The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Sixteen: Unionville Masonic Lodge

My final year of high school ended, and I tried to do as little to commemorate the achievement as possible. No parties, no yearbook, I skipped the senior picnic. The only reason I went to my graduation is that my parents threatened to disown me if I didn’t. I sat quietly, accepted my diploma, and then asked to be taken home.

“Aren’t you going to the big graduation party?” my mom asked. Every year, the school puts on a big shindig at a gym or health club or something like that, with lots of free food and swimming and basketball courts and whatnot, to encourage the entire senior class to spend one last night all together. It tries to be so good that no one else would consider having a graduation party that night, so the entire school doesn’t get drunk and wrap themselves around telephone polls around town. It is pretty much universally attended.

I said no, though, because I wanted to get home and start packing for college. I was finished with Burlington, to be honest. I wanted to get the hell out, before this town took anything else from me.

We mingled for a bit in the cafeteria, where there was punch and brownies and all that. A couple of my friends couldn’t believe that I was skipping the party, but I shrugged and held my ground. I think I told a couple people I had an unbearable headache and I needed to get some sleep.

The reception started breaking up so the seniors could get on their buses and head over to wherever this party was taking place (it was kept a secret, even though it was basically the same every year). I got in my car and was about to go home when I saw this kid I kind of knew—his name was Brian—get on one of the buses. It made me a little sad to see him. He was a nice kid, but he wasn’t one of my closest friends and I knew that I would never see him again. And then I started looking into the buses’ windows and saw kid after kid I would never see again for the rest of my life. Besides maybe a dozen good friends at most, this whole mess of people, the peripheral characters who had been around me since kindergarten, were out of my life for good. I regretted skipping the party and decided to go, but then the buses pulled out of the parking lot.

I jumped into my car and sped off after them as quickly as I could. I blew through four red lights—I have no idea how I have such bad luck with traffic lights, but I’ve never tailed anyone without driving through a red light or two—but I made it to some health club in Avon, right behind the buses. It was fortunate, too, because I would have been lost in Avon, depressed as hell and not ready to go home.

The party was ho-hum, nothing special. I left a little early, since I had my car and I could. I mostly just ate, a lot, and studied these people so I could remember as many of them as possible, even the ones I didn’t like. The premature nostalgia my classmates had been living for the past few months—I had to pack all of that into the space of a few hours.

I got in my car at about 3 AM. I think everyone else stayed there until 4, but I didn’t feel like sticking around. I didn’t tell anyone that I was leaving, because I find that kind of thing, done regularly enough, has a distinct effect on people. They think there’s something very strange and maybe important about you, that motivates you to leave a place without saying goodbye or making some kind of formal announcement. It gives me an odd mystique, which I desperately need, because truth be told, I’m completely transparent and dull most of the time.

I didn’t want to go home, so I decided to drive through every town I knew. I started with Avon, cut through Simsbury to get to Canton, then looped around and drove through Unionville and Farmington to get to West Hartford and Newington and New Britain and all the way into Hartford, then back into Farmington where I took a series of dark residential streets until I guessed my way into Bristol. Once I was in Bristol, I turned around to avoid Burlington, got back into the center of Farmington and was trying to figure out a way to get to Harwinton and Torrington and Thomaston without driving past my house or the school when I stopped a little short kind of in the middle of Route 4 and someone slammed into me from behind.

I was fine—my seatbelt was on and my airbag didn’t even deploy—but I was pretty shaken. I took a second to collect myself and then went outside. The other driver—a girl about my age—was already inspecting the damage, clearly distressed.

“I’m so sorry,” she told me. “I think everything’s fine, but my car doesn’t work.”

“Then something isn’t fine,” I suggested.

“Please don’t be mad at me!” she yelled. “Oh God, I’m such an idiot.”

“It’s my fault,” I said, and I explained how I had stopped short, for no reason.

“But I slammed into you,” she said. “I should have been watching. I was switching CDs. I wasn’t even watching.”

