The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand - Softcover

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The angel of death?

Some people think the angel looks peaceful, raising her arms in a gesture of acceptance and grace, while others think she looks sad, disappointed in her inability to rise off her pedestal. I think she’s a little pissed, waiting there to catch someone jumping off the bridge, her arms still empty after all this time. I would like to jump to her, but not to have her catch me. I’d like to land on her and knock her off her perch. It seems like a good goal, to hit her, to land on her, to be held by her—a morbid game, a strange version of ring toss. It never happened. The closest I ever came was hitting the pedestal. It would have counted only in horseshoes.

I have killed myself thirty-nine times. Usually when I say this—and I rarely do—people misunderstand me. They think I mean I have tried thirty-nine times, that I have tried and failed. Do not misunderstand me—I have succeeded thirty-nine times; it is not me who has failed. It is something else.

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The 39 Deaths of
Adam Strand

GREGORY GALLOWAY

Dutton Books

An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

“The best thing that eternal law ever ordained was that it allowed to us one entrance into life, but many exits.”

—SENECA, LETTER TO LUCILIUS (70)

“Lo! I leave corpses wherever I go.”

—HERMAN MELVILLE, PIERRE

“Men always come back. They’re so absurd.”

—JEAN COCTEAU, ORPHÉE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

Prologue

(“and shall come forth, they that have done good”)

Against the dark sky there is a darker shadow. It is motionless for a moment, quiet and still, barely perceptible on the edge of a dark cliff, standing against the dark sky, a black patch on a black background, and then it’s gone. It is falling—the camera catches it as it falls and tries to stay with it, losing it a few times, falling behind so there is only the black bluff before the figure reappears again. It is unclear what it is or where it is, but you can tell that it’s falling through the air, dropping from some height. You know it can’t be good, and maybe, even before the next part, you begin to realize that the falling object is a person—you don’t know who it is, but you know it’s someone falling and that they have jumped from something solid into nothingness.

There’s nothing more than that—the image of a person falling. You don’t see the impact, you don’t even see the body as it ends its descent even though the camera is right on it—it’s too dark, too far away, too many other dark shapes around it—bushes, boulders, the dark hillside and the night swallowing up everything—but the next shot is an image of the body, the camera poised directly over him, over his broken and lifeless body. There’s more light, a harsh light thrown on the figure from behind the camera—you can see blood and broken bones as the camera moves quickly across the body before stopping on the face. You can see him clearly on the ground; his face is calm, without a scratch on it, as if he had laid down on the ground, and the camera stays there on the closed eyes and quiet mouth, in stark contrast to the mangled body below. The camera moves position; the light lurches a few times, but the face remains the same. The image jumps and then jumps again; the camera twitches with impatience more than a few times. There’s no sound, only the image of the boy on the ground, until suddenly he opens his eyes.

I can’t watch it; I can describe it, but I can’t watch it. Probably because I’m in it. That’s me opening my eyes. I’m the one who jumped. I’ve done it lots of times.

ONE

The summer came for me with unusual and unwanted force, as if I suddenly found myself stuck in a vise and then feel its grip slowly tighten day after day, week after week, an annoying discomfort that becomes painful, almost unbearable. But then, as you will find out, there are a lot of things I find unbearable. Sometimes I’m the only one who feels that way, I think. For instance, I might have been the only person who didn’t want school to end. At least it was something to do, some distraction for a few hours during the day. The summer brought nothing but dread and determination. There was nothing I wanted from it, endless days of stale heat and humidity, long nights of dull talk and duller senses. It would be the summer of my seventeenth birthday, the distant looming of our last year in high school, and the knowledge that I was never meant to see any of it, had never wanted it, and would try anything to put a stop to it. It was the summer of illness and death and near-death, the time when I would finally, I thought, for once and for all, for forever, kill myself one last time. It should have been a great summer.

We lived on the edges of town during the long months of summer, spending our days on a small triangle of land we called The Point that stuck out into the river just north of town. It was our own isolated spot, practically an island, cut off from the rest of the world by the river on one side and the railroad tracks on the other. No one bothered us, which was fine by me, and we biked there almost every summer day and did nothing but fish and drink. Then we biked home and waited until after dinner to meet up again at the southern end of town, near the bridge that connected Iowa and Illinois, and drank some more. There really wasn’t much else to do.

While there’s nothing at The Point except tall grass and a pile of empty cans and bottles, there is a park underneath the bridge at the southern edge of town. There’s The Thorpe, an old steamboat grounded on the banks of the river near the park, with its white wooden sides stripping off and the large paddle wheel splintering and decaying from age and the floodwaters that attack it every spring. It wasn’t always useless, of course. It once had purpose, even when they took it out of the water and nailed it to the ground. The Thorpe used to be a museum, a place where people paid to go on board and look around at the small, cramped decks, where they could look out at the river and maybe imagine what a lousy life it must have been to be on board such a claptrap of a boat every day, going up and down the river over and over and where tourists could thank someone that their life was better than that. But once the casinos opened with their flashy, unrealistic replicas of the same steamboats, people seemed to lose interest in the real thing. It’s nothing now, closed to the public, can’t float, would cost too much to haul away for trash, so it sits and rots like the bleached carcass of some extinct animal. We don’t even bother to go there much anymore to climb around inside; everything has been stripped or stolen or smashed. Besides, we like to hang out over by the angel.

She stands across the parking lot from the steamboat, closer to the bridge, with her head tilted up toward...