Into the Trees
SYNOPSIS
Into the Trees by A. M. Heays is a hard and fast portrait of a seventeen-year-old boy who, for much of the narrative, goes by the alias Caine Maddox. He attends a Catholic school in Dunedin, New Zealand, and is of an upper middle-class background. At the manuscript’s beginning, he is found isolating in his bedroom, suffering after the recent loss of his best friend, Kai.
The manuscript unfolds in first-person, stream-of-consciousness narrative style, told in the past tense through the main character’s avid journalling. His grief is intense, and he admits that he has been engaging in substance abuse, even prior to Kai’s death.
He illustrates how he feels his school counsellor, the priest at confession, his friend group and his parents do not and cannot truly understand what he is going through. He feels that none of them are taking the situation of Kai’s death seriously enough.
After receiving a letter that Kai’s parents found in their son’s room, the narrator fixates on Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. He sets his sights on Japan’s Aokigahara Forest, where he hopes he might ‘meet’ with Kai again. The remainder of the manuscript sees the narrator running away to Japan and getting involved in the notorious yakuza gang to get a false passport, becoming Caine Maddox.
Naturally, this quickly becomes more than he bargained for. He meets Serena, who is also working for the gang, and who has her own complicated background.
As they travel towards Tokyo to complete the job, Caine and Serena confide in each other, becoming close.
We eventually learn the true details of Kai and ‘Caine’s’ relationship, and what really happened the night of the accident. Serena disappears the next morning, and ‘Caine’, believing she has left him, continues onward to the Forest, where he faces one of the biggest choices of his life.
AUTHOR'S NOTE The first rough draft of Into The Trees came about when I was seventeen years old, not as an attempt at creating a novel that would sell, but as a means of cleansing the wounds of my troubled adolescent psyche by way of the written word. Feeling a lack of autonomy and spiralling into madness, I wrote to satiate my mind’s desperate cravings to escape by crafting a fictional world of characters that I could find refuge in. Each sentence was a secret release of all the syllables stuck on every slight of tongue I could never quite form. It wasn’t until years later that I decided I would finish off the book and release it. The title ‘Into The Trees’ derives from the cautionary idiom of ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’ which has always struck me as a profoundly astute way of describing what it feels like to experience mental illness in real time. In the same manner in which an individual lost in a forest cannot be an accurate cartographer of the environment which surrounds them because they’re so immersed within it, an individual in the midst of immense mental strife has no way of knowing if there is a way out. Meanwhile, people on the outside can only observe the shadowy edge of the tree line from afar and know nothing of what it holds within. Only when one emerges from the metaphorical wood can they see clearly with their vision unobscured by their immediate surroundings. Yet many who go Into The Trees never return and become lost forever in a sea of towering pines. Thus, this book is intended as a raw, unflinching character portrait of a person in that state in all its violence, magic and liminality."
INTO THE TREES OPENING My wallpapers are starting to suffocate me. Once a sacred place of childhood sanctuary, my bedroom has become a self-imposed prison that feels both claustrophobic and comforting in its familiar oppression. The four walls keep me safe from the world and the world safe from me. It is a space where time stands still, where the blinds are always shut to blur the difference between day and night, where nobody can reach me and nothing is real. When my family first moved into this house over a decade ago, I remember my parents bickering back and forth about what to do with the archaic and mostly rotten 1940s wallpaper that clung to the timber panelling of my room. My parents agreed that the dated print depicting pink magnolias in bloom was garish and inappropriate for a young boy’s bedroom. However, they didn’t want to painstakingly scrape off the old wallpaper so they simply papered over it with a minimalist navy blue pattern instead. Twelve years later, the top layer is cracked, bumpy, and peeling from hasty application over an already rotten foundation. They papered over one problem only to create another, and now it’ll be twice as difficult to scrape the wood clean. In many ways, the wallpaper feels emblematic of the agoraphobia I’ve developed over the last thirty-one days to cope with my grief and the overwhelming guilt I feel at every turn. Isolation has an addictive quality to it for the longer you go without stepping outside, the more terrifying it feels to brave the outside world. It’s been so long that the outside world feels like a conspiracy, like a false memory implanted by the Mandela Effect. I shudder to think of it - all the chess game conversations and the watchful sets of eyes that follow you. In the presence of another person, it is impossible to convince yourself you don’t exist. The perception of others weighs you down to earth like gravity, tethered to reality. Even when I was a child, I had a habit of retreating into my subconsciousness to escape the material world. Unconsciousness is even better but one can only take so many sleeping pills before the body refuses to rest lest it fall into the black abyss forever. It is in the refuge of slumber that all is forgotten. Yet, the older I get, the more I have to forget and the more challenging it is to do so. Remnants of the past hang everywhere, as much as I struggle to evade them hence why I cling to the security of my bedroom so tightly.
INTO THE TREES EXCERPT And listen, that flimsy, false safety net of assurance that all your feelings are valid and your friends will be there for you unconditionally is the luxury treatment - that’s how women and more enlightened liberal friends act - they’re the nice ones. Most of my mates are dudes who’ll call you gay and tell you to shut the fuck up at the slightest off-kilter reply to ‘how you been?’ To them, having a cock and being openly sad is an inherently incendiary notion. The two are mutually exclusive, they cancel each other out. If you’re male and depressed, you’re a traitor to the culture for you’ve violated the implicit social contract we all signed when we reached adolescence that we’d collectively pretend to be emotionless. . .other than for expressing anger, pride and horniness, those we condone. It’s an ideological hangover from eras past when we lived in squalor, fought in wars for causes we couldn’t comprehend and died in our twenties. Those innate emotions we incentivise today aren’t our defining traits as a gender, nor are they inherently problematic; the simple truth is they were easiest to harness. Sex sells, anger fuels revolution and pride sits behind every power play in history’s textbooks. What did sadness ever do for private interests? Nothing. As men, we’re socialised by older, more powerful men to believe our primary societal value is to be productive; therefore, a feeling that outside forces can’t exploit for their economic, political, or social benefit is a feeling of being abhorred. So the popular narrative endures.