High White Sound

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