The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand

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

I guess I’ll just begin again

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 the traffic, her arms outstretched as if she’s starting to reach toward the sky or the bridge itself, her wings starting to spread behind her. Maybe she’s getting ready to fly off, but she hasn’t moved an inch since 1921, when she was erected in memory of the World War I veterans. We think. You can read the date, but most of the other words below have been chipped away from the stone by vandals who have been coming here a lot longer than we have. I don’t know why everyone has the same thought, to hack away at the base. Maybe they think one piece here or there won’t make a difference, but then before you know it, the whole thing is chopped off. There are no new ideas, I guess.

The marble angel was probably white once, like a statuary you’d see in front of a church or in the cemetery, but she has turned a grimy gray, almost black from the pollution constantly spewing from the factories in town: General Mills, which makes corn syrup, and Universal Wheel, which makes wheels for trains, and Union Carbide, which makes . . . I don’t know what they make, pollution mostly, it seems. We’re not sure what the angel is doing down by the river, standing there with her face tilted slightly away from the water, her eyes hooded and darkened by years of soot and dirt. It’s hard to tell where she’s looking—toward the bridge, watching it or watching the traffic as it moves back and forth, or is she looking at the sky, toward heaven, or is she looking lower, watching the river move past her, or maybe she’s looking across the river at Illinois, waiting for something or someone to arrive on the other bank. Maybe she isn’t looking at anything; it’s hard to tell. Her eyes seem dead and lifeless in certain light. Maybe she’s blind, her arms reaching out to feel her way through the world, blind like Justice or a wounded Greek god. She didn’t seem to be in anguish or distress; she seemed sad, wanting something, I thought, but maybe I was wrong. I thought about her too much.

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 seemed 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 that 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.

I have killed myself thirty-nine times—which most people think is a lot. It’s really a small number when you think about it. I mean, there are a lot more days I haven’t killed myself. There are a lot more times I’ve decided not to try to end it all than days when I have. I’ve said that before—no one thinks it’s funny except me. They’re still fixated on thirty-nine, thinking that it’s a lot. Maybe it is—all I know is that it’s thirty-eight times more than I wanted and one less than I need. I’m still here; that’s the worst part of the whole thing, unable to accomplish what should have been one small, inconsequential task but has become a larger failing to shape my own destiny. It is not the story I wanted to tell. The truth of it is, I didn’t want any story at all. That was the whole point. Instead, I have had to account for each death and much more. I have become a scholar of death, a student of its various ways, and the more I learn, the less I know.

Thirty-nine. It seems small when I write it and smaller still when I break it down into how it was done. This is how I’ve done it: eighteen times by jumping (from bridge or building or other high place and once from the back of a truck), five by drowning, five by asphyxiation, four by poison/overdose, three by hanging, one by fire, one by gun, one by chain saw, and one by train. There are reasons for this. I live within a few miles of two bridges and a high bluff that look down to the Mississippi River. I can’t go near the bluff or cross either bridge without seeing myself leaping out into the air, free-falling down toward a certain end. It’s like a video that starts playing in my head every time I see the bridges or the bluff. I’ve watched that video thousands of times. It’s my favorite, I guess. I’m a leaper.

I know this isn’t normal. I’m not normal. I’m not even normal in how I choose to kill myself. Gunshot is usually the way to go—over sixty percent of the people who kill themselves use a gun. More than 18,000 people a year. I don’t get it. For one, it’s messy, and someone’s going to have to clean up the mess you leave behind. Then there’s the problem of getting a gun (if you’re underage like me, it’s a problem—not a big one, but still), then you have to load it (if necessary) and place it to your head, in your mouth, under your chin, and then you have to pull the trigger. There’s too many steps, too much thinking involved, too much time to think, and too many times to wait, pause, stop. It’s not like jumping—after the first step it’s all over, nothing else to do but enjoy the ride down. Maybe I’m a coward, but I couldn’t use a gun, not again anyway. Forget the maybe part. I am a coward. I know that. It’s part of my problem.

