The Ghost Network (19 page)

Every major review of the album touched on the lyrics’ dark tone. The album sounds like a death rattle; journalists didn’t even have to stretch to find evidence to support stories about Molly’s “depression” or “dark moods”—but that didn’t stop some people from reaching. Roger Popdidian of
Rolling Stone
, for example, interpreted the poppy, benign “Party Babylon” as the inner monologue of a depressed girl hiding from the comfort of her loved ones in the anonymity of a loud club.
^h

While the rest of the world was dissecting the album, Taer used the new wave of Molly Metropolis–related Internet dialogue to recharge her batteries and revitalize her morale for her search. On a cold day in late January 2009, Taer loaded
Cause Apocalyptic
onto her
iPod, and walked through the city with Molly in her ears and her nose buried in Berliner’s sketchpad of drawn maps.
ⁱ

Along with the lines he drew to represent each of the streets he had walked on, Berliner used a series of symbols on his maps: blue X’s, red arrows, and black dots. Taer went to the streets that she knew Berliner had walked on. She compared the buildings and businesses on those streets with the marks on the map. She focused on a small red arrow pointing to a blue X, which appeared just south of the triangle of streets. She also examined a second red arrow, pointing to the intersection of two streets on the triangle.

Taer pondered the symbols all day and, getting nowhere, she headed for home. She looked up from Berliner’s map and found she had walked to the entrance of the L stop at the intersection of North Street and North Clybourn.

She had thought a blue X might mean a certain kind of building, but as she boarded the train she had a new thought: maybe the blue X’s were L stops, and red arrows indicated any place Berliner went into, whether it be a business, residence, L stop, et cetera. If she was right, the blue X with the red arrow pointing to it, the combination of symbols she’d been trying to decipher all day, could indicate Berliner had taken the L from the same North Street and North Clybourn station Taer had just used herself. The second red arrow, then, meant he went into another, unidentified building at the intersection of two streets.

Taer hurriedly scribbled the idea down in her journal, with some commentary: “This could be a non idea. The red arrows might not mean ‘places he went to,’ the blue X’s might not mean L stops. And even if they do, the red arrow pointing to the intersection could just indicate a coffee shop he went into or something. But maybe this is actually something.”

Taer waited until the next day to ask Nix for help. After work, she buttered her up; Taer cooked for her, cleaned the apartment, did all the laundry, and rented her favorite Disney movie (the version of
Robin Hood
with cartoon foxes). She made sure Nix was half drunk on red wine and full of pasta before she brought up her search for Molly and her new idea about the symbols on Berliner’s map. To Taer’s surprise, Nix didn’t fight. She drank more wine, and examined the map while Taer turned on her voice recorder and explained her theory about the arrows and X’s. Nix flipped through Berliner’s sketchpad, examining earlier maps they barely looked at, then she returned to the last map. “You think the red arrows are the places he went?” Nix asked.
^j

“Yeah, I think so. It could be.”

“So you think he took the L to Clybourn to go to a building that the second red arrow is pointing to.”

“Yeah! Yes. I mean, it could be nothing. He could’ve been getting coffee there.”

“If that blue X is the L, that means the other red arrow is on Armitage. Can you pull up Google Maps?”

“Yes! Yeah. Okay. Let me grab my laptop.”

“This could be really, really good,” Nix said.

“I know. I’m trying not to get my hopes up,”

“You just figured it out walking around?”

“Yeah,” Taer said.

Taer grabbed their laptops while Nix moved the dinner plates to the sink, and then looked up the area in question, trying to find the two streets that created a triangle with North Clybourn Avenue. Just north of the L, Clybourn intersected with Armitage, and Sheffield.

“Oh yeah, this is it.” Taer said quickly.

“How are you so sure?” Nix said.

“Look at this map. Look at this little road.”

While most of the streets that intersected with North Clybourn formed perfect triangles, the place where Clybourn would’ve met Armitage was interrupted by another, fourth street, North Racine Avenue. If Berliner had walked down Clybourn, Armitage and Sheffield, but not Racine, he would have to draw a triangle with two sides that didn’t meet, just like the lopsided almost-triangle in Berliner’s hand-drawn map.

At the end of Armitage, where it intersected with Racine, Berliner had drawn the second red arrow. Taer looked at the Street View on Google Maps to see what was there. At the intersection of Armitage and Racine, right where the arrow pointed, was a pair of office buildings. They were nearly identical: low, by Chicago’s skyscraping standards, gray, and nondescript. Their plain facades gave no hint about their interiors. In a word, they were boring—a capital crime in worlds populated with pop stars. One was the building that I had found, which listed Antoinette Monson as an owner.

*
Thanks to Jade Ashley Zanotti at Bauman Rare Books in New York for helping me track down a copy of the de Poisson biography and to Professor David Whittier of the University of Chicago for an account of the book’s history.

†
This birth-order information might’ve been lifted from the biography of Monson’s contemporary (and probable rival-in-absentia) Martin Bohemus. [
I’m not sure what Cyrus means here. Is there another lost biography? What does rival-in-absentia mean? —CD
]

‡
Quotations from de Poisson’s untitled biography have been adjusted to reflect modern spellings.

§
Christopher Columbus’s Second Voyage to America, In His Words
, eds. Olivia Dunn and Jamie R. Havert (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 15.

