The Ghost Network (7 page)

The Pullmans didn’t own a yacht but certainly had the means to buy, rent, or borrow one quickly. In 1999, only three of all the yachts registered in Canada, the United States, and Nova Scotia were called
Merrimac
. Two of them are still in use today. A Chicago resident named Bruce Adler, a wealthy bachelor in his fifties, owned the third
Merrimac
. Adler registered the
Merrimac
with the Chicago Yacht Association and reported that he docked the yacht at the Inner Jackson Harbor until 2001, when he broke the ship down to scrap wood.
However, the Inner Jackson Harbor’s longtime Harbor manager, Nancy Gould, remembers that that sailboat, not a yacht, was always tied to Adler’s dock.

Did the Pullman family borrow Adler’s yacht, sail it to Sable with the intent of stealing a horse, and accidentally crash on the shore of the island? If so, what would Alder have to gain by concealing this fact? And why would a twenty-three-year-old pop star have a screen-printed version of a map of the island on her wall? Where would a map like that even come from?

I can only answer the final question. Molly Metropolis commissioned the screen print on her wall, but it was copied almost exactly from a map called “Sable Island: Known Wrecks Since 1583,” drawn by John Fauller and now part of the collection at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History.

For whatever reason, Molly must’ve considered her screen print version of that map one of her most important wall hangings. Besides the place of prominence she gave it above her bed, she also used it as a hiding place. When Taer moved the print, a notebook, which had been wedged between the wooden box frame and the wall, fell onto the bed. Nix recognized it immediately. It was Molly Metropolis’s personal diary.

*
This recording is a harbinger of a fixation Taer developed with her recording device. She zealously recorded most of her conversations about Molly, spurred on early in her investigation by something Molly wrote in her own notebook: “Never work, always document!”—the phrase itself was a cheeky bastardization of a Situationist assertion “Never work!” Molly strove to make the act of living her life its own art. The documentation of her actions was compulsory, so art could be made without work.

†
“Brian Slade” refers to Todd Haynes’s 1999 film
Velvet Goldmine
, about a David Bowie pastiche character who faked his own death onstage.

‡
Molly Metropolis wasn’t the only celebrity who stayed there. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie famously favored the Peninsula whenever they stayed in Chicago with their brood.

§
This is a theory that her family and friends contested to the police as strongly as Nix contested it to Taer. In September 2009, on an unreleased date, Molly Metropolis’s mother, Melissa Young, underwent open heart surgery. Molly stayed with her family at the hospital for a week, and was attentive all through the tour. Molly’s family believed that she never would’ve disappeared purposefully while her mother was still recovering.

ǁ
The Transit Subcommittee chose plans designed by Savoy’s rival, Ronald Mansfield, but those plans weren’t implemented either because the Commercial Transport Committee eventually chose to divert the L restoration funds to building another Metra line, the Metra Electric South Shore Line that Taer and Nix used to travel between the city and Flossmoor.

After packing the rest of Molly Metropolis’s belongings into boxes and ferrying them to the hotel’s mailroom, Nix and Taer left the Peninsula, taking Molly’s notebook with them. When I spoke with Nix, she told me they stole the notebook out of “simple curiosity.” However, in an interview with Berliner, when I asked him if he could provide an outside perspective on Nix’s comment, Berliner said: “Their curiosity wasn’t simple.”

Nix and Taer didn’t examine the notebook’s contents until they got back to Taer’s apartment and Taer’s roommate had gone out for the evening, leaving dirty dishes in the sink. For half an hour, they thumbed through the pages together, reading passages out loud and examining Molly’s sketches of outfits and accessories. After this brief examination, Nix decided not to delve any deeper into Molly; she felt done with the notebook. Reading it felt like a betrayal, or like “grave-robbing your grandmother,” as Nix told me.

Taer had the opposite reaction. She wanted to read every word and look for clues in the sketches of costumes and half-finished song lyrics. Although Taer and Nix found the notebook together, and Nix arguably had more claim to it as Molly’s ex-assistant, Taer
treated the notebook like it was her property. Unfortunately, she had it with her when she vanished into Lake Michigan. The final written words of a figure about to become an icon sank to the bottom of a lake. Only ghostly secondhand information about Molly Metropolis’s notebook survives.
*

Although I would’ve preferred to examine Molly’s notebook firsthand, I enjoyed Taer’s tour of the contents via her own writing. Taer’s personality enticed me from the first moment I picked up her diary. She lacked self-awareness, but occasionally had a sharp critical eye. Just after “Apocalypse Dance” was released, she wrote:

Metro started out as a stand-in for the listener, someone as obsessed with fame as the listener (me? us?) is. With “Cause Apocalyptic,” she appears to be going in a different direction. Fame is inside her (infected her?) and she can no longer be a stand-in for me, or a version of me, but that sense—of her having once been me—lingers …

Taer liked the idea of being an obsessive as much as she liked obsessing:

So I can do a deep criticism here, on the lyric level, about love and revenge being the same thing, because they are both about obsessive attention, but then it gets all twisted because of course I’m obsessing. Like, would my time really be more valuable if I was just listening to
Boxer
or
Doolittle
for the
billionth time?
^†
Would my time be more “legitimate?” Is the level of fame important in determining the quality of the obsession? Is the type of fame important?

Most of Taer’s notes on Molly’s notebook are somewhat muddled, even big direct quotes—except one note, dated a few days before she disappeared, written with sloppy and hurried handwriting: “It was all in her notebook, in some form or another, it was all in there!”

