The Ghost Network (16 page)

In the early days of their relationship, Davis couldn’t find her way around the apartment to save her life; Berliner had to walk her everywhere, to the fridge to get water, to the front door to go home in the morning, even to the bathroom. By the time their relationship was deteriorating, Davis could move from the front of the apartment to the back with her eyes closed. She had found the secret second bedroom buried in a dead-end, and she slept there when she was angry with Berliner.

Davis spoke to Taer and Nix about these patterns of their relationship disdainfully, regretfully, but like Berliner, without shame. Despite their odd sex life, Davis never felt shy about the details. For her, it didn’t even feel transgressive. “In a certain sense, I never really could ‘get it up’ for him, you know? I mean, it just felt like normal sex in a strange place, to me. But it wasn’t supposed to feel like normal sex, it was supposed to be some new merging of person and architecture in a way that was supposed to open up the world. That’s how he told me I should feel about it, but I never did. Not really.”

Berliner was also shameless but for a different reason; he doesn’t mind, even likes, even revels in, being abnormal.

Davis talked and smoked for close to three hours with very few interruptions from Nix and Taer. They polished off two more bottles of wine in the last hour and although they were all drunk, Davis’s hands remained steady and her footsteps straight and even.

When Davis finished explaining her breakup with Berliner, no one said anything for almost twenty seconds, until Taer broke the silence.

“Well,” Taer lisped drunkenly, “I feel like I’m not going to be able to digest all this until tomorrow morning.”

“For sure,” Davis replied.

“But it’s like—I still don’t know what to do next.”

“Maybe we should avoid him,” Nix said.

“He’s not dangerous,” Davis said. “Just weird and sort of amoral. Just find him and talk to him.”

“He broke into our apartment,” Nix said.

“My apartment,” Taer said.

“And he hurt Cait’s forehead,” Nix said.

“The break-in, that’s something he would do. But he doesn’t hurt people,” Davis said.

“I hit his head with a dictionary,” Taer said. “He hit me back in self-defense.”

“Don’t defend him,” Nix said.

“But this argument doesn’t matter because I don’t know where to find him,” Taer said. “Where’s his apartment?”

“I can’t tell you,” Davis said.

“You can’t or you won’t?” Nix asked.

“I won’t,” Davis said, giving Nix a taste of the medicine Berliner would later feed me. “He won’t be there anyway. He doesn’t live there.”

“Where does he live?”

“I don’t know.”

“We could go ask Marie-Hélène,” Taer said.

“She won’t see you,” Davis said.

“Well, then, what are we supposed to do?” Nix asked.

“Look, I’ll give it to you that something is going on here, with Molly’s disappearance and Nick,” Davis said. “But I don’t know why you two in particular feel like you have to take it on.”

“It’s her,” Nix said, meaning Taer.

“Molly,” Taer said, thinking she was agreeing with Nix.

“Okay, then. My guess is that hunting down Nick is the right
thing for you to do,” Davis said. “He knows way more than I do. He’ll be able to help you out. I’m just not sure how to find him.”

Taer pulled Berliner’s sketchpad out of her bag. She held it out of Davis’s reach. “We have this,” she said.

Davis held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

Taer didn’t want to, but handed it over anyway. Davis flipped through the sketchpad, stopping at some pages, running her fingers along the middle binding.

“I can’t decipher it fully. But I know what it is. He’d draw a map of wherever he went during the day. You see these arrows here? That’s his path.”

Davis flipped to the last map in the sketchpad. In the margins, she wrote a key to the map. She defined some of Berliner’s personal annotations, like the arrows she had mentioned, labeled a prominent diagonal street “North Clybourn Avenue,” and made a few guesses of the names of some smaller streets branching off North Clybourn. She pointed out all the maps that were a similar shape to the last map, as if Nick was revisiting the same places.

“What does this mean? This name here?” Taer asked.

“Antoine Monson?” Davis asked. “It was Nick’s assumed name, I think, kind of a code name. I don’t know where it came from, but some of the screen prints in Nick’s apartment were signed Antoine Monson.”

“Molly sometimes had me sign her into hotels as Antoinette Monson,” Nix said. “I didn’t think it was that weird, just some fake name to hide her.”

“Huh,” Taer said. “Maybe it was some way they communicated with each other.”

“Whatever,” Davis said. “I’m glad to be done with the stress of dealing with both of them, to be honest.”

Nix and Taer left Davis cigaretteless, drunk, and wallowing in her own emotional filth. Davis gave the distinct impression that she wouldn’t be seeing or speaking to them again. The way she closed
the door seemed aggressively final. They went back to the Ramada Romulus; the lobby bar was still open. They installed themselves in a booth, ordered two Martinis, and gossiped about Berliner and Davis’s sex life. After the bar closed, Nix and Taer went up to their room. They danced together to music from Nix’s favorite band at the time, Sleigh Bells.

Very late that night, or very early the next morning, when the music had switched to Taer’s favorite band, The National, they argued again about whether they should continue their search for Molly Metropolis. Nix half-heartedly suggested giving up. Taer refused. She would go on by herself if she had to. For the first time in her life, she felt important; she thought that she and Nix were looking for Molly in a place that no one else—not the police, not the record company—could see. Taer promised, sweetly, to protect Nix, but she wouldn’t be able to save Nix from the danger ahead of them.

They slept and in the morning, hungover, they took the train back to Chicago and began to retrace Berliner’s steps.

*
From a feminist perspective, Taer writes she was bothered by Davis’s characterization of her life finding meaning only externally, through her boyfriend.

†
The story of Berliner’s life is culled from Taer’s recording of her and Nix’s conversation with Davis, as well as from interviews Cyrus conducted with Berliner and his family. —CD

‡
Probably Rohypnol.

