Suicide Forest (25 page)

“It was a dirty lens,” I said, “a
distortion.”

“That affected only one picture?”

“You’re believing what you want to
believe.”

“Projecting,” she said tightly.

“Yes.”

“Ethan, open your mind! Just because you
cannot see something does not mean it does not exist. Millions of
people believe in ghosts. Are you to say they are all misled?”

“Yes.”

“You are a fool then.”

“Millions of people believe in a god. That
doesn’t mean one exists.”

“Ah,” she said.

“Ah what?”

“Are you Christian?”

“I was baptized. But, no, I’m not
religious.”

“That is what I thought, and that is your
problem.”

“What is?”

“You do not believe in anything. You have no
faith in anything. You are a forever skeptic. I am arguing against
a brick wall.”

“With a wall.”

She made a face. “Do you wish to continue in
Hebrew?”

“Against a wall is fine.”

“So what do you think happens when we die,
Ethan?”

“Nothing.”

“That is very depressing, yes?”

“I guess. But saying I believe in something
isn’t going to change how I feel.”

“Well, I believe, Ethan. I believe in a god
and an afterlife. Because we are here. We exist and have purpose.
Something is responsible for that. And just because you do not know
what happens next does not mean there is nothing.”

I didn’t say anything, I wasn’t going to
start preaching, and my lack of response seemed to anger her. She
shook her head and exhaled loudly.

“
Ben would not kill himself
,” she
said. “He was happy. He wanted to be an actor. You do not have such
a dream one day and then kill yourself the next.”

“I agree with you there.”

“Well?”

“He was on drugs.”

“That is a stupid excuse.”

“No, it’s not. They mess with your mind.
They make you do things.”

“Not Ben,” she insisted stubbornly.

“Nina, you said Ben was obsessed with
suicide. Maybe you didn’t know the entire picture. Maybe John Scott
was right and Ben was a bit suicidal himself. Some people…you can
never tell. If he was, and he took drugs…”

Nina began fiddling with the stick and
wouldn’t look me in the eyes. “There is something I have to tell
you,” she said. “I have not been honest with you.”

I frowned. “What about?”

“Ben was not obsessed with suicide. It was
not his idea to come to Suicide Forest.”

“But you said his friend—”

“His friend did not commit suicide. She
attempted to. She took a sharp knife from the kitchen, ran a hot
bath, climbed in the tub, and slit both her wrists.”

“What—who found her?”

“The Chinese woman whose house she had been
staying in. She called the police. Doctors saved her life.”

I blinked as understanding registered. I
looked at Nina’s wrists. They were hidden by the sleeves of her
yellow rain jacket.

Smiling sadly, she rolled up the cuffs, then
the pink sweatbands she wore around each wrist, revealing a series
of white, ragged scars. The cuts appeared to have been made
recently.

“Jesus, Nina, why—” I stopped myself. “He
raped you.”

“I did not karate chop him in the throat. I
did not escape him. He raped me in that alleyway, and then he got
in his taxi and drove away.”

“I’m—I’m so sorry. God, Nina—I’m sorry.”

She nodded silently.

“So…” I said, believing I had to say
something, “it was your idea to come to Suicide Forest?”

She nodded again.

“And it was you who took that book about
suicide from the gravesite?”

“We kept our food in my backpack. I did not
want the book near our food. So I put it in Ben’s.”

“Does—did Ben know? I mean, your
wrists…”

“No, I never told him about the rape or the
suicide attempt.”

“He never saw those scars?”

“I never showed him. You know, Ethan, Ben
and I—we were more friends than partners. We never had sex. We
slept in the same bed, we kissed sometimes, but we never had sex.
Do you believe that? He tried one night in Thailand, but I made it
clear I did not want to. He did not try anymore. As I told you
before, I think he loved me. Or he was in love with the idea of
loving me. He was very romantic like that. He would have done
anything I asked.” She set the stick aside. “Do you think I am
crazy, Ethan? Do you think less of me now?”

“No, not at all,” I said honestly.

“Good. Because I care what you think of
me.”

