Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

When Nicolas Berliner and Regina Nix agreed to meet with Archer, they insisted on a number of conditions. If Cyrus refused to honor them, they refused to speak to him. Cyrus agreed to their conditions.

Cyrus wasn’t allowed to ask any questions about the identity of the other New Situationists. The most important stipulation for the interview was, as Cyrus jokingly called it, the Provision Against Real Place Names. Before meeting with Cyrus, Berliner and Nix agreed on a litany of made-up street names to stand in for the real locations of, for example, the underground headquarters of the New Situationists/Urban Planning Committee and the entrance to the subway station where they caught David Wilson’s train. Cyrus agreed never to investigate or print the actual location names. He actually signed a few legal documents assuring he never would, non-disclosure agreements. Berliner knew that anyone who wanted to look could find the location of the Urban Planning Committee, but there is nothing left there now. You can look if you want, but you will be disappointed.

I’m not sure how long Cyrus believed Berliner and Nix were telling him the truth about the train ride. I don’t know when he realized that they were lying to him — that the train wasn’t a dead end. But when he did realize, he broke his word and searched for the real location of the Urban Planning Committee underground headquarters. It wasn’t difficult for him to find, he just looked through the fire department’s publicly available incident records for the month during which the Urban Planning Committee burned. From Armitage and Racine, Cryus traced his way to the Old Town Aquarium, and from there he descended into the train station. Once something hidden has been found, it’s much harder to re-hide.

He left me his discoveries; I lightly edited Cyrus’s original manuscript to reflect the actual locations of all the events of this book. I made a trip to the train station hidden below the Old Town Aquarium (that trip is chronicled below), and following my visit to the train, all of the infrastructure has since been destroyed or concealed completely. With me, the chain was broken.

To visit the train, I didn’t have to study any maps or even make a long commute to find the hidden train station. Archer had left me instructions and I followed them: David Wilson would be waiting for me at 3 p.m. on Thursday, every Thursday for a year, until I showed up. I live within walking distance of the Old Town Aquarium.

On Thursday, May 16, 2014, 2:34 p.m., I descended the southwest staircase of the Old Town Aquarium and made my way to the train station platform below. Near the breaker box where I turned on the light, someone had written on the wallpaper in chalk: “If we don’t die here will we carry on further?”* How the phrase showed up on the wall of the New Situationists’ train station, I don’t know. Maybe Nix and Berliner saw it but didn’t mention it to Archer. Maybe Archer left it there for me.

The wall of the train platform was made of faded blue tiles. Little chunks of white tile, among the blue, neatly and largely spelled the French words PLAQUES TOURNANTES UN. Plaques tournantes is another old Situationist term, associated with the dérive : while wandering, the Situationists would identify areas they believed were linked together through some kind of shared ambiance, subdivisions of the city that didn’t follow the same neighborhood boundaries the city government set. They called the areas unities of ambiance instead of neighborhoods. Some of the unities served as “stations” during the drift, or “junctions in the psychogeographic flow of Paris.” They called the junctions or stations plaques tournantes , a pun in French with so many subtleties of meaning and so many connections to cultural conditions of the time that it is difficult to satisfactorily translate the phrase into English. In a certain sense, a plaque tournantes is a railway turnstile; the phrase can also refer to the center of something or a place of exchange.

With a few minutes to spare before the train was supposed to arrive, I walked the length of the train station a few times, fidgeting, taking pictures with my phone, and listening to the DJ Shadow track “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt,” from the album Endtroducing..… I felt anxious. I switched from “Building Steam” to “Apocalypse Dance,” and I felt better.

I peered into the dark tunnels on either side of the station until I saw the bright light that meant the train was approaching. I sat down on the bench to give the impression I had been waiting patiently the whole time. When the train stopped, I expected David Wilson to be alone, but he wasn’t. The woman beside him has been called Miranda Young, has taken the name Antoinette Monson, and was the world’s biggest pop star. Molly Metropolis.

She was dressed simply, as is her modus operandi now. She wore a pair of high-wasted beige pants, a white T-shirt with a very low V down to her belly button, showing off a triangle of skin, and a pair of black boots with a huge wedge heel, which she said she built herself. Her fingernails were bare and she wasn’t wearing much makeup. She wore sunglasses with small, round, very dark lenses, but took them off when we talked. She seemed pleased to see me. She made me feel nervous.

She introduced me to Wilson and after a word or two of greeting (he called her “Molls”), he disappeared into the control room to get the thing chugging. I didn’t see him again. Molly gave me a quick tour of the train. She explained that they had made some changes to the original design. She personally had ripped the seats out of the front car to make room for a table. The second car retained its traditional seats — slightly more legroom than L trains have today. She apologized for the noise, the rattle of the train. I drank water, she drank red wine, and we both ate from a bag of walnuts.

“Thanks for the water,” I said. “I’m a little starstruck.”

It was hard to talk to Molly. Her voice was familiar, her face was familiar, but it felt like if I had reached out to grab her, my hand would pass right through her body like a ghost on a TV show. In other words, Molly was unreal. She spoke to me like she was speaking to Barbara Walters, which was fitting. Molly has so many interviews left ungiven.

“I’m so glad to have you here,” she said. “But we have limited time. Unless you’re interested in staying on the train.”

“I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but that seems like a dangerous choice. After all, Caitlin stayed, didn’t she?”

“Oh my goodness, of course you’re worried! But don’t be worried. Cait is alive. She is perfectly alive and perfectly fine. Adjusting. Some people have a harder time adjusting, but she didn’t, she’s doing so well. Were you two close?”

After this little speech, I had more new questions than answers. Thankful Taer was still alive, I checked to make sure my voice recorder (which Molly agreed to me using) was working.

“I’m sorry,” I said, referring to the interruption to check the recorder. “Can we go back? Cait’s alive and ‘adjusting’? What are you talking about?”

“You knew Cyrus better than Caitlin, didn’t you, and you are probably worried about him. I don’t mean to be a tease!”

“Yes. And he’s alive, too, you’re saying?”

“Yes, alive and fine,” she over-exaggerated the word fine , like she was singing it in a musical.

I took a moment to assimilate this information. I cried, and she reached across the table, and held my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“No!” she said. “Cry!”

She kept holding my hand, in her surprisingly strong grip with surprisingly soft fingers, until I stopped crying. In writing down this moment, I’m reminded of Taer and Nix’s first post-college encounter, when Nix cried. Did Molly do this intentionally, so my rendering of the event would echo an earlier incident she knew was in the book? I wish I’d heard the echo at the time.