High White Sound by Hannah Herchenbach
* * *
Later that day I was safely hidden away on the floor of Pete’s room. Over the air and under the currents of the autumn wind, the sound of Eric Dolphy’s Memorial Album drifted in through the curtains. We stared at the secrets in the ceiling as increasingly bizarre noise glided out from his speakers. Piano riffs and sax harmonies drifted by occasionally, as if they got bored with the song from time to time and wandered off to the bar or got lost in the corner with a pretty girl.
I held up a cassette. “I brought you a set.”
“Why on earth did you put it on a cassette?”
“I don’t know. I just really like cassettes.”
“Do you just really like crappy things?”
“Hush.” I pushed play and let roll a 1946 stint Bird recorded with Earl Coleman. It was full of jukebox songs like “Slow Boat To China” and “Hey There” that were generally throwaways – but that was Bird’s gift. He made the ethereal out of the mundane.
Pete stood up. “Well – I’m off to the library.” He picked up a plastic sword that had been found behind a couch. “Perhaps I should keep this sword, for trips to Butler,” he mused, swiping it out from his belt loop and pointing it about the room. “How dare you card me, security guard!” And I was holding my stomach and falling over laughing on the couches.
He pointed the sword at me. “You should come.”
“Nah,” I chortled. “I hate that place.”
Pete laughed. “What, now that you're no longer sleeping there on the weekends?”
I froze. “How did you know that?”
“I worked there all freshman year,” Pete said. “How could I forget? You were always there. You would bring flowers, and candles, and knew all the guards.”
He had me at flowers and guards. I guess I could go back. The library would be beautiful for photographs. But first I put on my favourite white dress.
We darted across the campus in the pouring rain until we crossed into the light of the columns and out from the black.
The kids stared gape-jawed as we laid out candles alongside poetry stacks. There was Baudelaire, Verlaine, Ducasse and Yeats. Then there were figs, feather boas, a blue hand clock and a light-up garden gnome that we plugged into the wall. All around us all the other students still had their jaws dropped.
Why couldn’t they see the world as the island did? That man in a state of nature was – happy! And there were stars, millions of miles away burning with the same light that pumped through their blood, and the kids there knew it! God is dead, and yet I saw angels. Happy, unconscious and innocent, just like Rousseau said.
I had sympathy though. I too had spent a lot of time in my life banging my head against my desk. Even thought to myself once in the heated middle of one assignment, pressed to the final hour and sweat dripping out in fat beads down my head, what it must feel like to accept total defeat, think you can't do it, may as well end it here, this life I mean, because if you can't finish this assignment, then you can't finish this class you've failed and if you can't make it here then well we don't want you back at home – a sort of Spartan “Come home with your shield or on it" type sentiment.
There was a desperation in it that I remembered from the island. As above, so below, like the alchemists said. They were all looking for something, I guess.
I flipped pages and read Christopher Smart and John Clare. But why should I listen to Baudelaire? Where did all the decadence lead? Suicide attempts, and a gig running guns for Ethiopian warlord kings.
Still I dreamed of millionaires, trick girls and drag queens. Racing off cliffs and scrambling up trees and swallowing fire was more sane than a world where everyone was caught running harder and faster just to save their own skins. But then why were they so sad? They dance under the guise that they didn't care about anything, but they did. Death terrified them. It was not Oisin’s magical world where no one had to age. They were growing up, but the only thing that changed was the lines on their face.
Round and round the days go, spinning faster and tumbling over one another with nights, runs, tales, hangovers, lipsticks, bills and beers, until it all churns into a giant blur. The higher things went in that world the more they went carousel back to the start, to the bed, to the lighter and the drawn shades in the early twilight, the same dirty cabs with a fresh pair of hollow eyes.
The shine was slowly fading from their eyes. Maybe this is getting old – trying to beat time. Until you’re trapped in the same moment as if in a beautiful painting that was slowly fading in the sun. They were the last, loneliest and loveliest, and no one would ever know it, least of all themselves. It was a city without a home, abandoned by its country. So caught up in some fantasy they could not see their beauty. Instead they were all looking for some magical pill to come along and give their lives some meaning.
I longed for Jack, who could always come up with something – but he was gone. Even with all the things I knew, there was something about him I couldn’t shake. I knew Jack belonged somewhere, deserved something far better than any of those simple things. But without a future, all he did was drink. I wondered why he would feel the need to hide himself away from the people he professed to love, why he felt the need to be someone he was not. It was as if he were pulling at all the pieces of himself and could only find his center when diving into the pretty white lights of late night fantasy. But he had gotten lost somewhere along the way, tripped over and caught in what others felt he should be. That’s all you have to do to get yourself out of something real ugly – keep your eye on something else and never take it off.
With all that pounding pavement you feel almost certain that you’re changing the world, one night, one line at a time. But who’s going to hear it? Then you wake up one day, and four years have passed by while you were inside the frozen mirror.
I could not stay in that place, on that island spinning on the edge of oblivion, where people run and bash into one another in endless circles.
It couldn’t happen to me, I swallowed. I didn’t have to worry; none of this was real – I was back in New York. I wondered about the others.
Maybe it wasn’t a place to be saved. It was just a place full of people who had run away from everything and never went home.
It’s a hard swallow, the moment that you realize someone does not match the fantasy you made in your head. It’s like the grass has been yanked out from under your feet, as you wonder where the fantasies you have been living by end and the real world begins.
I wondered if it could all be avoided if we had found one another sooner. I tried to imagine another world, maybe on another island, where we could stop time, bend it and twist it to catch each other at the right moment.
But it was too late. I knew only one thing. If I did nothing, everything that I knew would vanish without a trace. If I didn’t save it, it would all disappear, like sea foam exploding on the waves.
It was beautiful but I was the only one who could see. It broke my heart. What is the purpose of beauty? If all the magic you see is going to fade away?
What am I chasing anyway? What are these things I see? Are they figments of my mind? And I’m scared of the soaring light as it flashes all around me – what if it’s nothing but moonbeams? Their perfect forms were nothing but hazy shapeless images in my head. It felt near impossible to make words out of the long white cloud of my mind.
Maybe this was how people got old, I thought. Maybe it comes from hoping and wanting things to be different but feeling powerless to change it. Feeling stuck somewhere while dreaming about all the places you can’t go.
Had the whole thing had been found at the bottom of a bottle? Even if it all was just a load of chemicals, this drowning in his sky and sea, did that make the things I had felt any less real? Or would I one day wake up and wonder where every feeling had gone, after all the dreams and every last hope had flown away?
Could I ever remember every last piece? No. I wouldn't even try. But maybe I could just remembe
I wanted to bawl. He came back, but then he went away. But for the moment he was there, everything was okay.
It hit midnight and the lights in the room all flickered off. And I felt so small as they all went out. Thinking, please.
Come back.
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