Suicide Forest (9 page)

And, perhaps most disturbing of all, an
upside-down doll nailed into the trunk of an adjacent tree.

I couldn’t move, couldn’t look away from the
eclectic arrangement of items as my mind raced, trying to make
sense of what lay before me. The lipstick indicated that the person
who had apparently died here had been a woman. That made this
gravesite even more tragic to me. I don’t know why. Women kill
themselves too. I guess I just expected if we found someone, it
would be a man. A woman dying in this way—in the wilderness,
alone—it didn’t seem right.

I wrenched my eyes from the sad remnants of
a life and looked up. No body hanging in the trees. No broken
noose. I scanned the surrounding forest. No bones, no clothes.

A darkness rose within me, mirroring the
darkness that permeated the forest, and I wondered about the woman
herself. Who was she? A secretary? A housewife? A flight attendant?
I’ve taught housewives and secretaries, dozens of them, and I
realized this woman might once have been a student at my school. I
tried to imagine one of my students taking their own life. I
couldn’t. They were all so happy, so bubbly, eager to learn
English, curious about the world.

Neil was moving. The sound of his feet
crunching leaves startled me out of my trance. I blinked and looked
at him. He scavenged an old stick from the forest floor, returned,
and poked the bag. It was as stiff as a board.

I wanted to tell Neil to leave the bag as it
was. Viewing a dead person’s belongings was intrusive enough;
rifling through them seemed sacrilegious. But I said nothing while
he worked the end of the stick into the large pocket and dragged
out something white.

“Underwear?” Tomo said. He’d crept up next
to me. “This kinky shit.”

Neil kept digging and extracted a purple
T-shirt, a pair of socks, a small-cup bra, a pair of scissors, and
a paperback book. The book was partially obscured by another shirt,
but I could see some kanji and the English letters IDE.

“Flip the book over,” I said.

“Why?”

“I want to see the cover.”

“That is the cover.”

I forgot that in Japan books were read right
to left. “Move the shirt then.”

Neil did so. The cover image was a
two-dimensional coffin in which rested what looked like some sort
of crash test dummy. The title read:
The Complete Manuel of
Suicide
.

“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s the book Ben
mentioned.”

Neil nodded. “The one that describes this
forest as the perfect place to die.”

It’s one thing when someone tells you
something; it’s another thing entirely to witness it with your own
eyes.

Seeing this book was like being slapped in
the face with cold, cruel reality.

“Hey, look there,” Tomo said, pointing at
the forest floor. I didn’t see anything but leafy mulch. He dropped
to his knees, brushed away some dead leaves, and snatched up a
small piece of plastic. He uncovered five or six pieces in
total.

“Is that an ID?” Mel asked.

“Driver license,” Tomo said, examining the
snippets of plastic he cupped in his hands. “Yumi Akido. January
18, 1983. Damn, she young. Where picture?”

He spread out his search, brushing aside
leaves and twigs. He unearthed more of the driver’s license, as
well as a destroyed VISA credit card and a Softbank debit card.

“She’s hot,” he said, examining one piece.
“Why would hot girl suicide?”

“Let me see,” I said.

He passed me the small section of ID. I held
it so Mel and Neil could view it as well. The woman’s hair was dyed
a reddish blonde and cut in a layered shag. She had a small mouth
and a perky nose. Her black eyes were heavily lashed—those fake
ones you could buy from a 7-Eleven that all young Japanese girls
seemed to favor. Her face was a little too round, but Tomo was
right. She was attractive.

I visualized her dead, her head flopped
sideways, her neck broken, the color drained from her over-blushed
cheeks, the sight gone from her eyes, her skin shriveled like an
orange peel left in the sun.

“Why did she cut them up like that?” Mel
asked.

“I reckon for the same reason she nailed
that doll to the tree,” Neil said. “They represented a society to
which she no longer felt she belonged. This was her way of saying
screw you to everyone and everything she left behind.”

