by Jeremy Bates
Suddenly Ben cried out. Then everyone was crowding over something on the ground, just off the path. I leaned over Mel and saw a pile of relatively new equipment. There was a silver flashlight, batteries still in the package, a hacksaw with an orange handle, black rubber gloves, scissors, tape, and a clear bag filled with numerous cans of chemicals.
“This must belong to the police or volunteers who search for the bodies,” Ben said. “See the scissors and the saw?”
“But what are the chemicals used for?” Neil said.
Nobody had an answer to that.
John Scott grabbed the flashlight and batteries.
“John!” Mel reprimanded. “What are you doing?”
“It will come in handy.”
“You can’t take it.”
“Why not? Someone obviously left it here.”
“They might be coming back for it.”
“I’ll return it on the way out tomorrow.”
“I think you should leave it.”
“Do you have a flashlight?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Anyone else?”
“I have one,” Neil said.
“That’s it? Two for seven people?” John Scott glanced at each of us in turn. “Is anyone else against a third flashlight? It’s going to be pitch black out here later.”
Put that way, nobody objected.
Somehow a pebble had snuck into my left shoe, annoying me to no end. I wasn’t wearing hiking boots like the others. My feet were size thirteen—a size that was nearly impossible to find in Japan, even in a city as large as Tokyo. Consequently, I hadn’t been able to buy proper boots for this trip and instead wore the pair of tattered Reebok trainers I’d brought with me from the States.
John Scott, now chatting up Nina ten feet ahead of me, lit a cigarette. He blew the smoke back over his shoulder.
I noticed his shoes for the first time: eighteen-hole Doc Martins, black leather, yellow laces. Like his leather jacket, I didn’t know what to make of them.
Had he planned on wearing them to climb Fuji? Or did he have something else in his big military-issued rucksack?
“What were you guys talking about earlier?” I asked Mel.
“Who?”
I didn’t reply. She knew who.
She said, “He was telling me stories about Okinawa. He said it’s a great place. We should visit there sometime.”
“Where’s he staying in Tokyo?”
“A love hotel actually.”
“Ha. Whereabouts?” Love hotels were neon-garish places where you rent a room either for a three-hour rest or for the entire night. You select the room from a panel of buttons and settle the bill via a pneumatic tube or pair of mysterious hands behind a pane of frosted glass. Mel and I had stayed in a bunch of them over the years for kicks, and the rooms had featured rotating beds, ceiling mirrors, karaoke systems, hot tubs, and vending machines selling everything from beer to S&M gear to women’s panties, previously worn.
“That one in Shibuya we stayed in. Remember, on that small, windy street?”
“Yeah, I remember.” I think the area was called Love Hotel Hill. Our room had no windows for the same reason casinos don’t. “There are a bunch of hotels there. He stayed in the same one we did?”
“I recommended it.”
I frowned. “How long have you known he was coming to Tokyo?”
“A couple days before he arrived.”
“Is that when you invited him to climb Fuji?”
“I told him we were climbing it, yes. He said he’d climbed it before and had other plans. But then he texted me last night and said his plans had fallen through.”
I stared ahead. John Scott took another drag of his cigarette, blew the smoke back at us.
“What do you think about his jacket?” I asked.
“What about it?”
“A leather jacket like that? To climb a mountain?”
“He wasn’t planning on climbing. I just said that. I guess it’s the only jacket he brought with him.”
Fair enough, I thought. But I still wanted to get a dig in. I didn’t like this relationship Mel had with him. Maybe I was overreacting. I don’t know. Something just didn’t sit right.
“Where’s he from?” I asked.
“Why all this interest?”
“I’m jealous.”
“St. Helena. I told you we went to school together.”
“What’s his last name?”
Mel gave me a look.
“What?” I said.
“Scott, duh.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Are you kidding me?” I’d thought John Scott was a double name or something, like Billy Bob.
“No, it’s his last name.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. It felt good—partly because the forest was so damn gloomy, but more so, I think, because I was laughing at John Scott.
“Why’s that funny?” she asked.
“Who introduces themselves with their full name?”
“A lot of people.”
“In a business meeting maybe. Do you call him John Scott?”
“I call him John.”
“What about other people?”
“Back in high school people called him Scotty. I don’t know now.”
“That’s like people calling me Ethan Childs.”
“He didn’t tell you to call him John Scott. That was your decision.”
“Yeah, well, if people kept calling me Ethan Childs, I’d tell them it was just Ethan. Who does he think he is? A celebrity?”
“What’s your problem with him?”
“I don’t have a problem with him—”
“Hey, look there!” Ben shouted.
For an instant a rush of dread washed through me. We’d found someone. He would be hanging from a noose. Dead and cold and—
It was a shoe. That’s it. A lone white shoe.
It sat about ten feet to the left of the path, next to a mossy rock.
Ben and John Scott were already making their way toward it.
“It’s a Nike,” Ben said.
The rest of us ventured closer. It was a men’s. Size eight or nine. The laces were missing.
I surveyed the area, but didn’t see any other sign of human intrusion.
“Looks like it’s been here for a while,” Neil said.
“You think it’s from…you know?” Mel said. “Someone who killed themselves?”
“Whose else could it be?” John Scott said. I considered thinking of him as just John from now on, but I stuck with John Scott. It still amused me that he allowed himself to be thought of as a two-name guy, like Tom Cruise. “A hiker would notice if his shoe fell off.”
“So would someone planning on killing themselves,” I said. “We’re talking about a person here, not a zombie.”
