The Ghost Network (13 page)

After Molly’s disappearance, the fifty dancers, musicians, roadies, assistants, and “Governing Council” members that made up Molly’s tour machine drifted around Chicago for a few weeks. SDFC put them up in a Holiday Inn while everyone waited for news. In late January, when hope that Molly would reemerge was still alive, but the financial burden of supporting her tour became too frustrating for SDFC to stomach, the record company dismissed the crew. Berliner’s dancer ex-girlfriend, Irene Davis, took the Amtrak to Romulus, where her parents had retired. She planned on staying for a few days, but while she was visiting her mother slipped, fell down a flight of stairs, and broke her neck. Davis remained in Michigan after the funeral.

Meanwhile, Taer read about the Situationists for days before she got bored and tired of research. She liked absorbing the same knowledge as Molly Metropolis, but knowing what Molly knew wouldn’t help her find Berliner. She pestered Nix for suggestions on how to proceed. Nix proposed that they speak to Davis, because she had dated Berliner for six months. Nix called Davis. Though she refused
to talk over the phone or to leave Romulus, Davis agreed to chat with them if they came to her.

Taer and Nix rode north on a freezing Metra train. Taer wrote in her shaky train handwriting: “Gina wants me to stop, but it would feel like I was abandoning [Molly]. I know it’s presumptuous to think that she’d want me to be looking for her, or that I have a responsibility to find her, but I feel like I’m in too deep. Even though I’m not really in anything. I mean, I could drop it, but then I would never stop thinking about her.”

They checked into a room at the Ramada Romulus and arrived at Davis’s parents’ small house later that evening. Davis met them at the door wearing a pair of black leggings, a huge knit sweater, and her legwarmers, a staple of any dancer’s wardrobe. She wore a circular piece of purple quartz around her neck on a long silver chain, a gift her mother had given her for her sixteenth birthday, and which she had worn almost every day since. Her hair hung loose and tangled around her face, and her eyes were bloodshot. She looked tired and bloated. Davis didn’t have the willowy, long-limbed body of a dancer. She was shorter than most and somewhat voluptuous, especially in comparison to the rail-thin bodies dancers usually maintain. Nevertheless, Davis was still incredibly graceful. Each of her movements seemed deliberate to Taer, from the way she poured her fifth glass of wine to the absentminded scratch of an itch on her arm. Taer thought Davis’s face was plain, but found her sexual anyway, despite, or perhaps as a result of, the dancer’s deep grief over her mother.

The mood in the house was grim and the architecture unforgiving. Berliner later described the house as having “that kind of built-in-the-seventies-under-communist-rule vibe, you know, like, with a bleakness to it, a house that just attacks you with its ugliness.” Davis invited Taer and Nix to sit at the glass table in the sparsely decorated kitchen and opened an expensive bottle of wine her father had been
saving for a special occasion. Taer turned on her iPhone voice recorder and Davis asked, “So what did Nick do to you? I’m assuming he didn’t fuck either of you.”

Taer told an abbreviated version of the break-in story, to which Davis replied, “Yeah, I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Then she coughed out the smoke from one of her mother’s Virginia Slims and asked: “So do you want to hear his life story?”

“Yeah,” Taer said.

“I know him a little,” Nix said.

“Did he tell you about all that weird stuff from his childhood?” Davis asked.

“No,” Nix said. “I just met him around the music video sets, or when the tour came to Chicago, you know.”

“His life …” Davis trailed off.

“Do you need—” Taer began to say, but Davis cut her off.

“I guess I’m inconsequential in a lot of ways,” Davis said. “That isn’t to say what I’ve been doing with my life isn’t important, but what does it mean to the greater world? Especially now that Molly fucked off—you know what I mean, Gina. You get used to your life meaning something because you’re doing something for someone whose life means something. I felt that way when I was dating Nick, too.

“So, yeah, I’m convinced that Nick’s life is important because he had this really cinematic childhood. Like, his life fits perfectly with a movie story, youthful rebellion, betrayal, sexual deviance, whatever. The rest of our lives have to be altered in some really significant way to make it into a movie—not Nick.”
*

Nicolas Berliner was born in 1983 in the college town Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
^†
In 1984, his father, Ronald, left his position as an adjunct professor of Natural History at the University of Illinois for a tenure-track position at the University of Chicago. Ronald moved his family into the city and settled in a spacious, three-level backhouse in Lincoln Park.

Berliner entered his teenage years as a gentle, well-mannered child. He preferred reading books to playing sports (although he eventually grew out of his bookishness enough to build the kind of stamina necessary to keep up with Molly Metropolis). He argued but never lost his temper. He liked broccoli without butter or cheese. His parents took hundreds of photos of him and catalogued them, extensively, in photo albums. They took him to museums and bought him new books every weekend for his “personal library,” the bookcase in his basement bedroom.

On June 28, 1998, when Berliner was fifteen years old, his father died suddenly in a four-car pile up on I-94. Perhaps it’s reductive to attribute all of Berliner’s subsequent actions to the impact of his father’s death on his psyche; that kind of semi-psychoanalytic oversimplification is a terrible way of assessing the labyrinth of a person’s emotional life. On the other hand, when Berliner’s father died, his whole life changed.

Berliner’s mother, Dana, previously a stay-at-home mom, found a job at a small advertising firm. His maternal grandmother, Helen Raulson, moved into the backhouse to watch Berliner in the afternoons after school and to help out around the house. An observant Roman Catholic, Raulson quickly became active in the local Catholic congregation; Dana, who had mostly ignored her religious upbringing since she met her secular husband in her early twenties, returned to the church.

