The Ghost Network (34 page)

When he was a teenager, his parents moved to Hoboken, and he began spending his weekends in New York City, listening to music
and sneaking into gay clubs. He read everything he was supposed to read: Isherwood, Rimbaud, and Burroughs. He went to Oberlin, where all the NYC hippies and queers went to smoke pot in the snow, out from under the thumb of the East Coast Ivys with their secret clubs and homosocial boozing. He returned to Oberlin to teach after getting his PhD at Columbia University. I don’t know why he decided to go back to the cold Midwest.

Cyrus dated David Woodyard, formerly of
The New Yorker
magazine, off and on for nearly twenty-five years; their relationship began when they both attended Columbia University. Cyrus began his first year as Woodyard finished his dissertation. The grad school part of their romance was public and dramatic, with a lot of screaming breakups in front of colleagues, followed by sudden reunions. It might’ve ruined Cyrus’s academic reputation. They evened out as they hit their thirties and lived together for a decade and a half before Cyrus’s book broke them up.

Their spectacular, final break up, and Woodyard’s purchase of an equally spectacular Chelsea townhouse to serve as his new bachelor pad, provided the
Gawker
bitches with excellent gossip fodder for several months. At the time, I reviled the loose tongues of Woodyard’s assistants and underlings, but I have to admit that I found their lack of discretion helpful while putting together Cyrus’s book.

Cyrus and Woodyard didn’t have to trifle with anything as tiresome as divorce papers and the legal splitting of shared assets, though I did hear that many of their final arguments were over custody of Squiggy, their dog, and that Woodyard won. Squiggy wasn’t equipped to handle Ohio’s winters.

Their “divorce” occurred during the spring of 2011, while I was finishing my senior honors project in Creative Writing (a series of personal essays that were supposed be the first half of a memoir about my adolescence in suburban Illinois, but which I have put in the proverbial drawer). After three years nurturing my “budding talent”—he called my writing promising and my personal voice nearly
developed (“nearly there” is a state I will remain in eternally)—Cyrus agreed to be my honors advisor. Although his own work and the details of his personal life distracted him, he managed to eke out of me the best work I could manage at that age. I graduated with honors in May, though not with high honors, which I would’ve preferred.

I spent the next two years living in Chicago, writing freelance articles for various not-so-prestigious websites without being paid. I would’ve been jealous of Taer’s career, had I known about her at the time, and despite her own frustration with her writing life. I lived in a carpeted, occasionally mold-infested apartment, probably not unlike Taer’s walk-up. My sister, whose name you might’ve heard because she is the only American to be accepted at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Russia in fifty years, sent me videos of her and her schoolmates performing the Small Swans’
pas de quatre
from Swan Lake—who do you think my parents talk about when they are at dinner with their friends? I posted my sister’s videos on Tumblr. I remained frustratingly anonymous.

Sometime in early August 2013, Cyrus stopped answering my e-mails. I thought he was finally tired of my depressing life. Then I found out that he had disappeared. On August 9, his sister, Francesca, filed a missing persons report with the police. On August 12, the Chicago Police Department found Archer’s car in an abandoned train yard near Pullman, Illinois. The car had been completely incinerated; there was a body inside, burned so severely that they couldn’t even take dental imprints. Archer was declared dead. His meager assets, and all of his books, went to his sister. He bequeathed all of his research for this book—his manuscript, Taer’s recordings, her journal, transcripts from all his interviews including the ones with Berliner and Nix—to me.

I’m absolutely certain of the reasons why Cyrus chose me to complete his book. I had stayed in contact with him after I left
school, while his colleagues and peers shunned him; I liked Molly Metropolis, a weird cyborgian fantasy pop star, and talked about her to Cyrus. Also, I went to the same high school as Regina Nix and Caitlin Taer. They were older than me, but I saw them around. Although Taer had attended Oberlin, and had taken Creative Writing classes, she had never studied with Cyrus and he didn’t remember her. I did, and he wanted to borrow that memory.

