“White Noise Woods”
I’m in my bed. My eyes are closed, and I try to keep them that way. The assaulting blue light in my room threatens this comfort I’ve desperately fought for. Who thought it was a good idea to make the screen of an alarm clock shine bright blue? Who in their right mind gave the buttons of a bedside fan luminous bright lights? Who needs to be reminded in the dead of night that they picked the ‘high’ setting?
I reach to my bedside table and flip the clock on its face. One threat gone. Then there is the fan, both an ally and a nemesis. Most nights I can stop the light by throwing a rumpled shirt in front of those buttons. This machine has one saving grace. With one source of sensory overload stomped brings light to another. Its thrumming sound keeps the other noise at bay, that terrible sound. Its blades chop up the thick night air, a consistent thrumming. I need that noise. It’s so much better than the alternative.
One day as a kid, I began to hear a noise, like a ‘beep’. The problem is that I still hear it. I forgot the day I first heard the ‘B’, but I still hear the ‘EE’. I’ve yet to hear the ‘P’.
Sound drowns my tinnitus. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a noise machine, ever since I was a very young child. I don’t know if my parents knew of it, but they’ve made sure I’ve always had one. When I grew older, of course I tried throwing it out. Like all the toys and heroes I had, everything I loved needed to go. Of course, that little machine was what made me reconsider my puberty driven toxic masculinity. It made me think that the one thing that could make me sleep was childish. I learned very quickly that I couldn’t last without it.
Fans soon became my next resort. Their whirring and rumbling reverberate, rotary blades breaking apart the noise in my head. Since then, they’ve been what keeps me down out night, even if my current one is treacherous with shimmering blue buttons.
Its treacherous in more ways than one. Fans don’t only exhale gusts of cold breath, but they suck air in. Over the course of many many nights, they suck in dust, lint, hair, powder, and anything they can get their blades on. Dust that clings to the blades, dust that seeps into the moving parts. A soft consistent whirr becomes a chunky beat. Every few seconds, a loud ‘CHACK’ spits from the mouth of the machine at irregular intervals.
The fan deteriorates further. It’s no longer a pattern. As I try to sleep, the continuous rumbling, the rick-tick-tattering, the sound of loose metal scraping against plastic chips away at my skull. Its unbearable to listen to a machine kill itself from the inside
‘Rick-tick-tack-rick-tick-tack-kururururururururur-rick-tick tack!’ spitters the machine.
I press the shimmering blue button and my room is once again dark and free from the assaulting noise. Then I hear what it was keeping at bay. With the press of a button, my room was filled with literal deafening silence. Empty space replaced itself with a dense fog of high pitch noise, bouncing off the walls, through the boards of my bed, through the bone of my skull. My ears shriek.
I’m now out of bed, digging through the closet in my hallway. Columns of neatly folded blankets and beach towels tumble to the floor, casualties of my assault on their domain.
‘Where is it?’ I ask myself frantically, until I hear the clack of my finger nail hitting hard plastic. There it is, my sweet sweet childhood friend. I whisper sweet prayers, please to my old companion, apologies for ever betraying them. The machine as a half a hemisphere of white plastic wielding a gray circle within, no doubt the speaker. It had a basic knob to turn it on, as well as a few buttons to select the specific sound.
The broken fan is dethroned from its pedestal. All hail the new king. My childhood fan is plugged into where they rightfully belong, at my bedside. I turn the knob.
Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba bump.
The digital sound creeps out of its container. Even through the tinny distortion, the sound of a beating heart is instantly recognizable. I understand it is meant for young children who were used to falling asleep to their mother’s heartbeat, but it always creeped me out and it still does.
I cycle through the noises. The waves of an ocean beat at the sand, the occasional gull calling crying out in the background. Howling wind streaming through a clearing, the whispers of grass and leaves as they sway in the gusts. A waterfall dripping down smooth stone. I’m very close to it now, I can feel it.