As we stood there, silent, each of us
thinking our own thoughts, I tried to piece together the bizarre
ritual this woman performed before she killed herself. Judging by
her scattered personal belongings she—and in no particular
order—put on clean undergarments, got drunk, destroyed her
identification, nailed the doll to the tree, applied lipstick,
brushed her teeth and hair, smoked a few cigarettes, then ended
herself.

“Let’s go,” Mel said, taking my hand.

“Okay,” I mumbled, but I didn’t move.

The woman—Yumi—would have arrived here
during the daytime; she couldn’t navigate the forest in the night.
Given that she had brought the book about suicide, she was likely
one of the hesitaters that Tomo had described. She was still
contemplating killing herself, trying to convince herself it was a
necessary evil. So what had she been thinking about while she sat
here on her own? Whether to turn back, head home, and go to work on
Monday morning? Her parents and siblings? The problems that drove
her here? And what could those be? She was only
twenty-fucking-one.

The underwear and bra.

Why?

Because, like I’d theorized, she wasn’t
completely sure she wanted to kill herself, and she wanted to
remain hygienic until she decided? I didn’t know about that. It
seemed a little like worrying about a fever when you were standing
before a firing squad. And what about the toothpaste and hairbrush
and lipstick? Hygiene again? Keeping up appearances? Or was I not
thinking symbolically enough? Brushing her teeth, combing her hair,
applying lipstick, these were actions she’d performed every day of
her life. Perhaps she’d wanted to go through the motions in an
effort to experience humanity one last time. And if that was the
case, did she have tears in her eyes while she brushed her teeth?
Anger as she smeared lipstick over her lips? Regret as she combed
her hair, one hundred strokes?

Or was she smiling, relieved her pain was
finally coming to an end?

I knew I was oversimplifying all of this.
But rationalizing, whether correctly or not, was my way of coping
with death.

I turned away from the belongings. I
couldn’t recall whether I’d been looking at them for thirty seconds
or two minutes.

Mel, I noticed, was faced away, staring into
the trees. I thought she was having her own moment of reflection
when she said, “Can you hear that?”

Those words put me immediately on edge. They
weren’t the words you wanted to hear in the woods, standing on a
gravesite.

“What?” I said softly.

“I thought I heard something.”

I listened. I didn’t hear anything.

“We should call the others,” Neil said.

“It’s not a body,” I said.

“No, but it’s good enough, I reckon.”

“Okay. Mel?”

She turned, frowning. “Yeah?”

“Can you call John Scott? Tell him to come
here?”

“Come here?”

“To see the grave.”

“To see the grave?”

“He and Ben and Nina, they’ll want to see
it.”

“Oh. Right. Wait—I don’t have my phone. But
I know his number. Give me your phone.”

I frowned at her. She had John Scott’s
number memorized?

What the fuck?

Still, I passed her my phone.

She took it and dialed his number.

“
John?
It’s me. Can you hear me?” Mel asked him
how they’d fared with their path, listened for a bit, asked a few
questions—asked him to repeat himself several times, indicating a
bad reception—then explained that we found a gravesite. She told
him how to reach us and to watch out for the crevice she fell into.
She recounted everything that happened to her, getting more and
more worked up in the process. Then she ended the call.

“Did they come across anything?” I
asked.

She nodded. “He said they found a metal dog
kennel.”

“What?”

“Those carrying things you take your dog to
the vet in.”

“Was there a dog in it?”

“I didn’t ask. I doubt it. John would have
said so.”

“Why someone bring dog?” Tomo asked.

“Because they didn’t want to die alone?”
Neil suggested.

“Like a murder-suicide, only with your pet?”
Mel said.

I wondered about that. Did the person kill
the dog before they killed themselves? Or did they just want its
company in their last hour? Was there a wild canine running around
the forest now, surviving off of small rodents—and perhaps human
bodies?

I pushed aside the thoughts and said, “So
what do we do? It’s going to be an hour or more until they get
here.”

“I still want to see dead fucker,” Tomo
said.

I raised an eyebrow. “A grave’s not good
enough?”

“No, man.”

“Then go look. I’m going to rest here.”

“Me too,” Mel said.

“Neil?” Tomo said. “You wanna come?”

“I don’t think so, mate.”

