The Ghost Network (31 page)

I saw Nix happy once during our interviews, while she was describing her escape.

“Can you tell me what happened that afternoon?” I asked.

Nix giggled. “I’m such a bad ass.”

Ali and Peaches left Nix alone during her second day of captivity at the Michiana house. She listened through the wall to the change of guards and peeked through the door when they opened it to give her food and clean clothes. She determined that she had a rotating set of guards, only one at any given time, armed with a small pistol that they passed to each other when their shift ended, like relay runners passing a baton. She saw one reading when Casares opened the door to give her lunch. She heard one take a phone call from his mother in the middle of the afternoon.

The next day, recalling how effective Taer had been with the dictionary during the break-in, Nix armed herself with the heavy porcelain lid from the back of the toilet. She waited until Casares brought her lunch, a little after noon. When he opened the door, she swung the toilet lid at his face, knocking him out cold and breaking his jaw and three of his teeth. The force of the blow reverberated through the toilet lid back into Nix’s arms, which went slightly numb with shock. Her hurt fingers throbbed. She let go of the lid with her left hand, but didn’t drop her weapon.

The guard, a nineteen-year-old girl named Andrea Stone, fumbled with the safety on the gun. Nix ran out of the bathroom and swung the lid at Stone as well, hitting her on the side of the head, though using only one arm, she couldn’t hit Stone with full force—lucky for her. Nix might’ve caused brain damage if she had hit Stone as hard as she could. Stone fell to the ground, bleeding and stunned. Nix dropped the toilet lid, grabbed the gun, and ran to the stairs, making a beeline for the front door. Peaches was waiting for her in the foyer.

Peaches stood in front of the door, her arms spread out like a human shield. From the top of the staircase, Nix pointed the gun at
Peaches and told her to move. When Peaches refused, Nix aimed for the stomach and fired; she missed, but hit Peaches in the shoulder. The bullet went all the way through her muscle and the wood door, finally stopping somewhere in the asphalt street. Peaches collapsed, while the young members of the New Society screamed and crowded around her, blocking the front door. Nix pointed her gun at everyone to keep them away and ran to the back of the house, through the kitchen, looking for another door. She burst out of the house.

Nix ran. She didn’t have shoes or a coat but she ran anyway, as far and as fast as she could, into the maze of streets surrounding the New Society’s Michiana house. She threw the gun into a bush. It took her an hour to find her way out of the lakeside area, but none of the New Society members pursued her. She was lucky she was kidnapped in April; if there had been snow on the ground, her feet would have frozen before she could find her way to the main road.

Nix went into the first business she saw, a diner, and told the waitress she had escaped from an abusive boyfriend and needed to call her sister in Chicago. She couldn’t remember Taer’s cell phone number off the top of her head and had to look it up in her e-mail account using the waitress’s iPhone.

Half an hour later, Berliner and Taer arrived at the Michiana diner, where Nix was drinking coffee, eating pie, and listening to the waitress’s own harrowing tales of bad men. Taer almost couldn’t look at Nix, with the ominous bandages on her chin and around her fingers, the fresh bruises on her elbows from banging into the side of the tub while she slept, the bruises forming on the inside of her fingers where she’d gripped the toilet lid.
^‡
As the Civil War histo
rian Fredrick Doyle wrote, “Young soldiers don’t truly believe in the cruelty of war until they see their first casualty.”
^§
In a burst of public emotion, Taer sobbed. She cried so deeply she choked, while Nix hugged her.

Taer pulled herself together. She awkwardly pulled off her puffy coat and handed it to Nix. Nix was moved by both the crying and the gesture. She took the coat from Taer. Even though it didn’t fit her properly, Nix put it on.

Berliner drove Nix to the nearest hospital, a small emergency-care facility called Franciscan ExpressCare. An attending physician redid Casares’s sutures and prescribed more Vicodin. On the long drive back to Chicago, Taer sat with Nix in the backseat. She put Nix’s head in her lap and ran her fingers through her hair, lightly massaging her scalp and gently working out all the tangles and knots. They didn’t speak. Nix wouldn’t discuss her own experience of the kidnapping while she was still fleeing from it.

Back at the New Situationist headquarters, Taer ran Nix a bath. She helped her undress, then sat next to the tub with her fingertips in the water while Nix soaked and cried a little. After the bath water went cold, they went to bed together and slept.

