Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

After the bombings, all of the New Situationists hid themselves on the lower floor of their quarters. Only Berliner and Wilson came and went. Perhaps all sixteen rooms were full; perhaps some people had to share rooms. Because I don’t know how many members the New Situationists actually had, and because Berliner and Kraus refuse to talk about that period of time in any detail, I don’t know what hiding out was actually like. It could’ve been lonely, isolated, and spacious, or cramped and frustrating. I do know that all of their supplies came in from a security guard who worked in the office building. Berliner warned me not to look for that person, laboriously switching between gender pronouns as he always did when protecting the identity of someone associated with the New Situationists: “If you look, you won’t find him. If you do find her, he won’t have any useful information.” I did search for the security guard but, as Berliner had predicted, I didn’t find anything of use.

Buried in their own architectural creation, the New Situationists were forced to take stock of themselves and their organization. They were disillusioned. At first they held an official meeting every day during their sequester and argued constantly about the future of the movement. Eventually they stopped meeting and stopped talking to each other at all. No one tried to save the New Situationists except Berliner, who gave a passionate speech about courage and idealism. When another member stopped him in the middle of his rant to call him an ignorant and senseless child, Berliner punched him in the face. The conflict between Berliner and the other members ended only when he was incarcerated. By virtue of their forced cohabitation, the New Situationists limped along into the New Year, as their isolation stretched into its tenth month.

By the time Kraus’s trial started in March, the police were spending less time investigating of the members of the New Situationists, for good reason. In 2003, six hundred and one people were murdered in Chicago, and about half of the homicides were related to gang or drug violence. The CPD had their hands full and a bombing suspect on trial; the newspaper headlines had shifted back to President Bush’s war in Iraq. The New Situationists and Kraus were buried on the second page of the Metro section. Though the Federal Investigation continued, and indeed remains an open case to this day, the New Situationists felt safer, and the group slowly disbanded.

After his stint in juvenile detention, Berliner didn’t return to the New Situationist headquarters. He had probably been the most emotionally affected by the collapse of the group; he had treated their goals like religion and Kraus like a priest. Heartbroken, he moved back into his mother’s house and sat in the courtroom every day to watch the proceedings of Kraus’s trial. He wore a pair of gray suit pants and a rotating set of pale blue button-down shirts. At the end of each day in court, the bailiff led Kraus through the small band of courtroom reporters allowed to attend the trail. They didn’t shout at her like on television, but the photographers took hundreds of pictures. Berliner followed in the wake of the reporters. He watched as Kraus stepped into the windowless van that transported her back to the Dwight Correctional Center, and then he walked all the way from the courthouse in the Loop to his mother’s brownstone in Lincoln Park. He ruined his shiny black loafers with weeks of that kind of walking. He stayed in every evening; he never socialized or watched TV. Instead, he read fiction: the collected stories of Borges, Drown by Junot Díaz, several novels by Italo Calvino, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

The trial ended on April 30; a week later, Kraus received her sentence. Berliner sat in the back of the courtroom during the sentencing and Kraus turned around to look at him three times. Kraus had refused to see Berliner when he tried to visit her in jail, so during the sentencing he wouldn’t sit close enough to Kraus to touch her. When the judge read her sentence, Kraus didn’t react, but Berliner burst into tears and ran out of the courtroom when the reporters took his picture.

“She’s not the kind of girl that wanted some kind of protection from me or from any boyfriend — and, anyway, our dynamic wasn’t like that. She hated having me in the courtroom in general,” Berliner said during our third interview.

“When I visited her in prison, later, she was always saying to me, ‘you shouldn’t have had to see my trial’—that was the kind of relationship we had. So, [sitting in the back of the courtroom] was a teenage defiant thing like, ‘Fuck you, you won’t see me? I’ll sit in the back. If we’re going to end, let’s end it dramatically. You’ll miss me.’ Of course, it wasn’t like that. I cried. I went to visit her the next week and made sure she was still my girlfriend. She was, she still is, no matter who I’m with she will always be, but in the courtroom everything feels dramatic. Everything in my life at that point had a very heightened sense of drama, and that was the apex. I started watching Law and Order with my mother, and I always wished they would keep up with the characters after the trials, just so I could have a guide for how to act. My mother told me to pray, but of course I didn’t have anything to pray to.”

During the trial, Berliner lost touch with the other New Situationists. He didn’t know most of their names and didn’t try to find out, but he would’ve liked to talk with some of them a few weeks before Kraus’s sentencing, when CNN began airing a series of investigative reports called “Who Are The New Situationists?” According to Berliner, the report got a lot of things wrong, but also got a few things right. He wasn’t specific about what details fit into what category, although CNN’s conclusion that the New Situationists had been hiding out somewhere in Chicago was clearly correct. More likely than not, the New Situationists returned to simple, everyday lives, started going to Starbucks again, bought business-casual attire, found jobs as assistants in offices, and moved slowly up the ladder. According to Berliner, one of the former New Situationists is now a popular food blogger; he says he saw her face for the first time in a picture in the Food section of the Tribune. a

“Sometimes I wonder if I’ll run into one of them at a bar sometime,” Berliner told me, “I wouldn’t even recognize them. That’s the strangest part. The group is still part of what I am but the only person that meant something to me was Marie. That’s weird to think about.”

After Kraus went to prison, Berliner fell in with a group of Chicago photographers and avant-garde artists, all of whom had recently graduated from Columbia College in Chicago (an arts college unaffiliated with Columbia University in New York), all of whom were at least four years older than Berliner, and all of whom used him for his cultural capital while he used them for low-effort companionship. When I asked Berliner to give me their names, he couldn’t remember more than one. He recalled them as an amorphous blob, as a group of people who worked terrible jobs in restaurants and coffee shops while trying to take their art seriously, and he could only distinctly remember one out of the clump, a lesbian portrait photographer named Claire Haskal, with whom he still occasionally gets drunk.

Haskal, who helpfully provided me with prints of several portraits of Berliner at eighteen and nineteen years old, recalls him as a nearly “catatonic” social presence. “He’d come out to openings and just stand with a group of us, never saying a word. People thought it was an affectation, or that he was intimidated because he was so young. That’s what I thought, I thought he was intimidated, so I tried to stick close to him, like he was a skittish dog. All the art fags wanted him as a pet. I did, too.