The Fall of Adam

No one saw Adam fall to his death, that cold Sunday morning. The aftermath of this fall shortly became school legend: “Freshman Found Dead, University Grieves Tragic Accident.” It wasn’t every day that an eighteen-year-old boy from halfway across the country managed to fall through a fourth floor window and plummet to a concrete walkway below. Everyone, it seemed, had been looking the other direction when Adam fell. For how else could anyone explain there being no witnesses to the event. Every student on campus felt it had been a personal betrayal to their school when they had not happened to see the fall and, more importantly, the reason for the fall. They made up for their lapse in attention by crowding the corpse to get a look at the “Tragic Accident.” No one saw Adam fall to his death, that cold Sunday morning, but what was worse, no one really cared.
It’s not that the students didn’t care that there was a dead body lying behind one of the largest dorms on campus, after all, they were thronging the corpse. But no one cared that Adam was dead. That was the truth. The truth was unmerciful. The truth often is.
Further exploration of the truth would reveal that everyone’s indifference was the fault of no one but Adam himself. In life, he had been a vain and preening sort of person, constantly assuming that everyone was vastly interested in what he had to say, and always convinced that his opinion was the only and absolute authority on any subject that might come up. His peers would say he was a stuck up, two-faced, self-righteous little asshole. His headstone would say he was a beloved son and brother. They don’t always print the truth on headstones.
What interested everyone far more than the fact that Adam had fallen was the fact that no one had seen him fall. To exacerbate everyone’s guilt was the detail concerning the landscaping around the scene of the accident. All across the hillside behind the dorm in question, there were no less than two dozen places from which a standing onlooker would have had a truly spectacular view of the fall and, of course, the impact.
It should not have been very mysterious that no one had seen the incident, considering how many people attended church regularly and were, consequently, away from campus. And it wasn’t that mysterious, either, that Adam was dead, considering that he was an idiot, therefore prone to falling out of windows, not to mention a well-hated idiot, therefore prone to being pushed. No one wanted to entertain this possibility; “murder on campus! A killer among us! Who will be next!?” But it was just too easy to entertain, like a good friend who drops by unannounced, willing to hear all the latest gossip and compliment the way you’ve decorated your house.
To feed the frenzy that eventually grew out of everyone’s fear of a malicious fellow student, was the fact that the dorm behind which Adam was found dead was not the dorm in which Adam lived. Questions began to circulate, questions many people imagined would ultimately go unanswered. What had he been doing in a dorm that wasn’t his own? Why hadn’t he gone to church as he told everyone he did every Sunday? Why hadn’t he stayed in his bed, asleep until 1:00 PM, as his roommates knew he actually did every Sunday? Over what could he have possibly tripped on the empty fourth floor landing? Had he committed suicide? Had someone pushed him? Was there a chance that a few lucky classmates might get their crocodile-tear-drenched face on the eleven o’clock news, sobbing to a reporter about how much they were going to miss their dear, dear friend?
The story of Adam’s death is not really about Adam as much as it is about the people who were left living after he had, this world, departed. One of whom was a boy named Eric. Eric thought that he wouldn’t really have blamed Adam for committing suicide, nor could he really blame a murderer for shoving Adam out the window. Whether either of those instances had been the case, Eric considered the stating of this opinion to be in far poorer taste than he was capable of descending to.
Within ten minutes of hearing about Adam’s untimely death, Eric decided that there was more to the story than met the eye, and that he was going to find out what, exactly, that “more” was. Eric was fortunate in that he decided this so soon after Adam’s death, because the first step in his investigation was one that would require immediate action.
Having heard enough detective stories, Eric knew that for there to be a crime (in this case a murder) there would first have to be a malicious intent. The best place to search for evidence of murder would have been the fourth floor landing on which Adam had been standing prior to his fall. However, the best place to search for evidence of malicious intent, without knowing the identity of the potential criminal, would be Adam’s room. Eric knew that attempting investigation anywhere near the scene of the crime would be futile, so he set off in brisk strides, against the flow of arriving onlookers, toward Adam’s dorm on the other side of campus.
Within five minutes time Eric had arrived outside of the late Adam’s room, and to his relief the door had not been entirely shut. Glancing once up the hall, and once down, to ensure that no one saw him enter the room, Eric slipped through the doorway and closed the door behind him, making sure to push until he heard the latch click into place. Both of Adam’s roommates, who were tremendously messy, were at church and would be for another hour at the very least, which gave Eric confidence that he could search uninterrupted for at least forty-five minutes and still have time to clear the area without being seen.
