The Ghost Network (28 page)

The third version of The Ghost Network was digital. Molly’s programmer had designed the visual base of MollyMaps as a detailed road map of Chicago and the surrounding area, pilfered from Google Maps. Over the base, Molly added the train lines and stations by typing in the address of a station, or never-built station, and connecting the address to another address, where the next station would be, had been, or was. The digital version of The Ghost Network also contained a well-designed search function. The user could search for any train line or train station by name or location. MollyMaps also recorded every revision to the map in a searchable archive.

Taer used MollyMaps’ search function to cross-check an L map or blueprint or L expansion proposal plan with The Ghost Network, but her favorite way to interact with The Ghost Network was to zoom in on the first station of a train line and examine the details of the area around each train station. Because MollyMaps’ core map had been stolen from Google, Taer could see the restaurants or parks or office buildings that had been built on land once considered a place for transport. When Taer picked a train line to examine in such detail, she rarely did so for a concrete reason. She chose her train lines impressionistically, because a color caught her eye or a particular curve in the line seemed interesting to trace. She moved between lines based on feeling; she was conducting her own virtual
dérive
through the fake train city that Molly had built.

While Taer and Berliner spent their days researching, Nix read about the Situationists, trying to come up with theories about what the New Situationists might’ve been hiding. She searched for
various Situationist keywords in MollyMaps. She compared a collage called “The Naked City”—which Debord and Constant made using map fragments—to the painting of The Ghost Network on the wall, looking for repeated patterns.

At 5:30 p.m., Berliner insisted the working day was over. He worried the three of them would go insane if he didn’t impose some kind of forced down time. They ate dinner together every night. They frequented the nearby Italian and Mexican restaurants or picked up Chinese or Thai carryout. When they ate Chinese, they drank beer. At the Italian restaurant, they split two bottles of wine between the three of them, always red. They all ordered spicy dishes or passed a bottle of hot sauce around the table.

At dinner, they caught up on each other’s personal histories. Berliner told them about his exorcism; Taer tried to explain the way her drive to be a successful writer had shaped all of her emotional experiences since she was sixteen. Nix talked about being best friends in high school with another latent lesbian, watching
Mulholland Drive
and fast-forwarding through the sex scenes.

A few nights a week, Taer worked at Rainbo. On those nights, Berliner walked Nix back to the Urban Planning Committee’s headquarters and stayed with her until Taer returned. They watched movies:
Videodrome
, the Wachowskis’ lesbian heist movie
Bound
, and Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire movie
Near Dark
. They drank more. Sometimes, Berliner told her stories about Kraus. Nix wanted to hear everything about the strict regulations Berliner had to follow when he visited Kraus at the Dwight Correctional Center.

When Taer didn’t have to work, Berliner sometimes walked home alone, Taser in his pocket just in case. He was living in his Molly-built
pied-à-terre
at the time, occasionally entertaining his archive girlfriend, Johnson. Sometimes Berliner and Taer spent a few hours hanging out alone in a nearby beer bar, Local Option, Nix at home in the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, drinking and reading alone. Perched at the bar in front of a row of taps,
sipping on tulip glasses full of highly alcoholic craft beers, Taer and Berliner debated the utility of psychogeography and
détournement
.

During our interviews, Berliner likened his friendships with Taer and Nix to an adolescent summer camp friendship. “Each hour in summer camp is the social equivalent of, basically, a week,” Berliner explained to me. “Romantic relationships that are eight hours old are practically marriages. Intense bonds form, clique loyalties are basically immobile once they coalesce. Then they’re over, just as fast.”

Berliner also told Taer his stories about Kraus, but Taer didn’t ask for more detail the way Nix did, preferring to debate at length whether Constant’s New Babylon could ever be built, and if it was built, if it could thrive. Berliner and Taer agreed it could somehow be built, but Berliner thought New Babylon would implode and Taer thought it could work. When Berliner asked Taer about her own relationship, she never said much, though more than once Taer told Berliner she was in love with Nix. Except for Taer’s one-on-one drinking sessions with Berliner and her nights at Rainbo, the young women spent all their time together, comfortable now in extreme geographical and physical closeness. They no longer knew what it was like to spend more than a few hours apart.

“We were ‘nesting,’ other dykes would call it,” Nix later told me. “It was shockingly wonderful to have this constant companion. Neither one of us had ever had a girlfriend like this before, someone we basically wanted to fuse with. To attach ourselves to so completely. Everything was very surreal, and we had this idea that maybe when things got ‘back to normal’ we would get torn away from each other. Which seemed overdramatic at the time but was, of course, what happened. So we were smart. We were smart to think our whole world was going to end.”

Some nights, they watched old episodes of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
on Berliner’s Netflix account. Some nights, they played
elaborate games of tag.
^§
Some nights, when the wine had soaked her brain and Nix blurred in front of her tired eyes, Taer almost forgot about the absent pop star and their desperate search for what had happened. Some nights Taer and Nix did nothing but talk for hours. Some nights they lay in bed, not talking to each other, their heads jammed together on the same pillow.

While they worked during the day, Nix, Berliner, and Taer listened to music. Taer put on her favorite bad-mood albums: Elliott Smith’s
Either/Or
and a single by The Zombies, “Girl Help Me.” Nix and Berliner liked these albums as well. They played them dozens of times while Nix read biographies of Debord, Taer clicked her way through the digital copy of The Ghost Network, and Berliner re-read another L map. They sang along with “Girl Help Me,” and the
Either/Or
track “Between the Bars” in unison.

