Everyone says my hometown doesn’t exist. I’m beginning to believe them. But that doesn’t mean that was always the case.
Let me back up.
The first time I encountered this bizarre denial was after my first semester at college. I trekked to the Amtrak station, luggage in tow, and asked the attendant for one ticket to Casey Falls, Michigan, please. She looked up from her desk and blinked. “Where?”
“Casey Falls, Michigan,” I repeated, a smidge slower this time.
After she performed a search on her computer, then sought counsel from her manager, they determined that, if Casey Falls was a real place, it wasn’t a stop on any of their lines.
“How can that be?” I protested. I could see its train station as clearly in my mind’s eye as their bewildered faces before me. Every spring break, I took the train with my family into Chicago, boarding at seven o’clock in the morning at the platform just east of Berry Street. Dad would hand me two dollars to buy a Coke and a bag of pretzels from the vending machines before the train arrived. My younger sister Janey and I sat impatiently on the benches waiting for our journey to begin.
But relaying this memory to the exasperated attendants did little to correct their system, which omitted Casey Falls from its available destinations.
I spent that Christmas alone in my dorm, desperately trying to get ahold of my family, but none of them answered. Mom, Dad, sister, phone, email, text, Facebook — nothing. Even stranger was that, overnight, their online presence vanished. Erased socials, bounced emails. When I called again, a recording informed me that the numbers I was trying to reach had been disconnected.
What is going on?
The following two weeks — ordinarily spent opening presents, reconnecting with high school friends, ringing in the new year — were instead subsumed under my intense investigation. I scrubbed the internet for any mention of my hometown. I came up empty-handed. Despite endless hours scouring Google, Yahoo, even Bing, I found no mention of the central Michigan burg, ensconced in forest, home to Casey Falls Army Training Camp and the defunct, collapsed copper mines. Even Google Maps erased Casey Falls from its records. Where ordinarily I would see the cluster of homes and farms and Main Street, there was only a green swath of forestland.
My hometown had literally been wiped off the map.
Worse yet, it was beginning to disappear from my own memory.
As break rolled on and my ceaseless search failed to yield a shred of evidence of my hometown’s existence, I noticed my own recollection of it fading. While staring bleary-eyed at the television on New Years Eve, watching revelers crowd Times Square to watch the spangled ball drop, I realized I couldn’t remember any previous New Years Eve. How had I spent them in Casey Falls? Maybe it was common to forget a few, for their memories to bleed into one another, to mix up which party went with which year, but to lose every New Years Eve from one’s personal history? I felt hollow, and in the void where Casey Falls and my preceding eighteen years of memories should have been, something dark and sinister lurked.
When my roommate returned in January and saw that I’d been holed up in our dorm for the entire break, he naturally enquired what happened. “What happened indeed!” was my mad response.
Desperate for a memory of home, even if secondhand, I interrogated Sean. “Surely you remember me talking about home at some point, right?” I asked. And while he agreed that, surely, in our various two a.m. chats we must’ve touched on the subject, he was chagrined to admit nothing specific returned.
The silver lining to this distressing chat was that I now had a partner. Sean, fascinated by my absent origin, took up the cause with me. He caught up quick, performing his own research online before arriving at the conclusion that we had to see for ourselves.
So, on a weekend in late January, he drove us in his junky sedan into the heart of the mitten, to where Casey Falls should’ve carved out a space for itself from the surrounding forest. To my horror, we found only trees. Where Main should have intersected with Blanchard, there was only a dirt drive reaching back into the woods. Sean didn’t think his car would handle the uneven road too well, but after some pleading, he acquiesced. We drove slow along the forested road, tree branches squeezing us into a tunnel of foliage.
“Right here!” I said. “Casey Falls should be right here!”
I leapt out of the car and raced through the woods. I’m not sure why, I don’t think it was rational, just my emotions taking control, a medley comprising anger, grief, confusion, fear, that propelled me through the underbrush until I tripped over something metal. I turned back to find a green box, like a geocache, resting on the forest floor. Inside, pages yellowed with age featured some sort of code scrawled across them, written with only half-decent penmanship. “What the hell is that?” asked Sean when he finally caught up to me.
It was the question we tried pairing with an answer over the ensuing month. Neither of us were real codebreakers, so we shopped the pages around campus, taking it to math nerds and professors in the hopes one of them might crack it. One by one, they tried their best to decipher the documents, but each one met invariably with defeat. One professor called it the toughest code she’d ever encountered while another suggested in all likelihood the pages were rubbish.
But the fact that I’d found it where my hometown should have been kept me from accepting the latter explanation. Something was written in those pages, something that helped explain what happened to Casey Falls.
But I’ll never uncover its secrets. Because, on March 3rd, someone tore our dorm room apart and the only thing they took with them was the coded pages.
Spooked by this flagrant invasion of privacy, Sean told me he would pursue the Casey Falls mystery no further. He believed that by showing the documents around campus, we’d attracted the attention of the feds — CIA, NSA, some other three-letter agency no one had ever heard of, and now we were being watched.
“Whatever happened to your hometown,” Sean said, “they don’t want anyone to find out.”
The next week, Sean transferred out, enrolling in a school on the east coast. He left without saying goodbye, another exit without ceremony.
I’ve since taken a barista job to be able to stay in Chicago through the summer, since I’ve got nowhere else to go. While reckoning with the fact I’ve become an orphan, in every sense of the word, I can’t help shaking the feeling that someone is watching me. Whatever happened to Casey Falls, it wasn’t good. I can feel it in my bones, the unheard screams of family and neighbors vibrating in the marrow. I feel them, and it makes me sick, but I cling to the horror because it’s all I have left of home.