Suicide Forest (7 page)

Gary was shot early in the morning on
December 12, 1999, while heading to practice at the Giant Center in
Hershey, Pennsylvania. He’d played for the Hershey Bears of the
American Hockey League. Although he went undrafted by the NHL in
’96, he was signed as a free agent by the Washington Capitals the
following year and spent the next three seasons bouncing between
the Capitals and the minors. Most sport pundits agreed he could
become a permanent fixture in the pros if he could recover from a
knee injury, which had required reconstructive surgery. The injury
should have ended his career, but Gary had a determination like no
one else I’ve ever met. He must have trained twice as hard as
anyone on his team to get back into playing condition, and the last
I spoke to him, about a month before his death when I called him on
his birthday, he said he was as good as new.

The guy who shot him was an
eighteen-year-old heroin addict who’d been in and out of juvie his
entire adolescence. He didn’t know Gary. They’d never met. Gary had
simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Gary used to jog every day along North
Hockersville Road, which cut through secluded woodland. On the day
he died he’d left the road to offer assistance to someone slumped
against the trunk of a tree. The person, Jerome Tyler, pulled a gun
and demanded Gary’s wallet. Gary refused and was shot with a .22
caliber gun. Tyler took Gary’s wallet and fled. Gary managed to get
back to the road before collapsing. He was taken to the hospital
where it was learned the small bullets did a huge amount of damage,
piercing his liver and aorta.

I was a senior at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and had been sleeping off a mild hangover when my
mother called me in hysterics and told me Gary had been shot. I
flew to Pennsylvania and arrived at the hospital that evening. My
parents were there with Gary’s wife, Cheryl, and their infant
daughter, Lisa. My father took me aside and explained Gary’s
condition. His eyes were red, an indication he had been crying,
something I had never seen him do. Walking into Gary’s hospital
room was the hardest thing I have ever done. He was lying on his
back in a mechanical bed, hooked up to a life-support machine. He
was pale, his skin oily, an oxygen mask taped over his mouth. I
didn’t know it at the time, but he wasn’t getting circulation to
his feet and brain. I remained at his bedside for as long as I was
allowed, not speaking, not doing anything except holding his
hand.

I fell asleep on a sofa in the visitor area
and was woken in the morning by my parents and Cheryl. It was
written all over their faces: bad news. Doctors had told them that
Gary would likely never wake from his coma, and even if he did, he
would be brain dead. The decision had been made to pull the
plug.

I flew back to Wisconsin in a daze. I don’t
remember the flight. Don’t remember anything about the days that
followed. I vaguely recall the funeral. Most of the people present
were family. The rest were Gary’s teammates. It was an open casket
service. Gary looked remarkably lifelike, and I half expected him
to open his eyes and say it was all one big joke. I brushed his
cheek with the back of my fingers. His skin was gravestone cold,
almost rubbery. The knowledge that this would be the last time I
ever saw him was like a physical blow, I found it hard to breathe,
and I went outside for some air. Three of Gary’s teammates were
there, smoking cigarettes. One of them was smiling as he told a
joke, like this was just another day in the locker room. I walked
over and asked the joker what he was saying. He had the sense to
appear suitably ashamed. I didn’t care. I punched him in the face,
pushed him to the ground, then dropped on top of him, raining down
more blows until I was pulled off.

Jerome Tyler, who’d been arrested by the
police the day after Gary died, was convicted of first-degree
murder. The trial lasted one week. The jury took an hour to return
a unanimous verdict. The sentence was life imprisonment with the
possibility of parole after ten years.

It wasn’t fair, I’d thought at the time.
Jerome was a cold-blooded murderer. He didn’t deserve parole. He
deserved death, an eye for an eye. I used to have fantasies about
killing him myself; it helped me get to sleep at night. In each of
these scenarios I would kill him a different way. Never instantly.
It would always be a long, drawn-out process. I would talk to him
during this time, mock him, celebrate my life in the face of his
death, paint a clear picture of the nothingness he was headed
for.