Forest rain. A steady flow of droplets pass through a forest. Its tinny, like all the other noises, but as my ears focus, the digitization fades. My mind fills in the details. I’m in bed now and the forest is much clearer, so much more focused.
It’s a nostalgic noise, a noise that has accompanied many dreams. The noise I woke screaming to when the monsters finally got me. Sometimes I heard their cackles and felt their fingers moments into the waking world. Best not to think about those now, not where I am now. It’s a nostalgic noise.
The moisture seeps through the forest. Everything is dripping, bolts of cold rain splashing and splattering in puddles, against leaves, everything rustling, pattering. Cold air, chilly air, damp air. This forest has been with me for so long. So so long. My forest. I’ve never truly explored my forest. It’s something that has built over these many long years.
Rain is pattering, a rapid succession of tunks and dunts, blunt splashes that mend and weld together into one consistent noise. Damp air, organic, thick with moisture.
TOOM!
Something is rumbling. I shift my body, trying to find comfort again. My legs kick and my blanket breaks into thin sheets.
TOOM!
My room is rumbling. I try to open my eyes and I can’t, like ripping yourself from a nightmare that won’t end. I’m kicking and the remains of my blankets scatter like a whirlwind, my skin cold in the damp wet air, my legs scraping against crooked floorboards.
TOOM!
My room is shaking. I would be able to process this better if my head hadn’t slammed against the cold iron, waves of pain reverberating through my skull. At first I think the gong noise is my brain rattling in my head and not the cauldron.
TOOM!
The room shakes and both me and the cauldron roll across the floorboard, the mental bowl clattering across the surface. Air hisses through my teeth, my head throbbing too much to let me think the appropriate profanity.
“Nye roogaisya, pozhaluysta. Tvo-i klyatviy sil'nyeye, chem tiy dumayesh!”
My eyes are open. I’m not in my room. My room was dark with a faint blue glow. I don’t live in a cabin, and I don’t sleep on floorboards in a pile of leaves. My room isn’t illuminated by dozens of red, black, and white candles, suspended by string up on the ceiling.
Then my eyes lock onto the source of the noise, or should I say the source’s eyes, its porcelain blinkers the size of literal dinner-plates. Out its gargantuan flopping jowls produced a shockingly human voice.
“Не ругайся, пожалуйста. Твои клятвы сильнее, чем ты думаешь!” she repeated, the entire cabin rattling under her heavy voice.
There I am, my brain burning with pain as I try to comprehend what is in front of me. Its very hard to figure out what part of her body is her body and what part is her head. Her head is a third of the size of the entire room, hulking over whatever body she has. Her face is a gnarled wood carving, a bas relief in the thickest walnut tree the artist could find. A thick brow hangs over her silver eyes, the willow vines of her hair flicking with each exaggerated expression. Despite her appearance, her words sound like something I would expect out of a human, surprisingly, and despite this, they echo deep in her throat, almost like a cavern-system through her body. It reverberates and leaves a tinny noise weaving through her words.
“Don’t speak the language of your mother’s mother, do you? For shame, but understandable.” Even when scolding me, her words sound like chirps.
TOOM!
The ground below shakes again, but I’m used to this unstable footing. Her candles sway, but their wax never drips. In this dreamscape room, I didn’t know if I was allowed to defend myself for never being taught my grandmother’s language. My grandma was a rugged Siberian woman who never spoke. She moved to live with my grandpa, an American. They met sometime in the second World War, a romance that sparked with neither of them truly understanding their language, from what I was always lead to understand. When my grandma moved back with him to Virginia, it was no surprise that she became reclusive and isolated, having next to no experience with the language or culture. My mom never really got to know her own mother. Not even she knows any Russian. My grandpa doomed my grandma to be a reclusive hermit.
“Take your time,” chirped the annoyed hag.
“I’ve waited this long, a few more moments won’t hurt me.” Her voice was very accented; it was a wonder she spoke with such clarity with that and the echoes deep within her throat.
I finally dared to speak to her.
