The Ghost Network (25 page)

The theatrical violence shook Ali. Although she knew Molly Metropolis wasn’t actually trying to hurt her, she had a sinking fear that her relationship with Molly was toxic. Molly had already started telling Ali her ideas for her next batch of songs; she called it her “album for the end of the world” and Ali, in turn, started to see Molly as a world-ender. She found herself in the precarious position of being a monster’s henchman.

Skendarian shot Molly and Ali’s violent dance on the first day of “New Vogue Riche” filming. After Skendarian wrapped shooting, a vulnerable Ali sought out Molly’s company. She suggested a late night spa treatment at the hotel, or maybe glasses of Scotch in the suite, but Molly told Ali she needed to spend her evening working alone with Berliner. With conspiratorial glee, Molly told Ali that she had a surprise for him: she had digitized the last of the L maps and The Ghost Network was complete. Ali took strong note of Molly’s wording, “working alone with Berliner,” and “a surprise for Berliner”—as if Ali’s involvement in The Ghost Network project meant nothing. For Ali, that was the last straw. She thought Molly considered her nothing more than a weight-bearing column, someone to lean on, but not someone who could contribute. She planned her defection.
^x

Berliner and Molly drank champagne and toasted the completion of The Ghost Network, calling it the first step in the discovery of the New Situationists’ agenda. Meanwhile, Ali called Peaches.
Ali aired her grievances with Metro; Peaches reiterated some of her own. Each girl allowed the other’s negative energy to intensify her own frustration. By the end of the conversation, Peaches begged Ali to quit and move back to New York. Ali had a better idea.

“Peaches and I did a lot of work without a lot of real thanks,” Ali told me in our first interview, unapologetic and still angry, just like Peaches, despite the two years that had gone by since Molly disappeared. “Metro was appreciative, sometimes, but she didn’t let us in and neither of us was satisfied with doing the work without getting to participate in what came next. I could’ve just left, but that would’ve been turning my back on all the time I’d spent collecting information. I believed, and I don’t think I was wrong, that Peaches and I earned the gold at the end of the rainbow just as much as she and Nick did. None of us knew what we were looking for, so it didn’t seem like she deserved it more than us. She didn’t.”

After the “New Vogue Riche” video shoot ended, while Berliner lingered in Los Angeles with Molly Metropolis’s crew to spend more time with Davis, Peaches secretly flew to Chicago and stole as many of the maps as she could; some eluded her, because Berliner had already moved them to his
pied-à-terre
, which Ali and Peaches didn’t know about, but most of them were stored in a small loft Molly rented for Ali and Peaches to use as a work/live space when they stayed in Chicago. (Luckily, Berliner had a backup. He had developed an intense paranoia after the New Situationists fell apart and had already made physical copies of the maps, which he stashed in a secret storage locker in Toledo, Ohio.) Ali applied for a license to carry a gun in New York.

Half a week later, while Berliner was midair, flying back to Chicago, Ali texted Peaches to tell her that she had quit the General Council. Berliner visited his apartment later that night and found it ransacked. He called Molly, who informed him she had received an ominous series of text messages from Ali and Peaches:

Metro—We thought it might be déclassé to break up with you via text, but to be perfectly honest, the thought of hearing your voice or seeing your face one more time was too much for us to bear
.

September 6, 2008, 10:26 p.m.

Goodbye, we’ve started a counterinsurgency. We’ve decided to take what you want to have. Give our regards to Nick
.

September 6, 2008, 10:27 p.m.

Watch your back
.

September 6, 2008, 10:27 p.m.

Sincerely, The Society of the Children of the Atomic Bomb.
^y

September 6, 2008, 10:30 p.m.

To fund their fledgling “counterinsurgency,” Ali called Anthony Zavos, the son of a friend of her father’s: a thirty-year-old real estate lawyer and trust fund baby. Zavos was young, rich, and short—only five foot five. He often dated dancers and high-end fashion models who towered over him; if he was destined to be short, he would rather flaunt his height than hide it. He lived in Manhattan and dressed in slim, European-cut suits and men’s leather ankle boots. Zavos also couldn’t stand to be alone, so he’d spend most nights jumping from party to party, friend to friend, squeezing in a few hours of sleep between 3 a.m. and dawn, then heading to the office of his father’s investment consulting firm where he was quickly rising through the ranks.

