Suicide Forest (21 page)

I handed him my jacket. It was chilly out,
but I knew I would warm up quickly once we started moving.

“Okay,” he said, “we need one more.”

“All right.” I looked at him
expectantly.

“Dude, you can’t tear a hole through this
leather without a knife.”

“I’m sure I could.”

“You can take mine.” Nina slipped off her
jacket. She only had on a thin T-shirt beneath.

“You’re going to get cold,” I told her.

“I brought a sweater with me.”

“Use mine,” Mel said.

“No, Mel, keep it,” I said. “We’re using
John Scott’s.”

“I told you—”

“Bullshit! I’ll rip the shoulders.”

“What’s your problem?”

“What’s the deal with you and that
jacket?”

“What are you talking about?”

“That leather fucking jacket.” I reached for
a lapel.

“Get your dickskinners off me.” He swatted
my hand away.

“Give me it!” I said, grabbing the front and
tugging.

He punched me in the face. My knees went
weak. Still, as I went down I managed to grab an inside pocket and
heard a loud tear.

I landed hard on my tailbone. The impact
cleared the stars from my vision, and to my satisfaction John Scott
was holding the jacket open, staring with incredulity at the huge
swath of lining I’d torn nearly free.

“Told you,” I said, though my jaw was numb,
the words blubbery.

“You fuck stick,” he sneered.

He might have come after me, but Tomo, Mel,
and Nina held him back.

I spat the blood out of my mouth and saw a
tooth exit as well.

Mel
tended to my
injury while John Scott got to work on the litter. He ended up
using my jacket and Ben’s, considering Ben would no longer need
his. Tomo and Nina kept to themselves. Neil went to the trees to
take another shit.

“What is it with you and his jacket?” Mel
said as she dabbed the blood away from my split lip. Her hands were
shaky, her complexion pale.

“It wasn’t his jacket. It was the fact he’d
let you and Nina sacrifice yours before he would his.”

“You mentioned something about his jacket
yesterday.”

“Whatever. It’s him. Not his jacket.”

“You’re upset over Ben. Your anger spilled
over to John.”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re in denial.”

“Denial that Ben’s dead?”

“Yes.”

I shrugged. I didn’t think I was. But I
wanted to get off the topic; I didn’t like Mel playing shrink.
Given how visibly rattled she was over Ben’s death, she was the
last person who should be dishing out post-traumatic advice.

“Okay,” she said with a final rub to get the
last of the blood from my chin. “That’s the best I can do. Just
bite on this until it stops bleeding.” She gave me the T-shirt
she’d been using.

“Thanks.”

“Now I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“Apologize to John Scott.”

I was incredulous. “For what?”

“Ripping his jacket.”

“Are you kidding?”

“We don’t need this right now, hon. We need
to put everything behind us. We all need to be on the same
team.”

“He punched me.”

“You started it.”

“Jesus, how old are we?”

“Exactly, Ethan.”

“Tell him to apologize to me.”

“Will you accept it if he does?”

I hesitated.

“Good,” she said.

John
Scott
sauntered over to me just before we were ready to leave. “Hey,
Ethos,” he said, “sorry for punching your face in.”

I glanced past him to Mel. She silently
urged me on.

“Sorry about ripping your jacket.” I paused.
“Looks like you’ll probably have to get it relined. Expensive.”

“Won’t be as expensive as fixing your
tooth.”

My tongue probed the spot where my left
incisor had been. “Yeah, well.”

“So we cool?”

“Yeah, cool.”

“Shake,” Mel told us.

John Scott stuck his hand out. I shook. He
used a rock-hard grip, as I knew he would, holding my hand for
longer than comfortable, squeezing tighter and tighter, as I also
knew he would.

Then he let go.

Best friends again.

John
Scott and I
returned to Ben’s body and set the litter down on the ground.

“Take his shoulders,” he told me. “I’ll take
his legs.”

“Wait. What about the rope?” The ligature
still encircled Ben’s neck.

“What about it?”

“Shouldn’t we take it off him?”

“I don’t think we should mess with it. We’ll
put the rest on his chest—”

“Hey,” I said in a sudden epiphany. “Where
the hell did he get the rope from?”

