Sister Ernestina reassured Dana and Raulson they were not responsible for Berliner’s infection. The death of a parent, especially a father, leaves the body of a male child very susceptible to demonic infestation. The Sister offered to cut her rate of 60 million lira (approximately $30,000) in half because she was moved by the boy’s story. Raulson and Dana decided to employ Sister Ernestina and 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 put them 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 both children 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 title, Kraus’s job was to dismiss or divert anyone who seemed captivated by the New Situationists, whether the interest was academic, political, or personal. Her job was difficult; she not only had to convince people to give up their curiosity, she had to convince them that there was nothing to be curious about. “The New Situationists can’t exist,” she often reminded Berliner. “That was how Debord would’ve wanted it.”§
Well-suited to her position with the New Situationists, Kraus gave a first impression of cold indifference; she rarely developed sentimental attachments. With David Wilson, she was the exception to the New Situationists’ program of extreme secrecy. While the two of them would have some level of visibility among the members and to the outside world, every other member remained hidden as much as possible. Later, after the New Situationists made themselves known through their act of domestic terrorism, the State Prosecutors and the public conflated the New Situationists’ historic secretiveness with long-term plans for the bombing. However, Kraus always insisted the Chicago Subway Bombings were a flight of fancy, planned in a few months, maximum; the secrecy grew out of an adherence to Situationist principles, plus a flair for theater.
“We were not above some Eyes Wide Shut—esque displays. Not the orgy part, but the masks, the passwords, the secrecy. We were feeling very dramatic at the time. We wore animal masks like in some movie,” Kraus told Anna Kirkpatrick during a 2009 exclusive video interview for Kirkpatrick’s political commentary show on MSNBC. During the same interview, Kirkpatrick asked, “Most of a decade has passed since the New Situationists disbanded. Can you tell us what they were exactly?” Kraus responded, “Anna, what makes you think the New Situationists have disbanded?”ǁ
At the coffee shop where Kraus and Berliner met, the first location of the high-end organic coffee retailer Intelligentsia, Berliner sometimes flirted with a young vegan barista named Anna. He often talked to Anna about his devotion and compulsion to walk. Anna also knew Kraus, a regular at the café, and had seen her reading a book about Debord and psychogeography. When Berliner and Kraus happened to stop in at the same time, Anna suggested Berliner ask Kraus for book recommendations. They spoke for a little while and left separately, but Berliner had already developed a bit of a teenage crush. Berliner walked to the coffee shop when he knew Kraus would be there, acting surprised to see her, and asking her if he could sit down at her table. After a few weeks of this, Berliner dropped the ruse and planned his run-ins with Kraus; they met several times a week to discuss urban planning philosophies and music.
Kraus didn’t like Berliner at first, but she never liked anybody at first. She slowly warmed to him, then surprised herself by thinking about the strange teenager when he wasn’t around. She broke up with her boyfriend of a year, a non — New Situationist, and a month later realized she’d broken up with him for Berliner. On a Saturday afternoon in August, she invited Berliner back to her mod apartment in the Ukrainian Village, and took his virginity on her maple platform bed.
Kraus was pleased that Berliner didn’t say anything too sentimental after their first time having sex; she was also pleased that he fell asleep with his head on her chest while she smoked a cigarette, drank wine, and thought about him. After a thirty minute post-coital nap, Kraus woke Berliner. She slowly and thoroughly explained that she had what previous lovers had called an “architectural fetish,” which she became aware of during a therapy session when she was sixteen. Under hypnosis, she had remembered her twelve-year-old self, masturbating against certain kinds of doorways because the molding was more beautiful. Kraus told Berliner that while she was pleased with devirginizing him, the two of them couldn’t continue a sexual relationship if he didn’t feel comfortable indulging in her preferred sexual practices. Kraus needn’t have worried. Kraus’s descriptions of her preferences were arousing to Berliner. He happily became her sexual protégé.