She leaned close and kissed me on the mouth.
Her lips were soft, and they lingered for a long moment. I was so
surprised I didn’t move—or pull away.

Then she got up and went to her tent.

I
tried not to read
too much into the kiss. Nina was under duress, emotionally
distraught. She was appreciative she could talk to me. That was
all. Believing there to be something more between us would be
baseless—and dangerous. So instead I focused on her confession. I
was amazed she had tried to kill herself, and I told myself I
shouldn’t be. Just because she was young, intelligent, and
beautiful didn’t exclude her from being suicidal. Most people who
knew me would never suspect I had once contemplated suicide. It was
a sickness, a disease that could affect anyone, anytime.

Nevertheless, her admission that Ben hadn’t
been obsessed with suicide didn’t change my mind regarding what
caused his death, didn’t make me jump on the ghost bandwagon with
her. Whether Nina wanted to believe it or not, Ben had taken his
own life, and the drugs were responsible. It was the only
terrestrial and thus logical explanation.

I stood and returned to the campfire where
John Scott and Tomo were silently reading their comic books. Nina
had zipped the door flap of her tent tight while Mel, still inside
our tent, had turned off the flashlight and was either lying awake
in the dark or sleeping. Maybe I was feeling guilty about the kiss,
but I no longer gave a damn about Mel and John Scott’s sketchy
relationship, no longer cared what he was doing here. All I wanted
was to slip under the crappy emergency blanket next to her, pull
her against me, and tell her I was sorry—sorry for everything. For
bringing her to this forest, for not being straightforward with the
Shelly situation, for siding with the others and voting not to
leave. This last point bothered me the most. She was my girlfriend,
my future fiancée, my future wife. She was scared and,
old-fashioned or not, it was my job to take care of her. I could
see why she was pissed off. In her eyes I had betrayed her.

Still, what could I have done differently?
Packed our bags and tried to forge our way out of Aokigahara an
hour or two before dark? I hadn’t thought it was a good idea then,
and I still didn’t now. Survival 101: if you get lost, remain at
ground zero until rescuers find you. Statistically, the heroes who
wander off to search for help are more likely to get caught out by
the climate or geography and die from exposure.

There was a guy I knew in college who
punched his ticket just that way. His name was Craig “Stag” VanOrd.
He was six foot two, a rugby player with spikey blond hair and pale
gray eyes, and probably the most popular student in our year. He
was the guy you talked to if you wanted to know where the party was
that night. The guy you talked to if you wanted to score pot,
mushrooms, ecstasy, blow, whatever popped your button. He wasn’t a
dealer. He didn’t make money selling the stuff. He didn’t need
money; his parents were loaded. He simply knew who had what and got
it for you. He wasn’t stupid though. He didn’t do this for anyone.
You had to be a friend, or at least a close friend of one of his
friends.

I wasn’t certain why he was nicknamed Stag,
but I imagined it had to do with the fact he had his way with
women. Rumor had it, to kick off Frosh Week, he was one of the guys
responsible for hanging twenty-foot banners on the freeway
overpasses near the college which read: “THANK YOU FATHERS FOR YOUR
DAUGHTERS!” Stag must have burned through two dozen of those
daughters between the time school began in September and when he
died in February. This number always amazed me because the girls he
wooed back to his room would be well aware of his reputation. Even
more, they likely knew most of the other girls he slept with.
Nevertheless, he not only pulled it off, but did so with panache,
somehow remaining on good terms with all his one-night stands, so
much so they never said a bad word about him behind his back.

Needless to say I was astounded when
Shelly—my ex, Shelly—told me she had slept with him. My first
question was whether she had been tested for STDs. She thought I
was joking, which I was not, and told me breezily that she got
tested every year. My second question—and this felt odd to admit
because Stag had been in a grave for three years at that point—was
whether he was any good in bed or not. Shelly smirked and did some
mysterious shrug of her shoulders. I left it at that, deciding I
didn’t want to know.

