Free The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato

Taer responded. “I’m just anxious.”
    “Whatever,” Davis said.
    “Sorry,” Nix echoed. “Do you want some water or something?”
    “I’m fine,” Davis said, “The next thing you need to know about Nick, is he has this apartment. He thought it up sometime after Kraus went to jail, but before he met Molly. It’s this weird, incredible place. He had it built after he went to juvie and got out, then Kraus went to jail. He said he was really solitary and sad all the time. I started calling it his ‘Blue Period,’ just as a joke. He didn’t like that at all.”
    In the years following the New Situationists’ unraveling, Berliner designed an apartment for him and Kraus to share when she finished her long prison sentence. c The apartment was a fantasy from Kraus and Berliner’s sex life—the perfect erotic space; they designed it together as a kind of ongoing foreplay. Berliner drew his blueprints of this perfect apartment based on his memory of their conversations. He started saving money, but with his low-paying job he knew it would be a stretch to complete the project before Kraus was paroled. Then he met Molly Metropolis and she offered to build it for him.
    In 2006, when Molly and Berliner met, Molly had dozens of projects in the conceptual stages mostly relating to her music career (her albums, her General Council, The Ghost Network—none of them had names yet) and she wanted Berliner, the only accessible former member of the New Situationists, to help her with her cartography projects. Berliner initially refused. The secrets of the New Situationists needed to stay secret, Berliner told her, but Molly already knew enough about the music industry to know that for the right reasons, almost everyone would open up. Molly found out (perhaps by visiting Kraus in prison) that Berliner was trying tobuild an apartment, and offered to fund the project in exchange for his secrets.
    So, Berliner agreed to work with Molly Metropolis. A few weeks later, Kathy J. purchased a song Molly wrote (“Love Me Sweet,” an album cut on Kathy’s pop debut One of the Boys ) and she used that money to buy a warehouse space in Old Town. A month later, Berliner began aggressive renovations.
    Though Berliner’s design evoked the rooms and flow of an apartment, it was more like a Situationist drawing than a real living space. He didn’t include any hallways in the design, just a series of rooms that opened into other rooms, like a beehive. The front room, a narrow rectangle, had mirrors and a kitchen-like space. The middle area was a labyrinth of interconnected rooms. Some of them had no windows and only one door. You had to walk through the rooms in a particular order to make it to the huge back room, which was the bedroom and living area. Berliner also designed a bed built into the wall, twice the size of a king bed. The floors were dark wood; the walls were painted eggshell white. Berliner found the exact molding that Kraus had enjoyed as a child.
    Molly made only one mark on Berliner’s apartment. On Berliner’s original blueprint, there were two rooms labeled bathroom. Molly changed the smaller room from a bathroom to a walk-in closet. During construction, Molly checked in with the progress frequently and attentively, to make sure the contractors were following the blueprints to the letter, but Molly never visited the apartment after it was completed. Perhaps she didn’t want to violate Berliner’s private space or perhaps she didn’t want to insert herself into his sex life.
    The first time Davis visited the apartment, she thought construction had only recently been completed. The rooms still smelled like paint. In the strange front room, a silver refrigerator stood next to a seven-foot-tall mirror, which leaned precariously against a wall. Berliner had been there at least once—he had beer and water in thefridge—but the place felt unlived in. They drank a few beers sitting on the floor, against the wall across from