The room was in shambles, but it was impossible to mistake Adam’s desk. It was covered in framed and unframed pictures prominently featuring him and, occasionally, a seriously inebriated blond female. There was one picture, on top of the printer, that showed Adam and a woman who Eric could only assume was Adam’s mother. Eric thought that they looked happy. His glance lingered on that picture and upon considering it for a few moments, Eric decided that Adam’s mother looked like the kind of woman who had seen hard times (most likely a divorce at least) and even while she smiled, the hard times showed in the wrinkles around here eyes.
Eric gradually pulled his eyes from the picture and began to search the desk space as thoroughly as he could without serious disruption to the sorted piles of papers and odd items. It wouldn’t do any good to have Adam’s roommates recognizing that his desk had been picked clean. In his head, Eric heard the words, “Eric wasn’t sure what he was looking for…” But as much as he wanted to feel like a serious and important detective, Eric knew exactly what he was looking for; he just wasn’t sure what it might look like.
Nothing on the desk’s surface looked suspicious, nor did search of the keyboard drawer produce damning evidence. There was a ream of paper, a pair of hideously oversized sunglasses from a skating brand nobody knew or liked, a pad of paper half filled with expired to-do lists, a metal ruler, a sheet of stamps, a roll of scotch tape, a watch, a battered black dental retainer case, and two staplers; a pocket sized one and a regular sized one. Eric reached to the back of the drawer for anything that may have been sandwiched between the ream of paper and the drawer’s paneling, and to his surprise his fingers closed around a soft square shaped package of some kind. He withdrew his arm and found he was holding a pack of cigarettes. “What a tool,” thought Eric as he pushed the cigarettes into his own pocket. Adam wouldn’t have shown the pack to his roommates for fear of being told on or being required to share, so Eric figured they were safe to remove.
Still lacking any evidence that Adam may have been inciting the wrath of some fellow student, Eric moved his search to the right hand drawers of the desk. The first was all pens, pencils and school supplies. The second drawer finally yielded results. It appeared to be stuffed with every old church bulletin and informational sheet of paper Adam had ever received. Determined that he was going to find something in the way of evidence, Eric plumbed the deepest depths of the drawer, and as soon as he saw the bundle of printed pages, he knew that he’d succeeded.
After closing the drawer, Eric sat down on the desk chair and began skimming through the papers. On the third page he read a segment, written in first person, describing the writer’s struggle with pornography. A few pages later there was further mention of pornography, as well as some sentences about how guilty the writer felt. Eric flipped forward, stopping at page eight where one word stood out as though it were written in bold: “homosexual.”
Before he could explore the context of the word there was a rattle at the doorknob. Eric sat dead still, moving only his eyes to check the clock on the wall. Unless one of Adam’s roommates had not gone to church, the person at the door wouldn’t have a key to the room. Doubt flared through Eric’s mind; suddenly his investigative plans seemed rather foolish. There were many people besides Adam’s roommates who might have had keys. The resident assistants on Adam’s floor would certainly have master keys, as would the resident director, not to mention campus safety. A more sinister thought presented itself to Eric; if Adam had actually been murdered, the killer could have taken his key before shoving him out the window.
Eric was still sitting rigid in the desk chair, and for all he could hear it didn’t sound like whoever was trying to get in had keys, but then a muffled voice broke the silence of the hall outside. “Are you looking for Adam?” It was one of Adam’s roommates, the tall one who’s name Eric could never remember. From the sound of it he was further down the hall, and had addressed whoever was trying to open the door.
“No. He has something for me. He told me I could pick it up while he was at church.” Eric didn’t recognize the voice, but he had an inkling concerning the papers in his hand and the voice outside.
“He’s not at church, or anyway, I don’t think he is. He doesn’t ever really go.” The roommate, his voice growing stronger as he drew nearer the door, exhaled in a mirthless kind of laughter and continued, “But if you know what you’re looking for I can let you in.”
“Thanks.” The roommate had obviously arrived at the door, Eric did the only thing he could think to do and rushed to the door silently, standing against the wall beside the door’s hinges. After the click of the lock, the door swung inward and Eric found himself pinioned in the triangular space formed by the door, the wall, and a wardrobe. He didn’t breath, and he certainly didn’t draw a huge breath and hold it, he just closed his mouth and paused every conscious physical action. The roommate and the stranger entered the room, the lights came on, and upon hearing the sounds of ruffling pages and opening drawers Eric assumed one or both was searching the desk, and he deemed it safe to resume breathing very quietly. After a period of time the stranger announced that what he was looking for was not there, and Eric instinctively clenched tighter on the pages in his sweaty hands.
The stranger said goodbye to the roommate, and left the room. Eric’s breath caught again as he considered the possibility that the roommate might close the door at the departure of his fellow student. With the high pitched whine of rusty old hinges cutting into each other, the door of the wardrobe next to which Eric was standing, swung open. Eric’s pulse did not slow once as the roommate rummaged among his clothing and closed the door again. Then, as college students are wont to do on warm Sunday afternoons, the roommate climbed into his bed, rolled toward the wall and exhaled decidedly, attempting to will himself into an immediate state of napping. As quietly as God had made possible he could be, Eric pushed the room door away from himself, slid around the door and into the hall.
