Pulse Points

by Jennifer Down

  I slept beside a man I’d met in a bar. He was Dutch, an architect, thirty-two, here for a conference. I didn’t care. We fucked twice, and afterwards we rolled away from each other and I told him everything. He tried to put his arms around me.

  ‘He was your older brother?’

  ‘Sixteen months older.’

  ‘Almost like twins,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about it, the jukai. Sea of trees.’

  ‘I don’t know what it will be like,’ I said. I felt the grief rising in weak spasms. I got up and went to the bathroom, drank a glass of water from the tap.

  ‘In some ways it’s almost a pilgrimage that you’re making,’ he said pleasantly. His accent made everything sound silly. I wished he’d stop talking. Above the bedhead was a mirrored pane. I could see my own body reflected in it, the shadow of pubic hair, the faint tan lines from a summer ago. White breasts, glass of water in my hand, flesh settled on my hips. There was a smudged handprint on the mirror and I couldn’t imagine it had been left by either of us: we’d fucked efficiently, neatly.

  I thought I should leave, but he said I should stay. I got back into bed beside him and he reached for me again. He had his arms around me for a long time. One of those blokes who hated silence and loved touching. I wondered if he had a wife or a girlfriend. We must have slept, because I dreamed lightly of flooded fields. I was seeing them from above. I was seeing the water-damaged crops.

  We said goodbye in the morning. I got lost trying to find my way back to my hotel. I ended up on the wrong train, then another. I stood on a train platform I didn’t recognise, looking at the map with its complicated coloured lines. I might have started to cry, but one of the white-gloved station employees approached. He had a badge of the British flag on his lapel. He asked if I needed help.

  ‘This is Yamanote line,’ he said. His fingers traced the map. He showed me where my hotel was, where Tokyo Tower was, where Ginza was, where Akihabara was, smiling the whole time. I kept saying thank you. I felt as helpless as an animal by the roadside. ‘Since you are here in Ikebukuro,’ the man went on, ‘why don’t you try the bōsai-kan?’

  ‘Bōsai-kan,’ I repeated dumbly.

  ‘It is a special and interesting earthquake museum. You can experience an earthquake. To feel the feeling.’ He held out both gloved hands, fingers splayed, and bent his knees as if bracing himself. ‘Wa-a-a-a-a!’ He laughed. ‘Actually, there is information on various type of emergency situations. It is a good attraction. The entry is free of charge. I recommend this place.’

  He’d been so helpful that I didn’t know how to refuse him. I couldn’t simply get back on a train and head off in the right direction. I thanked him over and over again. He gave me a fold-out map, the one I already had three copies of. Marked the route to the museum with a series of neat dashes; warned me it was easy to miss. I kept saying thank you. I wanted to wash the sex off my thighs.

  I walked all over the city. I wandered around the streets as if in a hallucination. I was scared if I went back to my hotel I’d fall asleep there in my cool, clean coffin room. I took photos in the fish markets; I bought a small bunch of peonies and carried them around all afternoon like a fool. I walked through the park I kept seeing from my hotel window. In a quiet suburb full of trees I sat in a tiny café styled like a French patisserie. Charles Bradley was playing over the speakers. The coffee was pale and sweet. Ordinarily I would have hated it, but I ordered another and a cake the size of my palm topped with gelatinous fruits and read my book for an hour in the window. It was late afternoon. The light was swimming-pool green. I caught another train, met Eri again for dinner. She brought her fiancé, I wasn’t hungry, I was beginning to get nervous. Afterwards the two of them were headed off to sing karaoke with some friends. I turned down their invitation. I had to get up early the next morning.

  I sat on the end of the bed to call Dad again. It was neatly made from the day before. I told him about the earthquake museum.

  ‘The Life Safety Learning Centre,’ he repeated, and laughed. ‘But how did you bloody end up there?’ He laughed harder when I told him about the man at the station, uniformed and well-intentioned, and how I’d gone out of politeness. I told him about the earthquake simulator.

  ‘It was frightening,’ I said. ‘It went on for longer than I expected. I was surprised.’

  He asked if I wanted to speak to Mum. I said I had to get up early the next morning.

