Free Suicide Forest by Jeremy Bates Page B

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