§
Actually, that idea is a slight bastardization of Debord’s ideas, but the 1990s weren’t like the 1960s and certain aspects of Situationist ideas had to be altered to fit a new group of people who were acutely aware they were on the cusp of a new millennium. David Wilson’s toast at the New Situationists’ New Years Party in 1999 was: “Not just a new year, not just a new decade, not just a new century, a New Situation!” Kraus was the party’s DJ; she played Prince.

ǁ
The episode aired on September 7, 2009. The entire interview is a fascinating watch—Kraus appears to be half-joking, half-serious at all times. Kirkpatrick can keep up, and she continues to push Kraus to say something substantive about the New Situationists, while fully aware Kraus is using her as the unwilling partner in a piece of Live News Theater.

a
From the confessional note they sent to the
Chicago Tribune
the night of the subway bombings, signed “The New Situationists (25 concerned parties).” Because of the New Situationists’ pattern of secrecy and promoting confusion about the group, it is likely that twenty-five doesn’t reflect the group’s actual numbers.

b
From “The New Situationists (25 concerned parties).”

c
According to Cyrus’s notes, Berliner invited Cyrus to visit the apartment in late 2011. The amount of access Berliner allowed Cyrus seems complicated, with a lot of push and pull. —CD

Taer and Nix made the somewhat desperate decision to search for Berliner by walking around Chicago with a half-labeled map as their only guide. They spent many fruitless days trudging in the snow; they thought they had no other choice.

They would’ve had an easier time finding answers to all their questions if they had researched another mystery in their midst, the mystery of Antoine Monson. Monson wasn’t an important person, or a famous one, or someone who became a darling to historians. As such, he isn’t an easy man to know. His name occasionally comes up in newspaper articles and crime reports printed during his life, but only a small number of articles and two books have been written about him. One of them is a short, out of print, and hard to find biography, written in 1892 by a French historian and philosopher named Jacques-Jerome de Poisson (second cousin to the Madame de Pompadour, on her father’s side). The name of the biography has been lost. In 1916, a student pursuing an advanced degree in French history at the University of Westminster found a single copy, broken at the binding and missing an index. He copied the book and sent it to one hundred or so friends and colleagues in the field, but no press
ever officially reprinted de Poisson’s text. If the book ever included an index or bibliography, it’s been lost (or it resides alone in a library or archive), providing reference to nothing. Without a bibliography to give the reader a guide to his sources, it’s impossible to imagine where de Poisson could’ve found any information on Monson at all.
*
a The following is a summation of de Poisson’s exploration of Monson’s life:

Born in 1470, Monson grew up with four brothers—Freddie, Gerard, Thomas, and Raphael—two of whom died in childhood.
^†
The details of Monson’s upbringing are fuzzy at best, but he appears to have been a farmer who taught himself, without attending a university, to be a navigator, geographer, and cartographer.

De Poisson relays certain events in Monson’s life with the disclaimer that the stories “may have been altered by popular fable and rumor,”
^‡
including the story of how Monson became an apprentice navigator on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to America by poisoning the intended assistant cartographer, Lucas Wadsworth.

That particular episode began on October 12, 1493, in a rough port on a rain-soaked Canary Island, the evening before Columbus’s second fleet set sail for the New World. Wadsworth went to a pub in the port town Palos de la Frontera for a last hurrah before months of toil and exhaustion. He drank heavily and bragged loudly about his imminent voyage, especially to a baby-faced, red-cheeked boy, about twenty-two years old, who bought him drinks and begged to hear all the details of his upcoming trip. After a few hours of drinking, Wadsworth keeled over, foaming at the mouth. The baby-faced
boy told the owner of the pub that he would carry Wadsworth to the docks, where he could pass out near his ship and stumble aboard in the morning. Instead of taking him to the docks, the boy put Wadsworth in a wheelbarrow and pushed him to the local general practitioner, who immediately recognized that Wads-worth had been poisoned. The boy told the doctor that he found Wadsworth in that condition on the side of the road and picked him up; the doctor tipped the boy for his trouble.

The next morning, “Luke Wadsworth” reported for duty on Columbus’s flagship vessel, the
Marigalante
. Columbus noted in his captain’s log: “The assistant cartographer, while a man of twenty-two, has the face of a child. He insists he is up for the task and indeed carries his own equipment, which he has himself constructed.”
^§
While the real Wadsworth struggled to stay alive in a nearby hospital (he eventually pulled through), Monson sailed toward America under his name.

Columbus’s primary cartographer, Juan de la Cosa, suffered from terrible seasickness. Constantly nauseated, he spent most of his time in his quarters with a compress on his forehead. He passed his duties off to “Wadsworth.” Columbus and Monson quickly became close. Monson confessed his secret to Columbus, who took the revelation well: “Young Wadsworth actually called Monson. Will never remember to use new name.”
^ǁ
Columbus was true to his word; in later entries in his Captain’s Log, Columbus continued to call Monson “Wadsworth.”

Columbus’s fleet made excellent time. Seventeen ships and approximately one thousand men reached what are now known as the Caribbean Islands on November 3, 1493. While Columbus explored the islands, searching in vain for the mainland of either China or
Japan, Monson stayed at a settlement called Isabella, working on his maps with de la Cosa, who had recovered as soon as his feet touched land. Monson, still working under the name Wadsworth, then served as a deputy to Columbus during the disastrous year and a half when Columbus was Governor of the settlements on the newly discovered islands. In April of 1497, Columbus decided to return to Spain on the
Marigalante
to beg for more supplies to help the struggling colonies. Monson accompanied him on his voyage; de la Cosa stayed behind to work on a series of maps of the islands.