“It’s the string.”

“The string?”

“That we followed in.”

I realized he was right. The string was a
thick twine, made with woven coir fiber, easily strong enough to
support a person’s weight.

“Tomo and I couldn’t find it when we went
looking for the body.”

“It’s gone? All of it?”

John Scott nodded.

“It was hundreds of feet long. Where’s the
rest of it?”

“Maybe some of it’s still lying around. We
didn’t have time to look. Now let’s do this. On the count of
three.”

We lifted Ben off the ground, stepped
sideways, and set him on the litter. Then we piled the string on
top of him and covered him with his sleeping bag. We carried him
back to camp, John Scott at the front, facing forward, me at the
back. Tomo, Mel, and Nina were waiting for us, their backpacks on.
Neil, however, was slumped against a tree, holding his belly.

I told John Scott to set the litter down,
then I went over to Neil and crouched next to him. “Neil? You
okay?”

“Hurts like a son of a whore.”

“Can you walk?”

“Don’t know. Help me up.”

I pulled him to his feet. He swayed, then
lurched off into the trees. He doubled over, placing a hand against
a tree trunk for balance. A moment later he vomited. I saw the
first bit of brownish sick gush from his mouth and turned quickly
away. He vomited again and again. I could do nothing to block out
the wet, splashing sounds or the putrid stench, which made my own
stomach queasy.

He returned, wobbly, but looking a little
better.

“We’re leaving now,” I told him. “Can you
make it?”

“I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“You can wait here. We’re going to bring the
police back.”

He shook his head and reached for his
backpack.

“Leave it,” I said. “We’ll get it
later.”

“No, mate…”

“No one’s going to touch it.”

He reached for it again.

“I’ll take it,” I told him, since I no
longer had mine to carry. I slipped it onto my back. “You just
focus on walking.”

I returned to where John Scott was waiting
for me. We lifted the litter again—it was heavier than I’d hoped it
would be—and led the way to where the string had once been.

“Hey!” Mel said, sounding panicked. “Where’s
the string?”

I explained.

“He took it?” She was incredulous. “But how
will we find our way out?”

“We know the general direction. We’ll come
to the red ribbon eventually.”

“What if we get lost?”

“We won’t.”

“You don’t know that for sure—”

“Mel, there’s no other option.”

I pushed forward, shunting John Scott with
the litter, and we began to walk.

It
was impossible
not to think of Ben, of course. I had only known him for a very
short time, less than twenty-four hours, but his sudden death made
me feel as if we were much closer. It bonded us in some way. And it
left an ache inside me. He’d been so young, so full of alacrity and
life. I recalled the way he’d greeted us outside the train station.
Open, friendly, displaying none of the automatic suspicion most
people harbor toward strangers. Kissing Tomo in the parking lot.
How excited he’d been upon discovering the Nike shoe and the
painted arrows, like a kid on Christmas morning. The way he’d
affectionately talked about his parents and grandparents. It was
almost surreal to glance down now and see his body in front of me,
covered by the sleeping bag, inert, something that would soon begin
to atrophy and rot. It didn’t seem right.

My mind skipped to his relationship with
Nina. At first I’d assumed the two of them had been together for a
long time. They came across that way. The familiar touches, the
knowing looks, the conversations in Hebrew, which no one else could
understand. Not to mention the fact they simply seemed good as a
couple. Then came the first revelation that he and Nina had only
met last month in Thailand, and the second, that the attraction
between them was not as mutual as it appeared.

Hearing the latter had admittedly given me a
thrill. Nina was available. I could get with her if I wanted, or it
was likely I could get with her, given the way she’d been flirting
with me. This was pure fantasy. Despite the Shelly/John Scott
fiascos, Mel and I were near perfect together, I would never cheat
on her. Still, it was nonetheless an ego boost to know I
could
get with Nina if the circumstances were different. It
made me feel attractive and vital.

Not anymore.

In fact, I wished Nina had never revealed
any of her Ben woes to me. Because now I not only felt guilty about
coveting a dead guy’s girlfriend, but my memory of them had become
tainted. I would have preferred to remember Ben and Nina as happy
and in love, not Ben foolishly courting someone who would not or
could not reciprocate his sentiments.

