worried! But don’t be worried. Cait is alive. She is perfectly alive and perfectly fine. Adjusting. Some people have a harder time adjusting, but she didn’t, she’s doing so well. Were you two close?”
After this little speech, I had more new questions than answers. Thankful Taer was still alive, I checked to make sure my voice recorder (which Molly agreed to me using) was working.
“I’m sorry,” I said, referring to the interruption to check the recorder. “Can we go back? Cait’s alive and ‘adjusting’? What are you talking about?”
“You knew Cyrus better than Caitlin, didn’t you, and you are probably worried about him. I don’t mean to be a tease!”
“Yes. And he’s alive, too, you’re saying?”
“Yes, alive and fine,” she over-exaggerated the word fine, like she was singing it in a musical.
I took a moment to assimilate this information. I cried, and she reached across the table, and held my hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“No!” she said. “Cry!”
She kept holding my hand, in her surprisingly strong grip with surprisingly soft fingers, until I stopped crying. In writing down this moment, I’m reminded of Taer and Nix’s first post-college encounter, when Nix cried. Did Molly do this intentionally, so my rendering of the event would echo an earlier incident she knew was in the book? I wish I’d heard the echo at the time.
“This doesn’t make any sense. The burned-up body, Archer’s car? Where did that come from?” I asked.
“Dead when it was put in there,” Molly said.
“How did—”
“We didn’t kill someone. There are a lot of dead bodies around. In hospitals, for one thing. And while it wasn’t strictly ethical what we did to get the body, we didn’t steal the corpse of some grieving family’s grandfather. If you look hard enough, not in the papers, you might find reports of a stolen cadaver from a medical morgue in Chicago. By ‘unethical,’ I mean we used the body for art, not science.”
“Was everything in Cyrus’s book a lie?” I asked.
“No. The end of the book was a lie because Gina and my Nick lied to him. It says in the book, though, that Gina cried at one point during their interviews. She did cry.”
I think she said this because she could tell I was ashamed I had cried.
“I heard the tapes,” I said. “I heard her cry. I don’t think Cyrus described her crying well, but it’s hard to do that.”
“How would you describe it?”
“She was re
ally crying, like the kind of crying when you end up all disgusting and snotty.”
“Poor Gina. She didn’t take Cait leaving well.”
“There are all kinds of people who aren’t taking it well,” I said. “People who don’t know she’s alive. Cait’s mom, for one.”
Molly picked at one of her nails. “I don’t want to lie to you, or argue with you. But, I’d prefer to steer the conversation in another direction.”
“But this is important,” I insisted. “Your parents—”
“That’s enough,” she snapped, her cute little snarl, captured by so many paparazzi, now directed at me. “Do you want me to stop talking?”
“We have to address this,” I said.
“I never like to be rude, especially to people who are interviewing me, I really try not to be. But I’m here at my own discretion and I can drop you off anytime I choose. People make sacrifices, I made my own and it was a very important learning experience for myself. I will make more, you will make some, many other people will sacrifice, and that isn’t the topic I choose to focus on, so you won’t either. I won’t speak to any questions about my parents.”
So I dropped it, and we moved on, starting with the extent of Berliner and Taer’s lies to Cyrus.
Molly told me that Cyrus’s book (whose ending I’ve preserved in its entirety, despite the lies) is true up until the first time Taer, Nix, and Berliner boarded the train, with Wilson not happy to see them. They rode the train, and Wilson begrudgingly informed Taer, Berliner, and Nix they passed a test by finding it. Having succeeded, they had a choice: they could get off the train at Plaques Tournantes Deux, or continue to the final stop, where their journey would continue. The first train ride had metaphorical importance. If they chose to continue, they would have to fake their own deaths. Wilson suggested the drowning in Lake Michigan, during stormy weather and rough waters and a current that hypothetically could pull a lifeless body miles away from shore in a matter of hours. Then they would have to return to the train, travel for many more hours, and they would never be able to return.
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