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, Stag took his
latest girl, Jenny Walton, to his parents’ cabin in the Pocono
Mountains, a three-hour drive east in Pennsylvania. They squeezed
the trip into a long weekend and were driving back late Monday
night when Stag lost control of his Jeep and shot off the road down
a fifty-foot rocky embankment (rumor was that Jenny had been giving
him head at the time). Although Jenny was beat up badly in the
accident, Stag came away from it without a scratch. You would think
the guy had been blessed at birth by the angel Gabriel himself to
lead a charmed existence…if you didn’t know what happened next.

It was twenty below zero in the mountains.
The Jeep’s engine was demolished in the crash, which meant Stag and
Jenny couldn’t run the heater to stay warm. Moreover, it was late,
the road they’d skidded off was little used to begin with, and the
embankment was too steep to climb, so Stag decided to head down the
mountain on foot to find help.

Jenny was discovered three hours later by a
Fedex driver who’d noticed the missing stretch of cable-and-post
guardrail. It took the police another two hours before they could
rig together a lift to hoist her back up to the road. She had
frostbite on her toes and fingers and had broken two ribs and her
collarbone. Stag wasn’t discovered until midafternoon the following
day. His tracks led to a frozen river fifteen miles away, which
he’d followed for another six miles. Paradoxically, he had taken
off most of his clothes, a common side effect of hypothermia,
before he made a burrow in the snow, where he had spent his last
hours alive on earth.

So, yes, I told myself now. We’d made the
right decision. Staying put had been the smart move. Mel might be
mad with me, but she would see. She would thank me tomorrow.

I
noticed the paper
cups in their hands for the first time. Confusedly I wondered where
John Scott and Tomo had found water, and why they were drinking it
when a quick glance at Neil told me he had none. Then I saw the
Suntory whiskey bottle propped against a tree root.

“What the fuck are you two doing?” I
said.

John Scott knocked back whatever was left in
his cup. “Didn’t think Neil would mind if we raided his bottle,
given his condition.”

“Have you thought about
your
conditions tomorrow?”

“I can hold my own, dude.”

“It’s a diuretic,” I said.

“Die what?” Tomo asked.

“It makes you piss,” John Scott said.

“Ah,” Tomo said.

“Yeah, ah, Tomo,” I said. “We’re in the
middle of a forest with no water.”

“Police go here tomorrow.”

“We hope. But what if they can’t find
us?”

“Don’t get melodramatic on us,” John Scott
said.

“It’s possible.”

He shrugged. “If they can’t find us, and it
doesn’t rain, we die in a few days anyway.” As if to prove he
subscribed to this brand of fatalism—or, perhaps more likely, to
rub his defiance in my face—he grabbed the bottle and filled his
cup. He sipped from it this time, returning his attention to the
comic.

“You want some?” Tomo asked me.

“No, Tomo. And I think you should stop
drinking.”

“Yeah, okay, no more. This last one. You
want manga?”

“No.”

“Big titties.”

“No.”

“They there. In my bag.”

I watched the two of them for a few moments,
reading and drinking, as if they were at a lazy slumber party. One
word came to mind:
idiots
.

Since I had nowhere else to go, and felt
foolish standing there lording over them, I sat down and flexed my
right hand. The blisters had indeed ruptured, though the rawness of
the pain had diminished and wasn’t very noticeable anymore. Aside
from the crackle and pop of the fire the night was unsurprisingly
quiet. Even Neil remained silent. It seemed his cramps had finally
subsided and he had fallen asleep.

Smoke billowed from the burning wood, the
musky smell tempting my hunger. I imagined myself cooking a sausage
over the flames, blackening the skin, sizzling the fat. The image
was so powerful I began to salivate. My eyes flicked hungrily to
the bottle of whiskey, which was half full. A cup of rye might not
be food, but it would suppress my appetite. It would also take the
edge off my nerves, let me forget about Ben for a little, the
ordeal awaiting us tomorrow. A cup, maybe even two. It wouldn’t
hurt. Probably let me fall asleep a little easier as well…

“How are we going to organize this watch?” I
asked, to distract myself.

“You’re not serious, are you, dude?” John
Scott said.

“It can’t hurt.”

“Don’t be a tool.” He lowered his voice.
“There are no fucking ghosts out there.”