So, to continue Cyrus’s story, here is the first revelation:

The last chapter of this book (before this epilogue) is a pack of lies. Nix and Berliner lied to Cyrus and he wrote the lies down. What I’m saying is, his intentions were good, and he failed. He finished his draft of this book, then he sat down on the couch, watched a lot of reruns of
Law and Order
, took a sabbatical from Oberlin College, and, for some reason, decided he must’ve been lied to. He began searching for the truth, for himself.

When Nicolas Berliner and Regina Nix agreed to meet with Archer, they insisted on a number of conditions. If Cyrus refused to honor them, they refused to speak to him. Cyrus agreed to their conditions.

Cyrus wasn’t allowed to ask any questions about the identity of the other New Situationists. The most important stipulation for the interview was, as Cyrus jokingly called it, the Provision Against Real Place Names. Before meeting with Cyrus, Berliner and Nix agreed on a litany of made-up street names to stand in for the real locations of, for example, the underground headquarters of the New Situationists/Urban Planning Committee and the entrance to the subway station where they caught David Wilson’s train. Cyrus agreed never to investigate or print the actual location names. He actually signed a few legal documents assuring he never would, non-disclosure agreements. Berliner knew that anyone who wanted
to look could find the location of the Urban Planning Committee, but there is nothing left there now. You can look if you want, but you will be disappointed.

I’m not sure how long Cyrus believed Berliner and Nix were telling him the truth about the train ride. I don’t know when he realized that they were lying to him—that the train wasn’t a dead end. But when he did realize, he broke his word and searched for the real location of the Urban Planning Committee underground headquarters. It wasn’t difficult for him to find, he just looked through the fire department’s publicly available incident records for the month during which the Urban Planning Committee burned. From Armitage and Racine, Cryus traced his way to the Old Town Aquarium, and from there he descended into the train station. Once something hidden has been found, it’s much harder to re-hide.

He left me his discoveries; I lightly edited Cyrus’s original manuscript to reflect the actual locations of all the events of this book. I made a trip to the train station hidden below the Old Town Aquarium (that trip is chronicled below), and following my visit to the train, all of the infrastructure has since been destroyed or concealed completely. With me, the chain was broken.

To visit the train, I didn’t have to study any maps or even make a long commute to find the hidden train station. Archer had left me instructions and I followed them: David Wilson would be waiting for me at 3 p.m. on Thursday, every Thursday for a year, until I showed up. I live within walking distance of the Old Town Aquarium.

On Thursday, May 16, 2014, 2:34 p.m., I descended the southwest staircase of the Old Town Aquarium and made my way to the train station platform below. Near the breaker box where I turned on the light, someone had written on the wallpaper in chalk: “If we don’t
die here will we carry on further?”
*
How the phrase showed up on the wall of the New Situationists’ train station, I don’t know. Maybe Nix and Berliner saw it but didn’t mention it to Archer. Maybe Archer left it there for me.

The wall of the train platform was made of faded blue tiles. Little chunks of white tile, among the blue, neatly and largely spelled the French words
PLAQUES TOURNANTES UN
.
Plaques tournantes
is another old Situationist term, associated with the
dérive
: while wandering, the Situationists would identify areas they believed were linked together through some kind of shared ambiance, subdivisions of the city that didn’t follow the same neighborhood boundaries the city government set. They called the areas
unities of ambiance
instead of neighborhoods. Some of the
unities
served as “stations” during the drift, or “junctions in the psychogeographic flow of Paris.” They called the junctions or stations
plaques tournantes
, a pun in French with so many subtleties of meaning and so many connections to cultural conditions of the time that it is difficult to satisfactorily translate the phrase into English. In a certain sense, a
plaque tournantes
is a railway turnstile; the phrase can also refer to the center of something or a place of exchange.

With a few minutes to spare before the train was supposed to arrive, I walked the length of the train station a few times, fidgeting, taking pictures with my phone, and listening to the DJ Shadow track “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt,” from the album
Endtroducing..…
I felt anxious. I switched from “Building Steam” to “Apocalypse Dance,” and I felt better.