Zavos had money and an insatiable thirst for excitement; Ali was also one of his favorite late-night hangout buddies. She told Zavos her story about Molly Metropolis and the Urban Planning Committee, and about her plans to take what Molly wanted. Zavos thought going head-to-head with a pop star seemed fun and agreed to fund her operation. He opened a bank account with a generous line of credit.

Peaches suggested they find a spy to keep track of Molly’s movements. She had someone in mind: a twenty-two-year-old SDFC intern named Tony Casares, who could feed Ali and Peaches information about Molly’s schedule and upcoming projects. Ali approved and, while Peaches spent her evenings recruiting Casares, Ali doubled down on the spy operation. She wanted to turn someone who had more day-to-day contact with Molly, someone who could report on Metro’s temperament and obsessions. Recruiting a dancer was Ali’s best bet; she’d been close with all of them. Ali cycled through a few options before settling on Irene Davis.

Born in Michigan, Davis grew up in New York City, where she had lived in a Tribeca loft with her parents and her three brothers. Although she barely remembered Michigan, Davis preferred to think of herself as a Midwestern soul displaced on the East Coast.
During junior high school, she was a lonely introvert, friendless except for her charismatic older brother, Aaron. She started dancing in high school, when her father enrolled her in modern dance classes. She made a few dancer friends, but she hated most of her classmates at Magen David Yeshivah High School and preferred to spend her time with Aaron. After Aaron was expelled for carrying on sexually with another male student, Davis got herself expelled as well, showing up drunk to class and smoking in the girl’s bathroom. With her new public high school’s less demanding course load, Davis focused more on dancing.

Every afternoon after school, she danced for two hours: ballet on Mondays and Wednesdays, jazz on Tuesdays, hip-hop on Thursdays. On Fridays, she stayed out all night drinking with her brother and his various boyfriends, only one of whom made a lasting impression: Paulo Forlizzi, twenty-two, tall, skinny, handsome and, most importantly, a rising choreographer with a good reputation. Most of Davis’s dance teachers had felt the need to inform her that she could never be a professional dancer because her body didn’t fit the mold; Forlizzi told her to “fuck what she heard.” He spent his own time working on technique with her. He said she was never going to be a ballerina, but if she worked hard enough, she could have a good career in modern or hip-hop dance, as a performance artist or backup dancer. Even after Forlizzi and Aaron ended their romantic relationship, Forlizzi continued to coach Davis. A month before she graduated high school, he called in a favor and got her an audition with Molly Metropolis.

Davis nailed it, and her body didn’t matter. Molly was looking for someone with personality and zing in her dancing, not someone bland that looked like they could perfectly execute choreography. She was building her General Council and she wanted it to be sparkly, creepy, dynamic; she preferred Davis’s sexy scowl, her curves, and her effortless grace to the legions of tall, skinny ballerinas with perfect extension.

Davis met Ali and Peaches on the low-budget, slap-dash set of the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” music video. Molly Metro encouraged her dancers to goof around and riff with each other and Davis spent the better part of a day freestyling to the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” chorus with Ali and Peaches, though Davis barely appears in the final cut of the video. During her brief screen time, in the few instrumental-only beats before the bridge, she performs a dizzying leg hold pirouette before the video cuts to footage of Molly humping the statue.