“Wait for what?” I asked. I feared something little would set off the gnarled witch. In this dreamscape, I had no doubt she would and could do anything.
“Wait for you to come back!” she exclaimed.
“Oh, it been so long. When you abandoned forest so long ago, it was troubling. I thought the promise I made to your grandmother would never fulfill!”
TOOM!
I find the courage to stand now. The floor is unstable and shaky. I don’t know how such a big figure can fit in such a little cabin. My head nearly hits the ceiling and perfectly in range of all the little candles and drying herbs. Behind me is a fireplace, a cackling fire that spat ash whenever the house rumbled. The Slavic witch never moves from her spot in the middle of the cabin. Even as it rumbles and shakes, she never moves.
“What promise?” I ask the Baba Yaga. I have no doubt in my mind who she really is. I don’t have first hand experience with Russian folktales or even my own grandmother, but I already see where this is going, where this has been going. The Baba Yaga looks pleased, finally getting to the point where she had been waiting so long to get to.
TOOM!
The Baba Yaga grinned, black iron teeth shimmering. Deep within her throat, leaking out between the crevices of her teeth is that tinny distortion. My tinnitus goes haywire, a high pitch beep ringing through my skull, blocking out all the little rattles and shakes from the cabin. Even with the assaulting noise, her booming chirpy voice still broke through.
“I’m sad your grandmother never used her gift to teach you tongue of your ancestors. You see, her ears had problems, great great problems. Americans were reckless during time of great strife. Trigger happy, is that your word? Your grandmother, oh poor Katerina, poor ears ruined after bombardment, explosion. Never to hear the sound of sweet mother’s voice, never to hear chirping of bird. No. Stolen, taken from her. Of course one of the men responsible came to her and of course your silly grandmother was foolish enough to fall for him. She had friends, family, community, but she abandoned that. She regretted her decision, you know. Brought to a foreign land. Realized she that she could not only not understand the culture, but not even live on her own, doomed to rely on your grandfather. Solitude from everyone else was only option. And all that time, her head was splitting with only noise she could hear. Splitting with harsh piercing noise.”
The witch looks so somber. Her gargantuan betrays the subtlest of expressions. She is disappointed. I never knew my grandmother was deaf. The Baba Yaga continued.
“I came to her in times of solitude. Tried to speak past the screeching sound. I gave her a little promise, promise to take away awful noise, give her hearing back. Put the noise somewhere else. Poor poor Katerina already suffered enough. I promise to give away noise subtly, to disperse it somewhere else.”
My tinnitus is deafening, painful, scraping at my skull and gashing at my brain. Even still, her voice weaves past the noise.
“I would not be like that cruel bomb and take it away at once, my young boy. It would be gradual, you would learn to live with it before it-“
I know where she is going with this before she can finish. I’m sprinting across the planked floor now. The Baba Yaga is taken in surprise; her porcelain-dish eyes somehow grow wider the second before she is out of my view.
“CHILD!” she screams, assaulting my ears even further as the sound bounces off the walls, knocking over terracotta bowls and plates. I don’t stop. My grandmother, a woman I never truly knew, gave the witch a promise. I understand now what that trade was.
The front exit is wide. I easily slip past and clatter onto patio. The floor around me, no, the entire house, wobbles and shakes. Outside is foggy overcast sky obscured by a canopy of evergreen. I look down at the muddy soil and realize the house is at least fifteen feet off the ground. The noise in my head subsides a bit but rushes back as soon as I hear her voice again.
“Please do not run! Child! Potomok! Потомок!”
Gnarled hands reach from within, swiping and grappling, but unable to reach. The house bends over backward, leaning in such a way to send me sliding back within the cabin. She is too late, I am already at the railing, I pull myself over it and now I’m dangling, a burning pain searing through my arms as I try to hold me weight. The house wiggles and shakes in frantic fearful dance. My arms can’t handle much more. I’m free-falling.
