The Ghost Network (2 page)

A coffin filled with keepsakes, sandbags, and her favorite records was buried in place of a body.

Compared to Chicago’s other disappearance that year, Taer’s was small potatoes. Taer was actually a footnote
*
in the larger disappearance of Miranda Young, better known by her stage name, Molly Metropolis.

Four months before Taer’s disastrous boat trip, Molly Metropolis disappeared in Chicago during her Apocalypse Ball tour. She performed to a sold-out crowd on January 8 and was gone before sound check on January 9. As of this writing, she hasn’t yet publicly reemerged. Her disappearance and Taer’s are inextricably linked.

Why begin to write a book about an unfortunate girl who probably drowned and a gone-but-not-forgotten pop star?
^†

Social associations helped jump-start the process of writing this book; if my partner at the time, David Woodyard, hadn’t written an article about Molly Metropolis and Taer, my reciprocal interest wouldn’t have developed. At the time of Taer’s disappearance,
Woodyard wrote for
The New Yorker
, often focusing on topics at the intersection of popular culture and politics. He noticed that both of the people pulled out of Lake Michigan on the morning of Taer’s disappearance were connected to Molly Metropolis. Nix, the eight-fingered hypothermic, was Molly Metropolis’s former assistant; Berliner had been friends with the pop star since before her rise to fame in 2008. Woodyard conceived of a piece about cultural obsession with mystery stories and disappearing women, critiquing the morbid curiosity in the tenor of the national response to Molly Metropolis’s disappearance, as well as the anemic Chicago-area broadcast news coverage of Taer’s story.
The New Yorker
wanted to publish the article the same week as the U.S. release of a new novel by Haruki Murakami, whose work frequently features disappearing women. Though in the original concept for his piece, Woodyard planned to use Taer’s disappearance as a persistent metaphor for the dangers of “mystery-mongering,” Woodyard’s final article mentioned Taer only briefly:

In Chicago, over 200 missing persons reports are filed every year. Any number of these disappearances are runaways or murders quickly solved. Very few missing persons are actual disappearances. In Chicago, we are surprised to have two so far this year. The pop star Molly Metropolis disappeared halfway through her concert tour. Then a girl named Caitlin Taer, who was friends with Molly Metropolis’s former personal assistant, vanished a few months later. No one outside of Chicago talks about Taer’s disappearance because no one knew her name before she disappeared, but they still talk about Molly.

There, Woodyard’s investigation into Taer’s disappearance stopped. If he had pushed harder, he might’ve been the one writing this book.

During Woodyard’s relatively brief period writing about Taer
and Molly Metropolis’s cases, he noticed that in Nix’s statement to the police, she mentioned Taer had kept journals with detailed notes on her day-to-day life for more than a year before the incident in Lake Michigan. Intrigued, Woodyard attempted to acquire Taer’s journals; he sent requests to the investigating police officers and Taer’s immediate family. Unfortunately, he didn’t receive the journals before his deadline.

A few weeks after Woodyard’s article ran, a small but heavy Fed-Ex box arrived at our door with a polite note from Taer’s mother apologizing for the delay. Inside, we found the journals, neatly stacked. Woodyard no longer had any interest in Taer’s journals but he had always been lazy about getting to the post office, so instead of sending them back immediately, he left the box in the corner of the living room, where they briefly became an unfortunate fixture of our decorating scheme. One evening, succumbing to a mild curiosity, I picked up a journal began to read.

The first entry was dated almost a year before Molly Metropolis (sometimes “Molly,” “Metro,” or “Molly Metro,” to her dearest friends and her closest fans) disappeared. The prose was neither stirring nor poised:

I’m totally disgusted with this carpet, and basically my whole life. I know I’m using the carpet as a metaphor for my whole life, but I can’t help it. It’s so gross. I can’t afford a steam cleaner. Maybe I’ll save up. Charles [Taer’s landlord] won’t do it, but he’s a fucktard. Listening to “New Vogue Riche,” and it’s cheering me up. I could use a dance partner.