I tried to remember what a person is supposed to do after a car accident. “Are we supposed to exchange insurance information?” I asked, noticing a small dent on the back of my car and a larger one on the front of hers.

“I don’t even know what insurance information is,” she said, grabbing my shirt in a kind of joking, exaggerated panic. It made me smile.

“Neither do I,” I admitted. “I guess we just show each other our insurance papers, and write stuff down.” We did that. Her name was Maryann. Middle name Elizabeth. Little things like that, you remember. And for the life of me, I can’t remember the color of her car.

After we took down what we figured we needed from our insurance papers, we sat down next to each other on the curb. The sun still hadn’t risen, but it was already heaving light over the horizon. The sky was gray, like the whole world was cigarette smoke. No one was on the road. We didn’t know what to do.

“You can go if you want to,” she said. “Although it would be awful nice if you could drive me to a gas station so I could make a phone call or something.”

“Do you have a quarter?”

“No. Do you?”

I checked my pockets. “No, I guess not.”

She gave me a funny look, like I had said something stupid. But there was no hostility in it. All the times I’ve been called stupid in my life, she remains the only person who was able to do it without a trace of hostility. Even when people are joking, it’s always with an edge, a kind of competitive, self-defensive malice. Never with her. “So why did you ask me if I had a quarter, if you weren’t even going to give me one?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t want to drive you all the way over to a gas station and then leave you there without a quarter.”

“Well that’s nice of you, anyway.”

“Of course, I wasn't going to give you the quarter, even if I found one. I was thinking of buying a gumball.” I smiled, and when she laughed I smiled a little more. “Hey, uh,” I started, nervously, “I don’t think I got your name,” pretending I hadn’t read it and recited it a thousand times to myself already.

“Maryann,” she said. “And you’re Chris,” betraying no embarrassment at all.

“Yeah.” I picked up a pebble and threw it at my car. “So what are we supposed to do?”

“We can call a tow truck, or an insurance company or AAA or something. Our parents, maybe.”

“We should do all of those things,” not moving.

“I’m such an idiot,” she moaned.

“It’s my fault,” I told her again. “Of course, they’re going to say it’s your fault, because state law always blames it on the person in back in these kinds of situations.” My driver’s ed teacher taught us that. If you rear-end someone, even if the guy in front slammed on the breaks for no reason on a busy highway, it's your fault in the eyes of the police. Of course, this guy also told us that it was illegal to drive with sandals, and he wore the same yellow sweater every single time we ever saw him, so who knows.

“My fault?” she said, now like she couldn’t believe it.

“‘Fraid so. State law.”

“Not if we were going in reverse.” I began to say something, but she raised her arms in the air, victorious, and I laughed.

We talked for another hour or two. Cars started to drive past, and finally someone pulled over. “You two need help?” he asked. We must have looked like we didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, until we looked over and saw our little car crash and remembered.

“Oh, I guess not,” I said. “My car’s fine, I can drive her someplace.”

“So what the fuck did I pull over for?” he asked, mad at us for just sitting there all this time, like he knew we had just killed two hours goofing around. He got in his car and drove off, and it was then that I figured this must have been the longest conversation I had ever had. I’m not a big talker, even now.

After that guy left, we sort of remembered what we were supposed to be doing and I offered to drive her home. She lived in Farmington, and we exchanged phone numbers in her driveway as I was dropping her off. It was the easiest time I’ve ever had dealing with a girl in my life. I called her that weekend and we went to a movie.

We ended up seeing each other almost every day, that summer. Maryann was one of the first people I felt I really got along with. Everyone else I tolerated, and they tolerated me, and that was the human condition. What a cynical bastard I was. Maryann snapped me out of it, at least for that summer.

One day in July, I picked her up in front of her house. She jumped into the car and kissed me on the cheek, which is what she always did. To anyone else, it probably sounds a little crazy to remember that with so much warmth, like I was uniquely privileged, but it still kind of blows me away, the way she was in general.

