Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

f Correspondence , 42.

g “The City of the Future,” in Haagse Post 102, No. 12 (1966): 126.

h The Situationist City , 12.

i Correspondence , 145.

j While Cyrus was writing about Debord’s decline, his relationship with Woodyard ended. Apparently, when Woodyard came to visit campus, during a small gathering of faculty, Cyrus spilled a glass of red wine on Woodyard’s signed copy of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, then called Lydia Davis “fake profound.” According to my ex-roommate Rachel (who overheard an adjunct professor mention it to her boyfriend while Rachel was waiting for the adjunct’s office hours to begin), Woodyard thought Cyrus had spilled the wine intentionally and then Cyrus passive-aggressively brought up the fact that Woodyard hadn’t yet published a book. When I spoke to Cyrus weeks later, he told me he and Woodyard broke up on that trip, while Woodyard was still on campus. — CD

k Thanks to Woodyard for help with the translation, and for the Centre George Pompidou for providing a copy of the letter.

l As CNN called it. — CD

m This particular piece of information about Molly’s teenage obsession comes from Berliner. Cyrus stitched together the story of her upbringing using information from Molly’s magazine profiles and interviews with her family and former teachers. — CD

n Correspondence , 164.

o Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), section 60.

p Molly’s early artistic output, especially the images of herself she and others produced in the months before and after Cause Célèbrety was released, also concerned itself with the problematic distinction between highbrow and lowbrow. One of my favorite images of Molly Metropolis is an animated gif of her wearing a white V-neck T-shirt with words projected onto her stomach, one after another, forming the phrase OPERA IS LOWBROW, EAT POP INSTEAD. Molly looks very young in the gif; it was built from a video she shot in late 2007 or early 2008.

q Kate Durbin, “From Célèbrety to Apocalypse : Molly Metropolis and the Evolution of Identity,” Molly Skyscraper , December 29, 2009; mollyjournal.blogspot.com/2009/12/from-celebrety-to-apocalypse.html.

After Molly’s disappearance, the fifty dancers, musicians, roadies, assistants, and “Governing Council” members that made up Molly’s tour machine drifted around Chicago for a few weeks. SDFC put them up in a Holiday Inn while everyone waited for news. In late January, when hope that Molly would reemerge was still alive, but the financial burden of supporting her tour became too frustrating for SDFC to stomach, the record company dismissed the crew. Berliner’s dancer ex-girlfriend, Irene Davis, took the Amtrak to Romulus, where her parents had retired. She planned on staying for a few days, but while she was visiting her mother slipped, fell down a flight of stairs, and broke her neck. Davis remained in Michigan after the funeral.

Meanwhile, Taer read about the Situationists for days before she got bored and tired of research. She liked absorbing the same knowledge as Molly Metropolis, but knowing what Molly knew wouldn’t help her find Berliner. She pestered Nix for suggestions on how to proceed. Nix proposed that they speak to Davis, because she had dated Berliner for six months. Nix called Davis. Though she refused to talk over the phone or to leave Romulus, Davis agreed to chat with them if they came to her.

Taer and Nix rode north on a freezing Metra train. Taer wrote in her shaky train handwriting: “Gina wants me to stop, but it would feel like I was abandoning [Molly]. I know it’s presumptuous to think that she’d want me to be looking for her, or that I have a responsibility to find her, but I feel like I’m in too deep. Even though I’m not really in anything. I mean, I could drop it, but then I would never stop thinking about her.”

They checked into a room at the Ramada Romulus and arrived at Davis’s parents’ small house later that evening. Davis met them at the door wearing a pair of black leggings, a huge knit sweater, and her legwarmers, a staple of any dancer’s wardrobe. She wore a circular piece of purple quartz around her neck on a long silver chain, a gift her mother had given her for her sixteenth birthday, and which she had worn almost every day since. Her hair hung loose and tangled around her face, and her eyes were bloodshot. She looked tired and bloated. Davis didn’t have the willowy, long-limbed body of a dancer. She was shorter than most and somewhat voluptuous, especially in comparison to the rail-thin bodies dancers usually maintain. Nevertheless, Davis was still incredibly graceful. Each of her movements seemed deliberate to Taer, from the way she poured her fifth glass of wine to the absentminded scratch of an itch on her arm. Taer thought Davis’s face was plain, but found her sexual anyway, despite, or perhaps as a result of, the dancer’s deep grief over her mother.

The mood in the house was grim and the architecture unforgiving. Berliner later described the house as having “that kind of built-in-the-seventies-under-communist-rule vibe, you know, like, with a bleakness to it, a house that just attacks you with its ugliness.” Davis invited Taer and Nix to sit at the glass table in the sparsely decorated kitchen and opened an expensive bottle of wine her father had been saving for a special occasion. Taer turned on her iPhone voice recorder and Davis asked, “So what did Nick do to you? I’m assuming he didn’t fuck either of you.”

Taer told an abbreviated version of the break-in story, to which Davis replied, “Yeah, I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Then she coughed out the smoke from one of her mother’s Virginia Slims and asked: “So do you want to hear his life story?”

“Yeah,” Taer said.

“I know him a little,” Nix said.

“Did he tell you about all that weird stuff from his childhood?” Davis asked.

“No,” Nix said. “I just met him around the music video sets, or when the tour came to Chicago, you know.”

“His life …” Davis trailed off.

“Do you need—” Taer began to say, but Davis cut her off.

“I guess I’m inconsequential in a lot of ways,” Davis said. “That isn’t to say what I’ve been doing with my life isn’t important, but what does it mean to the greater world? Especially now that Molly fucked off — you know what I mean, Gina. You get used to your life meaning something because you’re doing something for someone whose life means something. I felt that way when I was dating Nick, too.

“So, yeah, I’m convinced that Nick’s life is important because he had this really cinematic childhood. Like, his life fits perfectly with a movie story, youthful rebellion, betrayal, sexual deviance, whatever. The rest of our lives have to be altered in some really significant way to make it into a movie — not Nick.”*

Nicolas Berliner was born in 1983 in the college town Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. †In 1984, his father, Ronald, left his position as an adjunct professor of Natural History at the University of Illinois for a tenure-track position at the University of Chicago. Ronald moved his family into the city and settled in a spacious, three-level backhouse in Lincoln Park.

Berliner entered his teenage years as a gentle, well-mannered child. He preferred reading books to playing sports (although he eventually grew out of his bookishness enough to build the kind of stamina necessary to keep up with Molly Metropolis). He argued but never lost his temper. He liked broccoli without butter or cheese. His parents took hundreds of photos of him and catalogued them, extensively, in photo albums. They took him to museums and bought him new books every weekend for his “personal library,” the bookcase in his basement bedroom.