Taer’s love for “New Vogue Riche,” a track from Molly Metropolis’s first album
Cause Célèbrety
(pronounced Cause Celebrity) was nothing compared to her deep affection for Molly’s debut single, “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas).” The verse that introduced Molly Metro to the world and captured Taer’s imagination is as follows:
I can’t work
during the daytime / Save my en-er-gy for night lights / The dark city is the place for more / Work, work, work the floor
.

Along with rave reviews of Molly’s songs, Taer filled her journals with actual notes, grocery lists, and snippets of half-baked ideas or half-remembered conversations, alongside more traditional diary writing. I flipped through the pages, mostly bored and barely noticing when the text changed from Taer’s usual disjointed lists to actual accounts of her day-to-day. I did pause, however, over a single phrase near the middle of the journal, written twice the size of her regular handwriting and underlined several times:

I found the fucking secret headquarters and now we’re going to find Molly.

I stopped flipping through the pages, perhaps because of the whimsical nature of the phrase “secret headquarters.” I found the first entries Taer wrote about Molly Metropolis’s disappearance, and began reading Taer’s story. It is dramatic to the point of being almost unbelievable.
^‡

Taer’s journals mix fiction, diary-style writings, drafts of articles, and those grocery lists—a hodge-podge of styles with no system of transition or separation, making the truth and the context of the writing difficult for an outside reader to ascertain. Though I acknowledge that Taer’s journals are tangled and scattered, and that the truth and context of Taer’s writing is sometimes hard to establish, there is a profound semantic difference between “difficult” and “impossible.” Having thoroughly studied Taer’s journals, I developed a knack for deciphering her idiolect and an ear for her style. When she was writing something that would eventually become a
newspaper article, she’d affect an authoritative tone, which never sounded natural. These paragraphs would then appear, in edited forms, in her published criticism.

When she was writing fiction, she would try to play with words and languages, often incorporating phrases of French and Spanish (though she couldn’t speak either language). Taer’s fiction would often peter out as the narrative fell apart. The beginning of a story would be written with dramatic energy, many pages filled with hurried and messy handwriting. Perhaps a few days later, another few paragraphs would appear, continuing the earlier narrative thread. Then the story would wane until it vanished. She had little control over the fictional worlds she created in bursts of fevered inspiration, so if a story messily disintegrated, it was a telltale sign Taer was writing fiction rather than fact. Maybe she transferred her stories from the journals to a computer, where she regained control of her narratives, but I never found them on her internal or external hard drives.
^§

Although Taer’s last diary entries were written with the same drama and timbre as some of her stories, she meticulously dated all of them. She didn’t date her fiction. In her final diary entries, Taer abbreviated people and place names, which she never did in her fiction, and she didn’t vary the sentence structure. In short, though these later entries sound fictional, Taer wrote them like she was writing facts. Woodyard has proposed that she was writing fiction in the style of nonfiction for some aesthetic purpose, but Taer never, to my knowledge, affected that style elsewhere, nor did she ever profess a preference for experimental fiction in that mode. To steal a saying from my helpful friends at the CPD, “the best indication of future action is past action.”

The events written hastily at the end of Taer’s journals and
explored in this text unfold in dramatic, even fictive ways. I take full responsibly for any gaps in logic and legibility, stemming from a lack of knowledge or understanding.
^ǁ
I hope those gaps will be few and far between.

This book is built on over one hundred interviews with everyone from key players in the unfolding drama to those whose roles were only incidental. I interviewed nearly every living person mentioned in this text, with the notable exceptions of Irene Davis, one of Molly Metropolis’s dancers and Berliner’s ex-girlfriend, as well as Alice Becker-Ho, widow of the French psychogeographer Guy Debord. For their willingness to explain their take on controversial events, I would like to thank two of Molly’s former dancers, in the text referred to as Peaches and Ali, at their request.

Equally as important is what Taer left behind for me: audio files (which I transcribed myself) of interviews with Nix and various discussions of Molly’s disappearance with Nix and Berliner—as well as the journals, which she wrote in every day during the early months of 2010.

