Suicide Forest (33 page)

Before I knew it I had ascended at least
forty feet through the forest understory. I wasn’t sure because I
refused to look down. In fact, I didn’t look up either. I focused
only on the branches within my immediate vicinity, making sure to
carefully spread my weight among four separate ones at any given
time, pushing with my legs rather than pulling with my arms to save
strength and energy. It helped, I found, to visualize Spider-Man
climbing a glass building, left hand/right foot, right hand/left
foot, over and over.

Up until this point I’d felt relatively
safe. The branches were solid, and they cradled me within their
embrace. Yet once I approached sixty feet or so they began to thin
out in both volume and thickness—and my fear of heights kicked in.
I suddenly second-guessed what I was doing. This was not natural. I
was not a fucking monkey. And even though I wasn’t looking down, I
nonetheless was hit by an extreme wave of vertigo. This created the
sensation of spinning, throwing my balance off.

Abruptly terrified I was going to fall, I
hugged the trunk of the tree with both arms and waited for the
symptoms to pass.

“Ethan?” Mel shouted, her voice small and
concerned. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah!” I called back. My chest was so tight
I barely got the word out, and even had I wanted to elaborate I
wouldn’t have been able to.

For a good minute I remained frozen in
place. My heart was pounding, I was breathing too fast, and all I
could think was:
I’m stuck. Fuck going any farther. I can’t get
back down. I’m stuck up here
.

I tried to tell myself this was all in my
head. I’d gotten this far without problems. I could keep going. But
this failed to psych me up. The vice-like grip of fear had
paralyzed every inch of my body and wouldn’t let go.

“Ethan?” Mel shouted. “What’s wrong?”

I opened my mouth but my tongue felt thick
and I couldn’t respond.

“Ethan!”

“Resting!” I managed.

My breathing continued much too fast. I felt
a numbness in my lips. I figured this was because my cheek was
pressed hard against the trunk, then I realized the tingling was
also in my hands and feet.

Was I hyperventilating?

What if I fainted?

I closed my eyes and tried to forget where I
was. I told myself I was in the red oak on the farm, only ten feet
up, no biggie, I could jump down if I wanted. I thought of the warm
summer afternoon when I had spent hours in the tree flipping
through the May 1987 issue of
Playboy
magazine I’d
discovered hidden away at the bottom of Gary’s box of baseball
cards. I had been looking for a Kenny Griffey Jr. rookie card to
trade with my friend Danny Spalding, who said he would give me one
of his GI Joes for it, but instead of Kenny Griffey Jr. I found
Vanna White staring up at me. This was the first time I had seen
nude photographs of a woman—and a famous one at that—and I tore
free a half-naked picture of Vanna White sitting at a window, hid
it in the metal tackle box in which I kept all my other favorite
stuff, and returned the magazine to the bottom of the box of
baseball cards before dinner.

Gary realized the picture was missing a week
later, but he couldn’t tell our parents on me unless he wanted to
admit his pubescent fascination with naked women. Instead he
strolled into my room one evening and in his affable way told me he
knew I had the picture and wanted it back. When I denied taking it,
he wrestled me to the carpeted floor and put me in the Million
Dollar Dream, a submission move Ted DiBiase had used on the Macho
Man Randy Savage in Wrestlemania IV’s main event. But when I
wouldn’t submit he got creative and began pulling my hair out one
strand at a time while telling me it wouldn’t grow back and I’d go
bald—

“Ethan!” It was Mel again. “Come down right
now! You’re scaring me!”

I blinked, remembering where I was.

“Why aren’t you moving?”

Jesus bleeding Christ,
move
! I told
myself.

I released the trunk and gripped a branch
above my head with my left hand. I felt around with my right foot
for a new purchase, found one twenty inches higher than the last,
and eased myself upward, my stomach brushing the rough trunk.

I continued in this fashion for another ten
feet, then fifteen, then twenty-five. Mel and Nina encouraged me
from below. I barely heard them. Their voices seemed a million
miles away right then. I had one thought on my mind only.

Climb.

As I progressed the branches became thinner
still, so much so they bent beneath my weight. This freaked me out,
but I had come too far to turn around: I was almost above the
canopy.

