Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

The Situationists still aren’t widely known by name, but psychogeography has become fashionable again. Everyone likes to decorate with old maps; they fetishize the idea of transcending their borders. The Situationists have been assimilated into a commodities culture, the Spectacle, which would kill Debord if he were still alive. For the Situationists, this is a fate worse than death.

Debord didn’t live long enough to see his work bastardized into violent politics and consumerist trends. He did, however, live to see the Situationists’ relevance turned from active politics into passive academic interest. He even had to suffer through several reputable journals using the word situationism . After he wrote, “There is no such thing as situationism,” for years the word wasn’t used even by the Situationists’ political enemies, as if his writing was a royal decree. Then, when Debord was old and his power was sapped, the academics began using it. In a sense, those few times the word “situationism” was printed were like bells tolling Debord’s death.

This is the unsatisfying end to Debord’s story, to the story of the New Situationists, to Molly’s story, to Berliner’s story, to the New Society’s story, to Taer’s story, and to mine. I can’t satisfy you, so I wish, at least, that I could ease you more gently into an ending. I can’t do that either. I have nothing left for anyone. No one will be reading this, anyway. Why revise? Why edit? Why narrate?

Where is Molly Metropolis? — this question is left unanswered and might never be known. I certainly won’t be able to answer it. I’m content now to drift, like Caitlin Taer must’ve done, clinging to the scraps of a ruined boat in the dark and freezing Lake Michigan water, waiting for my turn to sink and disappear.

* The Situationist City , 1.

† Michèle Bernstein, All the King’s Horses , trans. John Kelsey (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 22–23.

“We have published several texts … that in thirty years will still be the basis for the creative movement that will not fail to constitute itself.”

— Guy Debord, in a letter to Constant Nieuwenhuys, 1959

Maybe this is funny or maybe it isn’t: Cyrus Kinnely Archer did, eventually, disappear. I’m not speaking metaphorically — Cyrus is as gone as Molly Metropolis or Caitlin Taer. His book ended when he reached the end of the story that Taer told him with everything she left behind, but his book also ended before the story ended.

Cyrus was born in Mequon, Wisconsin, outside of Milwaukee. I’ve seen a few pictures of him as a young, blonde child at the water park at Wisconsin Dells: at the top of the waterslide, eating applesauce with his brothers at the family-style themed restaurant Paul Bunyan’s Cook Shanty. He seems at home among the artifice of amusement parks and tourist traps.

When he was a teenager, his parents moved to Hoboken, and he began spending his weekends in New York City, listening to music and sneaking into gay clubs. He read everything he was supposed to read: Isherwood, Rimbaud, and Burroughs. He went to Oberlin, where all the NYC hippies and queers went to smoke pot in the snow, out from under the thumb of the East Coast Ivys with their secret clubs and homosocial boozing. He returned to Oberlin to teach after getting his PhD at Columbia University. I don’t know why he decided to go back to the cold Midwest.

Cyrus dated David Woodyard, formerly of The New Yorker magazine, off and on for nearly twenty-five years; their relationship began when they both attended Columbia University. Cyrus began his first year as Woodyard finished his dissertation. The grad school part of their romance was public and dramatic, with a lot of screaming breakups in front of colleagues, followed by sudden reunions. It might’ve ruined Cyrus’s academic reputation. They evened out as they hit their thirties and lived together for a decade and a half before Cyrus’s book broke them up.

Their spectacular, final break up, and Woodyard’s purchase of an equally spectacular Chelsea townhouse to serve as his new bachelor pad, provided the Gawker bitches with excellent gossip fodder for several months. At the time, I reviled the loose tongues of Woodyard’s assistants and underlings, but I have to admit that I found their lack of discretion helpful while putting together Cyrus’s book.

Cyrus and Woodyard didn’t have to trifle with anything as tiresome as divorce papers and the legal splitting of shared assets, though I did hear that many of their final arguments were over custody of Squiggy, their dog, and that Woodyard won. Squiggy wasn’t equipped to handle Ohio’s winters.

Their “divorce” occurred during the spring of 2011, while I was finishing my senior honors project in Creative Writing (a series of personal essays that were supposed be the first half of a memoir about my adolescence in suburban Illinois, but which I have put in the proverbial drawer). After three years nurturing my “budding talent”—he called my writing promising and my personal voice nearly developed (“nearly there” is a state I will remain in eternally) — Cyrus agreed to be my honors advisor. Although his own work and the details of his personal life distracted him, he managed to eke out of me the best work I could manage at that age. I graduated with honors in May, though not with high honors, which I would’ve preferred.

I spent the next two years living in Chicago, writing freelance articles for various not-so-prestigious websites without being paid. I would’ve been jealous of Taer’s career, had I known about her at the time, and despite her own frustration with her writing life. I lived in a carpeted, occasionally mold-infested apartment, probably not unlike Taer’s walk-up. My sister, whose name you might’ve heard because she is the only American to be accepted at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Russia in fifty years, sent me videos of her and her schoolmates performing the Small Swans’ pas de quatre from Swan Lake — who do you think my parents talk about when they are at dinner with their friends? I posted my sister’s videos on Tumblr. I remained frustratingly anonymous.

Sometime in early August 2013, Cyrus stopped answering my e-mails. I thought he was finally tired of my depressing life. Then I found out that he had disappeared. On August 9, his sister, Francesca, filed a missing persons report with the police. On August 12, the Chicago Police Department found Archer’s car in an abandoned train yard near Pullman, Illinois. The car had been completely incinerated; there was a body inside, burned so severely that they couldn’t even take dental imprints. Archer was declared dead. His meager assets, and all of his books, went to his sister. He bequeathed all of his research for this book — his manuscript, Taer’s recordings, her journal, transcripts from all his interviews including the ones with Berliner and Nix — to me.

I’m absolutely certain of the reasons why Cyrus chose me to complete his book. I had stayed in contact with him after I left school, while his colleagues and peers shunned him; I liked Molly Metropolis, a weird cyborgian fantasy pop star, and talked about her to Cyrus. Also, I went to the same high school as Regina Nix and Caitlin Taer. They were older than me, but I saw them around. Although Taer had attended Oberlin, and had taken Creative Writing classes, she had never studied with Cyrus and he didn’t remember her. I did, and he wanted to borrow that memory.

So, to continue Cyrus’s story, here is the first revelation:

The last chapter of this book (before this epilogue) is a pack of lies. Nix and Berliner lied to Cyrus and he wrote the lies down. What I’m saying is, his intentions were good, and he failed. He finished his draft of this book, then he sat down on the couch, watched a lot of reruns of Law and Order , took a sabbatical from Oberlin College, and, for some reason, decided he must’ve been lied to. He began searching for the truth, for himself.