Suicide Forest (6 page)

“You really want to have kids now?” I
said.

“Soon.”

“We’re too young.”

“Young, young, young!”

“You know how expensive they are?”

“Exactly. It’s why we’re leaving Japan—and
why we can’t simply keep country hopping for however long you want.
Not on the salaries we’re making. We’re okay now because we’re just
supporting ourselves. But if we had a child? There’s schooling,
clothes, food, medical bills. In the States I could get a job with
the Board of Education. I’d have maternity leave, benefits.”

“And you’d be in California. You know how
far that is from Wisconsin? I may as well be in Japan.”

“You could come to St. Helena with me.”

St. Helena?
I was gob-smacked. St.
Helena was a small town in the Napa Valley whose only claim to fame
was that Robert Louis Stevenson had walked down the throughway with
his bride more than a century before. This was the first I’d heard
of the idea of relocating there, and it surprised the hell out of
me.

I’ve come to believe there are four types of
ESL teachers in Asia. The first are young people looking to travel
for a year or two and save a bit of money before returning home and
starting the careers they would sink into for the rest of their
lives. The second are those who end up marrying an Asian and living
the rest of their lives as expatriates, maybe flying home every so
often for a wedding or a funeral or Christmas with their ageing
parents. The third are the more adventurous who are willing to give
up the better salaries and standards of living in Japan and South
Korea for a more laissez faire lifestyle in a tropical environment
in Southeast Asia. These are predominantly male and have little
interest in getting hitched in the near future, if ever. In fact,
many of them have dreams of retiring early, buying a hut on a
white-sand beach, and spending their twilight years with a constant
supply of fifty-cent beers and a revolving door of girlfriends half
their age.

The final type are the Runners, and their
label is self-explanatory: they’re running from something.

This was where Mel and I fit in. I was
running from Gary’s death, while Mel was running from her family’s
reputation.

Her parents divorced when she was in her
senior year at UCLA, and her mother soon began seeing another man.
When her father found out, he broke into the new beau’s house and
suffocated him to death with a plastic bag. He was tracked down by
the San Diego Regional Fugitive Task Force and was now serving life
in Corcoran State Prison, the same shithole where Charles Manson
was spending his remaining years.

After Mel graduated she returned to St.
Helena to be with her mother, where the population was something
like five thousand, and where the murder remained the talk of the
town. She was harassed constantly, and a month later she flew to
Japan to get away.

You can’t run forever, however, and although
she’s made it clear she wanted to return to the States, I never
imagined to her hometown.

Mel was looking at me expectantly, as if
waiting for my reply.

“We can’t go back there,” I said.

Anger darkened her eyes. “Why not?”

“You know why.”

“That was a long time ago. People
forget.”

“Not in small towns.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It’s a nice place.”

“There are a lot of nice places, Mel. Why
St. Helena?”

“My mom’s lonely,” she said after a few
seconds deliberation. “I think she’d like me back there.”

Panic gripped me. “You want us to live with
your mother?”

“Of course not. But we’d be close. I could
visit with her a few times a week.”

“Are there even schools in St. Helena where
we could work?” I asked diplomatically.

“You think I was home taught? The high
school has about five hundred students.”

“What are the chances they’d have a teaching
position available, let alone two?”

“It couldn’t hurt to check, could it?”

I opened my mouth to reply, then closed it.
I didn’t want to fight with Mel, not here, not now. So I merely
shrugged noncommittally.

She gave me an unreadable look, then picked
up her pace, leaving me behind to ponder the next five years in St.
Helena surrounded by lilacs and grandmothers and perhaps an angry
mob keen on a lynching.

We’d
been walking
for over an hour and a half now, and I was just beginning to get
used to the brooding strangeness of Aokigahara when the path ended
abruptly at two grotesquely fused trees that instilled in me both
fascination and revulsion. They wound serpentine-like around one
another, fighting, grappling, spiraling up and up in a decades-long
struggle to reach the spot of sky that must have opened when
another tree had fallen. They were the perfect embodiment of the
vicious survive-at-any-costs ruthlessness that had taken root
everywhere in the forest, reinforcing my perception that this was a
cruel, primeval, unforgiving place, a slice of hell on earth, even
for plant life.

