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.
Plans for Benthom’s L underground systems are archived in the Chicago Public Records, along with every other rejected proposal. The Public Records contain every blueprint of every proposed addition, whether the addition was adopted or the proposed stations and lines were built. Since the first steam locomotive pulled its wooden coaches out of the Congress Street Terminal in 1892, the hundreds of proposals that were never adopted have grown into an overlapping maze of alternate L train lines and stations, an “alternate universe transit system,” as the science fiction blog io9 put it.ǁ The train lines that were never constructed are the bastards and doppelgangers of the L that covers the city today.
For reasons I failed to comprehend during my first research trip to Chicago, Molly Metropolis was fascinated enough with the L to dedicate years of her life to designing a map that layered each potential, but never constructed, alternative or expansion to the L on top of a map of all the functioning L lines. She also included train lines and stations that had once been part of the system but had gone out of use. She created the map on a computer and also painted it onto the wall of a secret office she kept in Chicago. This giant, unwieldy map is the project she called The Ghost Network.
Molly’s Ghost Network is a strange piece; it catalogues not only a hypothetical transit system, but also one that would be nearly impossible to build and ridiculous to implement. The Ghost Network has, for example, dual train lines riding side by side for their entire route, save one or two stops; it has places where both elevated and underground trains run the exact same route. The Ghost Network exists in a world without decisions, where every proposal is adopted, where construction isn’t based on the realities of the city.
While The Ghost Network was the most interesting discovery Taer made while reading Molly Metropolis’s notebook, it wasn’t the most immediately useful. Before Taer could begin to put The Ghost Network in its proper context, she had to first act on the simplest note, scrawled on the inside cover: Nicolas Berliner’s name, phone number, and e-mail address.
When Taer showed the number to Nix, Nix immediately recognized Berliner’s name. She knew he was a paid member of the Governing Council (as Molly called her creative team, often shorted to the GC), but Molly had never told Nix exactly what Berliner’s job was. For a little while, Taer and Nix thought Molly and Berliner might’ve been lovers.
Once Taer saw Berliner’s number, it got into her head like an earworm. She couldn’t forget that she had “secret access” to someone deep in Molly’s inner circle; she couldn’t help thinking of Berliner’s number as the light illuminating a path. Nix, on the other hand, remembered a very strange exchange between Berliner and Molly.
Berliner’s number was on all of Molly’s phones and he was a permanent fixture on her “Approved Callers” list. If he called and insisted that the call was important, Molly would interrupt anything except a live performance. For example, during the production of her last music video, for “Apocalypse Dance,” Molly twice halted production for half an hour to accept frantic phone calls from Berliner.a According to Nix, after the second “Apocalypse Dance” call, Molly came back to the set pale and shaking. Nix brought her some water and as the dancers took their places, Molly whispered to Nix something along the lines of, “If you ever need to speak to Nick directly, I would like you to remember that things with him aren’t safe.”
“Do you want me to take him off the call list?” Nix asked.
“No, no, of course not. Nick himself is a good person. He is very special to me. But there are certain … I don’t want you mixed up in certain elements of his life. His girlfriend, Marie-Hélène, is in prison, you know. She killed someone. She says it was an accident. The police thought Nick was involved but they couldn’t prove it — I’m not saying he was but there is really no way of knowing what someone has done.”
Nix asked Taer not to call Berliner and Taer obliged, for a while, probably because sometime just before or just after finding the notebook, Taer and Nix’s relationship had become sexual. A week after the hotel room excavation, hidden among a transcription of the lyrics of Molly Metropolis’s song “I’ll Find You,” Taer recounts, almost dispassionately, “Gina and I had sex again this morning.” She didn’t note when their first encounter took place.b
Sex in general, like Molly’s notebook, is often hidden, lost, undocumented, and unread, especially sex between two young queer women. The real goings-on between two people are basically unknowable.c It doesn’t matter that we don’t understand the nature of Taer and Nix’s relationship. It’s only important that we know it did happen, because in deference to the girl she was having a sexual relationship with, Taer delayed calling Berliner. But she didn’t wait very long.
* If Taer had left Molly’s notebook behind that night instead of her own, perhaps Cyrus would have been writing a book only about what Molly did. Instead, Cyrus read what Taer wrote and spent time inside her head rather than Molly’s. According to Cyrus’s notes, by the end of his first day with Taer’s notebook, he decided to do some research of his own. He barely mentioned his interest to his partner, believing Woodyard would disapprove (he discovered, later, that he was right). He waited until their summer together was over before making his first research trip to Chicago, riding the same L lines Taer did, heading south of the Loop to visit the National Archives and delve deep into the fraught history of the trains Cyrus and I — and Taer — rode. — CD
† Boxer is an album by the indie rock band The National, released in 2007. Doolittle is an album by the band The Pixies, released in 1989. They are both highly regarded albums, and two of Taer’s all-time favorites.
‡ The train carried two passengers during its first trip: Mayor Harrison Jr., a proponent of government-owned transit versus privately owned transit, and his wife, Edith Ogden Harrison, a literary celebrity at the time (though her novels are barely read now). She liked hats with huge feathers and threw lavish, controversial séance parties, which the Chicago Evening Journal parodied in a political comic that depicted Edith Ogden as Chicago’s Marie Antoinette.
§ The original article from which that quote was taken was lost in a fire, but the quote survived in an article the New York Post ran several months later.
ǁ “Chicago’s Never-Built Train System Looks Like a Giant Octopus,” io9, last modified January 12, 2011; io9.com/Chicagos-never-built-train-system-looks-like-a-giant-1280648619.