by Jeremy Bates
“I do not have a phone.”
“Why not?”
“I have one at home, but I did not bring it with me. It is too expensive to use when you travel.”
“So you don’t have Ben’s number?”
“He does not have a phone either.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“I want to find him, of course.”
“Maybe he went to the parking lot?”
She frowned. “The parking lot?”
“If the forest was tripping him out, he might have wanted to get clear of it, get in the open.”
“Without telling me?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“No, I think he is lost,” she said firmly. “We must wait for him to come back.”
“And what if he doesn’t come back?”
“He will. He is probably just sleeping. You will see.”
Back at the camp Mel was already dismantling our tent. Neil was still reading his book, while Tomo had dozed off. John Scott was sitting up on the patch of ground where he’d slept, smoking a cigarette. I had to resist the urge to say something to him about Mel and him. It would be a sign of weakness, a concession I saw him as a threat. He’d likely get off on that; it would feed his alpha male complex.
“How late were you up last night?” I asked him instead.
“Late.”
“Did you see Ben around?”
“Nope. What’s going on?”
“He is missing,” Nina said, placing her hands on her hips. It was a confrontational pose, almost as if she were blaming John Scott.
I was liking her more and more by the minute.
“He’s fine,” John Scott said.
“You think so?” she said with an edge.
“Yeah.”
“You know, it is your fault he is missing. You could at least pretend to be concerned.”
“I’m not his babysitter. If he can’t handle—”
“Oh, just shut your mouth.” Nina turned to the others. “He does not have a phone, so we cannot contact him. I am going to wait here until he returns. You may all do what you wish.”
“I still want to go check out that body,” John Scott said. “Tomo was too chicken shit to do it last night.”
“I was too drunk,” Tomo said without opening his eyes.
“What about now?”
“Yeah, man, let’s do it.”
“Neil?” John Scott asked.
“I’ll live vicariously through your description.”
I didn’t feel I was in a position to speak for Mel right then, so I simply looked at her. She continued to dismantle the tent in silence.
“Mel?” I said.
“Yes?”
“Stay or leave?”
“Of course we’ll stay until Ben returns,” she said. “We can’t leave Nina here by herself.”
17
After we finished dismantling the tents and packing our stuff, we sat in a circle for breakfast, which was leftovers from the previous night’s dinner. Given everyone’s slim pickings, we decided to pool the food together, then divide it up amongst all of us. In total we had a bag of grapes, some nuts, dried fruit, a browning banana, and two packages of instant noodles, only we no longer had any water in which to boil them. I created seven portions, setting aside Ben’s. Neil, however, said he wasn’t hungry, so we divvied his up as well.
“Too bad you left your food at the ant site,” John Scott said to me.
“We’ll pick it up on the way back.”
“If the ants didn’t eat it all.”
They wouldn’t have. I hadn’t left anything open; it had all been packaged. Still, I didn’t bother telling John Scott this.
I couldn’t stop picturing the fucker and my girlfriend in bed together.
While we were eating, Neil disappeared into the forest, returning five minutes later.
“You just shit, man?” Tomo said.
“You’re bloody vulgar, aren’t you?” Neil replied, turning red.
“You have…” He made a farting noise.
“Come on, Tomo,” I said. “We’re eating.”
“How you say? Diareema?”
“The shits,” John Scott said.
“My stomach is upset, yes,” Neil said.
“Told you that fish smelled nasty, dude.”
“It wasn’t the fish. Kaori wouldn’t have given me bad fish.”
“Yeah, you right,” Tomo said. “Probably the bottled water.”
Neil scowled. Color had risen to his cheeks again, this time in irritation rather than embarrassment. He was about to snap.
“So what’s the plan?” I said, changing topics. “Should we start looking for Ben?”
“What’s the point?” John Scott said. “If he can’t hear us shouting from here, then he’s too far away for us to find regardless.”
“He might be injured,” I said.
“If he was, and within a potential search parameter, he would still be able hear us.”
“Not if he’s unconscious.” I glanced at Nina, then at each of the others, making sure I had their attention. “He was gone when we woke up, which means he left sometime during the night or early morning. He might have slipped and hit his head on a rock…or fallen into one of those big craters.”
“Whoa, slow down,” John Scott said. “If we start wandering around aimlessly, we’re likely going to get lost ourselves.”
“We won’t go far,” I told him, getting pissed off he was arguing with me. “But we have to do something.”
“When?” Nina asked.
“Now. There’s no point putting it off.”
“And what if we don’t find him?” Mel asked.
I looked at Nina. It was her call.
“Then we wait here,” she said. “If he does not return by lunchtime, then we head back to the parking lot.”
John Scott shook his head. Everyone else, however, seemed okay with the plan.
I said, “I think we should search in pairs. How about John Scott and Tomo, Nina and Neil, Mel and me?”
“I’ll go with Neil,” Mel said pointedly.
I looked at her. She looked away.