  There was a car accident. It wasn’t me driving round the Black Spur, it was Tommy dozing off in the car on Swan Street, me in the passenger seat reaching over to grab at the wheel. He ruptured his spleen and in hospital he got high on pethidine. He had a vision—colour and dreams in his arms—and all I got was to sit by his chair. He went off the SSRIs after that. We learned about them when I did my psych rotation, their uses and side effects. Of course that doesn’t happen to everyone. Of course if you feel drowsy or otherwise affected, you shouldn’t drive. Of course. He went cold turkey, like you’re not supposed to.

  ‘What does it feel like?’ I’d heard Sigrid ask him once. One of the afternoons when we’d cycled around the Merri Creek Trail with bottles of Mercury tinking in our crates, sprawled out in the sun, read to one another, done the quiz in the paper. We had so much time.

  ‘Dizzy,’ Tommy had said, ‘these sort of—electric-feeling brain zaps. Like shivers in your head that roll through.’ He’d pressed his hands to her hair, scrunched his fingers, raked them down her skull to her neck, but tenderly. Sig’s shoulders tensed. They’d thought I was asleep. I realised it was too late to let them know I was listening. ‘Like looking through fog. I just feel out of it.’

  ‘Must be dreadful,’ she’d said.

  ‘Gunna be good when it’s over,’ he’d said. My brother with his silly, lovely grin, withdrawing from the good pills. That was May. He went to Japan in September. We’d all waved goodbye to him at the airport. He’d swaggered off singing ‘The Internationale’ for reasons I’ve long forgotten, waving his windcheater at us till he disappeared through the silver doors. The security guard had laughed and dad had laughed and Sig laughed, too, but she’d been crying. Her eyes were leaking and she was doing that ragged breathing. I thought she was just getting ready to miss him. In a way she was. Maybe she’d known something then that the rest of us hadn’t.

  I’d brought a book to read on the bus but I ended up with my face to the window the whole way. I slipped in and out of light sleep, tiny flickering dreams. A sign in a window I couldn’t read; tunnels into the earth; my father with white smoke rising from his belly or chest, he was on fire and didn’t realise. I woke with a start and looked around me. I wondered if I’d cried out. I kept my headphones on and looked out at the mountain drawing closer.

  Mr Ukai met me at the bus stop. He was a small, slim man. He wore a parka. He held out his hand for me to shake.

  In the car he played Bob Dylan.

  ‘Osewa ni narimasu. Thank you for doing this,’ I said.

  ‘It’s good to be able to help. I go there to help anyway.’ His English was clear. His eyes did not move from the road.

  ‘Even so. It’s a big ask—it’s a big favour. I’m grateful. Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu.’

  ‘Ii-i-e. I think it is not so good for you to go there by yourself,’ he said gently. ‘I think, if you are not too tired, we will go to there now. We don’t want to be in the forest after dusk. It is a dense place.’

  ‘I’ve read a little bit about it,’ I said. ‘I read about that book. Kanzen jisatsu manyuaru.’

  ‘The Complete Manual of Suicide.’ He shook his head. ‘I think it is maybe a hysteria. I think you cannot blame a book. This sadness is an epidemic. It did not come from bookstores. But—’ we slowed at a corner and he turned to look at me, one hand on the gearstick—‘I have not read this book, so maybe I don’t know.’

  The roads were wet. The trees were fat with the sort of haze I imagined would burn off later in the day. I felt as if I’d been awake for a long time, but
it was still morning.

  ‘Yui tells me you are medical student. Very good.’

  ‘Well, I’m not very good. I’m just passing,’ I said. ‘And I still don’t know if it’s what I want to do.’

  ‘I still don’t know, either. And I am a doctor for thirty years.’ He laughed. ‘What do you like most?’

  ‘I want to be a diagnostician. I like solving puzzles,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know if I work hard enough for that.’

  We pulled in to a car park. We’d arrived suddenly. I hadn’t been looking for signs. Mr Ukai sat for a moment after he cut the ignition, looking at something I couldn’t see in the rear-view mirror. I thought he was going to ask me if I was ready, but he just reached into the back seat for his plastic water canteen.