ǁ
Christopher Columbus’s Second Voyage to America, In His Words
, 54.

a
From a letter Columbus wrote to the Monarchs. The quotation appears in several books about Columbus, including two that Cyrus owns:
The Second Voyage and Ferdinand and Christopher,
both by C. W. Peters. —CD

b
Simon Charles,
History’s Most Hated Cartographer: The New Biography of Antoine/Antoinette Monson
(San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1921).

c
Simon never revealed his source for the quotation “history’s most hated cartographer.”

d
The idea that Antoinette was barren began as court gossip and, in Charles’s hands, became historical myth. Antoinette actually bore three children. Aimé didn’t father any of them, but raised them as his own; as a private, perverse joke, Aimé and Antoinette named each of the children after their biological fathers, Antoinette’s various extramarital lovers. Any record of the children’s proper names was lost, but Antoinette recorded their pet names: Lo-Lo, Freddie, and Bébé.

e
The New Biography of Antoine/Antoinette Monson
, 206.

f
Thanks to Berliner for letting me examine the diary. [
Thanks from me, too. —CD
]

g
From 2001 to 2007, hip-hop and R&B dominated the Billboard charts and made up the vast majority of the number one singles. In 2008, Black Eyed Peas was poised to dominate the year’s charts with their two huge hits “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Gotta Feeling.” Their chart domination ended when Molly’s third single “New Vogue Riche” toppled “I Gotta Feeling,” ending a fourteen-week number one streak.

h
Roger Popdidian, “Album Review: Molly Metropolis—
Cause Apocalyptic
,” in
Rolling Stone
1097, No. 2 (2010): 68.

i
Parts of the story of Taer’s search on this day came to Cyrus secondhand, from Nix. Other parts came from Taer’s notebook and recordings. —CD

j
At the time, Nix wasn’t aware that Taer was recording their conversation and saving the mp3s. She was surprised when I played her the audio recording.

The next morning, a Saturday, Taer and Nix geared up for the cold. Taer wore tights under her jeans and Nix wore her blue U of C sweatshirt under her coat. Nix carried Berliner’s gun in the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt. They put on their boots, scarves, hats, and gloves; Nix had black leather gloves she’d taken from her mother’s house and Taer had one black glove and one gray because she could never keep pairs together.
*
They went out into the snow and took two buses (the 82 and the 73) to the intersection of West Armitage and North Racine.

They stood in front of the two gray office buildings they’d seen on computer screen, Taer a little reverent and Nix a little bored. Nix pulled one of her gloves off and flipped through Berliner’s sketchpad of maps as her fingers stiffened in the freezing air. She pointed out to Taer all the maps from previous dates that featured a triangle with a red arrow pointing at the intersection
they were standing on. If they were right about the meaning of the symbols, then Berliner visited one of these buildings often. Taer thought they might find the
pied-à-terre
Davis had described.

Nix flipped to the beginning of the sketchpad and found the first map with the triangle of North Clybourn, North Armitage, and West Racine on it. At the top of the page, Berliner had written a string of numbers: 1142015914520205. Nix handed Taer the sketchpad so she could put her glove back on. Nix stomped both of her feet against the pavement to warm up her legs, which were so cold that her muscles strained as she moved. Taer looked at the sketchpad and tried to guess what the numbers were; not a birthday, not an address, not a license plate number.

After a minute or two of standing outside the buildings, cold and getting colder, Nix told Taer she was going to search the building on the right and instructed Taer to search the building on the left. Annoyed, Taer shoved Berliner’s sketchpad into her coat pocket and—according to Nix—she said, “The cold makes you such a bitch.”
^†
They separated and made their way through the low drifts of snow that covered the paths to the entrances of the buildings. Taer reached her building first and found it oddly welcoming. The door, which was usually locked on weekends and required a key code to enter, was propped open with a small piece of wood. Inside, the icy wind blew tufts of snow onto the black-and-white tiled floors of the foyer. The lights and heat were on. Taer easily found a small bank of three elevators behind an unmanned security desk. She pressed a call button, the doors opened immediately, and she rode the elevator to the top floor.

The elevator opened into a long narrow hallway decorated with
the same tiled floors, plus floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the Armitage-Racine intersection. The hallway led to two suites of offices, one on either end of the building. Taer tried the doors to both of the offices; they were locked. Taer paused in front of the huge windows and spotted Nix, who was still outside, trying to find a way into her building. Taer watched Nix with renewed warmth and sympathy. She appreciated the tenacity with which Nix tried to pry open the building’s windows. She noticed the perfect coordination of Nix’s gloves and hat. She admired Nix’s faux fur coat, even though she usually thought the coat was pretentious.

Taer felt any sense of urgency fade away. She didn’t want the exploration of the buildings to feel like a competitive game between them. She didn’t want to hold herself back from Nix anymore; she didn’t want to fight; she didn’t want Nix to sleep on the couch. Alone at the top of an office building, Taer decided to dedicate herself to Nix, to love her, and to wait for her to find a way into her building before Taer started looking around hers.

Taking the building’s silence as evidence she was alone, Taer took off her mismatched gloves, sat down in front of the window, and started writing in her journal. She began by recounting the progress of her investigation: “I don’t know if the openness of this building is the sign I have the right one, or if the locked-up-ness of Gina’s building is a better sign. Maybe there’s a janitor in here who propped open the door and will have a lot of fun kicking me out when he finds me. The building is so silent, though. I can’t believe I’m seriously about to write this, but I wish the floors were carpeted so I didn’t make so much noise walking around.” As she wrote, Taer veered off into erotic daydreaming, in which Nix lay naked, except for her fur coat, in an igloo made of warm snow. In the fantasy, Taer had her own fur coat, which was held closed by a series of small buttons. Nix crawled across the igloo’s ice floor, kneeled at Taer’s feet, and started undoing the buttons.