“Come on, man. I don’t go alone. Maybe I get
lost, die. Then you blame.”

Neil shook his head.

“Please, man?” Tomo said. “Just little.”

“I told you, no.”

“Don’t be chicken guy.”

“I swear, Tomo—”

“Okay, okay. But come. Please?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Tomo!”

“Please?”

Neil sighed.

“So you come?” Tomo said.

“Will it shut you up?”

“I don’t say nothing.”

Neil told me to keep an eye on his backpack,
then he joined Tomo, and they wandered off deeper into the forest
together.

“Let’s go that way a bit,” I said to Mel,
nodding past her.

We moved a respectable distance from the
gravesite and flopped down on a flat patch of ground at the base of
a large cedar, our heads on our packs, staring at the canopy
overhead.

We didn’t say anything for a while. I wanted
to talk about the woman named Yumi, but I didn’t know how to break
the ice or what to say. Specifically, I didn’t want to trivialize
what we’d experienced. Finding the grave the way we had, raw,
untouched, the personal belongings spread bare on the ground, it
seemed as though there should be some moral weight behind my
words.

Mel said, “Do you remember when we first
met?”

That caught me off guard. “Yeah, of course.
At work.”

“Remember Elise?”

“Yeah.”

“She was in your group.”

“My group?”

“You know what I mean.”

I suppose I did. Like in any working or
social environment, there were cliques at our school. One “group,”
to use Mel’s terminology, consisted of the older, married teachers,
like Neil, who for the most part kept to themselves. Another group
was the guys in their early thirties. There were four of them.
Every day they swapped stories about their late-night debauchery:
Russian prostitutes, transvestite bars, street fights with other
expats. They were funny, friendly to everyone, and I got along with
them well enough. My group was made up of those in their twenties,
recent college graduates, traveling for a year or two to see the
world. Lumped in there with me were the Canadian Derek Miller and
three girls, Jennifer, Karen, and Elise. Mel was half in, half out.
Derek liked her; the girls didn’t.

The last group to speak of, if you could
even call it a group because it comprised notorious loners, would
be the freaks and geeks. I don’t like either of those labels, but I
don’t know a better way to describe some of the fringe characters
we work with. An example would be Brendan Christoffson, aka Blade.
That’s what he changed his name to halfway through the year: Blade,
as in Wesley Snipe’s Blade the Vampire Killer. Outside of work he
often wore barrettes or colorful headbands in his long black hair,
platform boots, and more chains than Keith Richards. He spoke
effeminately and regularly stunk up the teacher’s room with his
black nail polish.

There’s an ill-proportionally high
percentage of Brendans teaching English in Japan, likely due to the
fact the country is so quirky you can let your freak flag fly with
pride, and the myth that if you’re Caucasian you’re some sort of
Viking god in the eyes of the Japanese. A popular comic strip that
contributes to the latter perception stars a scrawny, introverted
Canadian who, once he moves to Japan, instantly morphs into
Charisma Man, a Rock Hudson type with a bevy of girls hanging off
his arms.

“What about Elise?” I asked, curious to see
where Mel was going with this trip down memory lane.

“She had a thing for you.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you date her?”

Coming from your girlfriend, that was an odd
question, and I struggled with how to answer it. “Because,” I
said.

“Because what?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t attracted to
her.”

“Why not? She was pretty.”

“She was loud.” Elise was Australian, from
some country town in western Queensland, and she didn’t have a
volume switch. She pretty much shouted everything at a nasally one
hundred decibels, her vowels pinched and drawn out to excruciating
lengths.

“She was
so
loud,” Mel agreed.

“And,” I said.

“And?”

“I met you.”

Although I couldn’t see Mel’s face—we were
still side by side, looking up at the canopy—I could sense her
smiling. This was the right answer. Even so, I wasn’t blowing
smoke. A couple weeks into my contract I arrived at work one Monday
afternoon and found Mel in the teacher’s room, keeping to herself,
pouring over a textbook she had to teach. I remember Derek pulling
me aside that same day and making a cock-sucking face, which seems
surreal now, given he’s become one of my better friends and she my
girlfriend.