  From the car boot he took out a smaller rain jacket and handed it to me. He retrieved a backpack, a torch and a length of fluorescent-yellow nylon cord, neatly coiled. That nearly brought me to my knees. I had a bad feeling in the guts. It smelled like new earth out here, petrichor; like bright air. I tried to think about that instead of the nylon cord.

  Mr Ukai shut the boot gently. He slung the backpack over his shoulder, and his waterproof jacket gave out a rustle.

  ‘Ja, ikōka?’

  We started towards the entrance. The leaves were wet underfoot.

  ‘People say it’s a mystical place, they say, nanka, many kind of thing, but it’s just a forest,’ he said. ‘The mystery is why are so many people sad.’

  It struck me as a distinctly un-Japanese thing to say. The woods were darker than I’d imagined. It was all electric green moss and untamed tree roots crawling over the forest floor. It felt prehistoric. We came to a length of yellow rope stretched across the path. There was a sign that said No Entry. Mr Ukai stepped right over it, then held it down so I could do the same.

  ‘I think it is best, from here, if I walk first,’ he said. He inclined his head. I nodded.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Cammy-san. If the experience becomes too heavy, nanka, tsurai—we will go back to my car. Please do not be troubled. Do—not—hesitate.’

  He pronounced my name kami, like ‘god’. I nodded again. I had my thumbs looped through the straps of my backpack. I felt like a child on an excursion.

  We fell into step single-file, me behind him. I wondered what he’d meant, exactly, with his polite broken English. There was such a chasm between us. I thought about Eri saying I can’t go with you.

  I kept my eyes fixed on Mr Ukai’s back, or on my own running shoes, caked with wet leaves. When he started humming to himself, I thought it must have been safe to look up. There was tape everywhere, strung between trees. Some of the trunks had numbers spray-painted on them. Mr Ukai stepped off the main trail onto a smaller one. He looked back at me. He said, ‘Daijōbu?’ and I said, ‘Daijōbu.’ I could feel sweat cooling on my neck.

  It had been weeks before we’d had the funeral. There were complications bringing Tommy’s body back. For a while the Japanese seemed to think there should be an autopsy, and that they should be the ones to undertake it, but that faded. I had half a Valium before the service and another after I’d read my eulogy.

  There was no word for closure in common Japanese. I’d looked it up online in my hotel room the other night.

  Mr Ukai had stopped humming. He was walking respectfully. Everything he did was gentle. He looked around openly, scanning the forest, where I dreaded it.

  There was human detritus everywhere. Plastic umbrellas, food wrappers, mittens, lengths of rope, a bicycle, a pair of scissors, a blue tarpaulin. The trees were so thick overhead, I wondered how they let any light through. I could see why Tommy would have loved it here.

  Mr Ukai paused. He waited until I was beside him, then he pointed at the base of a tree a little way off the path. There was a marker at its base. Someone had left a bouquet of f lowers, pink cellophane, and a tiny banquet of food, laid out on a piece of cloth.

  ‘It is recent,’ Mr Ukai said. ‘Maybe someone else is making our same journey today.’

  A few steps further I saw a skull turned green and a rotten shoe. There was a crop of tiny mushrooms growing by the heel of the shoe. Their stalks were young and firm. I squatted with one hand on a damp tree and vomited. Mr Ukai handed me a pocket pack of tissues. I wiped my mouth. I waited until I was sure I wasn’t going to do it again, then I stepped past Mr Ukai. I zipped my water canteen back into my backpack. I apologised in a way that sounded too formal.

  ‘Maybe a place near here would be good,’ he suggested when we started walking again.

  ‘It’s beautiful, but there’s no light.’

  ‘Aokigahara is a very dense place. That’s why it is jukai. Sea of trees.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I felt rude. ‘I just thought maybe we could find a clearing.’

  We walked for a long time. I watched the soil under my feet. The trees closed over almost completely, so that I had to bend my head in parts, but we did come to a clearing.

  ‘Here,’ I said, ‘I think this is a good place.’

  ‘It is,’ he agreed.

  My mouth tasted like vomit. I took off my backpack and fished out the plastic bag.

  ‘Cammy-san. If you wish, I can go somewhere else. So you can be discreet.’

  I looked up at him. I shook my head. ‘I don’t need to be here long.’

