Midnight Spaghetti

Part of going home for the holidays is traveling on streets you went down a million times as a child and realizing they're not the same streets.

Gordon, Massachusetts, is one of those places that only exists as a liminal space. You arrive there only to go on to the next location. There is little to stop for; even if it was home at one point, there isn't a reason to return. Even if you own a home there, thanks to time and money, you're really only ever renting.

"So wait, where are you going home to?" his boss Katy had asked him the day before.

"Gordon? Gordon Massachusetts." Mike had replied.

"Oh, that town's adorable! I went out to a wedding there last year." Katy gushed.

This was not an uncommon response. Gordon had been a shooting location for half a dozen Oscar-nominated movies and many weddings. It was quintessential New England. Cows and horses and farm stands with honor boxes. Gordon was the kind of place that was big into the slaughter and rape only a few hundred years ago. Today, it serves as mattress storage.

It had a couple of boarding schools and two restaurants that turned into wedding venues during the summer. There were lots of farms that'd been divvied up into subdivisions for YUPPIEs, DINKs, and a million other acronomical social climbing professional creatures (ASPiCs).

Growing up in Gordon, Mike took any excuse to get away. He attended a Catholic High School four towns over. Mike spent every weekend escaping to Boston on the commuter rail. It was hard to say if he intentionally avoided Gordon or if its empty nature operated as a negative vacuum, regularly ejecting him.

Katy then hit him with a curve ball, "Did you explore Staplehurst Castle often as a kid?"

Mike had no idea what she was talking about.

"Oh yeah, all the time." He responded.

That was a new one. He didn't know what she was talking about.

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"Mom," Mike called his parents from the car as he was on the road for the hour-and-a-half drive out. "Have you ever heard of a castle in Gordon?"

"Oh yes. Staplehurst, over on Tod Hill."

"I don't suppose that's new?" Mike asked.

"Oh no. I want to say early 1900s?"

"Huh. a castle from the 1900s. Someone asked me about it today. I swear I've never heard of it before."

"There's a lot of weddings over there. I think it's a facade. I don't think it was ever a real castle."

"Curious. Good to know. I should be rolling in around eight or so."

"Sounds good. We'll see you then! You're loved!" was Mike's mom's quirky way of saying, "I love you," without using the personal pronoun.

"Love you too, Mom," he replied before hanging up.

It'd been more than five years since he'd been to the home where he'd grown up. He didn't live far away, but youthful aversions stayed strong with him. Besides, his parents had always been happy to have the excuse to travel to see him in the city.

Mike didn't enjoy driving in the city. Yet Mike always enjoyed these late-night highway drives. In high school, it was an escape. It was radio at full blast. It was Toadie's "Possum Kingdom" and Spacehog's "In the Meantime," Sublime, Nirvana, and Nine Inch Nails.

Now, he listens to podcasts about food. "A Hotdog is a Sandwich." "The Sporkful."

He'd set the cruise control and navigate in and amongst infrequent road companions. There was always someone blasting through at over 160 mph. There was usually one guy weaving erratically, especially at holiday time. There was also at least one dude who'd sneak up on you without headlights. It was a weird kind of warm loneliness. It was an hour-long elevator ride where you never looked anyone in the eye, but their presence was felt. They were irritating and yet somehow welcome companions on the pitch-black drive.

Exit 90.

The highway offered little for lighting. But nothing was darker than turning onto the midnight spaghetti of roads that meandered through these small New England towns. People love to joke that Boston was built on cow paths. These paths still occasionally guided actual cows.

There were loads of greying barns, decaying cemeteries, and leaning farmhouses - none visible in the dark. Every so often, you'd pass a home with lights on inside. Something about the distance and the darkness made them look like illuminated dollhouses. They were homes that looked more like model train tableaus than human dwellings.

As he passed one of these figmented homes, his mind wandered through that very simile. It was something he'd turned over in his head since high school. Suddenly, he realized this simple self-distraction had shut off his internal autopilot.

He'd come to a fork in the road, and he couldn't remember which way to go for the life of him. He'd made this drive many times as a teen, yet here he was, at a total loss.

He pulled over and looked at his phone. No bars. Dr. Bell's dream shattered by NIMBY and a dearth of cell towers.

"Guess I'll drive around until I recognize something," said Mike to an empty car and you, the reader.

With that, Mike forked to the right. He turned the podcast off, focusing on the dark contours of the world around him. He'd go down this road a little way and see if there was something he recognized. If he went along for the next ten minutes and was still in unfamiliar territory, he'd turn back and go the other way.

He kept recognizing things, or at least he thought he was. He was equally confident that he had no idea where he was.

He came up over a rolling hill in the road. There was a break in the trees. Open fields spread out on either side of the road. Suddenly, the sky was filled with a bright moon and a salt shaker's worth of stars. It was the serenity of no light pollution.

Of course, thanks to Chekov's rules, illuminated in spectral spillage were the ruins of a castle.

Perhaps "castle" was generous. It was a circular tower of knobled rocks that was clearly empty inside. There were four visible window arches. Through them, you could see all the way to the rocky walls on the opposite side. It was no more than two stories tall and could be described as chode-like.

It was anti-climactic, but he couldn't deny there was a child-driven desire to climb it.

His only thought, other than an ill-advised compulsion to explore it at that moment, was, "Huh. I guess that means I'm lost."