Suicide Forest (5 page)

“Are we really going to see a body?” Mel
asked.

“It’s a big forest,” I told her
noncommittally.

“And probably if you do,” Ben said, “it will
only be an old skeleton or something.”

“Much better,” she said.

“Do you want to go back?” I asked her.

She looked at me. “Do you?”

“Don’t be a cheesedick, dude,” John Scott
said. “We’ve decided. We’re here.”

“Do you want to go back?” I asked her
again.

“Pussssieeee,” John Scott said.

“Stay out of this,” I told him.

“I’m just saying—”

“It’s not your business.”

“It’s okay, guys,” Mel said. “I’m fine.”

Snorting like he’d just won some bucking
challenge, John Scott took the lead with Ben, and we continued on.
I glanced ahead at the guy a few times, continuing different
conversations in my head. Some scenarios had me telling him nobody
wanted him here. Others deteriorated into a fistfight in which I
handily defeated him.

Gradually my irritation diminished, and my
attention returned to the forest. It was getting creepier the
farther we went. The saplings seemed to be pressing ever closer
together, their trunks lining up as tight as prison bars, while
some of the lower branches reached toward us, like skeletal
hands.

Suddenly Ben cried out. Then everyone was
crowding over something on the ground, just off the path. I leaned
over Mel and saw a pile of relatively new equipment. There was a
silver flashlight, batteries still in the package, a hacksaw with
an orange handle, black rubber gloves, scissors, tape, and a clear
bag filled with numerous cans of chemicals.

“This must belong to the police or
volunteers who search for the bodies,” Ben said. “See the scissors
and the saw?”

“But what are the chemicals used for?” Neil
said.

Nobody had an answer to that.

John Scott grabbed the flashlight and
batteries.

“John!” Mel reprimanded. “What are you
doing?”

“It will come in handy.”

“You can’t take it.”

“Why not? Someone obviously left it
here.”

“They might be coming back for it.”

“I’ll return it on the way out
tomorrow.”

“I think you should leave it.”

“Do you have a flashlight?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Anyone else?”

“I have one,” Neil said.

“That’s it? Two for seven people?” John
Scott glanced at each of us in turn. “Is anyone else against a
third flashlight? It’s going to be pitch black out here later.”

Put that way, nobody objected.

Somehow
a pebble
had snuck into my left shoe, annoying me to no end. I wasn’t
wearing hiking boots like the others. My feet were size thirteen—a
size that was nearly impossible to find in Japan, even in a city as
large as Tokyo. Consequently, I hadn’t been able to buy proper
boots for this trip and instead wore the pair of tattered Reebok
trainers I’d brought with me from the States.

John Scott, now chatting up Nina ten feet
ahead of me, lit a cigarette. He blew the smoke back over his
shoulder.

I noticed his shoes for the first time:
eighteen-hole Doc Martins, black leather, yellow laces. Like his
leather jacket, I didn’t know what to make of them.

Had he planned on wearing them to climb
Fuji? Or did he have something else in his big military-issued
rucksack?

“What were you guys talking about earlier?”
I asked Mel.

“Who?”

I didn’t reply. She knew who.

She said, “He was telling me stories about
Okinawa. He said it’s a great place. We should visit there
sometime.”

“Where’s he staying in Tokyo?”

“A love hotel actually.”

“Ha. Whereabouts?” Love hotels were
neon-garish places where you rent a room either for a three-hour
rest or for the entire night. You select the room from a panel of
buttons and settle the bill via a pneumatic tube or pair of
mysterious hands behind a pane of frosted glass. Mel and I had
stayed in a bunch of them over the years for kicks, and the rooms
had featured rotating beds, ceiling mirrors, karaoke systems, hot
tubs, and vending machines selling everything from beer to S&M
gear to women’s panties, previously worn.

“That one in Shibuya we stayed in. Remember,
on that small, windy street?”

“Yeah, I remember.” I think the area was
called Love Hotel Hill. Our room had no windows for the same reason
casinos don’t. “There are a bunch of hotels there. He stayed in the
same one we did?”

“I recommended it.”

I frowned. “How long have you known he was
coming to Tokyo?”

“A couple days before he arrived.”