To my left, a broken branch was intertwined
with a live one. The end where it had snapped off was pulpy and
jagged. This would be the branch John Scott had broken. I saw him
falling, toppling ass over tits on an express trip to the
ground…and I pressed onward and upward.

Soon I came to the severed limb. It jutted
two dozen inches from the trunk. Moving as deliberately as a mime
feigning slow motion, I inched up another ten feet. The crown of
the fir had begun to narrow into a conical shape, and the branches
had reduced in density enough I could finally see through them—and
the view took my breath away. An emerald landscape stretched away
to the horizon. Honda had said Jukai translated to “Sea of Trees,”
and I now I knew why—

The branch beneath my left foot gave way
with a sickening crack. My foot plummeted. I kicked wildly until it
landed on another branch.

Mel and Nina were yelling at me. I wanted to
tell them to shut up, but my heart was pounding out of control, and
I had no breath.

Mt. Fuji, I noticed, was not ahead of me. I
turned my head slowly to the left, afraid that even the simplest
shift of weight could send me to my grave. Not there. I rotated it
to the right. Nadda.

Behind me?

Wrapping my arms around the trunk—it had
narrowed to the circumference of a utility pole—I turned and saw
Fuji directly behind me. It seemed to be impossibly far away, one
of those distance shots you see on postcards.

Nevertheless, that didn’t matter. All we
needed to know was the direction, because then we could figure the
way back to the parking lot.

I marked the direction of the mountain with
a couple of nearby pines, so even if I got disorientated on the way
down I would know the correct way we had to travel.

I was about to begin my descent when I
noticed, perhaps two miles away, three at the most, a curlicue of
gray smoke trickling up through the canopy.

The
climb down was
just as harrowing as the climb up had been, only with each branch I
passed I was comforted by the thought I was getting closer to the
ground.

I remained facing the trunk the entire way,
and soon I was back to sixty feet, then forty, then twenty. Then,
thank God, I stood on the lowest branch, a paltry ten feet from the
ground. Nina and Mel were directly below while John Scott was a few
feet away, where he had crash landed, laying with his head on his
rucksack, watching me.

“I am never, ever letting you do that
again!” Mel said. “I was scared half to death.”

“Piece of cake,” I said, sitting on the
branch, dangling my feet.

“Did you see Fuji?”

“That way.” I pointed toward one of the
large pines I had made a mental note of.

“Excellent, Ethan!” Nina exclaimed.

I shoved my butt off the branch, hung by my
hands for a few seconds, then dropped to the ground. My legs,
overcome from the exertion I had put them through, and still a
little weak with fear, gave out completely. I collapsed to my
knees, then keeled over and lay on my side, inhaling the smell of
rotten leaves, never so glad to feel solid earth beneath me.

“So if Fuji is that way,” Mel said,
computing to herself, “then the parking lot is…” She turned on the
spot and pointed. “That way.”

“Hold on,” I said, and sat up. “I saw
something else.”

Mel and Nina frowned down at me. John Scott
propped himself up on his elbows.

“Smoke,” I said. “Nearby. Maybe a couple
miles away.”

“Smoke?” Nina said. “Like a forest
fire?”

I shook my head. “Like a campfire.”

“Where?” Mel said quickly.

I indicated the opposite direction of
Fuji.

“Who do you think—” She cut herself off.

“It could just be hikers,” I said.

“Hikers aren’t stupid enough to hike in this
forest.”

“We did.”

“We were stupid.”

“Someone who…” John Scott started, then
stopped. It was obvious speaking had become an effort for him.
“Someone who came here…to commit suicide.”

“What does it matter who it is?” Nina said.
“We are not going that way, yes?”

“I’m wondering if we should go check,” I
said.

Mel looked at me like I was crazy. “We have
our own problems right now, Ethan. We don’t have time to go try
talking someone else out of suicide.”

“He might have a phone.”

Silence.

“We can keep it powered on until the police
track it this time,” I added. “It will be a lot faster than us
walking out and walking back in. Not to mention we don’t have to
leave anyone behind. John Scott will remain here with Neil. We’ll
bring the phone back and stick together.”

“What if whoever it is doesn’t have a
phone?” Mel said.