While his mother found God, Berliner began taking aimless walks through the neighborhood. At first, he walked down the same blocks over and over again; then he branched out and walked deeper and deeper into the city. He let himself get lost, then tried to find his way out of the maze of unfamiliar streets into a part of the city he knew. The maze got smaller and smaller as he learned more and more streets. If you know a place, he realized, it’s no longer a trap.

Berliner walked for several hours a day. He reacted to loss by trying to turn his slippery memories into something solid. Too mature for his own good, Berliner worried he was young enough that he’d forget his father. He forced himself to go over the happy memories and the dark ones, and all the while he walked and walked and walked.

The first summer after Berliner’s father died, Berliner and Raulson lived symbiotically. Raulson initially encouraged his walking, thinking of it as an appropriately stoic and masculine form of mourning. She hated television and video games and loved that Berliner found his entertainment in physical activity. She enrolled Berliner in a summer baseball league and encouraged him to try out for his school’s team. Her own son had played for half a decade on the Chicago Cubs’ farm team before a knee injury took him out of the game; she still hoped to find a baseballer in the family. Berliner took to the game well enough, easily made St. Ignatius High School’s varsity team as a third baseman and sometimes outfielder.

Despite his success with the baseball team, Berliner’s school record took a turn for the worse. He skipped classes and refused to tell his mother and grandmother where he was going. His relationship with both his mother and grandmother deteriorated as the school year continued. They occasionally spied him walking with a young woman in her twenties, whom they believed he had started dating. They were terrified the relationship had become sexual. Over the course of the next year, Raulson and Dana worked themselves into a frothy moral panic, which boiled over when Raulson happened to
see Berliner in a neighborhood park, laying on a blanket under an architectural archway, making out with the young woman who had long red fingernails. Raulson interrupted them, forced Berliner to empty his pockets, and dragged him home in horror when she saw he was carrying a condom.

Raulson contacted an extremist, deviant order of nuns based in Southern Italy, outside of a small town called Ripacandida. The nuns specialized in cures for homosexuality and off-site exorcisms, a kind of “we’ll pray it out of you from afar” program. The matron of the convent was named Sister Ernestina Greco. She diagnosed Berliner with a “second soul,” an infestation of the “Wandering Devil.” Berliner’s walking, Sister Ernestina insisted, was an early symptom of profound religious doubt that would soon overtake every aspect of his life. If it was allowed to stay inside him, he would never be able to settle in one city, town, or country; he would spend thousands of dollars on new material items because his preferences for color and design would change quickly; he would be a fickle lover, and if he ever married, he would leave his spouse without producing any children.

Sister Ernestina reassured Dana and Raulson they were not responsible for Berliner’s infection. The death of a parent, especially a father, leaves the body of a male child very susceptible to demonic infestation. The Sister offered to cut her rate of 60 million lira (approximately $30,000) in half because she was moved by the boy’s story. Raulson and Dana decided to employ Sister Ernestina and her convent’s long-distance exorcism services.

On October 7, 1999, Dana and Raulson added a very small dose of a drug the sisters had provided to the pop Berliner drank with dinner.
^‡
He passed out and woke up tied to his bed. His grandmother and mother were sitting on folding chairs against the opposite wall of his bedroom. Raulson phoned the sisters and put
them on speakerphone; they began the exorcism ceremony, speaking in Latin and Italian. The only phrase they spoke in English was, “Out, demon!” presumably switching languages so Berliner, Raulson, and Dana could understand them. Drugged and held captive, Berliner shouted back.

The ritual took seven hours to complete, from around 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. By the end, Raulson and Dana were dizzy with sleep deprivation. Raulson especially was physically overwhelmed, and could barely stand. Berliner, however, seemed invigorated. His eyes were clear and wide, his breath was even. His body shined with a layer of cooling sweat. He felt like a marathon runner on the last mile of the race; the adrenaline had taken over his body completely, so he felt no pain.

Sister Ernestina, her voice hoarse from exertion, instructed Dana to untie Berliner. She asked Berliner if he felt different. He responded that he did. “He will still feel the urge to walk, at first,” she said, “but the desire will leave him. Remnants of the bad spirit. It can’t live inside a person without having some—harmless, I assure you—lingering effects. But a year from now, your son will have no desire to walk, and he will look back on all the walking he did and wonder, ‘What was it that made me enjoy walking so much?’ The devil is out of him. The devil is out of him.”

According to Sister Ernestina and Berliner’s mother, he was cured. Berliner has a different interpretation of the events: “The nuns and I fought all night, and they thought they won but they didn’t. I won.”

With his mother and grandmother’s fears allayed, Berliner was free to return to his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend, Marie-Hélène Kraus, and their friends, the New Situationists.

Kraus was born in the U.S. but had been conceived in France, so her mother chose to give her a French name. Her parents were both
children of Russian Jewish immigrants, but Kraus didn’t identify with her ancestral Jewishness or Russianness. She felt, spiritually, more in common with some semi-fake notion of “the French.” In kindergarten, she spent half the year speaking in an exaggerated French accent and convinced the other students she was European. When she got tired of the accent, she told her classmates that she had finally learned to “speak like an American.” Her best friend believed she was French until their sophomore year of high school. When she was sixteen, she was hit by a car while roller blading and broke her back. She spent a year in a body cast, during which time she memorized the number of casualties of each battle of the Civil War and read a lot of novels.

In high school, Kraus took great pains to style herself like an old Hollywood movie star, specifically Lauren Bacall, whom she identified with because they both had low voices and small breasts. Kraus smoked cigarettes constantly to emphasize the scratchiness of her voice, and even though she was very tall, she always wore heels to emphasize her height. She was a fashionable dresser with an encyclopedic knowledge of current American politics and popular culture. Perhaps because she spent so much time creating a fantasy around her persona, Kraus had a hard time connecting with people. Although she had many boyfriends during high school and college, she felt that Berliner was the first person to “love her honestly.”