Perhaps because of the mood these albums created, Taer developed a vague but constant sense of ill ease. She started working at night, once Berliner had left and Nix had fallen asleep. She obsessively re-read portions of Molly’s notebook, as if trying to crack a code, or uncover a heretofore hidden reference to The Ghost Network or the New Situationists. Occasionally, Molly wrote about the specific maps incorporated into The Ghost Network, but those passages were observations, not conclusions, and littered with her thoughts and emotional responses to the information she was gathering—interesting on first read, but useless to her once she’d read the passages dozens of times. Molly also interrupted her discussions of the maps to make oblique references to her “Eye of Horus,” or “Third Eye,” or “Pyramid Eye,” which had something to do with the reasons she sometimes held one hand over one eye during publicity photo shoots. Taer couldn’t find any connection between
these disparate parts of Molly’s notes, nor could she find a connection between The Ghost Network and Molly’s departure. She started to lose hope.

But on a warm April evening, almost seven weeks after Nix and Taer had found Berliner in the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, Taer found something.

*
The Situationist City
, 77.

†
To explore further, psychogeography is the Situationists’ attempt to marry subjective and objective experiences of the city, the myriad ways that people interact with the cities they live in. From
The Situationist City
: “On one hand, [psychogeography] recognized that the self can’t be divorced from the urban environment, on the other hand, it had to pertain to more than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be useful in the collective rethinking of the city.”

‡
Situationist International Anthology
, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007).

§
Which doubled as foreplay. —CD

On April 16, 2010, Taer was drinking red wine alone in Molly Metropolis’s two-story office, trying to focus on a proposed addition to the Purple Line circa 1950, meant to more fully accommodate the expanding western suburbs. (The proposal wasn’t considered cost-efficient and the Transit Committee rejected it.) Taer couldn’t concentrate; she found herself standing in front of Molly’s full-length mirror, experimenting with drugstore eye shadow. With a glass of red wine in her left hand and a makeup brush in her right, she listened to
Cause Célèbrety
and watched a “smoky-eye tutorial” on YouTube. She then wrote a Tumblr post, complete with selfies, describing her lack of proficiency with eyeliner and comparing the helpfulness of a variety of tutorials.

Half an hour later, her eyes were very smoky and she was significantly more drunk. As she later described to Berliner and Nix, Taer stumbled back to Molly’s desk and, humming along to “Famous Case,” Taer opened the MollyMaps program. She clicked around aimlessly for a while, not researching so much as stumbling through the program, drunkenly ambling from corner to corner of
the crowded virtual map.
*
She turned on the voice recorder on her iPhone and rambled for a bit about wanting to meet Molly, how happy she was to be with Nix, who her Carey Mulligan–inspired character Jenny had been, what she had wanted in life, and what, exactly, Molly meant when she was going on about the “Pyramid Eye.”

“There is a website that says pop stars are Illuminati puppets,” Taer said, “which is of course ridiculous until you start thinking about how I’m sitting alone in a secret headquarters basement place, which is so weird, and maybe she was just in the Illuminati and all the rest is bullshit to trap me and trap Jenny in a triangle forever, just walking around in the same terrible triangle her whole life. How sad is that? We’re all trapped all the time aren’t we, except Molly who got out of here. But I bet even Molly had a triangle! I wish I could—”

Taer stopped talking and for nearly ten minutes, her phone’s voice recorder only picked up some faint clicks from the mouse on her computer.

Then she spoke again, one final rejoinder: “Oh holy fuck.”

Maps have never been accurate. The best they can achieve is a high navigability. In the Exploratory Age, during the first big brouhaha over mapmaking, early cartographers with imperfect knowledge of foreign geographies used flawed equipment to draw maps with as many errors as accuracies. Cultural biases, such as those displayed in the Edge of the World maps, created absolutely abysmal conditions for rigorous accuracy. While Christopher Columbus attempted to circumnavigate the globe in search of gold and spice, most of the “rude class” still believed sea monsters filled the boundary waters between the safe continents and the black void of the unknown.

Modern day maps are still full of inaccuracies. They do a terrible job documenting borders, and are a hopeless match for the rural dirt roads that run between corn and sod farms in Ohio. Lazy mapmakers who use blueprints provided by city planners, rather than conducting their own cartographic surveys, accidentally include “paper streets” on their maps: streets that city planners or subdivision developers include on their blueprints but, for a variety of reasons, never get built.

Beyond even these unintentional discrepancies, some maps have inaccuracies deliberately added, those maps offered up as consumer products like London’s ubiquitous street guide,
A–Zed
. They are called “trap streets,” and they are purposefully fictitious; map publishing companies add them to protect their copyright. If another company sells a map that includes their false trap street, the first company knows their copyright has been violated and can sue. Trap streets are used as a weapon in corporate warfare, but in certain circumstances, trap streets can be used to fight a different kind of battle. Molly Metropolis certainly understood the importance of trap streets, and as she constructed her map of real train lines and paper ones, she included traps of her own.

Molly’s trap street was a train line that didn’t exist on any of the historic maps. By the time Taer was looking through The Ghost Network, it had been reduced to one errant, and tiny, dot. On the digital version of The Ghost Network, each train line was marked in a different color, and every dot that represented a station on the line was the same color as the line. Clicking drunkenly through The Ghost Network, in her digital
dérive
, Taer got lucky and stumbled upon a dot not connected to any train line.