Nix refused to get out of bed the next day. She curled up in a ball, under a heavy comforter. Though she wouldn’t let Taer get into the cocoon with her, Taer could see she was shuddering from the way the comforter shook. Nix refused to consume anything except water and more Vicodin for her aching fingers. Taking Vicodin on an empty stomach made her nauseated. Berliner visited the bedroom of the apartment Taer and Nix had claimed and spoke softly to Nix about the strength of the steel door.

“But they know where we are,” Nix said.

Berliner assured her that Ali, Peaches, and their New Society couldn’t get through the door. Nix didn’t speak to him again that day.

Taer stayed with Nix all morning and afternoon, writing in her journal, reading about the Situationists, and begging Nix to eat the Kraft Easy Mac she had found in Berliner’s room.

Nix didn’t move or respond until early evening; she was suddenly starving. Taer made her the microwavable macaroni and cheese, which tasted like plastic. Nix threw it all up, perhaps because of the Vicodin, or anxiety, or her body rejecting the chemical mess that flavored the Easy Mac. Taer held her hair as she vomited, then wrapped her arms around Nix’s shoulders while she sat on the bathroom floor, shaking.

Meanwhile, Berliner took the rental car with Michigan plates out for one last spin. He stopped at a Walgreen’s and cobbled together a gift basket of Virginia Slims, M&Ms, and seven different shades of red nail polish. Then he drove to the Dwight Correctional Center. On the way, he received a call from Davis’s father, informing him of her suicide. By the time Berliner reached the wide plastic table where he met Kraus during visitation hours, he was already shaking and crying. He buried his head in the crook of one arm and sobbed into the table, with his other arm stretched toward Kraus. The guards permitted her to hold his hand, so she comforted him that way.

In the prison’s visiting room, outfitted with various cameras and recording devices, Kraus and Berliner couldn’t speak freely about Nix’s kidnapping. They could talk for hours about maps and sex apartments and pop stars, but use phrases like “almost cut off her fingers,” and the prison guards would start to take notice. Berliner spoke as freely as he could; he could talk openly about Davis’s death at least, which he did as Kraus stroked the back of his hand.

Berliner was afraid he wouldn’t be able to fight back, he was
afraid he wouldn’t find what Molly Metropolis had found, and he was afraid that he, Nix, and Taer wouldn’t be able to protect themselves from the New Society. Kraus wouldn’t let him be afraid. She held his hand and whispered ferociously to him until Berliner no longer had the urge to cry.

Taer didn’t tell Berliner and Nix about the secret train for another day and a half. She waited until she decided Nix was recovered enough—still nervous and jumpy, but able to leave the Urban Planning Committee if she carried the gun with her. Preparing for a dramatic scene, Taer brought Berliner and Nix takeout from their favorite Italian restaurant, turned on her iPhone voice recorder to continue to track the story, and attempted to combine apology and explanation while their mouths were full.

Nix and Berliner were both livid that Taer hadn’t told them sooner. Most people have a particular arguing style, developed through years of familial conflict or friend-group infighting. Taer, Nix, and Berliner all argued differently. Berliner learned from his mother to be quiet during a fight; Dana Berliner didn’t appreciate raised voices. Nix, a veteran of popular girl hierarchies, hated conflict; she made jokes to amuse herself and defuse the tension. Taer, who had three stubborn brothers, immediately became defensive.

“Why didn’t you tell me about it this morning?” Berliner asked.

“I’m not telling you anything until you calm down and listen to me.”

“I’m perfectly calm.”

“Yeah, sure,” Nix said.

“I don’t have to tell you every little thing I do,” Taer said.

“I thought we were working on this together,” Berliner said.

“I think I’ve sacrificed enough to warrant full disclosure at this point,” Nix said.

“You could’ve trusted us, maybe,” Berliner said.

“How did I know you wouldn’t have figured something out from what I found, and not told me about it? How do I know I can trust you when it really comes down to it?” Taer said to Berliner.

“Well, two nights ago, you said to me, ‘I’ve been living in your lair for two months now, and you’ve been the best friend to Nix and me. I totally trust you.’ So there’s that.”

“I meant I trusted you not to make a move on me in the night or something.”

“That place really is like a lair,” Nix said.

“Stop fucking with me,” Berliner said. “This is exactly what Metro did. Leaving cryptic messages and just fucking off.”

“I’m not doing that,” Taer said.

“It feels like you’re doing the exact same thing.”

