Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

In the years following the New Situationists’ unraveling, Berliner designed an apartment for him and Kraus to share when she finished her long prison sentence. cThe apartment was a fantasy from Kraus and Berliner’s sex life — the perfect erotic space; they designed it together as a kind of ongoing foreplay. Berliner drew his blueprints of this perfect apartment based on his memory of their conversations. He started saving money, but with his low-paying job he knew it would be a stretch to complete the project before Kraus was paroled. Then he met Molly Metropolis and she offered to build it for him.

In 2006, when Molly and Berliner met, Molly had dozens of projects in the conceptual stages mostly relating to her music career (her albums, her General Council, The Ghost Network — none of them had names yet) and she wanted Berliner, the only accessible former member of the New Situationists, to help her with her cartography projects. Berliner initially refused. The secrets of the New Situationists needed to stay secret, Berliner told her, but Molly already knew enough about the music industry to know that for the right reasons, almost everyone would open up. Molly found out (perhaps by visiting Kraus in prison) that Berliner was trying to build an apartment, and offered to fund the project in exchange for his secrets.

So, Berliner agreed to work with Molly Metropolis. A few weeks later, Kathy J. purchased a song Molly wrote (“Love Me Sweet,” an album cut on Kathy’s pop debut One of the Boys ) and she used that money to buy a warehouse space in Old Town. A month later, Berliner began aggressive renovations.

Though Berliner’s design evoked the rooms and flow of an apartment, it was more like a Situationist drawing than a real living space. He didn’t include any hallways in the design, just a series of rooms that opened into other rooms, like a beehive. The front room, a narrow rectangle, had mirrors and a kitchen-like space. The middle area was a labyrinth of interconnected rooms. Some of them had no windows and only one door. You had to walk through the rooms in a particular order to make it to the huge back room, which was the bedroom and living area. Berliner also designed a bed built into the wall, twice the size of a king bed. The floors were dark wood; the walls were painted eggshell white. Berliner found the exact molding that Kraus had enjoyed as a child.

Molly made only one mark on Berliner’s apartment. On Berliner’s original blueprint, there were two rooms labeled bathroom. Molly changed the smaller room from a bathroom to a walk-in closet. During construction, Molly checked in with the progress frequently and attentively, to make sure the contractors were following the blueprints to the letter, but Molly never visited the apartment after it was completed. Perhaps she didn’t want to violate Berliner’s private space or perhaps she didn’t want to insert herself into his sex life.

The first time Davis visited the apartment, she thought construction had only recently been completed. The rooms still smelled like paint. In the strange front room, a silver refrigerator stood next to a seven-foot-tall mirror, which leaned precariously against a wall. Berliner had been there at least once — he had beer and water in the fridge — but the place felt unlived in. They drank a few beers sitting on the floor, against the wall across from the mirror. According to Davis, she kept looking at herself accidentally.

She asked for a tour and Berliner led her through the maze of middle rooms—“Thank god I was drunk the first time,” Davis said, “or else I would’ve probably freaked out”—into the back bedroom. They immediately went to the bed. Experiencing a transferred reverence for the space, Davis tried to be quiet as she and Berliner copulated. From the scrubbed walls and waxed floors she thought Berliner wanted quiet awe. She kept her eyes closed and her hands to herself. According to Berliner, the sex that day was mediocre. In fact, Berliner’s fantasy was the opposite of Davis’s assumption. His sexual excitement didn’t come from the pure space, but the violation of it — specifically Davis’s (or any female visitor’s) violation of it.

Once he explained what he wanted, Davis was more than happy to oblige. “He liked things like cracked tile, broken light fixtures, all kinds of stuff,” Davis said. “Sometimes he’d tell me what to break. Once, while he was asleep, I cut up all the curtains with a knife, then woke him up to show him what I’d done. He really liked that.”

Once, in a fit of anger and sexual excitement, she used a chair to punch a hole in the wall, then threw the chair at the bedroom window where it broke the glass, then hung in the frame for a few seconds before tumbling to the sidewalk. That night, she and Berliner had their most passionate sexual experience and most emotionally revealing post-coital conversation. They talked about music, and Davis told Berliner about her childhood in rural Ohio, where her parents kept bees.

The downside of Berliner’s unusual predilection was that it required costly upkeep. Berliner had the walls repainted monthly and a cleaning crew came to wash the floors and windows every week. He had a close relationship with his contractor, who often repaired dented walls, chipped plaster, or scratched molding. When Davis realized how intensely Berliner kept up his apartment, she had to confront the fact that she probably hadn’t been the first lover to visit. She was right; Berliner also occasionally brought home a librarian who worked at the Chicago city archives, but their encounters were sporadic.

In the early days of their relationship, Davis couldn’t find her way around the apartment to save her life; Berliner had to walk her everywhere, to the fridge to get water, to the front door to go home in the morning, even to the bathroom. By the time their relationship was deteriorating, Davis could move from the front of the apartment to the back with her eyes closed. She had found the secret second bedroom buried in a dead-end, and she slept there when she was angry with Berliner.

Davis spoke to Taer and Nix about these patterns of their relationship disdainfully, regretfully, but like Berliner, without shame. Despite their odd sex life, Davis never felt shy about the details. For her, it didn’t even feel transgressive. “In a certain sense, I never really could ‘get it up’ for him, you know? I mean, it just felt like normal sex in a strange place, to me. But it wasn’t supposed to feel like normal sex, it was supposed to be some new merging of person and architecture in a way that was supposed to open up the world. That’s how he told me I should feel about it, but I never did. Not really.”

Berliner was also shameless but for a different reason; he doesn’t mind, even likes, even revels in, being abnormal.

Davis talked and smoked for close to three hours with very few interruptions from Nix and Taer. They polished off two more bottles of wine in the last hour and although they were all drunk, Davis’s hands remained steady and her footsteps straight and even.

When Davis finished explaining her breakup with Berliner, no one said anything for almost twenty seconds, until Taer broke the silence.

“Well,” Taer lisped drunkenly, “I feel like I’m not going to be able to digest all this until tomorrow morning.”

“For sure,” Davis replied.

“But it’s like — I still don’t know what to do next.”

“Maybe we should avoid him,” Nix said.

“He’s not dangerous,” Davis said. “Just weird and sort of amoral. Just find him and talk to him.”

“He broke into our apartment,” Nix said.

“My apartment,” Taer said.

“And he hurt Cait’s forehead,” Nix said.

“The break-in, that’s something he would do. But he doesn’t hurt people,” Davis said.