I don’t have these fantasies anymore. It’s
not that I’ve forgiven Jerome. There’s simply no reason to continue
to hold ill will toward him. After seven months in prison he was
found in a bathroom, his head in a toilet bowl, seven stab wounds
in his back. Official cause of death was drowning.

Not one of the ways I’d imagined it, but
good enough for me.

We
came to a white
ribbon twenty minutes later. It was tied loosely around the trunk
of a small tree and continued perpendicular to us deep into the
forest. We stared at it, each of us coming to our own
conclusions.

“Did the police leave this too?” Mel
asked.

“Police or suicide guy,” Tomo said.

“Why would a suicidal person leave ribbon
behind?”

“So his body could be recovered?” Neil
suggested.

Tomo shook his head. “So he go back
out.”

I was confused. “If he came here to kill
himself, Tomo, it would be a one-way trip.”

“Some guys, they don’t decide. They still
thinking.”

“So they spool out this ribbon behind them
in case they change their mind about killing themselves?”

“Yeah, man,” he said, then started along the
ribbon.

“Wait!” Mel said. “Where are you going?”

He looked back. “We follow, right?”

“You know what might be at the end of it?”
Neil said.

“Don’t be chicken guy again.”

Neil scowled. “Don’t call me that.”

“What? Chicken guy?”

As we started along the ribbon, I tried to
get into the mindset of the person who came to this forest, alone,
spooling out a lifeline behind them in case they changed their mind
and wanted to return to civilization. They would have been
suffering for some time. Suicide wasn’t something you did spur of
the moment. So what had happened to them that they’d want to end
their own life? The death of a spouse or child? Financial ruin?
Poor health?

Or just some really bad luck?

I pictured the person sitting at their
computer late at night, perhaps smoking a cigarette in the dark,
researching different ways to kill themselves, researching this
forest, at least how to get here, where to park. Goosebumps broke
out on my arms.

Researching your own death.

Man almighty.

I became aware I had begun to move faster.
At first I imagined this was due to the fact I wanted to cover as
much ground as possible in the time we had allotted to us before
turning around. But I realized there was more to it than that, for
it almost seemed as though the forest, like the sentient one I had
imagined, was
pulling
me deeper into its embrace.

I didn’t realize I had left the others
behind until Mel cried out.

She was twenty feet back, submerged in the
ground to her neck. Her elbows were hooked over a twisting root,
which was likely the only thing preventing her from sinking
deeper.

From what I could tell when I reached her,
she had stepped into one of those volcanic craters, only this one
had been obscured by a latticework of roots and debris. I guessed
the mouth was almost six feet wide, but it was difficult to be
certain because I wasn’t sure what was true ground and what wasn’t.
My first thought was of a trapping pit used by hunters and
camouflaged with branches and leaves—though this one was made by
the forest, not man.

“Are you okay?” I asked, my mind racing for
a way to help her.

“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes wide with
panic. She swiveled her head from side to side, searching for
something else aside from the root to grab hold of.

I knelt at what I determined to be the lip
of the hole. She was too far to reach. “How deep is it?”

“I don’t know.” She was trying to keep panic
from her voice and failing. “I can’t touch the bottom.”

“Can you try to climb out?”

She struggled for a moment, twisting this
way and that, until the root she was dangling from shifted,
dropping several inches.

She yelped.

I dove forward and grabbed her wrists. It
was a stupid move. Instinctual. Because I was now on my stomach, my
upper body cantilevered over the crevice, and I had no leverage to
pull her out, no way to move back on my own.

Beneath us, through gaps in the dead leaves
and branches and roots, all I could see was darkness.

How deep was it?

“Don’t let go of me,” she said in a
frightened whisper.

“I won’t.”

I heard Neil and Tomo coming toward us.

“Careful!” I warned them.

“Oh boy,” Neil said.

“Oh shit!” Tomo said. “The forest fucking
eat her.”

“Grab my legs,” I told them, “so I don’t
fall in.”

A moment later I felt hands around my
ankles.

“Don’t let go.”

“I don’t, man,” Tomo said.