“Everyone in Japan has a phone. Someone
coming out here, whether it’s a hiker or a suicide, will have
brought theirs in case they got lost or changed their mind about
killing themselves. And if it’s the guy who killed Ben and Tomo,
well—he has our phones, right?”

Mel said, “You’re just going to ask him,
‘Hey, can we get our phones back to call the cops on you for
killing our friends?’”

“We overpower him and take them. There will
be three of us. We have the spears. And he won’t be expecting
us.”

“What if he has a gun?” Nina said.

“Guns are illegal in Japan and pretty much
impossible to get. Besides, if he did have one, he could have
simply stormed our camp and shot us all. Instead he’s been hiding
out until night and sneaking up on us one by one. That tells me he
likely doesn’t have any weapon at all.”

“Do it,” John Scott grunted.

Mel and Nina exchanged glances, equal parts
desperation and fortitude.

“
Do it
,” John Scott repeated.

“Okay,” Mel said grudgingly.

“Okay,” Nina said a moment later.

Nina
and Mel gave
John Scott a peck on the cheek, and Mel promised him we’d be back
soon. I didn’t want to shake his hand, knowing it would be awkward,
but I didn’t think I should leave without saying anything, so I
told him to hang tough, which sounded fatuous and condescending,
though that was not my intent.

Then we started off, unaware that this would
be a one-way trip from which none of us would be returning.

Despite
Ben and
Tomo decaying beneath their sleeping bags, despite Neil holding
onto life by a thread and John Scott facing the possibility of
amputation and internal hemorrhaging, despite the fact we were
still trapped in the most terrifying place I have ever been,
despite all of the darkness that had stolen into our lives—invited,
if you believe we’d brought it upon ourselves—a tiny kernel of hope
burned inside me. We were moving. Finally, we were moving. We had
been at the campsite for forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours in
any one spot can make you go stir crazy. Add a lack of food and
water and everything that had happened and it can make you go
asylum crazy. I was exhausted, ill-tempered, dehydrated, jumpy, and
scared witless. One more night doing nothing except thinking about
death and dying and a lurking killer likely would have pushed me
over the edge. So moving was good. It gave me hope. We had a plan.
We were going to get through this. We were almost at the end.

The little light that penetrated the canopy
was an otherworldly bluish-gray. It permeated the understory
unevenly, creating a disconcerting mismatch of floating shadows and
emerald foliage. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but the
trees seemed even more dense and overcrowded here than they had
been anywhere earlier, many growing so close together we would
often have to turn sideways to slip between them. There were also
more herbaceous plants, ferns, and shrubs, which we could do
nothing about but raise our arms and plow straight through.

The farther we went the more anarchic the
scenery became. We passed beneath a vine as thick as my leg that at
one point in the past had looped itself around a tree several
times, only now the tree had died and decayed, leaving the vine
suspended in the air like a giant spring. One medium-sized pine,
defying the rules of nature, had grown in the form of a horseshoe,
almost as if it had decided it did not like the world it found
itself in and tried to return to the safe haven belowground. So
much deadfall was strewn around the base and the doubled over crown
you couldn’t tell where the tree began or ended.

Every minute or two we would stop, scavenge
a couple dead branches, and place an X-shaped marker on the ground
so we would be able to find our way back again.

The feeling of isolation, of traversing some
forbidden corner of the globe, was so extreme I was caught off
guard when we came across yet another ribbon. It was blue and
intersected our path at a ninety-degree angle. We expressed mild
surprise at seeing it, but otherwise forged on. We had a mission to
complete. There was no longer time for melancholic reflections.

My thoughts turned to the encounter that
awaited us. It was going to be more complicated than I had
initially assumed, because it would be impossible to know from a
distance whether the person at the campfire was a harmless hiker, a
suicide, or the killer himself. This meant we couldn’t simply sneak
up and whack him on the head while he was sleeping. We’d have to
first confront him, which was not ideal. Killer or not, he might
panic and flee. And if he didn’t, and he wasn’t wearing a T-shirt
that read “The Aokigahara Murderer,” how were we supposed to
determine his guilt or innocence? If he was uncooperative and
refused to lend us his phone, or said he didn’t have one, did we
forcibly search him and his belongings—even if he was an innocent
person?