  I took the letters and the hammer out of the plastic bag. I chose a tree. I lined up the pieces of paper. They were neatly folded into four, no envelopes. I fixed them to the tree. The nails were probably too small, but they held. I nailed Eri’s Phillip Island photo to the trunk, too, then the yellowed poster from our bathroom in the Yarraville house, the one with the constellations.

  When I finished hammering I stood back to look at my shrine. Mr Ukai was on the other side of the clearing, sitting on the trunk of an enormous fallen tree. He was watching me with a placid face.

  ‘Please take your time. Do not hurry,’ he said.

  ‘I think I’m done,’ I said. I left the hammer by the tree. I had no more use for it.

  Afterwards Mr Ukai took me back to his house. His wife served us green tea and small sweet cakes and mandarines with tough skins. We sat at a low table. Mr Ukai said it was all right not to kneel. Mrs Ukai looked at me the way you might look at an orphan. She asked gentle questions. We winced at each other.

  Their daughter Yui was my age. She arrived home from university and introduced herself.

  ‘Yui has just been on student exchange. For one year. In Austin,’ Mr Ukai said.

  ‘Texas,’ Yui said. She gave a little smile. Fathers and daughters were the same everywhere you went. Mrs Ukai insisted on cooking me dinner. She made yudofu, tsumire and daikon. I was surprised at how hungry I was.

  ‘Yudofu is my favourite,’ Mr Ukai said. ‘I have tried to cook yudofu myself, but I am not so good as my wife.’ He laughed pleasantly. His wife did not speak English. She smiled at me through the steam rising from her bowl.

  After dinner Yui and I stood in the dark outside on the wooden verandah and smoked a joint. She spoke with an American accent so convincing she even had a slight drawl.

  ‘I’m sorry about your brother.’

  ‘It’s okay. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done to stop him.’ My arms were feeling warm on the inside. I had the sudden urge to stand close to Yui, to let our arms touch, to see if hers were hot, too, but some part of me realised I was high.

  ‘Why did he come here to do it?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. He did a student exchange here when he was in high school. He never knew what he wanted to do. I’d never heard him talk about Aokigahara before. But now I’ve seen it, it makes sense to me.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ Yui said. I wanted my mother.

  The last bus to Tokyo left at 8.10 p.m. Mr Ukai drove me back to Kawaguchiko station. As we approached the station I began to thank him again, clumsily. We parked beneath a floodlight.

  ‘The
re is a Japanese saying—Nodo mo to sugireba atsusa o wasureru. Do you understand?’ Mr Ukai asked. I shook my head. ‘It means “One forgets the heat once it has passed down the throat.”’

  My backpack was heavy on my lap. I went on thanking him. He got out and waited until I was on the bus. I waved at him from the window. He was still standing there when the bus pulled away. I waved until I couldn’t see him anymore.

  I felt as if I’d been gone for days when I got back to the city. I couldn’t bear the trains and the streets. I couldn’t bear this country.

  I felt filthy. I started to undress to get in the shower, and then I thought I’d better phone my dad if I was going to do it at all.

  ‘I went. I saw it.’

  ‘Oh, Cammy,’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

  I sat on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Do you remember that time we went to get Tommy from the mountains, and we drove home through the Black Spur? The trees were thicker than that.’

  He began to cry. I heard him sucking in air through his teeth.

  WE GOT USED TO HERE FAST

  1996

  In the morning we walk all the way to the beach to count puffer fish. Me five, her four, plus a dead rat. Lally crouches and pokes it with a stick. There are maggots squirming in there and it makes me feel crook. It’s the second day of school holidays. It’s not raining, but it’s so cold the air feels wet. Lally picks up twigs and holds them like cigarettes. Her breath comes out in clouds. I can tell she’s trying to be grown-up but she looks constipated. We walk all morning, up and down the creek, then to the train station, because that’s where it’s safe to cross the freeway. By the time we get to the Snakepit, the footy’s started. Lally’s tired, which is sort of Mum’s fault since she’s the reason we had to stay out of the house. At half-time we find the sausage sizzle. The guy’s wearing a Karingal guernsey but he’s nice. He asks if we want a sausage each, and when I tell him I’ve only got sixty cents he gives us two anyway.