Ali and Davis stayed friends after that video shoot, though Ali had reasons other than friendship to recruit Davis to her New Society of Children of the Atomic Bomb. Firstly, Ali had heard about Davis’s budding relationship with Berliner, so she knew turning Davis would give her access to more than one key person. Secondly, Ali knew Davis was susceptible to bribery. Davis’s family, once comfortable financially, now struggled to pay hefty medical bills following first Davis’s mother’s then her grandfather’s prolonged battles with cancer. Ali turned Davis over the course of six weeks, pushing her toward duplicity one inch at a time before she buckled and agreed to betray both Molly and her boyfriend in exchange for a hefty payoff.
^z

With The Ghost Network finished, and Ali and Peaches nipping at their heels, neither Berliner nor Molly knew which direction to head in next. Molly still adamantly believed the L maps would unlock the secrets of the New Situationists, but couldn’t figure out how. Berliner started thinking of The Ghost Network as a sort of stalling tactic, a way to feel like they had accomplished something
when they had actually discovered nothing. “The Urban Planning Committee felt like a joke during those days,” he admitted, “and Metro and I were arguing. Half of the time we met or talked on the phone, we fought and fought about the importance of The Ghost Network. I thought she was clinging to a sinking ship, to be frank. She was worried I was going to freak out and leave her, like Ali and Peaches did.”

Berliner checked in with Kraus during his weekly prison visits. She agreed with Berliner that The Ghost Network seemed like an exercise in futility. She encouraged him to keep fighting with Molly, and to explore other avenues without her when she was out of town. Molly’s rising fame troubled Kraus. She worried about the conflicts in being both a Situationist and a pop star.

In the meantime, Molly Metropolis prepared for war with the dancers. She bought the building on Armitage and Racine and replaced the New Situationists’ security door with a newer, thicker, more secure model.
^aa
She tried to get Berliner to reengage with The Ghost Network. He wouldn’t, so she spent hours alone with her giant composite map.

On Molly Metropolis’s final day in Chicago, Berliner was baffled by her mood. Over breakfast in her Peninsula Hotel suite, instead of arguing about The Ghost Network, she told Berliner tour stories of broken animatronic costumes and dancers’ lovers’ quarrels. Then she impulsively suggested visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Berliner asked to join her at the museum, expecting her to
say no. As she’d grown in popularity, her SDFC handlers had become more wary about Molly appearing in public with a “known terrorist.” Instead of refusing, Molly embraced Berliner and told him she was so happy he asked to come along.

She roused the rest of her friends and security entourage and drove her little convertible to the museum. She walked through the galleries wistfully, brushing her fingers across the molding on the doorframe as if savoring the texture. She signed autographs without a hint of exhaustion or annoyance. She wore a black veil, a neon purple shirt, and a pair of neon orange pumps by shoe designers DSquared2, with a white wooden heel carved into letters. Her left shoe said
EAT
and her right shoe said
POP
.

Berliner blended in with the rest of her small entourage; even with all the scrutiny the museum trip eventually received, no publication or gossip blog reported that Molly Metropolis had been gallivanting around with a member of the New Situationists just before her disappearance. According to Berliner, Molly Metropolis loved the silence and stillness of museums. She loved looking at a piece of art hung or placed against an unscuffed white wall. She loved installation pieces, because they felt truly ephemeral, unable to be captured or copied. She once told Berliner that she treated her naked body like the white walls of an art museum and her clothing like the art hung on those walls.

In that way, Molly lived in opposition to the Situationists, who abhorred the stiffness of museums’ “climate-controlled art” and expelled all their artists for being artists. The art world, Debord argued, participated in a capitalist system that treated art like commodities and sold them for money; art museums were big players in the Society of the Spectacle. The artists with the most recognizable or trendy “names” would fetch the highest prices regardless of the quality or emotional significance of the art they produced. All creation of art was tainted by this system, Debord insisted. Art was complacent, as were the artists.

Debord had once wanted to infiltrate the art world, but soured on the idea of changing the system because he never had the power to do so; Molly, at the apex of her career, had the power to change popular culture. Top 40 radio didn’t play singles that sounded like her synth-infused tracks before Molly released “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas).” Now, despite her disappearance (or perhaps partially because of it), Molly’s sound remains
en vogue
.
^bb
If Debord had been her judge, Molly would’ve been ejected from the Situationist International.

Berliner and Molly were both delirious from the power she wielded as a cultural force. Imagine spending years following the path of men and women you deeply admired, only to realize you were coming close to eclipsing them. Imagine lifting your heroes onto your shoulders; imagine how powerful and strong you would feel.