“I wanted to find what she found. You met her, you knew her.”

“I could’ve hid this whole thing from you, but I didn’t want to do it by myself,” Berliner said. “Is that what you want?”

“No,” Taer said.

“To go at it alone?”

“No, I said,” Taer said. “Okay, okay? Let me tell you! I found some stations on the map, these little pink dots, they were just floating there, all by themselves—”

“This is exactly why you should’ve told me right away,” Berliner interrupted, “We didn’t get a chance to check everything, they might be errors—”

“Well, they’re not errors, and this is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you right away, because you’re not listening—” Taer said.

“I’m listening!”

“No, you are interrupting me when I’m trying to tell you what happened.”

“Guys,” Nix said, firmly.

“Okay, so, I think that when Molly wrote in her notebook about the Pyramid Eye, or the Third Eye, or even all that stuff with
Chombart de Lauwe mapping that triangle for that girl, do you remember that?” Taer asked.

“Yeah,” Berliner said.

“When she was writing that, I think she was trying to make us think about triangles, in relation to The Ghost Network. I think she hid a triangle on there somehow, and I think I found two points on the triangle. She marked them as stations on the digital map. One of the marks is on this address, the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, so I think Molly thought of this as a metaphorical station—unless there is a train station under here, I don’t know, I don’t think so, though. Anyway, I found a second dot in the same color, and I went there.”

Taer then told Berliner and Nix the story of finding the station and running from the approaching train. As Nix and Taer discussed the train, Berliner opened MollyMaps, pursuing an idea that had been nagging at him since Taer mentioned she had found some station dots unconnected to any train lines. Berliner checked the revision history of the digital version of The Ghost Network and saw that on January 9, sometime after Molly had left the Museum of Contemporary Art, she had added a map to The Ghost Network and then deleted it. Berliner restored the deleted map. It appeared on The Ghost Network as a narrow, pale pink triangle. One apex landed at the Urban Planning Committee headquarters; the second apex was the Chicago Executive Airport, where Taer had run from the mysterious train; the third apex was at a location neither Berliner nor Taer recognized, but it intersected with a station on a train line that had never been approved by the city.

The non-approved train line would’ve been 154.8 miles long, stretching from the most affluent southern suburbs of Milwaukee all the way down to the country clubs in Chicago’s southern suburban region. The line would’ve sideswept the overcrowded Loop lines meant for businessmen and other commuters. Most of the line’s
stations would’ve hugged the waters of Lake Michigan. Once it left the water, it veered into the Theater District.

The Chicago Transit Authority proposed the train line in 1957, in a project co-sponsored by the State Tourism Board. The CTA and Tourism Board designed the line not only to increase tourism to the city’s beaches but also to attract the “right kind” of tourists by stopping only in the wealthiest suburbs.
^ǁ
A
Chicago Tribune
reporter, writing about the tourism proposal in its entirety, dubbed the train line “The Party Line,” both referring to the leisure-based purpose of the line and mocking the city’s newly elected mayor, Richard J. Daley for ‘toeing the party line’ of his political party.
^a
The Party Line was supposed to be a cost-efficient line because it reused some bomb shelter/underground stations that had gone out of service in the 1940s, but when Daley and the CTA discovered that each of those underground stations would need about a million dollars in renovations before they would be up to code, the Party Line died. The plans for the line were filed with the rest of the city’s transit records. Decades later they were mined from the Public Archives by Peaches. Molly Metropolis added the Party Line to The Ghost Network on August 3, 2009.

Berliner relayed the history of the Party Line to Nix and Taer. They decided to go to the third point in Molly’s triangle the next day, in the early afternoon. They didn’t even have to take the L;
the Party Line station was within walking distance of the New Situationist headquarters on North Wells Street, halfway between West North Avenue and West Schiller Street, at the site of the Old Town Aquarium, a boutique tropical fish store. The land had been privately owned by a real estate company called Rind-Grandin Global since the mid-1960s. Jim and Ian Schakowsky, brothers and world-class deep-sea divers, had first rented the property in 1972 and had been running Old Town Aquarium for nearly four decades. Although they didn’t advertise this service, the Schakowsky brothers’ elite clients could hire them to procure any aquatic life-form “physically smaller than Jim,” the taller of the two. A regular customer, who spoke to me on the promise of anonymity, has a secret collection of endangered sea life acquired for him by the Schakowskys.