“Is that when you invited him to climb
Fuji?”

“I told him we were climbing it, yes. He
said he’d climbed it before and had other plans. But then he texted
me last night and said his plans had fallen through.”

I stared ahead. John Scott took another drag
of his cigarette, blew the smoke back at us.

“What do you think about his jacket?” I
asked.

“What about it?”

“A leather jacket like that? To climb a
mountain?”

“He wasn’t planning on climbing. I just said
that. I guess it’s the only jacket he brought with him.”

Fair enough, I thought. But I still wanted
to get a dig in. I didn’t like this relationship Mel had with him.
Maybe I was overreacting. I don’t know. Something just didn’t sit
right.

“Where’s he from?” I asked.

“Why all this interest?”

“I’m jealous.”

“St. Helena. I told you we went to school
together.”

“What’s his last name?”

Mel gave me a look.

“What?” I said.

“Scott, duh.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Are you kidding me?”
I’d thought John Scott was a double name or something, like Billy
Bob.

“No, it’s his last name.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. It felt
good—partly because the forest was so damn gloomy, but more so, I
think, because I was laughing at John Scott.

“Why’s that funny?” she asked.

“Who introduces themselves with their full
name?”

“A lot of people.”

“In a business meeting maybe. Do you call
him John Scott?”

“I call him John.”

“What about other people?”

“Back in high school people called him
Scotty. I don’t know now.”

“That’s like people calling me Ethan
Childs.”

“He didn’t tell you to call him John Scott.
That was your decision.”

“Yeah, well, if people kept calling me Ethan
Childs, I’d tell them it was just Ethan. Who does he think he is? A
celebrity?”

“What’s your problem with him?”

“I don’t have a problem with him—”

“Hey, look there!” Ben shouted.

For an instant a rush of dread washed
through me. We’d found someone. He would be hanging from a noose.
Dead and cold and—

It was a shoe. That’s it. A lone white
shoe.

It sat about ten feet to the left of the
path, next to a mossy rock.

Ben and John Scott were already making their
way toward it.

“It’s a Nike,” Ben said.

The rest of us ventured closer. It was a
men’s. Size eight or nine. The laces were missing.

I surveyed the area, but didn’t see any
other sign of human intrusion.

“Looks like it’s been here for a while,”
Neil said.

“You think it’s from…you know?” Mel said.
“Someone who killed themselves?”

“Whose else could it be?” John Scott said. I
considered thinking of him as just John from now on, but I stuck
with John Scott. It still amused me that he allowed himself to be
thought of as a two-name guy, like Tom Cruise. “A hiker would
notice if his shoe fell off.”

“So would someone planning on killing
themselves,” I said. “We’re talking about a person here, not a
zombie.”

“Where are the laces?” Mel asked.

“Maybe he needed them to do the deed,” Neil
said.

“With shoelaces?” I said.

“You know what I think?” Tomo said. “I think
the animal eat the guy.”

Ben shook his head. “There would be a
skeleton, clothes.”

“Maybe it drag him away. The shoe fall
off.”

“I don’t like this,” Mel stated.

“Are there bears in these parts, Tomo?” I
asked.

“Yeah, man,” he said. “So many.”

“I’m serious.”

“Yes, there are,” Neil said. “I’ve read
about people seeing bears while climbing Mt. Fuji. But they rarely
attack humans unless you get between them and their cubs.”

“I don’t say the bear eat the live guy,”
Tomo said. “I say he eat the dead guy.”

“Who cares what got him?” John Scott
shrugged impatiently. “All we’re doing is guessing. And all that’s
doing is wasting time. I want to see a
body
.” He returned to
the footpath, heading deeper into the forest.

After a beat, the rest of us followed.

It
became
noticeably darker, quickly. Earlier, pieces of the granite-gray sky
had been visible through the patchwork of overhead branches. Now
little if any gray penetrated the thickening canopy, turning midday
into a premature dusk. I usually enjoyed the twilight that bridged
late afternoon and early evening. There was a sereneness associated
with it. But not here in Aokigahara. Here, the trees took on a
sinister, emaciated appearance. Their green leaves lost their
vibrancy, as if drained of life. Elastic shadows thickened and
pooled. My mind and eyes began to play tricks on me to the extent
I’d see a tortured face in a twisted tree trunk, or a blackened
skull in a mound of volcanic rubble. Moreover, I had the
uncomfortable sensation of being watched. Several times I sensed
movement in the corner of my field of vision.