“I was reading about the Masons today,” she said. This was in the early days of Wikipedia, and we were still figuring out all the weird things you could find on that thing.

“You mean my neighbors?” I asked. I lived next-door to this family named the Masons. Nice people, except for their stupid dog that they never kept on a leash. So every time you drove down the street, the thing would go straight for your wheels, and you’d just see this yipping little cat-sized dog run at your tires and then disappear in your blind spot and all you could do was keep driving and hope you didn’t flatten it, even though you were secretly hoping you would so you never had to deal with that stupid fucking dog ever again. And meanwhile the woman would just watch this dog go for my tires, and probably laugh to herself at how freaked out it would make me.

“No, the Freemasons,” she said. “You know, the secret society?”

“Oh, right right right.”

“They control the world, you know,” she said, matter-of-factly. She didn’t believe it, but she enjoyed the idea. This is a kind of game we played; one of us would say something stupid and the trick was to defend it as long as possible while the other person had to be on the side of boring old logic.

“Don’t they just get together to sit around and wear silly robes and get drunk twice a week?”

“Everything you know about the Masons you learned from that Simpsons episodes where Homer joins the Stonecutters.”

I smiled and nodded. Very proud.

“Do you know how many of the Founding Fathers were Masons?” she asked me.

“No.”

“All of them, basically.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Well, I don’t know. They put a lot of their imagery in currency, and even the way Washington is designed and all that.”

“Does that matter?”

“Well, that’s not the half of it,” she assured me. “They organized our government with their—I don’t know—Masonic principles. That’s why things are the way they are, not because of democracy, but because of a bunch of old white guys who get together in secret buildings and wear robes and manipulate markets and start wars and so on.”

“But there are people who do that anyway in plain sight who don’t wear stupid robes.”

“Oh, these Masons are the ones running the show, don’t be fooled. Besides, isn’t your denial only the attitude people have when they're benefiting from the fucked-up social order and want to keep it the way it is?”

I smiled, because I knew I was about to express a deeper distate for humanity than she had been able to muster, which meant that I would win. “And isn’t that just what people say when they’re too lazy and scared to take responsibility for the fucked-up social order themselves, which only strengthens it exponentially?”

“No,” she said in a goofy voice after a beat, but I was already raising my arms in victory. She grabbed the steering wheel out of reflex, even though we were on a straight road.

“You know,” I said, “there’s a Masonic Temple or something in Unionville.”

“No way!”

“Yeah, it’s got that sign with the G and the ruler and the triangle or whatever that is.”

“Oh my God, of course. I thought that was a hair salon or something.” She was practically jumping out of her seat, she was so excited by this.

“It’s in that same plaza,” I said. “Maybe it’s a big Masonic zoning conspiracy to make sure they always have the best haircuts.”

“Let’s go there,” she said. “Let’s go inside and see it. I want to see it.”

“There’s nothing to see,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I’m one of them.”

“No, seriously.”

I shrugged. “What could possibly be there? Even if there were a conspiracy, this certainly wouldn’t be the headquarters.”

“That’s what they want you to think.”

“Even if they wanted to have their headquarters in some tucked-away, inconspicuous place, there are more tucked-away, more inconspicuous places than this.”

“Don’t you see? That’s the genius of it!”

“It’s probably just some offices, or a pool table and a bar, or a conference room or something.”

She grabbed my shirt. “What would be better than seeing first-hand the real seat of power? The place where people really run the show, that we’re not supposed to know about.”

I rolled my eyes. “The New World Order, right here in Unionville!” Unionville, Connecticut is not even a town. It is a borough of Farmington, a town with a population just a hair under 25,000.

“So if it sucks, then we leave, twelve seconds of our young lives wasted, big loss.”

It was hard to argue with this. And she was so damn enthusiastic about it. The best I could do was delay it. “Not tomorrow,” I said. “I have to go see my grandparents tomorrow,” which was true.