I shrugged. “Okay. Mel and Neil. Nina and me.”
“I think Tomo and me will follow the string to the body,” John Scott said, standing. “Who knows? Maybe Ben wanted to go back and see it for some reason.”
“Why would he want to do that?” I said. “It’s what tripped him out in the first place.”
“Maybe once he sobered up he wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”
I didn’t want to concede to the prick, especially when I knew he only wanted to visit the body to assuage his own curiosity, but he had a valid point. Ben might have returned there.
We got to our feet, paired up, and began spreading out.
Nina and I went in the opposite direction she had gone earlier. We walked mostly in silence, focusing on searching for signs of Ben’s passage. Then, suddenly, she tripped on a rock, stumbling forward. I grabbed her by the waist, preventing her from toppling over.
“You okay?” I said.
“Yes, thank you. I was not paying attention.”
We began walking again.
I said, “I’m sure Ben’s okay.”
“I am sure too.”
“Even if we don’t find him, the police will put together a search party. They’ll find him. This isn’t Yellowstone Park.”
“Where the bear Yogi lives?”
“That’s Jellystone.”
“You know,” she said, “I feel bad—”
“He’ll be fine—”
“No, you do not understand.” She frowned. “You see, I think he loves me.”
I looked at her. “That’s a bad thing?”
“I do not love him back.”
“Oh.”
“I know, I know. That is not nice thing for me to say, especially with him missing, but it is true. It is why I feel bad, because I am thinking like this, no
w, when I should be worried for him.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You know,” Nina went on, “I was not sure I wanted him to come with me to Japan. But he did. He insisted. I thought why not. Better than being alone. But maybe I was wrong. I like being alone.”
“Where are you going next?”
“After Japan? The United States, your country.”
“You’ve never been?”
“No.”
“You should visit Wisconsin.”
“That is where you are from?”
“Yes—no. It’s where I’m from, yes, but you don’t need to visit. I was joking. There’s not much to do there.”
“It is peaceful?”
“Quiet.”
“Ah, that is what I am looking for! Remember, I told you I am searching for a place to meditate. You should come with me, Ethan. We will live together.”
I looked at her again. She was brutally blunt.
“So what do you think?” she pressed.
I shook my head. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Do not be shy,” she said.
“I’m not shy. You’re just—I don’t know.”
“I am what?”
“Is Ben going to the US too?” I asked.
“He cannot.”
“Why not?”
“He has not completed his service in the military. We both finished our three years around the same time, but he has to do an extra nine months because he is an officer.”
“You were in the military too?”
“Yes, in Israel, both men and woman have to serve.”
“That’s nuts.”
“We are a small country, in a part of the world where not many other countries like us. We do what we can to survive. Women have served in the military since before the Palestine War.”
“What did you do—your role or whatever?”
“I was part of the Border Guard.”
“Like the Border Patrol in the US?”
“Do they protect against terrorists?”
“More like illegal immigrants.”
“Then I do not think they are similar.”
“Have you ever shot anyone?”
“No, but I am trained to use machine guns, grenades, mortars, anything. So do not mess with me, Ethan.”
“And you have a mean karate chop.”
“That is right.”
I tried picturing Nina in military uniform with a machine gun, and for some reason the image came easily. Perhaps it was her headstrong personality—
Mel screamed.
The sound iced the marrow in my bones because it wasn’t a scream of surprise or alarm.
It was one of pure horror.
“Come on!” I shouted at Nina, already running, my heart drumming inside my chest.
Mel and Neil were not far away, and I reached them quickly. Through the trees I saw them standing side by side, their backs to me.
Abruptly the forest took on a surreal quality, because ahead, past them, I glimpsed what they were staring at.
When I reached Mel, I spun her away from the grisly sight, pulling her against my chest, shushing her softly, telling her that everything was going to be all right, which, of course, was the farthest thing from the truth.
18
As I stood there holding onto Mel, facing Ben, I felt as though I had fallen down the rabbit’s hole—either that or I had been whacked in the face with a stupid stick—and it was with a detached clinical eye that I studied the husk of what had once been the go-happy Israeli.
He was suspended several feet in the air above the ground, which led me to believe he had climbed the tall pine tree from which he was hanging, stood on one of the lower branches, tied the rope above his head to a higher branch, and stepped to his death.
His head seemed too large, at least larger than I remembered it, in comparison to the rest of his body. Then I realized his head wasn’t too big at all; his neck was too thin, too elongated. The rope was knotted snug beneath his jawline, pulled impossibly high and tight by gravity and his own body weight, crushing the soft tissue in his throat, providing the illusion that his neck had been stretched.
His eyes were closed, his mouth a gaping orifice, from which his tongue protruded, swelled thick, a blood-purple color. I couldn’t be sure given the distance between us, but it appeared as though his face was covered with small red blotches, almost as if he had developed a bad case of the measles, and it took me a moment to realize these were likely the result of burst capillaries that had bled into his skin.
