Suicide Forest (28 page)

“Did we finish all the food?” Mel asked. She
was sitting on the ground, her knees pulled to her chest, looking
miserable.

I said, “There’s still Ben’s ration from
yesterday’s breakfast. It’s not much.”

“Break it out, dude,” John Scott said. “What
have you been hoarding it for?”

“I haven’t been hoarding it,” I said. “I’ve
been holding on to it until we really needed it.”

I withdrew the ration from Mel’s backpack. I
had sealed it in a plastic Ziploc baggie that one of the sandwiches
had been in. She set six paper plates on the ground. I divided the
food into six even portions: a tablespoon of nuts, half a
tablespoon of dried fruit, a thin slice of browning banana, and a
small pile of dried ramen noodles.

The sight of it made my stomach growl
noisily.

“What about the grapes?” John Scott asked,
eyeing the eleven grapes I hadn’t doled out.

“I think Neil should have them,” I said. “He
needs the liquid.”

“You think Neil can eat?”

“It’s up to him to decide, not us.”

John Scott shrugged. Mel and Nina
nodded.

“Okay, Mel,” I said. “Choose.”

She took the portion closest to her. Nina
took hers, then John Scott. He tossed the nuts and fruit into his
mouth, chewed quickly, then inhaled the noodles from his hand. He
finished everything in under ten seconds. Mel, Nina, and I ate our
portions more slowly. I deposited the nuts in my mouth a few at a
time, savoring the crunch and texture. I sucked on the sweet
squares of mandarin, apricot, and apple until I could tease myself
no more and swallowed. The banana was mushy but delicious
nonetheless. I consumed the noodles like John Scott had, all at
once, crunching them between my teeth until they were a paste,
surprised at how good something so plain could taste.

John Scott watched us silently, most likely
regretting wolfing his food back so quickly. He reminded me of a
dog hanging around the table for scraps.

I told Mel to wake Tomo and give him his
portion, then I brought Neil’s to him. If he’d looked bad when I
woke, he looked doubly so now in the budding morning light. His eye
sockets were shadowed, his cheeks cadaverous, his mouth slack. He
seemed somehow shrunken, like a mummy.

“Hey, buddy,” I said. “You up?”

He opened his eyes. They were rheumy and
distant and unfocused.

“I have some food for you. You hungry?”

He said something, but it was so quiet I
could barely hear.

I lowered my head. “What was that?”

“…wadda…”

“We don’t have any. But the police are going
to be here soon. They’ll have water.”

He closed his eyes.

“Do you want food?”

A barely perceptible shake of the head.

“Have a grape. They have water in them.”

No reply.

“Neil?”

“…no…”

“Here.”

I pressed a grape against his mouth. His
lips parted and the grape disappeared inside.

“Chew, Neil. You have to chew.”

He worked his jaws slowly. A rill of juice
spilled out of his mouth.

“Swallow now. Okay? Swallow—”

He coughed, rolled laboriously to his side,
then vomited, though the only thing that exited his mouth was the
butchered purple grape. He continued to dry retch. The sound was
abrasive and dusty and strained.

I remained at his side, frustrated at my
inability to assist him in any way.

John Scott shouted Tomo’s name. I glanced
over my shoulder, confused. John Scott was turning in a circle,
surveying the forest.

“Tomo!” he called again.

Neil flopped onto his back and closed his
eyes. Tears streaked his pale face.

“I’ll be back,” I told him, then returned to
the campfire. “What’s going on?”

“Tomo’s gone Elvis,” John Scott said.

“What?”

“He’s missing,” Mel said. “He’s not in his
tent.”

The words hit me like a sledgehammer to the
chest. I looked at his tent. The door was now unzipped, the inside
empty except for his sleeping bag and backpack.

“He’s fine,” I said automatically. “Probably
woke early and did some exploring.” But even as I said this I
doubted my sincerity. I had been up for nearly an hour now, almost
since first light. Where would Tomo have been for all that
time?

“Tomo?” I shouted.

The only reply was the echo of my own
voice.

“This is seriously fucked up,” John Scott
said.

“He’s fine,” I repeated, unable to come up
with anything else, even as panic built inside my chest. I kept
thinking,
Not Tomo. Come on. Give me a fucking break. Not
Tomo
.

