Suicide Forest (11 page)

Ben shrugged. “I think it depends on the
person. Everyone reacts to circumstances differently. It is in
your…how do you say...constitution.”

John Scott nodded and said, “You just got to
deal with what your problems are. Move on. There was this guy, true
story, I shit you not. Growing up, he was always the shortest kid
in his class. Like tiny. He also had this whiney, womanly voice,
and he used all these effeminate gestures. You would have sworn he
was gay, but he wasn’t. And you’d laugh if you knew what his name
was. Insult to injury, you know? But I can’t tell you that yet.
Anyway, you wouldn’t think it could get much worse for the poor
sucker, right? A weak dick who could never get any chicks? Well,
get this. On top of everything else he was a black dude in some
white hick town in Minnesota. So when the guy wasn’t getting the
shit kicked out of him by the homophobes, the racists were doing
it. Bottom line is, he knew he wasn’t going to get any taller or
whiter or less gay, so if anyone’s going to kill themselves, it’s
going to be this guy, right? You know what he did?”

We looked at him blankly.

“He buys a guitar and practices the shit out
of it. Then, when he’s seventeen or eighteen, he signs his first
record contract. A few years later he releases
Purple
Rain
.”

There was a moment of silence.

“The guy was Prince?” Mel said.

“Symbol Man?” Tomo said.

“Is this story for real?” Ben asked.

John Scott grinned. “Real as rain, brother.
That’s my point. You never know what life’s going to throw at you.
So why take yourself out of the game early before you know how it
ends?”

As
soon as everyone
had finished eating we set out. I thought the rest and the food
would have dispelled some of the heaviness that had settled inside
me after discovering Yumi’s gravesite. It didn’t. In fact, I felt
grimmer than ever, and again I began to worry about the possibility
of getting lost in Aokigahara. If we couldn’t find this new ribbon,
and we couldn’t find our way back to the white one, we would be in
serious trouble. We had limited food and water. If we failed to
make it back to the main trail, and it didn’t rain, we likely
wouldn’t survive more than a few days. I believed we were heading
south, but that was a guess at best, because the forest never
seemed to change. Just more malformed trees and zigzagging roots
and teeth-like rocks. The white ribbon could have meandered
southeast or southwest. Hell, for all I knew, it could have looped
back upon itself, taking us north. The forest was that
disorienting, that deceptive.

Sometime later, just as I was beginning to
believe we had indeed gotten lost, we spotted the ribbon. It was
red and fifty feet to the right and continued in the same direction
we’d been heading.

“Looks like we strayed a little,” Neil said,
scratching the stubble on his chin. “No matter. We’re not far
now.”

He marched toward the ribbon. The rest of us
fell into line behind him. For his age Neil was in good shape,
showing little signs of fatigue. Nina, Ben, and Tomo also seemed to
be doing okay, and the four of them gradually pulled away, so soon
there was a thirty-foot gap between them and Mel, John Scott, and
me.

Mel was thin and sprightly looking. You
would think she went to the gym several times a week, but the most
exercise she got was her once-a-week salsa lessons. Her muscles
would be rusty for this kind of continuous exertion. It was part of
the reason I’d originally planned to climb Mt. Fuji in two stages;
I knew it would be difficult for her to climb the mountain in one
continuous trek.

Like most soldiers, John Scott was fit and
muscular. You could see this in his gait, the roll of his
shoulders, his bullish neck. But he was a smoker. I could hear his
labored breathing. It was wheezy, and every so often he would
cough, hawking up a large amount of phlegm.

And me? What was my excuse for lagging
behind? I was simply a big guy. I had a lot of weight to move. At
six foot four I weighed two hundred ten pounds, which put me
roughly twenty pounds overweight. Fortunately, because of my large
frame, this was not very noticeable, though Mel often cautioned me
about something called invisible fat.

When had I begun to put on the weight? I
wondered. Growing up, Gary and I had been equally athletic. We both
played center for top-tier hockey teams in our respective age
groups. We both scored similar numbers of goals, had similar
numbers of assists. Gary won the MVP trophy while in Bantam AAA; I
won it in Peewee AAA. Then sometime in high school, grade ten I
believe, I began slowing down, losing my edge. Soon I was no longer
the fastest skater or the best stick handler. In Midget Minor I was
moved to left wing. In Midget Major my coach suggested I try
defense. Still big and strong, I performed adequately in the new
position, but I had become a mediocre player at best.