Molly’s record label, SDFC Records, provided some limited, but helpful, information on sales figures and marketing strategy and approved brief but informative interviews with recording and publicity executives who worked with Molly. HBO Films allowed me to view uncut footage from their unfinished concert special
Molly Metropolis Presents: The Apocalypse Ball
, and for that I am grateful. I appreciate the willingness of Nix and Berliner’s families to speak with me, but I am especially indebted to the families of Molly Metropolis and Caitlin Taer, who agreed to be interviewed despite the difficulty of the subject matter. Molly’s team, who still call themselves the General Council, were instrumental in making Molly come alive for me. In the countless interviews, profiles, YouTube videos,
Tweets, and music videos that Molly left behind, I found the pop star she wanted to be.

Once Molly and Taer’s story begins to take definitive shape, it quickly fizzles into absurdity, like a map of a world with slightly distorted proportions—almost normal looking at first, but on a second viewing, a terrible deviation, a ghost of a place that never was, a land that couldn’t be, a burning and terrible world beneath everything that we know to be real.

This book isn’t about the disappearance of Molly Metropolis or the death/disappearance of Caitlin Taer. It’s the story of Taer looking for Molly Metropolis, and whether or not she was found.

*
The sentiment is semi-lifted from a piece by
New Yorker
journalist David Woodyard, who actually used the word
addendum
in his article concerning Taer. Woodyard has asked the author to clarify that point.

†
My assumption is that Cyrus K. Archer meant to expand on this question, perhaps even try to answer it, but I think it works better if I let it stand. It’s the central question of the book, after all. A question even I am trying to answer. —Catie Disabato

‡
In fact, according to Cyrus’s notes, he was urged by David Woodyard to disregard everything he read in Taer’s notebook. Woodyard believed Taer’s story about Molly was fiction, and didn’t think Cyrus should write a book about it. Woodyard’s lack of support for Cyrus’s project was one of the main factors in the disintegration of their relationship. —CD

§
Graciously, Taer’s mother allowed me to access all of Taer’s computers and data storage devices.

ǁ
I’ve tried to wrap up any pieces left hanging, and I apologize for the places forthcoming where I’ve been unable to do so. —CD

PART 1

“When I started writing songs, I didn’t have a plan,” Molly said. “I didn’t follow any songwriting rules, I made my own boundaries. I took whatever detours felt right to me. I wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to write this hit and be the world’s biggest pop star.’ I just wanted to feel the whole history of culture resonating through me.”

—“Living in Molly’s Metropolis,”
The New York Times Magazine

January 2010. A new decade had recently been rung in, with less pomp and circumstance than the previous decade, which had the Y2K scare, not to mention the resurgence of Prince’s fantastic “1999,” selling over two million new copies over the course of the year. When the world celebrated the new millennium, Molly Metropolis was only thirteen. Born to an upper-middle-class interracial family, Molly’s African American mother differentiated her from her white high school classmates. She didn’t have any siblings or friends to share the experience of growing up biracial in a majority white space. Characteristically, Molly let her dissimilarities from her peers be her strength. “Sometimes I felt like an alien,” Molly told
The New York Times
in late 2009, “but even when I felt completely lonely, I thought, ‘it’s better to be unique than to be just like everyone else.’ ”
*

A few weeks after giving that interview, as the overwhelming success of her single, “Apocalypse Dance,” and its accompanying
thirteen-minute
Alice in Wonderland–themed
music video portended her stratospherically successful year, Molly Metropolis disappeared.

Molly was gone just as we were truly getting to know her. Five hit singles from her outrun electro–infused
^†
and dance floor–centric debut
Cause Célèbrety
^‡
gave Molly pop stardom and global name recognition. Her public presentation resembled Marilyn Monroe’s opaqueness disguised as translucence, before Marilyn died and was de-mystified. Like an Old Hollywood starlet with a name and backstory invented by a studio bigwig, Molly “seemed to invite you in, but then you realized you’ve had hours of conversation with her and you don’t really know anything about her.”
^§
The only difference was that Molly made up her name herself. During a time when pop singers like Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears cultivated down-to-earth public personalities and signed away their last shreds of privacy to MTV’s reality television factory, Molly wanted her persona to be like parties at Holly Golightly’s apartment: crowded and so fun you forget you never really spoke to the hostess.
^ǁ