Mel said, “Where would he go?
Why
would he go somewhere?”

“Maybe he’s looking for the ribbon,” I
said.

“Without telling anyone?” Mel shook her
head. “That’s not like him.”

“Well, where do
you
think he
went?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. I saw
it in her eyes.

“He didn’t hang himself.”

“Ben—”

“Ben was on drugs!” I said.

“All right, everyone calm down,” John Scott
said. “We’ll go look right now. He’s around here somewhere. He has
to be around here somewhere.”

Ten minutes later we found him.

I
spotted red
thirty yards away from me. It was the same rich crimson as the
vertical stripes on Tomo’s motorcycle jacket, and I likely would
have missed it if it didn’t contrast so strongly with the
surrounding verdant foliage. At first I told myself it was my
imagination. I was projecting. I had been expecting to find Tomo’s
body hanging from a tree, I had morbidly convinced myself of this
when he failed to respond to our repeated calls, so here I was, my
mind playing tricks, confusing a cluster of wild berries for racing
stripes. But that didn’t stop me from charging forward, bending and
snapping branches out of my way.

It had been no act of the imagination. It
was Tomo. His back was to me, his body suspended in the air by his
Louis Vuitton scarf.

I smashed the final branches away from my
face and pulled up three feet short of him. I attempted no heroic
rescue this time. I had known Ben was dead when we saw his dangling
body, of course I had known, but I gave into false hope and tried
to save him. Not again. I had come to expect the horrors that
Aokigahara had on offer, and to believe in their authenticity.

Tomo’s hair was, as always, even in death,
fashionably unkempt. The biker-style collar on his sheep-leather
jacket was upturned, how The Fonz sometimes wore his in
Happy
Days
. I’d been with Tomo when he’d bought the jacket in a retro
shop in Kitchijoji. I’d told him not to get it because I didn’t
like the oversized, in-your-face American eagle embossed on the
back, which I was staring at now. Above it were the words LIVE TO
RIDE and below it RIDE TO LIVE. Derek and I had nicknamed Tomo
“Easy Rider” for a few weeks, though this didn’t stick because Tomo
either missed or ignored the sarcasm, which made the teasing
redundant.

His left Converse All-Stars had fallen off
his foot, revealing his foot in a bright yellow sock. The blue
canvas shoe rested on the ground below him, eerily reminiscent of
the lone Nike we came across on our way into the forest.

People say your life flashes before your
eyes when you’re on the cusp of death. I believe this to be
possible because I experienced a similar phenomenon right then,
only the kaleidoscope of images were not of me but of Tomo. I
thought of the first time Derek and I met him drinking the tallboy
at Shinagawa station, and he greeted us with a ridiculous sounding
“G’day mate!” taught to him, we learned later, by an Aussie friend.
I thought of his twenty-second birthday party which, for reasons
known only to him, he decided to hold at a club in which all the
patrons were sweaty, dancing Nigerians and young hip hop girls who
were into sweaty, dancing Nigerians. Tomo and his Japanese friends
fit in well enough, but Derek and I stood out in a bad way and
almost got beaten up for being white. I thought about the
yakitori
restaurant in Shimokitazawa that he had taken me to
where, to his grand amusement, I unknowingly filled up on pig’s
heart, liver, tongue, and uterus.

In this brief moment when time seemed to
have ground to a halt, I thought of a dozen other occasions I’d
shared with Tomo, but one stood out above the others. The day I
spent with him and his younger sister and the way he had so
patiently and expertly dealt with her autistic episodes. It
reminded me of his future, or, more precisely, of his lack of
future. He would never begin his residency at the hospital. He
would never become a psychiatrist, never start his own practice,
never help anyone with their problems. Never get married or have
kids. Never travel overseas. Never have grandchildren.
Never,
never, never, never
. He would never do any of those things
again nor a thousand others. He was dead. The end. Game over.
Gone.

I touched a hand to his shoulder. His body
turned slowly toward me, rotating, like a side of beef on a
butcher’s hook. His eyes were open and blank. His skin, like Ben’s
had been, was pale and patchy with burst capillaries. To my horror,
a beetle scuttled out of his parted lips and up his face.