I peered into the dark tunnels on either side of the station until I saw the bright light that meant the train was approaching. I sat down on the bench to give the impression I had been waiting patiently the whole time. When the train stopped, I expected David
Wilson to be alone, but he wasn’t. The woman beside him has been called Miranda Young, has taken the name Antoinette Monson, and was the world’s biggest pop star. Molly Metropolis.

She was dressed simply, as is her
modus operandi
now. She wore a pair of high-wasted beige pants, a white T-shirt with a very low V down to her belly button, showing off a triangle of skin, and a pair of black boots with a huge wedge heel, which she said she built herself. Her fingernails were bare and she wasn’t wearing much makeup. She wore sunglasses with small, round, very dark lenses, but took them off when we talked. She seemed pleased to see me. She made me feel nervous.

She introduced me to Wilson and after a word or two of greeting (he called her “Molls”), he disappeared into the control room to get the thing chugging. I didn’t see him again. Molly gave me a quick tour of the train. She explained that they had made some changes to the original design. She personally had ripped the seats out of the front car to make room for a table. The second car retained its traditional seats—slightly more legroom than L trains have today. She apologized for the noise, the rattle of the train. I drank water, she drank red wine, and we both ate from a bag of walnuts.

“Thanks for the water,” I said. “I’m a little starstruck.”

It was hard to talk to Molly. Her voice was familiar, her face was familiar, but it felt like if I had reached out to grab her, my hand would pass right through her body like a ghost on a TV show. In other words, Molly was unreal. She spoke to me like she was speaking to Barbara Walters, which was fitting. Molly has so many interviews left ungiven.

“I’m so glad to have you here,” she said. “But we have limited time. Unless you’re interested in staying on the train.”

“I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but that seems like a dangerous choice. After all, Caitlin stayed, didn’t she?”

“Oh my goodness, of course you’re worried! But don’t
be worried. Cait is alive. She is perfectly alive and perfectly fine. Adjusting. Some people have a harder time adjusting, but she didn’t, she’s doing so well. Were you two close?”

After this little speech, I had more new questions than answers. Thankful Taer was still alive, I checked to make sure my voice recorder (which Molly agreed to me using) was working.

“I’m sorry,” I said, referring to the interruption to check the recorder. “Can we go back? Cait’s alive and ‘adjusting’? What are you talking about?”

“You knew Cyrus better than Caitlin, didn’t you, and you are probably worried about him. I don’t mean to be a tease!”

“Yes. And he’s alive, too, you’re saying?”

“Yes, alive and fine,” she over-exaggerated the word
fine
, like she was singing it in a musical.

I took a moment to assimilate this information. I cried, and she reached across the table, and held my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“No!” she said. “Cry!”

She kept holding my hand, in her surprisingly strong grip with surprisingly soft fingers, until I stopped crying. In writing down this moment, I’m reminded of Taer and Nix’s first post-college encounter, when Nix cried. Did Molly do this intentionally, so my rendering of the event would echo an earlier incident she knew was in the book? I wish I’d heard the echo at the time.

“This doesn’t make any sense. The burned-up body, Archer’s car? Where did that come from?” I asked.

“Dead when it was put in there,” Molly said.

“How did—”

“We didn’t kill someone. There are a lot of dead bodies around. In hospitals, for one thing. And while it wasn’t strictly ethical what we did to get the body, we didn’t steal the corpse of some grieving family’s grandfather. If you look hard enough, not in the papers, you might find reports of a stolen cadaver from a medical morgue
in Chicago. By ‘unethical,’ I mean we used the body for art, not science.”

“Was everything in Cyrus’s book a lie?” I asked.

“No. The end of the book was a lie because Gina and my Nick lied to him. It says in the book, though, that Gina cried at one point during their interviews. She did cry.”

I think she said this because she could tell I was ashamed I had cried.

“I heard the tapes,” I said. “I heard her cry. I don’t think Cyrus described her crying well, but it’s hard to do that.”

“How would you describe it?”

“She was really crying, like the kind of crying when you end up all disgusting and snotty.”

“Poor Gina. She didn’t take Cait leaving well.”