They checked into a room at the Ramada Romulus and arrived at Davis’s parents’ small house later that evening. Davis met them at the door wearing a pair of black leggings, a huge knit sweater, and her legwarmers, a staple of any dancer’s wardrobe. She wore a circular piece of purple quartz around her neck on a long silver chain, a gift her mother had given her for her sixteenth birthday, and which she had worn almost every day since. Her hair hung loose and tangled around her face, and her eyes were bloodshot. She looked tired and bloated. Davis didn’t have the willowy, long-limbed body of a 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 been saving 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 afternoons after school and to help out around the house. An observant Roman Catholic, Raulson quickly became active in the local Catholic congregation; Dana, who had mostly ignored her religious upbringing since she met her secular husband in her early twenties, returned to the church.
While his mother found God, Berliner began taking aimless walks through the neighborhood. At first, he walked down the same blocks over and over again; then he branched out and walked deeper and deeper into the city. He let himself get lost, then tried to find his way out of the maze of unfamiliar streets into a part of the city he knew. The maze got smaller and smaller as he learned more and more streets. If you know a place, he realized, it’s no longer a trap.
Berliner walked for several hours a day. He reacted to loss by trying to turn his slippery memories into something solid. Too mature for his own good, Berliner worried he was young enough that he’d forget his father. He forced himself to go over the happy memories and the dark ones, and all the while he walked and walked and walked.
The first summer after Berliner’s father died, Berliner and Raulson lived symbiotically. Raulson initially encouraged his walking, thinking of it as an appropriately stoic and masculine form of mourning. She hated television and video games and loved that Berliner found his entertainment in physical activity. She enrolled Berliner in a summer baseball league and encouraged him to try out for his school’s team. Her own son had played for half a decade on the Chicago Cubs’ farm team before a knee injury took him out of the game; she still hoped to find a baseballer in the family. Berliner took to the game well enough, easily made St. Ignatius High School’s varsity team as a third baseman and sometimes outfielder.
Despite his success with the baseball team, Berliner’s school record took a turn for the worse. He skipped classes and refused to tell his mother and grandmother where he was going. His relationship with both his mother and grandmother deteriorated as the school year continued. They occasionally spied him walking with a young woman in her twenties, whom they believed he had started dating. They were terrified the relationship had become sexual. Over the course of the next year, Raulson and Dana worked themselves into a frothy moral panic, which boiled over when Raulson happened to see Berliner in a neighborhood park, laying on a blanket under an architectural archway, making out with the young woman who had long red fingernails. Raulson interrupted them, forced Berliner to empty his pockets, and dragged him home in horror when she saw he was carrying a condom.
Raulson contacted an extremist, deviant order of nuns based in Southern Italy, outside of a small town called Ripacandida. The nuns specialized in cures for homosexuality and off-site exorcisms, a kind of “we’ll pray it out of you from afar” program. The matron of the convent was named Sister Ernestina Greco. She diagnosed Berliner with a “second soul,” an infestation of the “Wandering Devil.” Berliner’s walking, Sister Ernestina insisted, was an early symptom of profound religious doubt that would soon overtake every aspect of his life. If it was allowed to stay inside him, he would never be able to settle in one city, town, or country; he would spend thousands of dollars on new material items because his preferences for color and design would change quickly; he would be a fickle lover, and if he ever married, he would leave his spouse without producing any children.