This has to be a dream
, I told
myself.
I’m dreaming. No way this is real. It can’t be
.

Mel, who I realized was standing beside me,
didn’t move, didn’t cry, didn’t speak, didn’t react at all. I think
I might have been waiting for her to scream, and if she did that, I
probably would have screamed too. But she didn’t. She was likely in
shock. I was likely in shock as well. Then she broke her paralysis
and gripped me in a fierce hug, burying her face in my
shoulder.

God almighty, life could be an awful mess
sometimes.

I
was still holding
Mel when John Scott and Nina arrived. John Scott went immediately
to the scarf and hacked through it with a sharp rock he’d been
carrying. The ready-to-use rock surprised me, making me wonder if
he had been expecting to find Tomo hanging from a tree branch. The
scarf snapped with a sharp rip and Tomo collapsed inelegantly to
the ground. This was perhaps the most horrible sight yet: seeing my
friend crumple the way he crumpled. It reinforced the idea he was
no more, nothing but a torso and limbs, raw meat, not unlike the
nose-to-tail cuts of pork you find in the supermarket’s frozen
section.

I released Mel and knelt beside Tomo,
straightening him out, providing him whatever dignity I could. I
drew my fingers over his eyes, closing his eyelids. I had only seen
this done in movies and on TV before, and it was something I never
wished to do again. Then, in the next instant, I was consumed with
a scorching rage. I was going to find out who did this, and I was
going to make them pay.

I stood, my hands balled into fists. Mel
touched my shoulder. I flinched away.

“Who did this?” I demanded. “Who the fuck
did this?”

No one answered, and I realized I was likely
scaring them.

I took a deep breath, stepped backward to
gain space, held up my hands. “Tomo didn’t kill himself,” I said
quietly.

“Neither did Ben,” Nina said.

I glared at her. She stared back, defiant. I
was about to remind her that Ben had been on drugs, Tomo hadn’t
been, there was a difference—when I realized how senseless that
would sound. Two suicides in less than twenty-four hours. Of course
there was a connection. Their deaths were linked as inseparably as
blood and bone.

“Okay,” I said.

Nina bit her lower lip, which had begun to
tremble. I was confused, wondering how she could have
misinterpreted “okay”—unless she was simply relieved. For the past
day she had been the outsider, on her own. No one would believe
what she had inherently known—and she must have inherently known
Ben hadn’t killed himself, just as I inherently knew Tomo didn’t
kill himself.

What assholes we had been to her.

“So who did it?” John Scott asked. “Who
killed them? We’re out here by ourselves.”

“We don’t know that,” I said.

“You’ve seen someone?”

“Someone killed Ben, and someone killed
Tomo. That means there’s someone out here.”

Nina was staring at me. I knew what she was
thinking.

“No,” I said.

“Why not, Ethan? Why will you not—”

“Because there are no such things as fucking
ghosts!”

“How could someone make him hang himself? We
would have heard him shouting. We would have heard a struggle—”

“Check,” Mel said.

“What?” I said.

“Nina’s right. Tomo couldn’t have been
hanged without a struggle. Check.”

I looked at Tomo’s body. Mel dropped to her
knees. She cupped Tomo’s head in her hands, turned it from side to
side. She parted his hair, bit by bit, how chimpanzees groom their
offspring for lice and other parasites.

“See!” she said suddenly, excitedly.
“See!”

I knelt beside her and saw a blood-crusted
contusion.

Nina
ran back
toward camp. I wasn’t sure what she had planned—I suspected, but I
wasn’t sure—so I chased her down. She went directly to Ben’s
body.

“Nina!” I said. “Wait—”

She tugged the sleeping bag back and
recoiled, spinning around, her cheeks blown out. Her head bobbed
back and forth like a regurgitating pelican, then she vomited onto
the ground. When she finished, she immediately covered her nose
with the crook of her arm.

I pulled my shirt up over my lower face and
joined her next to Ben. The stench coming off him was as nauseous
as garbage left out in the sun for a week. His face was yellowish
now, the blood having drained from it to settle and pool in the
lowest portion of his body. His tongue still protruded from his
mouth, though it had darkened further to an eggplant purple. His
neck was covered with red abrasions and contusions.