Free Suicide Forest by Jeremy Bates

I
believe that. How could they not have favored Gary over me? How
could anyone not have? He was—Gary.
    I’d say the worst of the depression—the
suicide-thinking depression—lasted one month, maybe two. During
this time I rarely left the apartment except to attend my classes.
I had wanted to be by myself. I had wanted nothing to do with the
outside world.
    I had wanted a place like Aokigahara, a
place where I could be left alone and forgotten.
    Nevertheless, I’ve always been a pragmatist,
and I also understood that my death wouldn’t bring Gary back and,
just as those signs we’d passed earlier had insinuated, it would
only cause my family and friends more pain.
    Unfortunately, I had witnessed this domino
effect firsthand. It occurred back when I was in high school. On a
Saturday afternoon during summer break six guys I knew had crammed
into a car with five seatbelts and were driving to see a Pearl Jam
concert. Barry “Weasel” Mitchell was behind the wheel. He was
speeding. My close friend Chris, who was in the car, told me he’d
wanted him to slow down, but he’d been too timid to say anything.
Everyone else was fine with the speed, he figured he could be too.
They were passing around a two-foot-tall bong, hot-boxing the car.
When the bong came to Weasel, he told his little brother Stevie,
who was in shotgun, to hold the steering wheel straight while he
took a hit. At this point Chris no longer wanted them to slow down,
he wanted them to stop, so he could get out, and he was just
working himself up to say something when the car drifted onto the
gravel shoulder of the road. Weasel shoved the bong aside and
yanked the steering wheel to the left. He overcompensated. The car
knifed across the two-lane blacktop. He swung the wheel back the
other way. Again he overcompensated. Suddenly the vehicle took on a
life of its own, swerving back and forth, back and forth, out of
control. Inevitably it launched off the highway, nosed into the
shallow culvert, shot back out, and crashed headlong into a tree a
little past Blackhawk Airfield.
    This was as much as Chris remembered because
he was knocked unconscious. Newspapers and the gossip that filtered
through our school filled in the gaps for me. A passing motorist
called in the accident. The guy who didn’t have his seatbelt on—the
sixth passenger, Anthony Mainardi—was launched through the
windshield, but miraculously he was the least injured, suffering
only lacerations to his face and some bruising. The other injuries
ranged from Kenny Baker needing facial reconstruction surgery to
Tom Reynolds suffering several broken ribs and swallowing half his
teeth. Stevie, who was two years younger than everyone else, was
the sole fatality. The collision with the tree shoved the engine
block back several feet, crushing him in his seat. Apparently his
guts were squeezed out of him, similar to what happens to roadkill.
He was pronounced dead at the scene.
    Two weeks after Weasel was charged with
vehicular homicide by intoxication, he stuffed some socks in the
exhaust pipe of his parents’ remaining vehicle, climbed in behind
the wheel, started the engine, and got fatally high on carbon
monoxide poisoning. His mother had a nervous breakdown shortly
after and was checked into Badger Prairie Health Care Center (which
in the nineteenth century had been called the Dane County Asylum
for the Criminally Insane), where she failed to kill herself by
slitting her wrists but succeeded by jumping from an eighth-floor
window. The day after she was buried Weasel’s father, a police
detective, took his service revolver and blew his brains out—
    “Ah, shit,” I heard Tomo say, tugging me
back to the present.
    Some two dozen feet ahead of us was a glade
created when a large tree fell over and knocked down several
smaller ones. The white ribbon ended there.
    “It’s a dead end,” I stated.
    “Looks like it,” Neil said.
    As the meaning of this sank in,
disappointment welled inside me. We