Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

h Roger Popdidian, “Album Review: Molly Metropolis— Cause Apocalyptic ,” in Rolling Stone 1097, No. 2 (2010): 68.

i Parts of the story of Taer’s search on this day came to Cyrus secondhand, from Nix. Other parts came from Taer’s notebook and recordings. — CD

j At the time, Nix wasn’t aware that Taer was recording their conversation and saving the mp3s. She was surprised when I played her the audio recording.

The next morning, a Saturday, Taer and Nix geared up for the cold. Taer wore tights under her jeans and Nix wore her blue U of C sweatshirt under her coat. Nix carried Berliner’s gun in the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt. They put on their boots, scarves, hats, and gloves; Nix had black leather gloves she’d taken from her mother’s house and Taer had one black glove and one gray because she could never keep pairs together.* They went out into the snow and took two buses (the 82 and the 73) to the intersection of West Armitage and North Racine.

They stood in front of the two gray office buildings they’d seen on computer screen, Taer a little reverent and Nix a little bored. Nix pulled one of her gloves off and flipped through Berliner’s sketchpad of maps as her fingers stiffened in the freezing air. She pointed out to Taer all the maps from previous dates that featured a triangle with a red arrow pointing at the intersection they were standing on. If they were right about the meaning of the symbols, then Berliner visited one of these buildings often. Taer thought they might find the pied-à-terre Davis had described.

Nix flipped to the beginning of the sketchpad and found the first map with the triangle of North Clybourn, North Armitage, and West Racine on it. At the top of the page, Berliner had written a string of numbers: 1142015914520205. Nix handed Taer the sketchpad so she could put her glove back on. Nix stomped both of her feet against the pavement to warm up her legs, which were so cold that her muscles strained as she moved. Taer looked at the sketchpad and tried to guess what the numbers were; not a birthday, not an address, not a license plate number.

After a minute or two of standing outside the buildings, cold and getting colder, Nix told Taer she was going to search the building on the right and instructed Taer to search the building on the left. Annoyed, Taer shoved Berliner’s sketchpad into her coat pocket and — according to Nix — she said, “The cold makes you such a bitch.” †They separated and made their way through the low drifts of snow that covered the paths to the entrances of the buildings. Taer reached her building first and found it oddly welcoming. The door, which was usually locked on weekends and required a key code to enter, was propped open with a small piece of wood. Inside, the icy wind blew tufts of snow onto the black-and-white tiled floors of the foyer. The lights and heat were on. Taer easily found a small bank of three elevators behind an unmanned security desk. She pressed a call button, the doors opened immediately, and she rode the elevator to the top floor.

The elevator opened into a long narrow hallway decorated with the same tiled floors, plus floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the Armitage-Racine intersection. The hallway led to two suites of offices, one on either end of the building. Taer tried the doors to both of the offices; they were locked. Taer paused in front of the huge windows and spotted Nix, who was still outside, trying to find a way into her building. Taer watched Nix with renewed warmth and sympathy. She appreciated the tenacity with which Nix tried to pry open the building’s windows. She noticed the perfect coordination of Nix’s gloves and hat. She admired Nix’s faux fur coat, even though she usually thought the coat was pretentious.

Taer felt any sense of urgency fade away. She didn’t want the exploration of the buildings to feel like a competitive game between them. She didn’t want to hold herself back from Nix anymore; she didn’t want to fight; she didn’t want Nix to sleep on the couch. Alone at the top of an office building, Taer decided to dedicate herself to Nix, to love her, and to wait for her to find a way into her building before Taer started looking around hers.

Taking the building’s silence as evidence she was alone, Taer took off her mismatched gloves, sat down in front of the window, and started writing in her journal. She began by recounting the progress of her investigation: “I don’t know if the openness of this building is the sign I have the right one, or if the locked-up-ness of Gina’s building is a better sign. Maybe there’s a janitor in here who propped open the door and will have a lot of fun kicking me out when he finds me. The building is so silent, though. I can’t believe I’m seriously about to write this, but I wish the floors were carpeted so I didn’t make so much noise walking around.” As she wrote, Taer veered off into erotic daydreaming, in which Nix lay naked, except for her fur coat, in an igloo made of warm snow. In the fantasy, Taer had her own fur coat, which was held closed by a series of small buttons. Nix crawled across the igloo’s ice floor, kneeled at Taer’s feet, and started undoing the buttons.

She glanced out the window and saw Nix pressing all of the call buttons on the panel outside of the door. A few seconds later, Nix lunged for the door, pulled it open, and went inside. Taer thought someone working on a weekend, or even Berliner, had probably buzzed Nix in. Either way, she wasn’t worried. Nix still had the gun.

With Nix safely inside, Taer searched the building, looking for traces of Berliner. All the offices on the eighth and ninth floors were bolted.

As Taer continued down the stairs to the seventh, sixth, fifth floors, her frustration mounted. The naturally anxious part of her personality took hold and she struggled to maintain a quiet, systematic exploration of the building.

Like a terrified rat in an impossible maze, she scurried from floor to floor, sometimes lingering for several minutes, yanking on the locked doors of the offices and searching the walls for hidden doors. Sometimes she only stayed on a floor for a moment before hurrying to the next. After half an hour of racing around, Taer paused to catch her breath and meditate on her failure. She walked glumly down the stairs, dragging her hand along the dirty railing until it was smudged with black grime.

Taer didn’t realize it until she had reached street level, but the staircase she was walking down was built strangely. From the second to the tenth floors, the stairwell functioned normally, with concrete stairs connecting each level and plaster doors leading to each level’s foyer. However, at the street level, the stairwell didn’t have a door. The concrete wall continued, unbroken. There was no way to enter the building’s lobby through the stairwell. Also, the staircase didn’t stop descending when it hit the first floor. Although the elevator didn’t have a “B” button, the stairs descended into a basement level. Taer hadn’t considered a basement, even though most buildings in Chicago have one; Chicago is tornado country, and basements are where people hide from them.

As soon as Taer reached the bottom of the staircase, she knew she had found something. The door to exit the stairwell was abnormal; instead of wood and plaster, it was made of heavy steel and required a code for entry. Against the wall, there was a small keypad. She considered her obstacle for a few moments, then pulled out Berliner’s sketchpad and opened it to the page with the strange series of numbers. She punched “1142015914520205” into the keypad and, with a lurch, the door unlocked itself.