In the still forest his body drooped bonelessly, resembling a puppet at rest, except there were no strings or rods connected to a puppeteer’s hands, only the rope, the horrible rope, stretched taut and groaning softly as it struggled with the weight of the burden it bore.
Ben was wearing the same clothes as he had the day before, though his jumper was unzipped, revealing a T-shirt with the words “Meat is Murder—Tasty, Tasty Murder”—a joke that seemed terribly wrong right then. The inside legs of his jeans were damp and colored brown, an indication he’d urinated and defecated on himself.
This last detail made me think of a documentary on capital punishment I had once seen. The program had dedicated a considerable amount of time to hangings, given that they remained a legal method of judicial execution in sixty or so countries, including in some parts of the United States. From what I recalled, the goal in an ideal hanging was to break the subject’s neck and sever the spine. Brain death would then take a couple minutes to occur while complete death could take up to twenty minutes—yet the subject would lose consciousness almost instantly and not experience any of it. On the other hand, if the distance of the drop through the trapdoor was miscalculated, and not enough torque was created to break the subject’s neck, he or she would either die of decapitation if the drop was too long or strangulation if the drop was too short.
I couldn’t help but wonder now what happened to Ben. Had he died quickly—or had he dangled from the tree branch for a protracted period of time, kicking and twitching in a gruesome, extended fashion?
The vacuum I’d been in while all these thoughts plowed through my mind abruptly burst. Once again I became aware of Mel hugging me, mumbling something over and over. My first guess was “I can’t feel;” then, more likely, “This can’t be real.”
Behind me vegetation thrashed, and a moment later Nina burst past us, making a strange moaning sound. When she came to Ben’s body, she stopped, as if couldn’t bring herself to touch it. That moaning became a whimper, higher pitched but just as awful.
John Scott and Tomo appeared. John Scott paused for a moment, swore to himself, then scrambled up the tree. He tugged furiously at the anchor end of the rope, but couldn’t get it undone.
Seeing him take charge kicked me into gear.
Maybe Ben was still alive.
It seemed impossible, but…
I released Mel and went to Ben. I wrapped my arms around his waist and lifted, so the pressure from the noose was off his throat. His body was as stiff as a mannequin’s. The stench of his feces almost made me puke. It smelled worse than shit—blood-and-guts rancid—almost as if he had discharged his internal organs into the seat of his pants.
“Get my knife!” I shouted, then recalled I had forgotten it back at the crevice. “Get a rock! Something!”
Tomo and Neil dashed away in different directions. John Scott continued to work at the knot. I remained where I was, elevating Ben. He seemed incredibly light, though I imagined that was due to the adrenaline coursing me. In fact, my thinking thus far seemed to be remarkably clear.
“He’s already dead!” Mel blurted. “He’s dead!”
Nina dropped to her knees and stared up at Ben, her arms outstretched. It was a strangely religious pose, almost as if she were praying to him.
“He’s already dead!” Mel wailed.
I knew this was true—it was as obvious as day—but I continued to hold out hope, however
illogical.
John Scott shouted triumphantly from above me, and suddenly Ben was free. I tried to lower him gracefully to the ground, but ended up dropping him like a board.
I knelt beside him and pressed my fingers to his neck, waited, then lowered my ear to his chest.
I looked at Nina and shook my head.
19
The pandemonium passed. We calmed down somewhat, although everyone’s nerves remained frayed and raw. Consciously or subconsciously, I wasn’t sure which, we’d moved as a group a dozen feet away from Ben’s body and kept our backs to it. He wasn’t very long dead, but death was still death. No one wanted anything to do with it.
Mel and Nina gravitated toward each other and hugged. Nina cried softly while Mel stroked her hair. Tomo stared at the ground, Jay Gatsby cap in one hand, scratching his messy hair with the other, as if he couldn’t figure out what happened. Neil was nowhere in sight; I wasn’t sure where he’d gone. John Scott had lit a smoke and was pacing, his face a mask of concentration. He was likely thinking about the repercussions that Ben’s death would have on him. As he should be; he was in some serious trouble.
After five minutes of this bizarre game of theater—nothing seemed real right then, more like a staged play, we the actors—I felt obliged to say something, though it wasn’t very inspired.
“I’m sorry, Nina, I—” I shook my head, the rest of what I was going to say faltering on the tip of my tongue.
“I cannot believe he would do this!” she blurted, wiping tears from her eyes and shaking her head. “He was happy. Why would he do this?”
I waited for John Scott to say something. When he didn’t, I fixed him with an expectant stare.
“What?” he said. Challenge in his voice.
“Why do you think Ben did this?”
“How the fuck am I supposed to know?”
“Are you serious…? Are you serious?” I might have kept my cool if the recalcitrant asshole had shown any signs of compunction. He didn’t. Zero.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to blame this on the mushrooms?”
“He was tripping out all night,” I said. “He took off into the forest on his own. Then he kills himself. What other explanation is there?”