“Where are the laces?” Mel asked.
“Maybe he needed them to do the deed,” Neil said.
“With shoelaces?” I said.
“You know what I think?” Tomo said. “I think the animal eat the guy.”
Ben shook his head. “There would be a skeleton, clothes.”
“Maybe it drag him away. The shoe fall off.”
“I don’t like this,” Mel stated.
“Are there bears in these parts, Tomo?” I asked.
“Yeah, man,” he said. “So many.”
“I’m serious.”
“Yes, there are,” Neil said. “I’ve read about people seeing bears while climbing Mt. Fuji. But they rarely attack humans unless you get between them and their cubs.”
“I don’t say the bear eat the live guy,” Tomo said. “I say he eat the dead guy.”
“Who cares what got him?” John Scott shrugged impatiently. “All we’re doing is guessing. And all that’s doing is wasting time. I want to see a body.” He returned to the footpath, heading deeper into the forest.
After a beat, the rest of us followed.
5
It became noticeably darker, quickly.
Earlier, pieces of the granite-gray sky had been visible through the patchwork of overhead branches. Now little if any gray penetrated the thickening canopy, turning midday into a premature dusk. I usually enjoyed the twilight that bridged late afternoon and early evening. There was a sereneness associated with it. But not here in Aokigahara. Here, the trees took on a sinister, emaciated appearance. Their green leaves lost their vibrancy, as if drained of life. Elastic shadows thickened and pooled. My mind and eyes began to play tricks on me to the extent I’d see a tortured face in a twisted tree trunk, or a blackened skull in a mound of volcanic rubble. Moreover, I had the uncomfortable sensation of being watched. Several times I sensed movement in the corner of my field of vision.
And still there were no animals, no wind, just the trees and us in this…crypt.
I wasn’t the only one getting spooked by the forest. We were all acting like animals sniffing out a trap, sneaking glances at the canopy or the suffocating trees, as if searching for some lurking threat.
A crackling of vegetation sounded off to the right. Ben and Nina, who were both ahead of me, jumped a foot off the ground. Tomo dropped into a squat, his hands framing his face like the guy in The Scream. Mel grabbed my forearm so hard it hurt. Then, from behind us, John Scott howled with laughter. I knew what he’d done before he tossed another rock into the trees.
“Gosh, John!” Mel cried. “That wasn’t funny!”
He continued to laugh. Neil, who was beside him, and who I could imagine John Scott elbowing conspiratorially when he’d picked up the rock, appeared guiltily amused.
“You fuck-ass!” Tomo said, though he was smiling witlessly. “I almost shit my brains.”
This caused John Scott to crack up harder. Ben and Nina joined in, then everyone was having a good chuckle. We needed it. A release from the pressure that had evidently been building inside all of us.
It was a brief reprieve, however, and after the laughter died down, and we were on the move once again, the silence inevitably returned, just as disquieting as before.
I glanced beside me at Mel. She was chewing her bottom lip, her eyes downcast, watching where she stepped. I could almost feel the tightness in her body. She looked over, smiled. It was a hesitant smile, a hospital smile, how the nurses smiled at me while I was with Gary in his final hours. A reassuring smile.
I felt suddenly bad for springing this camping trip on her. She wasn’t cut out for stuff like this. She often refused to watch horror movies because they were too scary, and she rarely, if ever, did anything that was dangerous or illegal.
I took her hand in mine and said, “Still feeling like this is an enchanted forest?”
“A little,” she said. “But I feel like we’ve just walked into the wicked witch’s domain.”
“I know what you mean.”
“What were you thinking about? You haven’t said anything for the last five minutes.”
“Our Spain trip,” I said, which was true. I’d been compiling a mental list of some of the dumbest things I’ve done or attempted to do in my life. Making the top three was my decision last summer to cross Spain’s Camino del Ray, a three-foot-wide decrepit walkway pinned against a sheer cliff face three hundred thirty feet above a river. I’m afraid of heights, and I’d believed conquering the walkway might help me overcome the fear. But when I got to a section where the concrete had collapsed, leaving a large open gap bridged only by narrow steel beams, I returned the way I’d come, meeting up again with Mel, who’d had the sense to wait behind.
“Blue skies, warm weather,” Mel said. “That was such a nice vacation. I wish you didn’t mention it.”
“You’d rather be there?”
“You mean rather there than Japan? Or rather there than a haunted forest?”
I’d meant a haunted forest. But now that she’d brought it up I said, “Than Japan. We don’t have to go back to the States. We could teach in Spain. They need English teachers.”
“It’s not that easy. They’d rather hire someone from the UK who already has a EU passport.”
“What about Thailand, or the Czech Republic? We could even go to Turkey. They’re always hiring. That’s the best perk with teaching. We can go anywhere, travel anywhere.”
“And what about the future, Ethan? We can’t keep hopping around the world until we’re sixty. We need to—”
“Grow up,” I finished for her.
“It’s true.”
“We’re only twenty-six.”
“That’s closer to thirty than twenty.”
“It’s closer to twenty-five than thirty.”
“Whatever.”
“It’s still young.”
“We’re getting older. And what do we have to show for it? We have no house, no savings. No—” She trailed off. “What about children?”
I swallowed. Kids again. She’d been talking about them more and more lately. I would like to have one or two…eventually. Thirty always sounded like a good age to me, though I don’t know why I choose this number aside from the fact it’s the beginning of a new decade. I suppose I figure I would have matured the necessary amount to be a father by then.
“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.