White Nights

Swinburne students enrolled in the Diversity in Australian Literature unit engaged in discussions about current socio-political issues and how writing can express perspectives and ideas gone long unheard. Toma Corbeanu gives us White Nights, a terrifying look into body dysphoria and depression.

Be advised, references to self-harm.

What's it like to live in someone else's skin? (Photo: Toma Corbeanu)

Blackness cradles me. It’s only the music and the drink and the crush of movement. 

My eyes are closed, mouth open, chest heaving. Bodies are everywhere. I feel their pressure,  the moisture of their sweat. In the darkness, no one knows who you are. 

I'll deafen myself to make the world silent. I'll drown the thoughts. I'll destroy myself. 

The ceiling is low. Our outstretched fingers caress it. My nails shine like fish scales. Wires hang like vines. The floor is sticky, holding us back as we jump and sway, crawling over each other, bees squirming in our hive. Faces flash under the strobes that bounce across the room,  slashing the dark. 

In the thrashing current, I feel a presence. It is Death. I turn to face her. She smiles. Her pale hand offers me another. ‘Pentru dumneavoastră,’ she says. I take it and down it. She laughs and trails away. I follow. She is walking towards the stairs and disappears down them. 

Just as I reach the threshold, something twists in my stomach, and I retch. Collapsing to my knees, I vomit onto the ground. As I heave, I feel the cold floor beneath my hands become gritty. They now rest on the sand of that beach, mottled with bindies, stray grass and pebbles. I look up and I see the bush surrounding me. The sound melts away, carried over the scrub by the wind. I wipe my mouth and blush smears onto my hand. Over my shoulder, they are sitting around the campfire. The bush looms around me, barbed. The vomit squelches,  turns. It looks at me. 

'If you’d have kept it to yourself, then you wouldn’t be over here on your own, would you?’ It reeked of the goon-bag tempranillo that we’d been swigging on that night. 

‘I told them nothing.’ 

When I’d met them all at my new job, I figured I’d be the bloke, match the gravelly digger’s tone they all had, and try to forget. I’d even cut my hair short. But on that night, long after the bag had been inflated and tossed among the empty bottles, the boys started talking only occasionally and quietly to themselves. They stared into their phones while country songs played over the speaker. If you were attentive, you could hear cicadas. When I’d asked  Simmo if he was feeling sleepy, a high-pitched, off-camber tone had spouted from me. I got no answer. 

The texture of the vomit swirled into a smile. ‘But the truth comes out eventually, doesn’t it?’

I remember I’d woken up the next day. I crawled out of my tent and couldn’t find the old Ute we’d all come in with. The wind swept the branches of the bush around me. Our rubbish was littered everywhere. The hinterland watched me. I was alone in this place, and there was no one left to help. Only a crude drawing in the dirt remained. A stick figure with gashes at the ends of its arms. A kitchen knife lay with it. Words were scratched into the earth beside it. 

‘Better get on with it.’ My vomit had a keen memory. 

I drag myself off my feet, hurtling down. I am on the stairs. They are tight and narrow and never end. The walls are covered in the scribbles and scratches of those who came before.  Vino mai aproape, they whisper. Soluția este la capătul scărilor. I’ve stowed the kitchen knife inside my jacket. 

There is a mirror on the wall. I stop my descent momentarily and peer through. I don’t see the wall behind me. I see the reflection from the window in my family living room. At night,  when you stand close to the window, it reflects the whole living room back at you like a huge mirror. This is the reflection I see. According to the reflection in the window, my mother is sitting on the couch behind me. It is that night. The night I told her.  

I can see myself as I was then. I’m coming out of the corridor, and I am walking slowly. I stopped beside her. The words are about to croak out of me, groggy with sleepiness. I watch it happen.

She didn’t respond poorly, not with anger or confusion. She laughed. It’s happening again in the reflection, and I feel myself grow hollow, as I did then. The sound echoes in the caverns of my being. She didn’t believe me. She couldn’t believe me. The kid she’d raised to become a strong, empathetic Romanian man had turned into something she could have never conceived. 

In 1989, in Romania, my mum finished high school, and my dad started it. That same year, the only violent overthrow of a dictatorial government in Eastern Europe took place. They never saw the fighting and were only children during his rule. But the weight of hunger and the burden of uncertainty will follow you anyway. You don’t need to see the blood.  Something happens to people who live in places like that. Unrelenting stress, fear,  uncertainty, and sickness. The visits of the gentle pale hand. It does something to you. 

It doesn’t fuck you up. Because people who go through circumstances like that are not people who are somehow wrong internally, somehow broken, lesser, in need of fixing. 

But you do adapt. You adapt to a place whose rules are so different and alien to the eyes of someone for whom the 80s was hippies and flared pants that to those people you are fucked  in the head. And I can’t find it in myself to blame her. 

