The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato Read Free Book Online Page B

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 putthem 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 bothchildren 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.”
    Berliner and Kraus met in a coffee shop in Wicker Park shortly after he began walking. At the time, Kraus worked as the Chief Officer in Charge of Recruitment for the recently formed New Situationists. In contradiction to her intentionally ironic