High White Sound
a novel
hannah herchenbach
Copyright 2010 Hannah Herchenbach
dedication
For all my friends who are my family,
and all my family, who are my friends
for comfort
These are the times that try men’s souls.
Thomas Paine
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade
WH Auden, 'September 1, 1939'
Table of Contents
Prologue
i The City
One. The Friends
Two. The Visit
Three. The Party
Four. The Wish
ii The Island
Five. The Detour
Six. The Kids
Seven. Taken Away
Eight. Then
Nine. And
Ten. So
Eleven. Next
Twelve. Home
Thirteen. The Show
Fourteen. Until
Fifteen. Then
iii The Fall
Sixteen. Taken Away
Seventeen. The Kids
Eighteen. The Detour
Nineteen. The Wish
Twenty. The Party
Twenty-One. The Visit
Twenty-Two. The Friends
Epilogue
prologue
At least once, every ordinary person wakes up on an otherwise perfectly normal morning with a simple but troubling thought: How did I get here? It happened to me earlier today, when I was stirred from my nap in the grass atop this hill by a deafening tear. I sat up to find a seal with the tatters of what had been my white dress in his mouth. It was my only article of clothing, and I am now uncertain as to what to wear.
While the incident wasn't terribly unusual, it nevertheless reminded me that I have been out on this island for years with no real purpose, roaming as if in search of something I never knew I had lost. Some consider spending one's days on remote hilltops and abandoned beaches without a single thought for the preservation of one's future a tragic waste of time, a complete loss of potential, or worst yet – an absolute failure.
But the view is so nice I find it hard to leave. At sunset black dolphins leap from the waves, and at night you can make out shadows of yellow penguins moving in groups across the sand under the glow of the moon.
So what does it matter that I'm hidden out here at the end of the world, whiling my youth away? People who glorify youth have got it all wrong. After all, it was the innocents who led me to run screaming out here in the first place. It was only chance that I escaped a similar fate – though in some ways I haven't really escaped it at all – for it is now, in the folly of my youth, that I am about to kill something I love.
But to explain what I'm doing out here, with my typewriter on a mountain in the rain, with my torn white dress blowing in the wind, would require going back to the other side of the world, back to a time of innocence when everyone was guilty, back to the dawn of that summer when all that I knew about the world blew apart.
I have but one aid to serve my memory – this vial of ambrosia by my side, for it was the night I found the bottle that it all began. Gold flakes circle and swirl through the amber liquid like falling snow, and as I gaze in rapture at their dizzy patterns, in an instant it all comes rushing back. New York.
part one
the city