Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

Taer, Berliner, and Nix moved as fast as they could down Armitage. They didn’t run into anyone, but they couldn’t hide on the sidewalks brightly illuminated by streetlamps. They didn’t know if anyone from the New Society would follow them, but just in case, they took a long, inefficient route to their destination. They walked, looking over their shoulders, to the L station at Armitage and North Sheffield Avenue. They took the Brown Line one stop south, to the Sedgwick station, exiting the car just as the doors closed. They doubled back, taking the Brown Line north to Fullerton, where they switched to the Red Line and rode to the Grand Station. They left the L behind and walked to Berliner’s pied-à-terre .

Berliner offered Taer and Nix the semi-hidden second bedroom, but instead the three of them piled into the main bed and spooned together, trying to feel protected and safe. Berliner slept, Nix slept, but they said Taer’s anxious fervor kept her awake all night. The adrenaline that had surged through her body in the moments after the explosion didn’t dissipate. At 8:30 the next morning, Nix would’ve preferred to stay asleep, but Taer shook her and Berliner awake. She had already made a Dunkin Donuts run. The Old Town Aquarium opened at 9 a.m. and she wanted to get going.

Nancy Franklin was, again, manning the store and the jellyfish, but this time she greeted Berliner warmly, as if she knew him. According to Berliner, she said something like: “Jim and Ian said you are friends with Antoinette Monson. You should’ve mentioned that the other day and I would’ve let you do whatever you wanted.” Franklin led them to the emergency exit, disabled the alarm, and pointed the way to a narrow passage which led to the staircase Berliner had seen on the blueprints of the building. Taer descended into the darkness without a second thought.

The staircase wasn’t very deep but it took them a long time to reach the bottom because it was narrow, unlit, and unstable. At the base of the staircase, Berliner felt around for the breaker box — subway regulations during the year the station was built called for breakers at the foot of every service staircase. Berliner opened his cell phone and shone his light against the wall. He found the breaker and flicked the switches. All of the light fixtures on the ceiling, ornate 1920s-style chandeliers strung with heavy crystals, lit up.* The station stretched out in front of them. In some ways, a subway station is the perfect secret space in Chicago. Even though the L trains run underground for huge distances, everyone in Chicago still thinks of public transit as something hovering above the city rather than creeping below.

Continuing her obsessive self-documentation, Taer turned on her iPhone voice recorder.

“It’s pretty,” Nix said, her voice echoing against the tiled walls. “I mean, like, it looks fancy, like Union Station.”

Berliner sneezed. “I’m allergic to dust.”

Taer said, “This place is so rad!”

A few minutes later, bored and underwhelmed after the first train station she visited produced a train so quickly, Taer had changed her tune, grumbling: “What do we do now?”

The three of them explored the train station from end to end, but besides a few benches and a surprising lack of mold or grime, they didn’t find anything. They sat on the benches and waited. Nix laid her head in Taer’s lap and made weak jokes: “They really need to get more funding so that they can add more trains. This wait is ridiculous. I’ll be late for work.” Berliner ate some trail mix Nix had in her purse and answered some of Taer’s questions about his mother. They played the app version of the board game Life on Taer’s iPhone. Two and a half hours went by. Then, as Taer complained about not being able to nap on a hard tile floor, the crystals on the chandelier started to shake.

“Jurassic Park,” Taer said, referring to the scene where the water ripples from the vibration of the footsteps of an approaching T-Rex. A few seconds later, the voice recorder picked up the unmistakable rattling clank of an approaching train.

The train was two cars long, and old, and green. It had probably been in the underground station since the ’50s, but someone had taken care to repaint it. The sides were a forest green, the window frames a yellowish off-white. On the front was a big beacon-like light, and two stoplight fixtures on either side of a door. Where there would’ve been a sign that displayed the name of the next stop, there was instead a sign with a black triangle painted on it.

On Taer’s recording, mixed in with the clatter of the train and the screech of its brakes, I could hear Berliner speaking quickly, though his words were indiscernible to me. Berliner told me he was giving Taer and Nix a quick history of the train car — vintage 1950s, painted like they would’ve been painted — as well as identifying for them the man who was driving the train.

It was David Wilson, the other publicly known, non-incarcerated member of the New Situationists. He stopped the train and stepped onto the platform.

“Hey!” Taer said.

Wilson ignored her and spoke to Berliner instead. “I suppose Marie-Hélène told you something ridiculous.”

“She didn’t tell me anything, she told me she didn’t know anything,” Berliner said. “This is Cait and this is Gina.”

“Okay.”

“Did she know something?” Berliner asked.

“Marie’s the kind of person who wouldn’t tell me if she’d found something out,” David said. “I assumed—”

“I was the one who found it,” Taer interjected. “It wasn’t him.”

At the same time, Berliner said: “It was kind of a group effort.”

“Okay,” Wilson said. “Good for you.”

“So what now?” Taer asked.

“I guess you might as well get on the train,” Wilson said.

Wilson went to the engine room to start the train car again, while Taer, Nix, and Berliner climbed inside the first car. The seats, some facing forward and some facing back, were covered in decaying red fabric. The white paint on the walls was chipped and the stuffing was coming out of the plush seats. Nix sat, squeezing the fabric of the seat cushions in her fist, feeling the dust on them. She felt uneasy but didn’t speak up. Berliner picked at the peeling paint with his fingernails, collecting a handful of millimeter-long paint chips, then pocketing them. Taer, exhilarated, grabbed the metal handrails and walked up and down the center aisle of the car, examining everything she could. When the train started she could barely contain a shout.

“We followed Molly Metropolis’s map,” Taer said, when Wilson walked back into the train car. “Where is she? What is this train? Where are we going?”

“Are we not going back there?” Nix asked. “Because let me off.”

“Seriously?” Taer said.

“I’m not going somewhere random with this dude,” Nix said. “Fuck that.”

Wilson laughed, a dry wheeze. He said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, Caitlin, but this train is nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” Taer said. “It’s a train.”

“It’s a toy,” he said. “You found the life-size version of a child’s train set.”

“What do you mean?” Berliner asked.

“But,” Taer said, painfully hopeful, “there’s a train here that’s not on a regular map. That you can only find on Molly Metropolis’s crazy map.”

“Our crazy map,” Berliner said.

Wilson laughed again.

“How did you know we were down here?” Berliner asked.

“There are security cameras. And I come down here a lot,” Wilson admitted sheepishly.

Berliner laughed, perhaps cruelly, but Wilson wasn’t shamed. “You came into the group too late, Nick. And you were still young. Your life wasn’t affected the way our lives were. The rest of my life is going to be about the New Situationists, and I was just some kid who smoked too much pot and read too much about Guy Debord. I didn’t understand what being part of the group was going to mean for the rest of my life.”