Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

Berliner never met them at Redfish. Taer and Nix ate fried green tomatoes, chicken gumbo, and jalapeño cornbread as they glanced around the dark restaurant, mostly empty except for a few overworked businessmen and tired assistants picking up carry-out for the office. They sat for two hours, quickly working their way through several beers, watching the door. Taer tried calling Berliner, but he didn’t answer his phone. †

Eventually they gave up, paid the bill, and walked slowly from the restaurant to the Randolph and Lake entrance to the Brown Line. They walked through the Financial District, which had emptied out at 5 p.m. and echoed like a ghost town at night. Around them, the city’s tallest skyscrapers gleamed; hundreds of stories of empty offices hovered over their heads. The dark street was covered with snow, pounded so hard into the pavement that it cracked like glass under their boots.

On the empty Brown Line, the trains seemed unusually rickety as they whipped around the sharply curved corner of the Loop. Taer and Nix held hands and Taer attempted to curb the dark mood by insisting that Berliner was probably delayed, without his phone, in an area with no reception, or running out of battery power. Nix said nothing. The train went along its course, shaking. They transferred to the Blue Line and rode it back to Taer’s apartment.

Nix asked to stay in Taer’s bed and Taer agreed with a little half hug against Nix’s shoulder. They planned to drink some more and watch television — probably Law and Order: SVU , a mutual favorite — but their plans evaporated when they returned home.

Inside the apartment, they found a terrible mess. The cushions on Taer’s couch had been slashed; her refrigerator and freezer doors were open and some of the contents had been pulled out. Her pots and pans were on the floor. In her bedroom, Taer’s dresser drawers had been pulled out of their frames and upended. Her mattress had been cut open, her bed frame was dismantled. The suitcase Nix had been living out of was turned over and her clothes had been picked through. There was a hole in Taer’s bedroom wall.

Nix accused Berliner; to her thinking, he was the only possible culprit. It did seem likely she was right, as Berliner hadn’t shown up to dinner and knew they would be out of the house at that time. Nix thought the whole dinner was a ruse. Taer called the police. A pair of CPD uniformed cops arrived half an hour later and took down a report. Although Taer mentioned Berliner, they told Nix and Taer evidence was too scarce and no one would have time to investigate the burglary.

Taer and Nix slowly cleaned the apartment. They swept up the broken glass, put the pots and pans back in their cabinets, and threw away any food on the floor, but — exhausted — they left the mess in Taer’s bedroom. They fell asleep on a torn mattress with the empty dresser drawers on the floor around them, like a kind of vegetation. They slept pressed together on one side of the mattress until Taer woke up suddenly. She heard, from somewhere inside the apartment, a loud thud.

Waking Nix, who relayed the story to me later, Taer slid out of the bed and grabbed a dictionary off her bookshelf to use as a blunt weapon. She crept into her living room and saw the silhouette of an intruder picking through the remains of her couch cushions. As the silhouette turned, Taer swung the dictionary at his or her head as hard as she could. Her hit landed, but Taer dropped the dictionary because of the pain and shock in her arms. The intruder also dropped the items he or she was carrying, before slamming Taer into a wall and sprinting out of the apartment. Dazed, and bleeding from the side of her head, Taer groped for the light switch. With the lights on, she turned her attention to the items that the intruder had left behind.

Nix stumbled into the living room and found Taer examining her spoils of war: a pocket-size sketchpad and gun. The gun was a.22 caliber, single action, Smith & Wesson pistol with a thumb safety, wooden grip, adjustable target sights, and a blue steel finish. ‡Nix picked up the pistol, made sure the safety was on, and unloaded it, while Taer thumbed through the sketchpad. Each page of the pad was filled with a hand-drawn street map, and on the inside of the front cover, someone had written Molly Metropolis’s personal cell phone number.

Under the harsh florescent bathroom lights, Nix put Neosporin on Taer’s scalp. Both wide awake and jittery, Nix opened a beer and Taer opened the sketchpad. Taer hoped for text more illuminating than Molly Metropolis’s had been. The sketchpad disappointed her, however. Berliner never wrote. He drew, and he only drew maps. On each page, Berliner had drawn a crude street map and dated it. Occasionally the maps were labeled with street names, or landmarks. Berliner also drew a series of symbols on each map, though he didn’t provide a key for what the symbols meant.

Finding the sketchpad indecipherable, Nix and Taer’s conversation devolved into perhaps their most significant argument. They had been fighting so often because, as Nix puts it, “sometimes you get into a mode where you’re fighting all the time and the only times that feel honest and passionate are the times you’re fighting.” The gigantic blowup, which Taer recounted in her journal and Nix explained to me in detail, ended their pattern of argument and reconciliation that characterized the earliest part of their relationship.

The meat of the fight was about Nix and Taer’s personal safety. Though Nix’s mother and her family were devoted hunters, Nix, like her father, hated guns; the appearance of one was enough to put her off entirely. She wanted to destroy Berliner and Molly Metro’s notebooks, flush the pages down the toilet, and never think about them again. She tried to do so. In response, Taer grabbed Berliner’s sketchpad from the vanity and ran out of the bathroom. Nix pursued her. They tussled over the sketchpad; Taer tripped over a cabinet drawer and fell hard, smashing her head on the wall and floor, and tearing open the skin on her elbow.

Taer’s fresh injuries chastised Nix. She brought out the Neosporin again and apologized profusely. According to Taer: “I wouldn’t have cared if I broke my wrist, she was so guilty about hurting me, it fixed everything. She’s going to help me look for Molly!” Nix agreed to let Taer call Berliner again in recompense for making her fall. Again, they called from Nix’s phone, but discovered the number had been disconnected.

Nix told me the story of the break-in sitting at my kitchen table, while the sounds of the street blew in through open windows. Nix smoked, a habit she had picked up from Berliner after the Lake Michigan incident. Left-handed, her smoking emphasized her missing fingers. I think she always took off her prosthetic fingers before coming to see me.

“After we called Nick and found out his phone was disconnected, we were just tired. We went back to bed, and I was rubbing her back — she liked that — and telling her all about Molly. She liked that, too. Molly had this thing, where she’d buy a lot of books on a subject, and sit on the floor, and surround herself with the books, and read little bits from all of them. When she was trying to learn about something. We didn’t usually have time for her to do that, so it didn’t actually happen all that often. She hadn’t had time for it for months, by the end of it. But early on — before ‘New Vogue Riche’ came out, especially — she had a few days where she could just, you know, ‘learn stuff’ on the floor, with all these books. I was telling Taer about that, and she asked me what kind of things Molly liked to learn about. The only one that I could remember was the Situationists. She loved reading about the Situationists. Do you know about them?”