I kept stringing her along and delaying the inevitable until August. My original strategy was to just not mention it and hope she would forget, but she never forgot. I wasn’t even sure why I didn’t want to go. I honestly didn’t expect trouble, because I was sure that it was just a little unremarkable social club of some kind. At the most, I should have been a little reluctant to waste my time, but instead I was dead-set against it, like it was personally or morally objectionable to me, and I didn't want to know why. She kept making me promise that we would go, and I kept ducking and weaving, until that day in August about a week before we were set to leave for colleges in different states when she got into my car with a camcorder.

“What the hell is that for?” I asked.

“Don’t drive anywhere just yet,” she said, and she curled up with her feet on the seat and faced me. “Please. Please, let’s go to the Masonic lodge today.” I sighed. “Please. I really want to see it. We’re barely going to see each other this week, we’ve both got too many things to do. This is our last chance. Please. It’ll be fun. I want to do this with you. Let’s go.” I could tell, it took a lot out of her to ask me like that. She was being pretty serious, and we were hardly ever serious with one another unless we were being very serious, and this was a strange, unexplored, unstable, slightly awkward middle ground. But that’s why I was crazy about her. She asked. And if I said no, she would have been disappointed and she would have sulked for a little bit, but that would have been that.

“Buckle up,” I said. Defeated.

She did, quietly and slowly. I pulled out of her driveway. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she whispered.

I didn’t want to say anything to confirm this, just in case there was a chance I could still get out of it, even though I knew there wasn’t. “Why do you have the camera?”

“We need to tape our findings,” she said, instantly brightening. “We’ll sell it to Fox or something for six figures. They’ll turn it into a big primetime exposé on conspiracies and whatnot.”

“And what if we don’t find anything worth taping?”

But she had already turned the camera on and she was filming me driving down the road. “Here’s Chris,” she narrated. “Now when you’re killed by shady Masonic foot-soldiers for breaking into their inner sanctum, I will escape into the woods, hide out for a few weeks and eventually send this tape in an envelope with no return address to local news stations.”

“Right.”

“So please, give the world one last message before your untimely demise.”

“Yes, thank you for this opportunity,” I said. “I would just like to say that I am greatly gratified that I was murdered, because it proves that I was right about the real power of the Masons, and that skeptical Maryann, who didn’t believe we’d find anything, was all wrong.” Maryann looked into the camera and shook her head, then turned it off.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked.

“I figure we go in there at about 4:10, figure out there’s nothing to see around 4:12, get back to the car at 4:13 and head home disappointed at 4:14.” I blew through a yellow light and she grabbed onto the dashboard. She always said I was a terrible driver.

“Jeez, enough complaining already!” She spun around in her seat so she was facing me again. I shot her a glance that only lasted for as long as I could afford to take my eyes off the road. “What’s wrong with you? You’re supposed to want to do things like this.”

“Things like what?”

“Stupid things. Mini-adventures, exploration, breaking and entering. This is what being too young to legally drink is all about.” I still remember every word of this.

“I’ve never been a fan of stupid things. Especially stupid things that involve breaking and entering.”

She threw her hands in the air in mock exasperation. “It’s not like we’re going to climb in through the vents and rappel down the side of the building or anything. We’re going to knock on the door and try to see what’s inside.”

“Well I just don’t see what the point of all this is.” I didn’t believe it, though. I think I just wanted it to be pointless, so I could feel better about wanting to skip it.

“I can’t go alone,” she said. “I want you to come with me. Isn’t that enough? If you refused to come with me, I just wouldn’t go for a while, and then eventually, I’d go with someone else.”