I’ve been looked at by doctors and more doctors, doctors of every kind. They’ve poked and prodded at me, analyzed me, examined me, and talked to me—talked and talked and talked—and I have left them, almost without exception, shaking their heads. I don’t want anything from them anyway, only to be left alone, but people (my family, mostly) want some explanation, some simple answer. Of course there are no easy answers. I’m a freak. There’s something inside me that compels me to do what I do and something that prevents it as well. How screwed up is that? I don’t get it. No one does, but mostly they think the problem is in my head. Maybe it is, but for me there seemed to be no other way to go about it. I look at the people around me—my parents especially—and I can’t figure out how they can live the way they do, how they can go on day after day. My father is not an unhappy man, but he isn’t anywhere close to happy either. He seems to go through the motions, an efficient program of actions—wake, shower, eat, work, eat, watch TV, sleep, repeat—micromanaging his existence to the minute, eliminating any wasted effort or spontaneity. He’s the type of guy who thinks there’s a right way and a wrong way for toilet paper to come off the roll—he’s contemplated the issue, put serious thought to it, maybe even performed a test or two until it’s a problem solved and he doesn’t have to think about it anymore, unless it’s done wrong and then he has to correct it and educate the person who has created the problem (usually me). It’s over, by the way, never under.

I understand his desire for control—we are alike in that way. Except I take enjoyment in my actions—some of them—as hard as that might seem. I’m frustrated, restless, bored (very), but I’m not unhappy, depressed, or whatever other label they’ve tried to pin on me, and I’m certainly not an automaton like my father. I have more control of my life than they give me credit for (and less than I would like, believe me). I see that my father seems to take no comfort in his control, but he has no complaints either. His is a smooth, uninteresting road, which he has carefully, meticulously paved for himself.

While my father has few complaints—and the complaints he does have seem to be the same few repeated over and over—my mother does little but complain. Each day for her is a series of small traps that were set in the night while she was asleep, nothing lethal, only annoying, like getting caught time after time in those paper Chinese handcuffs. The trouble is, everything is a trap for my mother—the weather, the sky, the sun, the clock. She complains about the length of the straps on her purse: one day they are too long, the next too short; she complains about the humidity and its effects on her clothes and hair; she complains about the time it takes to make her morning tea and then complains that it’s always too hot, which only traps her deeper inside the clock. While my father seems able to control every tick, my mother seems to always wake up ten minutes too late. She’s always in a rush, always behind, no matter what she does—time is conspiring against her. She complains about it every day, and of course it’s never anything she’s done. Her road is anything but smooth, but she puts no effort into repair. Her job, it seems, is to find fault, not to fix anything. She moves through each day beset with problems, and she is continually providing her own narration in a half-hushed muttering of disappointment and correction. You can never make out exactly what she says, only a word or two here and there, but her cadence is always the same, like some epic blues song she is fated to sing over and over.

There are two things my mother never complained about: my brother and my father. She rarely complained about me, or not nearly as much as I gave her reason. Complaining is her way to feel as if she has accomplished something—the world is against her, but she is not defeated. She knows what’s wrong with the world and everyone in it. They might set their traps, but she won’t stay caught. She has her reasons—a need to vent her energetic anger or whatever that might help her get through her day—just as I have mine, or don’t. I try not to peer too deeply into my whys; it’s a tangle I’d prefer not to spend time picking apart, just as the whys of my return time after time seem inexplicable, beyond current understanding and reasonable explanation. No one seems as interested in the why of my refusal to leave this life, not nearly as interested in the why of my desire to leave. That they think they can fix. Why is that? Everybody’s got their own disease, I think, but not everyone’s got their own cure. I thought I did, but I was wrong.

My father is a loan officer down at the bank. Unfortunately, he’s not one of those guys who ruined the economy. He didn’t give anyone a loan he shouldn’t have, didn’t fudge any numbers, take any risks he shouldn’t have, didn’t do anything one inch this side of illegal or unethical. He’s a safe-bet man, limited liability, which is why he works in a small bank in a small town, why we don’t live in a bigger house and drive a better car. The most interesting thing I can tell you about him is that he is an amateur efficiency expert. He puts a stopwatch to everything—how long we take to wake up, how long we spend in the shower, how long we take to get dressed, how long to eat breakfast, how long to leave in the morning, how long I spend on the computer. This is where I get my interest in details, I suppose, my fascination with data, all that crap, a trait I only developed because of a certain gene passed down from my father. You can’t outrun your blood. I don’t try to impose my interests on others, usually. That’s all my father does. He has timed it all and somehow developed an optimal time for all of these things. Overages are quickly reported. If you are in the bathroom longer than ten minutes in the morning, he’s there banging on the door, yelling that you’re wasting water or wasting his time.

