“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“No!” she said. “Cry!”
She kept holding my hand, in her surprisingly strong grip with surprisingly soft fingers, until I stopped crying. In writing down this moment, I’m reminded of Taer and Nix’s first post-college encounter, when Nix cried. Did Molly do this intentionally, so my rendering of the event would echo an earlier incident she knew was in the book? I wish I’d heard the echo at the time.
“This doesn’t make any sense. The burned-up body, Archer’s car? Where did that come from?” I asked.
“Dead when it was put in there,” Molly said.
“How did—”
“We didn’t kill someone. There are a lot of dead bodies around. In hospitals, for one thing. And while it wasn’t strictly ethical what we did to get the body, we didn’t steal the corpse of some grieving family’s grandfather. If you look hard enough, not in the papers, you might find reports of a stolen cadaver from a medical morgue in Chicago. By ‘unethical,’ I mean we used the body for art, not science.”
“Was everything in Cyrus’s book a lie?” I asked.
“No. The end of the book was a lie because Gina and my Nick lied to him. It says in the book, though, that Gina cried at one point during their interviews. She did cry.”
I think she said this because she could tell I was ashamed I had cried.
“I heard the tapes,” I said. “I heard her cry. I don’t think Cyrus described her crying well, but it’s hard to do that.”
“How would you describe it?”
“She was really crying, like the kind of crying when you end up all disgusting and snotty.”
“Poor Gina. She didn’t take Cait leaving well.”
“There are all kinds of people who aren’t taking it well,” I said. “People who don’t know she’s alive. Cait’s mom, for one.”
Molly picked at one of her nails. “I don’t want to lie to you, or argue with you. But, I’d prefer to steer the conversation in another direction.”
“But this is important,” I insisted. “Your parents—”
“That’s enough,” she snapped, her cute little snarl, captured by so many paparazzi, now directed at me. “Do you want me to stop talking?”
“We have to address this,” I said.
“I never like to be rude, especially to people who are interviewing me, I really try not to be. But I’m here at my own discretion and I can drop you off anytime I choose. People make sacrifices, I made my own and it was a very important learning experience for myself. I will make more, you will make some, many other people will sacrifice, and that isn’t the topic I choose to focus on, so you won’t either. I won’t speak to any questions about my parents.”
So I dropped it, and we moved on, starting with the extent of Berliner and Taer’s lies to Cyrus.
Molly told me that Cyrus’s book (whose ending I’ve preserved in its entirety, despite the lies) is true up until the first time Taer, Nix, and Berliner boarded the train, with Wilson not happy to see them. They rode the train, and Wilson begrudgingly informed Taer, Berliner, and Nix they passed a test by finding it. Having succeeded, they had a choice: they could get off the train at Plaques Tournantes Deux, or continue to the final stop, where their journey would continue. The first train ride had metaphorical importance. If they chose to continue, they would have to fake their own deaths. Wilson suggested the drowning in Lake Michigan, during stormy weather and rough waters and a current that hypothetically could pull a lifeless body miles away from shore in a matter of hours. Then they would have to return to the train, travel for many more hours, and they would never be able to return.
“You’re on the Edge of the World,” Wilson had said. “You liked those maps, didn’t you, Nick?”
Ignoring the ominous tone of Wilson’s declaration, Taer had pushed him for more information. “Where would the train take us?” she demanded.
“New Babylon.”
I made a surprised noise.
“Finding the train is like passing a test,” Molly said. “The train has three stops. The first stop is where you get on. And you can get off at the second or third stops. If you get off at the second stop, that means you don’t want to come to New Babylon, you don’t want to build a new world with us. If you get off at the third stop, that means you want to keep moving.”
“And getting off at station two, that’s an acceptable choice?” I wanted to make a joke like if I tell you, I’d have to kill you, but I was still a little bit nervous around Molly. It really was exactly like talking to the ghost of someone really, really famous.
“It’s what Gina chose,” she said.
“And Nick Berliner.”
“Well, yes, sort of,” Molly said. She smiled. “For the time being. He’s waiting for Marie-Hélène and then they will come to New Babylon together.”
“Waiting for her to get out of prison, you mean.”
“Yes, that’s my darling Nick, he’s very romantic about her. It’s wonderful to be around two people who are so dramatically fucking in love with each other. It’s been an inspiration to myself.”
As Marie-Hélène Kraus has been in prison since before Molly met Berliner, I’m not sure how she spent time around both of them (did she visit Kraus in prison with Berliner?) or whether it was enough time to adequately understand the depth of their love. I didn’t bring this up.
“Okay, so, New Babylon. Let’s go back to that. I’ve heard of that, it was a city Constant Nieuwenhuys designed, but it wasn’t a real city, it was never built.”
“ ‘Realness’ doesn’t mean it had a zip code. It was a real city then but, no, it was never built. But he didn’t design it to make an art project. It was a city, a potential city. Until now, when its potential has been realized.”
“What does that even mean?”
“We are building New Babylon, and we are living there. Cait is there, and Cyrus.”
“Is that where all the New Situationists went after the bombing?”
“I can’t answer questions about that.”
“But—”
“Stop asking.”
“Had you built the city from Constant’s original design?”
“New Babylon, by its very nature, is never ‘finished,’ always changing based on the desires and pleasure of the inhabitants but — restricted to traditional definitions — one might say that it is built. We have, for example, running water.”
“You built it since you were gone, a whole city?”
“Oh no.” She laughed. “You shouldn’t attribute the building of this city to me just because I’m famous. I’m not the builder of New Babylon, merely one of its most prominent citizens.”
“Who is the builder?”
“To explain that, let’s go back for a moment to the nature of New Babylon and Constant, because if you’ve studied his documents — we have a lot of the originals, actually — you’ll notice that he wasn’t very specific in regards to the practicalities involved in building his city. Their city, the Situationist city. So we’ve had to be very innovative. A lot of that innovation originated before I arrived. I’m not an engineer, though I’m becoming one, which is very exciting for me. I think every citizen of New Babylon will be able to self-identify as an engineer, that will be part of our national identity.”
“National identity?”
She nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “In terms of intent, has that remained the same, from Constant’s drawings?”
“For the most part.”
“So who is the mastermind? The guy who decided, fuck it, fuck America, I’m moving to New Babylon even if I have to build it myself?”
Molly looked at me. “You’re not as imaginative as Caitlin. Or perhaps, that’s not fair, just less well-read. The architect of New Babylon is Guy Debord.”