One moment, there is nothing. There is no ground below my feet, there is no noise, no sight as everything blurs together. Then there is everything. There is the sensation of all the wind in my lungs being knocked out as my stomach slaps across the muddy surface. Gasping, rasping breaths. I see the cabin and all its glory. The cabin is small and quaint of course, much more ominous when its balancing off thick stalky brownish-orange chicken feet Both easily able to stand twenty feet in the air at full height. The cabin shakes in twisting dance and its massive feet strike the earth.
TOOM TOOM TOOM!
Air finally weaves its way into my lungs and I gasp.
“CHILD!” echoes a voice within the cabin. I take that as my queue to run. There is a path she is moving through but I know taking it is suicide. The forest around is so much denser, but much harder to fit a hut between the twisting trees. Each breath feels like fire. Mud is molded all over my body. I must continue.
‘TOOOOMPH!’ goes the house as it collapses in on its legs. I’m hiding behind shrubbery and try to control my raspy breaths. The house would appear so much more natural if it wasn’t lying crooked along the path. Something is squeezing out the door now, angry Slavic curses seeping out. It’s time to run again.
Down through the evergreen forest I run, past logs, deep through mud and mist. Everything in me is on fire. There is no wildlife, no birds, no deer, no squirrels. This forest, teeming with plant-life and water, is uninhabited by any animal. Perhaps they know.
I’m wondering when I will wake up from this nightmare. In most dreams, I will get the instinctual urge to climb the tallest structure I can find and dive head first, ending as my head contacts the hard surface below. I don’t trust my odds.
I don’t think I made it far when I just collapsed by the bush choked with honey-suckle. Everything hurts. I think I hear it in the distance, getting much closer.
Toom Toom Toom Toom TOOM!
Mud squelches between its chicken feet. It has discarded its shell. I through the shrubbery, I can barely see its feet, but as I peer upwards, I see the body attached to those talons and the massive head that sits atop it. She’s muttering something and first, but then hollers out, piercing my skull with the wicked scream of tinnitus. I never answered her threats, her pleas, her begging. She skulks and squawks like the being her bottom half supposedly came from, kicking up dirt and muck, mists of decomposing bog spraying all around. She doesn’t see me but she splatters me filth, some of it spraying my lips, specks assaulting my eyes. I neither recoil or spit, too tired and too afraid to. Even as her skulking form tramples the treeline as she exits this clearing, moving deeper into the woods, the tinny distortion and the high pitch screeching assaults me.
I’m barely conscious as I realize I’m moving. When did I get out? I’m now on shaky footing, trudging through mud and muck. You know you’re really god damn exhausted when prickers and thorns slash at your legs and you don’t give a care in the world. I feel everything and nothing simultaneously. All my muscles want me dead, my chest feels like caving in, and I just want to curl up in a ball and just lie there forever, but I nevertheless, I move on.
By the time my ears can hear the forest noises, the wind wafting through trees and the chippering of birds that previously weren’t there, many things are flowing through my head. I think about the nightmarish woman who only should exist in the dreams of my Eastern-European relatives. I think of an elderly woman on a gnarled rocking chair, swaying back, and forth, back, and forth, deafened by the noise in her head. She passed away at least nine years ago. I wonder that if she, my grandma Katerina, could even hear in her final years, would she have anything, anyone to listen to?
I’m not fazed when I walk through the treeline into my backyard. In my sluggish trudge I questioned if this was really a nightmare or not. Even then I realized I was in too much pain to be dreaming. This is not a dream. This is not a dream.
I think it’s noon. It’s too overcast to tell. I stumble up my deck and through my unlocked sliding back door. Muddy footprints track behind a glossy floor, but I don’t care. Up the stairs I go, each step physically taxing. I want to sleep. I need to sleep. I hear a faint sound in my room as I approach the door. It opens to the noise of soft forest rain.
Brendon Estridge
I wrote this story about my horrible tinnitus. On quiet nights, I suffer the most. Onomatopoeia is very prevalent here for that reason.
Twitter: @JoestarJohny