“Mel,” I said, doing my best to affect calm,
even though I felt like a man on very thin ice. “Put your arms
around my neck. I’ll put my arms around you. Then Tomo and Neil
will pull us free.”

“I can’t let go.”

“Yeah, you can. The hole’s probably not very
deep anyway. Don’t think about it.”

“You saw how big those craters were.”

“This is just a small one. Come on. You can
do it.”

She looked so scared I thought she might
cry. She shifted, so her right armpit was hooked firmly over the
branch, then she reached for me with her other arm and snagged the
collar of my jacket. I slipped my arm beneath hers.

“Good,” I encouraged her. “Do the same with
the other.”

She followed my instruction and now had both
arms around me, her hands locked together behind my neck, while my
arms encircled her torso.

We had become one big Barrel of Monkeys
chain: Mel, me, Tomo, Neil.

“Tomo, you got me?” I called back to
him.

“Yeah, man.”

“Neil, you have Tomo?”

“We’re good, mate. Tell us when.”

“Now.”

They began to pull.

“Wait!” Mel cried. “My hands are
slipping!”

“I got you,” I told her.

The rearward movement caused my shirt to
ride up my stomach. Sharp sticks scraped my bare flesh. Slowly,
however, Mel emerged from the hole, the root she’d been dangling by
now beneath her navel. Then I was back on solid ground. I rose to a
kneeling position, pulling her toward me. Tomo released my ankles
and squatted beside me—

Suddenly the roots Mel had moved onto gave
with a wicked crack. She screamed and plunged into the darkness
below, her hands clawing at the rocky wall as she disappeared.

I pitched forward in a futile effort to grab
her. I likely would have fallen in as well had Neil and Tomo not
restrained me.

“Mel!” I shouted.

I listened with sick anticipation for her to
strike the ground. I heard nothing.

“Mel!”

Tomo and Neil were yelling also.

“Ethan!” Mel’s voice floated up,
high-pitched and uncertain.

I couldn’t tell how far down she was.

Had she broken an ankle on impact? A
leg?

At least she was alive
.

“Mel, what happened?”

“Help me—Oh God!”

“What’s wrong?” I demanded. “What
happened?”

“I’m on a ledge or something.
There’s—there’s nothing below me.”

For a moment I had an image of a massive
subterranean cavern opening below her, filled with the bones of all
the animals—and perhaps suicides—that had fallen down the crevice
in the past.

I swallowed my fear and said, “Don’t move,
Mel. Don’t do anything. We’re going to get you out.” I turned to
Neil. “Get your flashlight.”

He scavenged it from his backpack and aimed
it into the yawning hole. Mel had taken most of the roots and
deadfall that covered the opening with her when she fell, and we
had a clear view down. The shaft didn’t follow a straight line but
corkscrewed around the vertical axis, resembling the cardboard core
of a paper towel roll that had been twisted and untwisted. Mel was
fifteen to twenty feet down, standing on a narrow, debris-covered
ledge. Her stomach was pressed against the rock face, her arms
spread eagle.

Beyond her the shaft continued into
blackness.

“Good Lord,” Neil said.

I clenched my jaw.

“How deep is it?” Mel called, unwilling to
move at all to look down.

I pretended not to hear her. “Go find a long
vine!” I told Neil and Tomo. I turned back to Mel. “We’re getting a
vine, Mel. We’re going to get you out.”

“Hurry, Ethan.”

“Don’t move. Don’t do anything until we get
the vine—hold on.”

I joined Neil and Tomo, who were two dozen
feet away, tugging at a tangle of lianas, trying to pull them free
from the tree trunks and branches that their shoots had latched
onto.

I shrugged off my backpack and dug through
the top pocket for the Swiss Army knife I had brought. I popped the
small blade and began sawing at the woody stem of one liana a few
inches above where it was rooted in the ground. The diameter was
about twice that of a garden hose. It took me close to a minute to
cut through it.

I stood and looked up. The severed liana
dangled from a mess of branches and other lianas above. Both Tomo
and I tugged at it with all our strength, but we couldn’t free
it.

“Shit,” I said, wiping sweat from my
forehead with the back of my hand.