Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

I found the fucking secret headquarters and now we’re going to find Molly.

I stopped flipping through the pages, perhaps because of the whimsical nature of the phrase “secret headquarters.” I found the first entries Taer wrote about Molly Metropolis’s disappearance, and began reading Taer’s story. It is dramatic to the point of being almost unbelievable. ‡

Taer’s journals mix fiction, diary-style writings, drafts of articles, and those grocery lists — a hodge-podge of styles with no system of transition or separation, making the truth and the context of the writing difficult for an outside reader to ascertain. Though I acknowledge that Taer’s journals are tangled and scattered, and that the truth and context of Taer’s writing is sometimes hard to establish, there is a profound semantic difference between “difficult” and “impossible.” Having thoroughly studied Taer’s journals, I developed a knack for deciphering her idiolect and an ear for her style. When she was writing something that would eventually become a newspaper article, she’d affect an authoritative tone, which never sounded natural. These paragraphs would then appear, in edited forms, in her published criticism.

When she was writing fiction, she would try to play with words and languages, often incorporating phrases of French and Spanish (though she couldn’t speak either language). Taer’s fiction would often peter out as the narrative fell apart. The beginning of a story would be written with dramatic energy, many pages filled with hurried and messy handwriting. Perhaps a few days later, another few paragraphs would appear, continuing the earlier narrative thread. Then the story would wane until it vanished. She had little control over the fictional worlds she created in bursts of fevered inspiration, so if a story messily disintegrated, it was a telltale sign Taer was writing fiction rather than fact. Maybe she transferred her stories from the journals to a computer, where she regained control of her narratives, but I never found them on her internal or external hard drives. §

Although Taer’s last diary entries were written with the same drama and timbre as some of her stories, she meticulously dated all of them. She didn’t date her fiction. In her final diary entries, Taer abbreviated people and place names, which she never did in her fiction, and she didn’t vary the sentence structure. In short, though these later entries sound fictional, Taer wrote them like she was writing facts. Woodyard has proposed that she was writing fiction in the style of nonfiction for some aesthetic purpose, but Taer never, to my knowledge, affected that style elsewhere, nor did she ever profess a preference for experimental fiction in that mode. To steal a saying from my helpful friends at the CPD, “the best indication of future action is past action.”

The events written hastily at the end of Taer’s journals and explored in this text unfold in dramatic, even fictive ways. I take full responsibly for any gaps in logic and legibility, stemming from a lack of knowledge or understanding. ǁI hope those gaps will be few and far between.

This book is built on over one hundred interviews with everyone from key players in the unfolding drama to those whose roles were only incidental. I interviewed nearly every living person mentioned in this text, with the notable exceptions of Irene Davis, one of Molly Metropolis’s dancers and Berliner’s ex-girlfriend, as well as Alice Becker-Ho, widow of the French psychogeographer Guy Debord. For their willingness to explain their take on controversial events, I would like to thank two of Molly’s former dancers, in the text referred to as Peaches and Ali, at their request.

Equally as important is what Taer left behind for me: audio files (which I transcribed myself) of interviews with Nix and various discussions of Molly’s disappearance with Nix and Berliner — as well as the journals, which she wrote in every day during the early months of 2010.

Molly’s record label, SDFC Records, provided some limited, but helpful, information on sales figures and marketing strategy and approved brief but informative interviews with recording and publicity executives who worked with Molly. HBO Films allowed me to view uncut footage from their unfinished concert special Molly Metropolis Presents: The Apocalypse Ball , and for that I am grateful. I appreciate the willingness of Nix and Berliner’s families to speak with me, but I am especially indebted to the families of Molly Metropolis and Caitlin Taer, who agreed to be interviewed despite the difficulty of the subject matter. Molly’s team, who still call themselves the General Council, were instrumental in making Molly come alive for me. In the countless interviews, profiles, YouTube videos, Tweets, and music videos that Molly left behind, I found the pop star she wanted to be.

Once Molly and Taer’s story begins to take definitive shape, it quickly fizzles into absurdity, like a map of a world with slightly distorted proportions — almost normal looking at first, but on a second viewing, a terrible deviation, a ghost of a place that never was, a land that couldn’t be, a burning and terrible world beneath everything that we know to be real.

This book isn’t about the disappearance of Molly Metropolis or the death/disappearance of Caitlin Taer. It’s the story of Taer looking for Molly Metropolis, and whether or not she was found.

* The sentiment is semi-lifted from a piece by New Yorker journalist David Woodyard, who actually used the word addendum in his article concerning Taer. Woodyard has asked the author to clarify that point.

† My assumption is that Cyrus K. Archer meant to expand on this question, perhaps even try to answer it, but I think it works better if I let it stand. It’s the central question of the book, after all. A question even I am trying to answer. — Catie Disabato

‡ In fact, according to Cyrus’s notes, he was urged by David Woodyard to disregard everything he read in Taer’s notebook. Woodyard believed Taer’s story about Molly was fiction, and didn’t think Cyrus should write a book about it. Woodyard’s lack of support for Cyrus’s project was one of the main factors in the disintegration of their relationship. — CD

§ Graciously, Taer’s mother allowed me to access all of Taer’s computers and data storage devices.

ǁ I’ve tried to wrap up any pieces left hanging, and I apologize for the places forthcoming where I’ve been unable to do so. — CD

January 2010. A new decade had recently been rung in, with less pomp and circumstance than the previous decade, which had the Y2K scare, not to mention the resurgence of Prince’s fantastic “1999,” selling over two million new copies over the course of the year. When the world celebrated the new millennium, Molly Metropolis was only thirteen. Born to an upper-middle-class interracial family, Molly’s African American mother differentiated her from her white high school classmates. She didn’t have any siblings or friends to share the experience of growing up biracial in a majority white space. Characteristically, Molly let her dissimilarities from her peers be her strength. “Sometimes I felt like an alien,” Molly told The New York Times in late 2009, “but even when I felt completely lonely, I thought, ‘it’s better to be unique than to be just like everyone else.’ ”*