Gary, on the other hand, continued to excel,
continued to score, continued to attract all the attention of the
scouts. Then he was signed by the Capitals. He met Cheryl the same
year. She was the friend of a teammates’ girlfriend. They got
married six months later at the church that Gary and I had attended
since we were kids. I was his best man. Cheryl fell pregnant almost
immediately, and Lisa was born.

Cheryl called me late one evening a few
weeks after Gary’s funeral. This was during my suicide stage when I
rarely left my apartment. I had classes the next day, but I wasn’t
sleeping. I never went to sleep early then. People say when you get
depressed all you want to do is sleep, but that wasn’t true for me.
Sleep was the last thing I wanted, largely because of the
nightmares. Instead I would watch TV or movies until I couldn’t
keep my eyes open any longer.

I checked the call display, saw Cheryl’s
number, and didn’t answer. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t
want to talk to anyone. There was nothing to say. I didn’t want to
console or be consoled. I wanted to feel my grief. I wanted it to
be mine.

Nevertheless, Cheryl called back ten minutes
later, then ten minutes after that. Realizing something bad might
have happened, I picked up. As soon as Cheryl greeted me I knew I
had made a mistake. Although she sounded somber, unsure, there was
no panic in her voice. She spent the first several minutes asking
me questions about college, my classes, campus, like we were
friends, but we had never been friends. She had been my brother’s
wife. I saw her at birthdays and on other special occasions. I
didn’t feel comfortable talking to her like we were friends. I
didn’t even know why she was calling. Comfort, I imagined. She was
lonely. I was too. Gary connected our lonelinesses.

I interrupted her and told her I had to go.
She didn’t ask me why, didn’t protest, didn’t start talking about
Gary, for which I was grateful.

We hung up and have never spoken again.

She was seeing someone else now. My parents
told me this. Initially the revelation made me angry, which was
unjustified. Gary was gone. Cheryl had to move on with her life.
Still, it felt like a betrayal. If things worked out with this guy,
this stranger, he would one day become Cheryl’s husband, Lisa’s
father.

Lisa had just started grade three. She sent
me a Christmas card every year I’ve been in Japan. I wondered how
long this would continue for, how long Cheryl would feel obligated
to help Lisa to write them—

“Hey,” Mel said, poking me in the side to
get my attention. “We’re here.”

The
string bisected
the red ribbon at perhaps a sixty-degree angle, heading southwest,
or at least what I believed to be southwest.

“This is where Tomo and I stopped,” Neil
said.

“So which way should we go?” Ben asked.

“I say the string,” John Scott said.
“Something a little different, you know?”

“That is okay with me.”

John Scott and Tomo stepped forward at the
same time, eager to go, and they almost bumped into each other.
John Scott waved. “Gentlemen first.”

Tomo said, “More like pimp daddy first.”

“You’ve been watching too much MTV,
dude.”

“Fa shizzle dizzle it’s the big Neptizzle
with the Snoopy D-O-Double Gizzle!”

Tomo spitting out Snoop Dogg lyrics in his
off-kilter English accent was both bizarre and comical, though John
Scott was the only person to laugh.

Tomo took the lead, followed by John Scott,
Ben, Nina, and Mel.

Neil, it seemed, was finally feeling his
age. He waited until everyone passed him by, then fell into step
beside me, at the rear.

“Hope you’re keeping track of the way we’ve
come,” I said to him.

“I thought you were.”

“We’re getting pretty far in.”

“We just retrace our steps.”

“Easier said than done.”

“We follow the white ribbon to its
beginning, make a left. That’s it.”

“If we can find the white ribbon again.”

“How could we not? It’s ten minutes that
way.” He gestured the way we’d come.

“More like twenty,” I said. “And if we miss
it, even by a little, we might never find it.”

“We won’t miss it.”