Someone had painted what looked to be a
white arrow about ten feet up on each trunk. They pointed in
opposite directions.

“Are those arrows?” Mel said, frowning.

“I reckon the police made them,” Neil said,
“to find their way to other trails.”

“Or bodies,” I said.

Everyone looked at me.

“You really think they lead to bodies?” Mel
said.

“Maybe not anymore,” I admitted. “The police
would have removed them already.”

“So which way do we go?” John Scott said,
lighting up a cigarette.

“I don’t think we should leave this path,”
Mel said.

“We won’t go far,” he assured her.

Ben nodded. “We will split up. Half of us
will go left for an hour, the other half go right. If either group
sees something, we will call the other.”

Mel and I checked our phones. We both had
reception.

“What happens if neither of us find
anything?” Mel asked.

Ben shrugged. “Then we meet back here in two
hours.”

“So we good?” John Scott said.

“Yeah, man,” Tomo said.

John Scott nodded at Neil. “What do you say,
big guy?”

Neil was gazing off into the forest. “I
don’t know,” he said. “I have a bad feeling about this place.”

“Of course you do. It’s fucking freaky as
hell. We’re all freaked. But we’ve already come all this way. We’re
so close to finding something.”

“Mate, that’s the thing. I don’t reckon I
want
to find anything.”

“You don’t want to see a body?”

“We don’t belong here. It’s wrong what we’re
doing, disrespectful.”

Mel was nodding.

“Anyone else want to chicken out?” John
Scott said.

This pissed Neil off. “I’m not chickening
out.”

“Then come with us.”

“Yeah, man,” Tomo said. “Don’t be chicken
guy.”

Neil threw up his hands. “I’m not a chicken!
And if it will shut you two up, fine, I’ll come.”

“Hooah!” John Scott cawed idiotically. He
looked at Mel and me.

Although I’d begun to rethink the wisdom of
what we were doing out here, the arrows had admittedly piqued my
sense of adventure. And John Scott was right. We’d already come all
this way. Why stop now? It was just a little farther to see what
was behind that final corner. Then we could make camp, eat, relax,
and leave here tomorrow with a sense of accomplishment.

Mel saw my decision in my eyes, and she
relented. “One more hour,” she said. “And that’s it.”

“One more hour,” Ben agreed, smiling.
“Okay—Nina and me, we will go left. Who would like to join us?”

“I’m down,” John Scott said. He ground his
cigarette under his heel, told us, “Peace out,” then started into
the trees like a dutiful Boy Scout eager to earn his next merit
badge.

The Israelis waved goodbye to us and fell
into line behind him.

“And then there were four…” Neil said
quietly.

The
terrain off the
footpath was challenging and slow going. This had less to do with
the obstacles of trees than with the ground itself. Every few yards
we were stepping over rotting logs and dead branches and volcanic
rocks. I tried to grab hold of saplings for support, but they would
often tear free from the thin soil as easily as a decaying limb
from its socket. Most hazardous of all, it turned out, was the fact
a massive network of lava tubes extended beneath our feet. Twice we
passed areas where the solidified magma had collapsed beneath the
weight of a tree into one of these underground tubes, creating
jagged craters twenty feet wide. We circumnavigated the
moss-covered and scree-filled depressions with caution. If you
stumbled into one and the fall didn’t kill you, the sharp rock
would shred your flesh and you would likely bleed to death before
help could arrive.

The only positive to the difficult
landscape, I thought, was that I was so focused on the topography
and keeping a straight line I had little time to reflect on hanging
bodies and rapidly approaching night.

