Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

bb Check out the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s movie Drive, for example. — CD

cc And here’s where everyone got confused. Taer and Nix thought Berliner had broken in to steal Molly’s notebook. Berliner thought Nix and Taer might be working with Peaches and Ali to draw him out. Peaches and Ali thought Nix had some secret information about where Molly had gone and were trying to find Berliner to reunite them with Molly. Everything got all muddled and Cyrus did his best to put all the threads together, failing in places, sometimes blinded, sometimes wrong. — CD

Every time I interviewed Berliner and Nix, we met in my apartment in Chicago, a small but elegant one bedroom with historic 1920s moldings Berliner admired. Berliner wore the same gray suit and pale blue button-down shirt every time. Nix wore tight blue jeans and loose tank tops.

When they met me at my apartment, to talk to me about Taer, Molly, Kraus, the New Situationists and the old, they refused my offer of beer or wine, but ate any snacks I offered them. Sometimes their answers were candid. Other times, they sounded rehearsed. Together, they could be quite intimidating.

After months of dodging my calls and threatening to sue me, after Berliner finally agreed to be interviewed, the first question on my list was “How did you become involved with Caitlin Taer and Regina Nix?” When he explained how he heard about them from Davis and waited to see if they would find him, a much more interesting question arose: “You and Molly never trusted anyone. Why did you trust Taer on that first evening you met?”

When I asked him this question, Berliner’s attitude toward me changed. For the first time in our long, frustrating interaction, he really opened up and spoke honestly. Later, he would open up again about Molly, but when I asked about Taer I saw for the first time Berliner as the charismatic figure who could attract the attention of both compulsively secretive political groups and enigmatic, budding pop stars.

“God, I don’t know why I trusted her,” he said, “Very often, when you meet a person for the first time, their emotions are really turned off. Even people who are really open, I’m not just talking about closed-off people. Most of the time, people don’t show you their heaviest, deepest emotions the first time you meet them. I mean, they don’t want to show you that vulnerable part of themselves and you don’t want to see it. You don’t want them to see yours either. There’s a social contract between people who have never met before, to be some diminished version of yourself.

“Until I met Cait, that was par for the course. But with Cait, I saw the intensity of her emotions so instantly. It was like I could just look inside of her and see all her emotional junk, all her fear, all her love. And it was like she was letting me see it. And when you see that in someone, when I saw that in her, I began to feel that I knew her deeply before I really did. I felt that very quickly. That would’ve been dangerous, had Cait not been basically good.

“On top of that, because Irene had told me Cait was coming, and I had been waiting for her to arrive, I’d done a lot of research on her. I had this parasocial relationship with Cait before I ever met her. All of those factors came together. And I just knew I should just …”

Berliner trailed off without completing his thought, and let the silence stretch to an uncomfortable length. Then he continued: “Molly always said to act on instinct, and trusting Cait felt like what Molly would’ve wanted me to do. Molly was deeply important to me and I wanted to find her. Then I met this person, and she wanted to find Molly, too. I’d been alone. I’d been looking for Molly alone for a long time.”

On that Saturday morning when Taer found Berliner, he took Nix and Taer back into the Urban Planning Committee headquarters. Taer showed Nix the trick door. Berliner offered them wine — they took it — and he told them a little bit about himself and his history with Molly. Taer reminded Berliner she was in possession of Molly Metropolis’s personal notebook and would only show it to him if Berliner let her help look for Molly. He agreed.

Berliner called the taxi, and the three of them rode to the Chicago First National Bank and Trust. Taer retrieved Molly’s notebook from her safety deposit box, then they returned to the Urban Planning Committee by L, checking over their shoulders as they rode.

Taer expected Berliner to recognize the notebook and to know how to unlock its secrets, but he had never seen it before.

Unlike Berliner, Ali and Peaches had seen inside Molly’s notebook. Because Molly used the notebook for both her New Situationist research and her ideas for her pop career, she had shown Ali and Peaches selected pages, while carefully concealing others — and they wanted to see inside it again. One of the New Society’s young members had followed Taer to and from the bank, but she didn’t know about the notebook and didn’t understand its value to the leaders of the New Society. When the spy reported Taer’s activity to Ali, the dancers finally knew where the notebook was: behind a steel door they couldn’t yet breach. They refocused their energies on finding a way through the door.

Back at the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, Berliner scoured the pages of the notebook for anything he would understand but Taer would’ve missed. He didn’t find any secret codes, any words with double meanings that only he could understand. All he found were the same exclamations of Molly having “found something,” which Taer had read before; nothing he knew about Molly added a new and revealing context to the words.

After two days of reading and re-reading Molly’s notebook, Berliner concluded that if Metro had written down anything important, they didn’t have the context to understand it yet. This was very optimistic of him; he said it for Taer’s benefit, mostly. Privately, he thought Metro had probably never put anything on paper that could point them to something in The Ghost Network. Molly was too tied to the old New Situationist ways, protecting herself by never writing anything down.

Berliner put the notebook aside and spent his days with The Ghost Network, re-examining the hundreds of historical documents and maps he and Molly had used to build the mega-map. He also returned to the Situationist texts — which he hadn’t read in years, not since he first met Kraus. In his return to the Situationist books, letters, and journals, Berliner focused on two prominent Situationist concepts: psychogeography and dérive , or the “drift.”

Dérive was walking without destination, moving through urban space without a specific purpose, changing course based on feeling rather than on traffic signals, breaking the boundaries implicit in the inflexible confines of roadways, sidewalks, and other route designators. On their dérives , Debord and the Situationists searched for new routes through the familiar neighborhoods of their city, seeking to make the familiar seem unfamiliar.

They left graffiti on the streets, claiming them as their own space through Situationist markings. Asger Jorn painted, “If we don’t die here, will we carry on further?” on the Rue du Sauvage, just across the river from one of the Situationists’ favorite buildings, a nearby morgue. Ivan Chtcheglov linked sex to the city, painting, “I came in the cobblestones,” with white paint on some cobblestone streets.

The Situationists had fun during their dérive , and fun was one of their goals, but enjoyment wasn’t the only thing they were after. In defying how city planners wanted them to move through the cities, the Situationists also considered the dérive a serious tool for remaking the city and a cornerstone of the way of life in their potential Situationist city, New Babylon.