I didn’t reply. Not because I agreed or
disagreed. There was merely nothing more to add. We either found
the white ribbon again or we didn’t. If we did, we were fine. If we
didn’t, we’d have to put our heads together and figure out what to
do.

“What do you think happened to that girl’s
body?” Neil said.

“The police must have taken it out.”

He nodded.

“What?” I said. “You don’t agree?”

“I nodded, didn’t I?”

“But…?” He appeared to be holding something
back.

“Why would they leave her stuff behind?”

“Maybe their hands were full.”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe she changed her mind and left on
her own accord.”

“After cutting up her ID and bank
cards?”

I shrugged. “She could always get them
replaced.”

“Same question then. Why not take her stuff
with her? The bag, the umbrella.”

“What are you getting at, Neil? She either
walked out of here, or the police carried her body out. What other
alternatives are there? You think one of those
yūrei
came
for her?”

“Now there’s something to think about.”

I glanced at him. He was watching the
ground, his face expressionless. “You don’t believe in ghosts, do
you, Neil?” I asked.

“I never used to,” he said. “It’s not a
Western thing, is it? But Kaori does. Her belief has rubbed off on
me.”

“She’s seen a ghost?”

“Says she has. One night she woke up and
says she saw the face of a little girl at the end of her bed.
Earlier that day a little girl—she swears it was the same one she’d
seen—was killed crossing the street outside our apartment. Kaori
didn’t learn about the girl’s death until the next day.”

My first impulse was to laugh. I didn’t.
I’ve met several people who’ve claimed to have seen a ghost, and
they took their supernatural encounters quite seriously.

As a teenager I worked as a bellhop at a
small family-run hotel in downtown Madison. The owner was a woman
named Bella Grayson. She had no siblings and took over the business
from her father a decade earlier when he became ill in his old age.
She’d started working at the hotel when she was a child and had
moved her way up through every position: dishwasher, housekeeper,
line cook, office administration, etcetera. She’d seemed proud of
this, getting to the top not via a handout from her father but
through years of grunt work. She came across as a smart,
down-to-earth woman—until halfway through my job interview when she
cautioned me that the hotel was haunted, or at least had been in
the past.

The story, as I remember it, went like this:
six or seven years previously, around midnight, after most of the
other staff had gone home, Bella Grayson had been in the office,
placing the day’s revenue in the wall safe, when she heard a loud
noise from the adjacent saloon. She went to check it out and found
a little girl in a red dress and shiny black shoes walking away
from her, disappearing down the far hallway. Bella chased after
her. She swore she was only a few seconds behind, but when she
reached the hallway it was deserted. Back in the saloon she noticed
all the ashtrays were aligned along the edges of the tables.

She called to the barmaid, a
twenty-three-year-old girl named Grace who’d been in the kitchen
changing into street clothes. Grace denied seeing anyone since the
last customer left, the man who ran the hardware store across the
street, and she was adamant she’d set the ashtrays in the middle of
the table, alongside the cardboard coasters, where they
belonged.

Nothing else unusual happened until a month
later, when a bachelor staying in a room on the second floor
complained about a little girl in a red dress running up and down
the hallway all night.

A few weeks after this, when Bella arrived
at work, she found the safe in her office wide open, though no
money was missing.

She told her ailing father about the
mysterious happenings, and he confessed that he’d seen the girl
himself, and that a girl had died at the hotel in the early
1900s.

I recalled the way Bella had watched me
after this revelation, intently, almost as if she were daring me to
contradict the claim in some way. I assured her I believed every
word and got the job. I ended up working at the hotel for three
consecutive summers, often remaining late into the evenings.

I never heard so much as a boo.

Although I don’t believe Bella was having me
on, I remain convinced there must be a rational explanation to her
tale, even though it eludes me.

Regarding Kaori’s ghost, I can only assume
it was nothing but a collection of shadows at the foot of her bed.
The fact a girl died the same day was a coincidence. Either that,
or Kaori unknowingly heard about the death not long after it
happened, perhaps as a passing comment between two mothers in the
apartment’s lobby, something her conscious mind missed but her
subconscious registered and manifested when she was half asleep and
more susceptible to suggestion.