The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato Read Free Book Online

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 beensaving 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