I take the steps two at a time. It is twisting ever deeper. The ceiling gets lower, and the staircase is darker. Vreau să se oprească. 

Through the gloom, I see a figure. It climbs the stairs, slowly, surely, with great effort. As I get closer, it takes shape. It is a young woman. I know her. She sees me. Her eyes widen. In a moment, I am passing her. She lunges for my arm. She catches me. It is Macy. I cannot read her expression.  

With her free hand, she reaches for me and holds my face. She cradles it in her thin fingers. I  melt into it, and the world falls away. The blackness is warmed by a dull white ceiling light.  At once, we are back at that little shack on Millowl. Together we sit down on the blue couch. Cicadas hum their evening song. Distant cars break the sound of waves against the shore. There was the smell of dust and sand in the air, sunbaked dirt cooling into the night.  Heat covered us, swamped us. My long hair was tousled and loose, as it had been back then. 

Around us fluttered those we’d been closest to in school. They giggled and fell over each other, supporting themselves on walls and tables. They laughed at each other. A TV show was playing, and no one was watching. 

‘Sorry about the music choice,’ I say as I had said then. It spat feebly from the speaker on the dining table behind me. Squeaky folk music from some Mediterranean coast or Carpathian forest. I’d told her it was the sound of home. A home, of course, I’ve never seen. 

‘Are you sure that’s what you need to apologise for?’ Macy hadn’t said that back then, on the couch. My memory, or perhaps the Macy who’d come with me from the club into my memory, was asking me this question here and now. 

‘I thought you were better than them.’ A splash punctuated the end of my sentence. Macy and I turned to look. One of our friends spilled half their mixer on the floor, pink as an oil spill. Another said something about retards, and then they all laughed. One of them caught my eye and started dancing the Transylvanian wedding dance they’d asked me to teach them. They were so out of time with the accordion, I couldn’t help but wince. I hadn’t told them I’d never been to a wedding before. I supposed if I could convince them, I could convince myself.

I looked past them. Death was leaning by the door, watching. She was expectant. 

‘We both know that we can do better. They’re sweet, but high school friends are always  temporary.’ She took my hand again. I turned to look back at her. I could feel Death’s eyes. 

‘I know.’ I push her hands off mine. I stand up. ‘That’s why I stopped talking to you.’ Macy’s eyes crinkled. She looked at her hands. ‘You know I’d never say that to you.’ ‘But you did. “I’ve always wanted a man like you?”’ 

She flinches. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just all so new, and so-’ 

I pushed past the others. They moved aside. ‘Careful, here he comes!’  Death got off the wall and put her hand on the doorknob. 

I heard Macy get off the couch, and a moment later, she grabs my hand, and I stop. I turn to look at her. 

‘None of us can do this alone.’ My eyes trace her neck, which has never been pierced by stubble. 

‘I won’t let any of you hurt me anymore.’ I pull away. Death opens the door, and I step back onto the stairs. As I continued downward, I looked over my shoulder and saw Macy. Her hand is still outstretched. 

At the bottom of the stairs, I find the bathroom. My face feels cool. Dragging a finger across my cheek, I find that tears are flowing from my eyes like blood from an open wound. I lock myself into a stall. Tonight, I will kill it. 

It’s a parasite. I never asked for it. I hate what it does to me. I hate what I am. I won't let it stain me anymore. I take the knife and begin to cut. It howls. Screeches. Blood pools at my feet, stains my socks. The sound scratches against the dull sheen of the music muffled from upstairs. 

It falls to the floor. I breathe heavily. I crush it under my foot. Stomp on it once, twice, again,  again, again. I'm screaming. It's like crushing a small fish. I get out of the stall and slam the door. 

'Satisfied?' 

I turn to face the voice. It’s a ladder, rusted and cobwebbed, sitting by the door.

'Ladders can't talk.' 

'And pain won't heal you. It's a crazy world.' 

'Go away.' 

'I'm a ladder.' 

'What do you want?' 

'Better yet, young lady, what do you want? Because you won't find it here.' 

I smile at the ladder, bulge my eyes. I reach into my jacket, making jazz hands with my free fingers. I slowly withdraw a flask.  

'Ta-da!' 

The ladder sighs. 'You can still get out. There's always a way out.' I ignore the ladder. 

Looking into the mirror, I find that I can do it now, confront the creature that looks back.  Hairy, sweating, a broad frame unfilled by shrunken muscle. Sunken eyes. My hair has grown back out. I bleed from the groin. The wound sounds like a saturated mop as it drips on the floor. Polishing off the flask, my eyes return to the mirror, and Death is beside me. She hugs me from behind, her head on my shoulder, those flat, seeing, piercing eyes telling me it's time.  I smile. She laughs. I collapse. The body I hate is dead. I am free.