My mother and I are the prime culprits in the household, make no mistake about that—we travel from room to room wasting something, demonstrating the great waste that seems so infuriatingly obvious to my father but still remains somewhere outside our mind’s grasp. He would be better off living alone, with his rooms dark and quiet, his electricity tucked safely inside the walls, the water waiting inside the pipes, the dials on all the meters creeping forward as slowly as possible, not flying as you would think they are in our house. He tries to educate us, but we are slow learners. At least my father is not a stern man; in fact, he thinks he has a sense of humor.

My father likes to quote the best thinkers of his day—Bill Murray, David Letterman, Peter Sellers, everyone from M*A*S*H, and especially Woody Allen. The world is separated into two categories, he said, trying to recite something from Annie Hall, the tragic and the miserable. The tragic are people with handicaps, cripples, mentally impaired, all of that. And the rest of us are miserable. You’re definitely not tragic, so you should be happy that you’re miserable. The problem was, I wasn’t miserable. I knew I wasn’t tragic (my father was wrong about the categories, btw; horrible is the other category, according to Woody), but I never considered my life too miserable. We were a solid middle-class family in a small working-class town. My parents loved each other and me and my brother, as far as that went, and we never struggled or faced any hardship that was out of the ordinary. I was lucky; I knew that. It was something else.

What’s wrong with you? my father asked me after I awoke from number eight.

I’m bored. I’m the chairman of the bored. I didn’t know what to say; I thought he’d like it, think it was funny. It seemed like something one of his guys would say.

Boredom is just another form of depression, he said. I don’t know what movie he got that from.

If you’re bored, do something, my mother said. Read a book, watch TV, take a walk. Call somebody. This is no way to behave just because you’re bored.

I did do something. Over and over. It’s not what they had in mind.

Friends introduced, with crème de menthe

If you could pick four people to be stranded on a desert island with, who would they be? I know I wouldn’t pick my friends, but then, I spent almost every day of the summer with them at The Point, which is practically the same thing. There’s no one else around, our phones don’t work, Todd has baseball practice or games, and Jodi won’t come there. So it’s just me and Ash and Bruce and Darryl and Vern. They remind me that the vise is turning.

I remember my mother once saying something along the lines of you only find out who your true friends are when you’re dead, which stuck with me. I’ve been dead thirty-nine times and I’m still not sure who my real friends are, and I’m less sure now than ever. I’ve been with the same hodgepodge collection of different personalities for most of my life. I’ve known most of them for at least eight years or more. We don’t seem to like the same things as a whole, or no longer agree on most things, but it is the few things we agree on that seem to keep us connected. That and the fact that we have been hanging out together for so long, it has become a repetition that has excluded most others, keeping us insulated and isolated, together and apart.

The Point is over a mile from my house, down River Road—we always said down, even though it was actually north, but the road sloped down from the height of the bluff to level with the river. The railroad tracks were built up on a mound, blocking the view of the river in some spots. We rode our bikes there in the morning and dragged them up and over the raised tracks and then down again and through bushes and tall grass and weeds. There had been a path cut years ago, and every spring we tried to find it again and clear a narrow trail to the end of the triangle.

We spent most of our time fishing, if that’s what you could call it; it wasn’t really fishing, but mostly just having a line in the water. We didn’t really care if we caught anything. Having a fish on the end of a hook was actually more of a nuisance—we preferred to go to the same spot every day and drink and do as little as possible until it was time to go home in the evening.

You know the only difference between fishing and not fishing? Ash said. In one of them you wish you weren’t fishing.

We all arrived earlier than usual one morning and waited for Darryl to arrive with another bottle of wine. He’d found (or stolen) a case of it the last week of school, and had hidden the bottles in some undisclosed spot, and arrived every day with another bottle we let cool in the water for a few hours before we cracked it open. It was, we knew, some cheap, supermarket wine, but we treated it as if it