When we stopped for a much-needed rest, I
took out my water bottle from my backpack and passed it around. It
came back to me almost empty. I finished it off, knowing Mel still
had half a liter in her bag, which would get us by until
tomorrow.

Tomo went to pee behind a tree. I decided to
go as well. While standing on a log with my back to the others,
staring out into the trees, I was struck by a sobering notion. If
we got disorientated out here, we could become hopelessly lost. The
signs had already warned us of this, of course, and Mel had
mentioned it, but I had never taken the idea seriously until
now.

Lost in Suicide Forest
.

Tomo and I returned to the others at the
same time. He was fastening his belt buckle, boasting that his dick
had grown since the last time he’d taken a leak. Neil told him it
must have been pretty small to start off with.

“How do you guys feel?” I asked.

“Tired,” Mel said.

“Hungry,” Tomo said.

“Hungry and tired,” Neil said.

I nodded. “Another thirty minutes or so.
Then we’ll head back and eat.”

Mel looked the way we’d come. “We sure we
know
how
to get back?”

“I know the way,” I said.

“Because if we get turned around…”

“I know the way,” I repeated.

“I guess we could always yell.”

It was true. If we began yelling, John Scott
and the Israelis would likely be able to hear us and find us. Or if
Mel called John Scott’s phone, and told him to yell, we could make
our way to them. Yet this would be embarrassingly desperate for all
of us, and I was sure it wouldn’t be necessary.

We continued in the direction the arrow had
pointed.

After only a few minutes I was once more
breathing hard, and I was glad I had quit smoking. In the back of
my mind I heard Mel tell me, “See? I told you that you should
quit.” She was always saying things like this. If we went to a
restaurant, and it turned out to be good, she would say, “See? I
told you we should come here.” Same if we watched a particularly
entertaining movie: “See? I told you we should see this one.”

Tomo picked up a long vine that continued
for as far as I could see ahead of us. “We follow this,” he said.
“We don’t get lost.”

Less than five yards later he shrieked and
tossed the vine aside.

“What happened?” I asked, thinking something
had bitten him.

He was sniffing his hands. “It pee on
me!”

“What?”

“Feel!”

I picked up the vine hesitantly. It was
coarse and dry.

“There!” Tomo said, pointing to a spot
further down the stem.

“Yeah, I see it,” I said, noticing a
six-inch section that seemed to be covered in some kind of liquid.
It appeared to be the only wet spot.

“Smell it!” Tomo said.

I did so and detected a faint ammonia
odor.

“It does smell like urine,” I told Mel and
Neil, who were staring at Tomo and me like we were talking
apes.

“So what?” Mel said. “An animal—”

“You see animal?” Tomo said. “Where? I don’t
see none.”

“Where else would it come from?”

“I piss on forest, it piss on me.”

Neil harrumphed. “Please, Tomo.”

“It’s true! Go smell!”

“Forget it.”

Tomo turned to me. “Taste it.”

Rolling my eyes, I started off again.

A vine peeing back on us. Fuck.

I
flirted with
thoughts of the paranormal for a while. A sentient forest that
lures people and animals deep into its heart with the illusion of
green tranquility, then, when they become hopelessly lost and
expire, it feeds on their carcasses. If I ever wrote a book, I
could call this story
The Venus Forest
, or perhaps
The
Flytrap Forest
. There would have to be a large cast of
characters so the forest could pick them off one by one. And the
protagonist would have to somehow survive and defeat the forest.
This stumped me for a while, because how could you defeat an entire
forest apart from burning it to the ground? Then again, I decided
eventually, if the genre was horror, it didn’t need a happy ending,
did it?

When I tired of amusing—and
frightening—myself, I purposely blanked my mind and focused on
keeping in a straight line. Unexpectedly, I began to think of Gary.
That’s when it always happened. When I least expected to think of
him. Of course, in the months following his death, I thought about
him incessantly. But time had a way of dulling the pain, distancing
the memories. You never forget something like your brother dying,
you never accept it either, but at some point, for good or bad, you
learn to live with it.