Nix remembers some of what Molly wrote, but she never examined it as closely as Taer. Berliner was with Molly when she wrote some of the entries, so he can make good guesses at what was inside. Combined with Taer’s notes, this allowed me to partially reconstruct the contents.

According to all my sources, Molly Metropolis had written in the notebook during the nine months prior to her disappearance. Scattered throughout the notebook were sketches, lyrics, and plans pertaining to her music career, but a significant number of pages were given over to Molly’s other pursuits. She had divided the notebook, roughly, into thirds. The first third was written in April, May, and parts of June 2008. Molly spent the majority of this first portion discussing the work of Antoinette Monson, a fifteenth-century cartographer, who Molly describes as a “cartographer of the potential.” Because Taer gave Molly’s hot pink screen print of Sable Island only the most cursory of examinations, she didn’t immediately realize that this “cartographer of the potential,” has a nearly identical name to the one signed on the screen print: Antoine Monson.

Molly wrote the second third of the notebook in late June and early July. In this section, Metro wrote a number of song lyrics and concept notes about her third album, which she had tentatively
titled
Cause Oceanic
, and which, of course, was never recorded. Taer didn’t quote from this section at all in her journal, Nix had to describe it to me. Nix doesn’t remember any of the final lyrics Molly wrote, much to my chagrin as a converted fan of Molly Metropolis’s music.

The most significant portion of Metro’s notebook was the final third, which she wrote from July to December. In those pages, Molly described an ambitious project called The Ghost Network, which had to do with the Chicago L system. Molly planned to design a gigantic map which would catalogue every single L train line ever built in Chicago and combine them with every single L train line
not
built—that is, every train line proposed but never incorporated into the system.

Molly Metropolis wrote, and Taer quoted: “What is a public transit system consisting of elevated trains? It’s not just a transport for bodies. It’s a system to transport systems (digestive, nervous, etc.), a series of tracks that transport ideas. It’s not the accessories of a city, lying on top of the skin, but the veins and arteries within the body.”

Calling Chicago’s public train system an elevated train line is a lie—many of the train tracks aren’t elevated—though it hasn’t always been so. In 1898, when the Chicago Transit Authority approved the plan for the train line in conjunction with Democratic mayor Carter Harrison, Jr., they planned a completely elevated train system and envisioned a glistening, futuristic track with trains whizzing between the tops of Chicago’s towers. The
Chicago Tribune
referred to the upcoming train system as the “Alley Elevated” or the “Alley L.” By the time the inaugural train took its twenty-mile-per-hour journey around the short, looping track,
^‡
the two most prominent Chi
cago newspapers were using “the L” to refer to the train and the nickname became part of the urban nomenclature.

The owners of the
Trib
and the
Evening Journal
(which later became the
Chicago Sun Times
), Mayor Harrison Jr. and prominent Republican politician Conrad Kelsey, put aside their long-standing rivalry to mutually use the L to wage a propaganda war against New York and its mayor William L. Strong. Prominent regional historian Albert Whitfeld asserts that both Harrison Jr. and Kelsey prompted their reporters to trump up or instigate some kind of competitive feeling between New York City’s underground subway and Chicago’s new elevated train line. From the September 17, 1899, issue of the
Tribune
:

Indeed, New York City’s train system runs below their streets, shaking automobiles and pedestrians alike when a train passes below, and forcing the families and professional men who use the train lines to crowd into dark tunnels. In contrast, Chicago’s glorious Elevated Train Line will hang above the city like some silver necklace on the neck of a comely heiress, rising above our shining city like a jewel.
^§

In the decades that followed Chicago’s first train ride, private companies started building and running elevated train lines, and the city let the corporate world take on the burden of building public transit.

In 1939, as countries in Europe began fighting among themselves for the second time in a century, a savvy but generally disliked businessman named Samuel Insull owned two-thirds of the train lines,
cars, and stations. Insull treated Chicago utilities like a game of Monopoly, and because he controlled much of the L plus the Edison Electric Company and half of the Port of Chicago, Insull was winning.

Mayor Harrison Jr. dreamed of a publicly owned transit system. He wanted the city to buy all the existing train lines, then build new ones underground to serve as bomb shelters. Should the Blitzkrieg terrorizing London ever come to the United States, the ruling body of Chicago wanted a safe space to hide and convene a war council. To both gain control of the L and build his safe underground shelters, Harrison Jr. waged a publicity war against Insull. The
Trib
called him an Anglophile and a homosexual. Several of Insull’s male lovers, who may or may not have been well-paid actors, gave interviews with both of the city’s major newspapers, describing not only their “lewd lifestyle,” but also Insull’s plans to defraud major stakeholders in his company. Insull’s CFO implicated Insull in criminal activities, and Chicago detectives arrested Insull on charges of profiteering, racketeering, electioneering, and bribery. The state seized his business holdings, including all of his L lines. The city held him without bail and he died in prison before his trial began, succumbing to stab wounds accidentally inflicted as a bystander to a yard fight.

Harrison Jr. hired the architect-designer H.W. Benthom in 1943 to develop a plan to replace the entire elevated system with subways, each fortified. Benthom’s designs were a work of architectural beauty, a system that resembled a great river and its tributaries, with the Loop as a whirlpool at the center. A year later, the city completed construction on the first underground station at State Street. The disused station’s closely spaced support columns are still visible today through train windows when the Blue Line travels between Chicago and Damen.

By the time Benthom finished drawing his plans for the rest of the subway stations, Hitler had been put down and America had
already bombed Hiroshima. The war was over. The appeal of underground shelters got lost among the plans for victory parades.