PART 2
“Right now I’m a songwriter, and what I do is I perform, and write verses and choruses. But I might not always do that,” Molly said. “I might cross over, not like into another genre, but into another aspect of culture entirely. I don’t like boundaries. Everybody is a complicated character. It’s like that poem from — what’s his bucket? — Walt Whitman. ‘Song of Myself.’ Like, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ ”
Chapter 9
On June 18, 2002, just after 4 a.m., every member of the New Situationists received an emergency text message. The group often used text messaging for mass or personal communications. They all had burner cell phones, the same type that drug dealers used, which didn’t require that they disclose any personal information when signing up for service. Twice a month, they destroyed their old phones and bought new ones. Every member of the group used a generic nickname, like Jane or Joe or Nick, as their “phone name,” and they developed a series of simple code words to cloak the meanings of their messages. A text that began with “911,” for example, was personal or low priority. The message on June 18 began with the word “hey” which meant there was some kind of emergency that required immediate attention. The rest of the June 18 text was written in a biliteral cipher: a code where each letter of the intended message was replaced by a group of five A’s and B’s; for example, ‘m’ could be represented by ABAAA and ‘o’ could be represented by BBBAA, so ‘Mom’ would be spelled ‘ABAAA-BBBAA-ABAAA.’ David Wilson had adopted the simple code as a way for the New Situationists to communicate covertly but easily.
Although the group had scattered after planting their bombs, they were all awake when the message came in and they quickly decoded it: “M-H was arrested. Come to the headquarters now.” Before Kraus’s arrest report had even been filed, the New Situationists had sheltered themselves in their headquarters, the secret basement level of an office building at 2356 North Racine Avenue, at the corner of Armitage.*
The New Situationist headquarters was modeled on a building designed by Constant, but never built. Constant called the building La Maison Astuce or The Trick House. When he was young, Constant hoped to build La Maison Astuce as a personal residence to retire to, but by the time he reached the end of his life he was more concerned with painting than building. In 1992, he published the blueprints for anyone to use.
La Maison Astuce has seventeen rooms that branch off one central hallway. The first sixteen rooms, identical squares, are only accessible from the top floor. Inside each room is a little world onto itself, not unlike individual apartments in an apartment building, though with a markedly different ambiance. Each “room” has two levels, the top floor with a foyer, living room, public bathroom, and office. Connected by a staircase, the bottom floor has a bedroom, kitchenette, private library, and private office. These sixteen rooms are, as Constant put it, “like their own little worlds.”†
The seventeenth room, at the back of the house, is the trick that gives the Trick House its name. Although it is the same size as the other sixteen rooms, it’s not split into two levels. Instead, the ceilings are two stories high. The door at the end of the second floor hallway opens into empty air; from inside the seventeenth room, the door blends seamlessly into the high wall. Any visitor that doesn’t know the trick to the room could, according to Constant, “fall to their death.”‡ The seventeenth room is safely accessed from the second floor hallway’s obscured eighteenth door, which has no doorknob. To open the door, you must push “in the spot where the doorknob would be”§; the door then opens to a spiral staircase.
The New Situationists also added a “back door” to the office, which wasn’t on Constant’s original plan. This secondary or emergency exit led to the underground garage of the building next door, through an entrance labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY, though no employee of the second building had a key. Although Constant didn’t design the back door, he condoned its creation. In an explanation of the space published in Potlatch, a proto-Situationist publication, he wrote, “A hidden exit, or several, placed somewhere in the building could provide additional opportunities for spatial play. Design at will, according to the landscape.”ǁ
When the New Situationists built The Trick House, they imagined that members could occupy the sixteen apartments, but most New Situationists never got around to moving in. Before the bombings, only Kraus, David Wilson, and the president of the New Situationists lived in the headquarters. Everyone else rented separate apartments. Berliner visited the headquarters often, but he was never given a room of his own to use; instead, he stayed with Kraus. There they could be alone to talk pop philosophy and have sex. According to Kraus, she let him sleep naked in her bedroom while she attended strategy meetings “above his clearance level” in the president’s office.
After the bombings, all of the New Situationists hid themselves on the lower floor of their quarters. Only Berliner and Wilson came and went. Perhaps all sixteen rooms were full; perhaps some people had to share rooms. Because I don’t know how many members the New Situationists actually had, and because Berliner and Kraus refuse to talk about that period of time in any detail, I don’t know what hiding out was actually like. It could’ve been lonely, isolated, and spacious, or cramped and frustrating. I do know that all of their supplies came in from a security guard who worked in the office building. Berliner warned me not to look for that person, laboriously switching between gender pronouns as he always did when protecting the identity of someone associated with the New Situationists: “If you look, you won’t find him. If you do find her, he won’t have any useful information.” I did search for the security guard but, as Berliner had predicted, I didn’t find anything of use.
Buried in their own architectural creation, the New Situationists were forced to take stock of themselves and their organization. They were disillusioned. At first they held an official meeting every day during their sequester and argued constantly about the future of the movement. Eventually they stopped meeting and stopped talking to each other at all. No one tried to save the New Situationists except Berliner, who gave a passionate speech about courage and idealism. When another member stopped him in the middle of his rant to call him an ignorant and senseless child, Berliner punched him in the face. The conflict between Berliner and the other members ended only when he was incarcerated. By virtue of their forced cohabitation, the New Situationists limped along into the New Year, as their isolation stretched into its tenth month.
By the time Kraus’s trial started in March, the police were spending less time investigating of the members of the New Situationists, for good reason. In 2003, six hundred and one people were murdered in Chicago, and about half of the homicides were related to gang or drug violence. The CPD had their hands full and a bombing suspect on trial; the newspaper headlines had shifted back to President Bush’s war in Iraq. The New Situationists and Kraus were buried on the second page of the Metro section. Though the Federal Investigation continued, and indeed remains an open case to this day, the New Situationists felt safer, and the group slowly disbanded.
After his stint in juvenile detention, Berliner didn’t return to the New Situationist headquarters. He had probably been the most emotionally affected by the collapse of the group; he had treated their goals like religion and Kraus like a priest. Heartbroken, he moved back into his mother’s house and sat in the courtroom every day to watch the proceedings of Kraus’s trial. He wore a pair of gray suit pants and a rotating set of pale blue button-down shirts. At the end of each day in court, the bailiff led Kraus through the small band of courtroom reporters allowed to attend the trail. They didn’t shout at her like on television, but the photographers took hundreds of pictures. Berliner followed in the wake of the reporters. He watched as Kraus stepped into the windowless van that transported her back to the Dwight Correctional Center, and then he walked all the way from the courthouse in the Loop to his mother’s brownstone in Lincoln Park. He ruined his shiny black loafers with weeks of that kind of walking. He stayed in every evening; he never socialized or watched TV. Instead, he read fiction: the collected stories of Borges, Drown by Junot Díaz, several novels by Italo Calvino, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.