I flexed my fingers around the tent poles.
We’d been walking for twenty minutes. The blisters on my right hand
stung, and I guessed they had ruptured. But I wasn’t going to stop
for a rest; there’d be time enough for that when we reached the
ribbon.

I began to think in the here and now,
particularly what was going to happen when we got out of Aokigahara
and rang the police. They would meet us in the parking lot. We
would be questioned—no, interrogated. The police in Japan were
extra thorough when it came to the petty crimes often associated
with foreigners. This never made sense to me, especially given the
blind eye they turn toward the yakuza, which performs all kinds of
illegal activities on an epic scale.

I’d been arrested in the country before, or
at least detained, so I knew what I was talking about. After a
night out with a friend, I caught the last train heading to my side
of the city—or I thought I had—because it ended its service at what
appeared to me to be an arbitrarily chosen station miles and miles
from where I wanted to be.

I began walking in the direction I thought
my place was, and along the way I came upon an unlocked bicycle
propped against a utility pole. I hopped on it, telling myself I
would return it the next day. The bike only had one speed, but the
streets were flat, and soon I was zipping right along—straight into
a dragnet. I would later learn that the police often erected these
traffic stops specifically to curb the number of bicycles borrowed
by one-way joyriders like me, which, not so surprising, is a common
occurrence in a city with ten million bikes that all look alike and
are rarely locked up.

The officer asked me if the bicycle was
mine. I told him it was. He checked the registration sticker. This
was something else I didn’t know then. It was compulsory for
cyclists to register their bikes and attach a sticker to the frame.
The officer called in the number on his radio. My ride turned out
to belong to a woman named Kimiko Kashiwa. He asked me if I was
Kimiko Kashiwa. I told him, no, I wasn’t.

The police station was a big white building
where everyone spoke Japanese to me. One cop eventually attempted
English. It was good enough that I could guess at his questions.
What is your name? Where did you get the bike? Why did you take it?
Where do you live? Where do you work? Then he got into the weird
questions. How much money do you earn? What do your parents do?
Where did you grow up? What school did you go to? When they ran out
of irrelevant things to ask, they made me sit in an uncomfortable
seat for the next five hours, though I could see no purpose to
this. Finally, after filling out a bunch of forms I couldn’t read,
having to redo several pages because my penmanship went outside the
provided boxes, they set me free with an ominous-sounding warning I
didn’t fully understand.

Given how serious they had reacted to the
theft of a crappy fifty-dollar bike, I could hardly imagine how
they would treat a case involving a questionable death.

I had done my research after this late-night
encounter, to determine whether I’d been illegally detained, and
learned there’s no habeas corpus in Japan. The police can hold you
for up to twenty-three days without charging you with a crime and
without allowing you access to legal counsel or counselor
assistance.

I flexed my fingers again. Now it wasn’t
just my right hand that was hurting. My biceps and shoulders had
started to ache. How long had we been walking for? Thirty minutes?
Longer? How far was it to the red ribbon? No more than forty
minutes. Which meant another ten minutes before we could rest.

I continued to stare ahead at John Scott’s
back. I wondered if he was tiring as well. He had to be. He wasn’t
Superman, though he might like to believe he was. Strangely, as
much as I disliked him, I felt bad for him. Because he, of course,
had the most to be anxious about. The rest of us had done nothing
worse than trespass, if even that. He had given Ben the mushrooms,
had taken them himself, which could be proven with a urine test.
And drugs, even soft drugs, were a big no-no in Japan. Paul
McCartney had once been locked up here for nine days, the Wings
tour cancelled, because he had been caught with marijuana at Narita
Airport. The Stones had struggled for years to enter the country
because the band members had previous drug convictions. And then
there were all the stories you heard about concerning friends of
friends. One off the top of my head involved a Brit who was
arrested for smoking a joint in his own home. Ten cops searched his
apartment and found some cannabis seeds in a box and a few grams of
pot in the freezer. He was sentenced to eighteen months in
prison.