I shrugged, even though it made me kind of queasy to think about. We were there, by now. She handed me the camera, which she had zipped up in a little fabric case. We got out of the car and starting walking up to the door of the Masonic Lodge, which was kind of on the side of the building. She grabbed my arm and pulled herself up against me and hit my shoulder, just a walking bundle of excitement. And I had to admit that I was a little excited. Now that we were here, it was kind of great. I dropped the veil of detachment, and I guess she could tell, just from my body language, because she kissed me again when we got up to the door. It was very inconspicuous, as far as doors go. Small and wooden. There was a sign nailed to it, which read “Masonic Temple. Unionville, Connecticut. (860) 673-5399.” Maryann tried the knob, and it was open.

Right in front of us was nothing more than a staircase, leading up to another door on the second floor. We stood in front of the stairs for a second, as if we were silently asking them for permission to climb. They were just twelve narrow stairs, going straight up, with an ugly green handrail, but we felt we were standing in front of something religious. After that second, Maryann started up quickly, bounding up two or three at a time, using the railing to fling herself up, like she had to get there before me. I started up after her, the camera bouncing against my thigh. I never took it out of the case that day.

At one point, near the top, she turned around to make sure I was keeping up. “This is how the whole world happens!” she called back at me without stopping. “Yeah,” I said, a little too lightheaded to figure out whether or not she was being serious. Because I believed her, regardless. We were about to stumble upon nothing less than the reason behind every one of the world’s questions.

She got to the top first, and then waited for me to catch up. I was only a couple of steps behind her, but she had this look in her eye like she would explode if she had to wait even a second longer. She grabbed my hand and pulled me over that last step, and we turned around and faced the door together. She brought her hand to the horizontal metal bar to push it open, and paused for just a second. It was clear Plexiglas and we could see right through it. We both looked before she pushed the door open, so we should have known what was coming, and in fact, we did. But somehow, it was still a shock.

Empty. Completely empty. It was a big open room, like a banquet hall, with wood floors and blank walls and a high plaster ceiling. At the far end, there was a graceful molding of simple arches, like in the foyer of an old Colonial house. It suggested the front of a theater or church, but there was no stage or altar or anything like that. Nor was the rest of the huge room filled with chairs or pews. It must have been eight thousand square feet of empty space. I won’t pretend I wasn’t scared.

Neither of us said anything. We could hear our breath echoing sharply off the ceiling and the back wall, stinging our ears. Razzing us. She swore, as loud as she could, so she could hear it bounce off the bare white walls.

“What is this place?” I asked. The room answered: Nothing. Not only was there nothing there, but the nothingness was so profound that it was hard to imagine that anything had ever been, here or elsewhere. Like it was built empty and then kept that way, or maybe it hadn’t even been built, and it had just happened. There was too much air in the room. There was so much light, and I have no idea where it was all coming from. There must have been windows, because we hadn’t flicked any switches, but all I remember is wall, and moldings.

“There must be something here,” Maryann suddenly whispered, in a kind of panic. She ran over to the wall and kind of pressed up against it, like she thought a secret door would open up or something. I don’t think she needed to find very much to satisfy either of us. Even just a card table and a couple of folding chairs would have at least been something. We just needed to see evidence of life in here, because it all couldn’t come to this, an empty room, full of air. But the way she was feeling that wall, it was very uncanny. She wasn’t pushing on it, but she was kind of rubbing it, like if she felt it, she thought it would feel her back and that’s how she would know that something was there, in that room with us.

She ran around the whole place, pressing on the wall every now and then, until I called her back. “There’s nothing here!” I shouted.

“I know,” she said quietly, and she was very far away, but the voice bounced around the room and found me as if she were whispering into my ear. She walked over from the other end of the room, and I waited, listening to every footstep. When she got over to me, we turned around and headed for the exit. She slipped her hand into mine, but there was nothing in it. The gesture was as empty as the room.

It was hard to come to terms with that failure of ours, for whatever reason. We didn’t talk much, and I just drove her home. That week, we were busy and didn’t see each other much, and when we did, our conversation was forced, like the best we could do was remember how it had been before, and try to recreate it. We promised to keep in touch, but after I had been in Boston for a week and neither of us had even tried, that’s when I knew it was all over and I would never see her again.