And still there were no animals, no wind,
just the trees and us in this…crypt.

I wasn’t the only one getting spooked by the
forest. We were all acting like animals sniffing out a trap,
sneaking glances at the canopy or the suffocating trees, as if
searching for some lurking threat.

A crackling of vegetation sounded off to the
right. Ben and Nina, who were both ahead of me, jumped a foot off
the ground. Tomo dropped into a squat, his hands framing his face
like the guy in
The Scream
. Mel grabbed my forearm so hard
it hurt. Then, from behind us, John Scott howled with laughter. I
knew what he’d done before he tossed another rock into the
trees.

“Gosh, John!” Mel cried. “That wasn’t
funny!”

He continued to laugh. Neil, who was beside
him, and who I could imagine John Scott elbowing conspiratorially
when he’d picked up the rock, appeared guiltily amused.

“You fuck-ass!” Tomo said, though he was
smiling witlessly. “I almost shit my brains.”

This caused John Scott to crack up harder.
Ben and Nina joined in, then everyone was having a good chuckle. We
needed it. A release from the pressure that had evidently been
building inside all of us.

It was a brief reprieve, however, and after
the laughter died down, and we were on the move once again, the
silence inevitably returned, just as disquieting as before.

I glanced beside me at Mel. She was chewing
her bottom lip, her eyes downcast, watching where she stepped. I
could almost feel the tightness in her body. She looked over,
smiled. It was a hesitant smile, a hospital smile, how the nurses
smiled at me while I was with Gary in his final hours. A reassuring
smile.

I felt suddenly bad for springing this
camping trip on her. She wasn’t cut out for stuff like this. She
often refused to watch horror movies because they were too scary,
and she rarely, if ever, did anything that was dangerous or
illegal.

I took her hand in mine and said, “Still
feeling like this is an enchanted forest?”

“A little,” she said. “But I feel like we’ve
just walked into the wicked witch’s domain.”

“I know what you mean.”

“What were you thinking about? You haven’t
said anything for the last five minutes.”

“Our Spain trip,” I said, which was true.
I’d been compiling a mental list of some of the dumbest things I’ve
done or attempted to do in my life. Making the top three was my
decision last summer to cross Spain’s Camino del Ray, a
three-foot-wide decrepit walkway pinned against a sheer cliff face
three hundred thirty feet above a river. I’m afraid of heights, and
I’d believed conquering the walkway might help me overcome the
fear. But when I got to a section where the concrete had collapsed,
leaving a large open gap bridged only by narrow steel beams, I
returned the way I’d come, meeting up again with Mel, who’d had the
sense to wait behind.

“Blue skies, warm weather,” Mel said. “That
was such a nice vacation. I wish you didn’t mention it.”

“You’d rather be there?”

“You mean rather there than Japan? Or rather
there than a haunted forest?”

I’d meant a haunted forest. But now that
she’d brought it up I said, “Than Japan. We don’t have to go back
to the States. We could teach in Spain. They need English
teachers.”

“It’s not that easy. They’d rather hire
someone from the UK who already has a EU passport.”

“What about Thailand, or the Czech Republic?
We could even go to Turkey. They’re always hiring. That’s the best
perk with teaching. We can go anywhere, travel anywhere.”

“And what about the future, Ethan? We can’t
keep hopping around the world until we’re sixty. We need to—”

“Grow up,” I finished for her.

“It’s true.”

“We’re only twenty-six.”

“That’s closer to thirty than twenty.”

“It’s closer to twenty-five than
thirty.”

“Whatever.”

“It’s still young.”

“We’re getting older. And what do we have to
show for it? We have no house, no savings. No—” She trailed off.
“What about children?”

I swallowed. Kids again. She’d been talking
about them more and more lately. I would like to have one or
two…eventually. Thirty always sounded like a good age to me, though
I don’t know why I choose this number aside from the fact it’s the
beginning of a new decade. I suppose I figure I would have matured
the necessary amount to be a father by then.