It wasn’t until he arrived at his own dorm room and had securely closed the door and drawn the blinds that he let out a deep sigh and lifted his shirt to withdraw the purloined document from between his belt and lower back. He counted out twenty-three single spaced, typed pages, broken occasionally by a single blank line, and a time and date signature. At the very bottom of the stack was a leaf of notebook paper that was half covered in untidy handwriting. It appeared to be a letter, and Eric disregarded it because it obviously did not belong with the rest of the stack. As he considered the words before him, the idea of a murder became less and less ridiculous to him. He saw how it all might have played out in his mind:
The twenty-three printed pages were not foreign to Eric; he had produced similar pages the previous semester. He was holding what he could only assume was the Twenty-Eight Day Spiritual Growth Journal of a male student though there was no name upon it. Among the descriptions of many moral failings and triumphs, the student responsible for this journal had confessed that his spiritual growth was plagued by homosexual feelings that he dared not share with anyone. Eric remembered how he had felt turning in his own journal, fearful that someone might accidentally get possession of it and learn all his own ridiculously trivial secrets.
Eric theorized about how this journal might have lead to Adam’s death. Obviously Adam had come into possession of the journal of a fellow classmate. But how? “He must have pulled it out of the trash. Like all good students, who ever wrote this journal had cleared out all old work at the beginning of the new semester, and with every other piece of homework and scrap paper his journal had ended up in some dumpster, from which Adam must have taken it.”
Adam’s twisted delight at having such a juicy piece of dirt to hold over the head of a fellow student was too much for Eric to think about. For a very brief moment Eric pictured Adam’s body, that very morning, sprawled out on the concrete. “He deserved it, that little prick.” Eric reprimanded himself for thinking something so cold and heartless, and he recalled the picture on Adam’s printer; “he had a mother.” Moving past the moment of detestation, Eric finished imagining the story of Adam’s death.
After learning that Adam had discovered his deepest and darkest secret, the author of the journal must have been furious and terrified, resolving to kill Adam to keep him quiet. At this, Eric thought again about Adam’s cold dead body and was struck with remorse for his previous thoughts, and with pity for the dead boy. “He was a prick, but he was just doing what came naturally, and he was only eighteen. He probably would have become a better person, eventually.” Adam’s death, for the first time to Eric, seemed tragically abrupt.
Eric fell asleep in the chair, the papers still clutched in his hands. In his dreams he saw Adam, heard glass breaking, heard the voice of the stranger in Adam’s room, and imagined himself falling from a fourth story window. When he woke from dreaming, he remembered nothing. It was dark outside and Eric wondered how long he had slept. He glanced again through the pages of the journal. He saw the chain of events in his head, as clearly as before, and wondered how he might discover the identity of the journal’s author. The only method that had potential for results, Eric thought, was to scan the journal for names of people who might lead him to the author.
Thorough scrutinizing of each page yielded limited results. There was one name that appeared regularly: Michele. From the context of the places where Michele was mentioned, Eric surmised that she was a close friend of the writer. A thought came suddenly upon Eric, and though he was hesitant to commit to the idea, he was almost certain he recalled hearing that Adam had been dating, or in the first stages of dating, a girl by the name of Michele. He couldn’t remember what her last name was, though he knew he had heard it. From whom he had heard this information, and whether or not it was accurate, he hadn’t the slightest idea.
Absent mindedly, Eric moved from the comfortable chair in which he had been sitting, to his rigid desk chair. It was an easy enough process searching the school’s student database for people, and though there were bound to be a number of girls by the name Michele, Eric thought that he might scan the last names to see if one jogged his memory. One did. He saw the name, “Durham, Michele,” and remembered purposefully mispronouncing it with an emphasis on the last syllable of Durham. Upon reading the rest of her information, Eric had no doubt that she was a connection to the incident of the journal and Adam’s death; the dorm and floor where Michele resided was the same dorm and floor from which Adam had been thrown to his death.
Eric had all the pieces he needed to find the author of the journal, but he was unaware that the last one was sitting on the floor. His eyes wandered the room. Lost in thought, he didn’t even realize that he was staring at the discarded letter until he had been looking at it for ten seconds. He picked it up and examined the writing, which was in black ink, and was both lopsided and irregularly proportioned.


“Mom,
sorry I haven’t written in a while. I’ve been busy, but I’m getting stuff done, so I figured you wouldn’t mind if I waited until homework wasn’t so tough to write you. This semester is going pretty good, you were right about chemistry, having Dean as a lab partner has been great. He understands all the wordy stuff more than I do, and he explains it better than the teacher. I’m hoping to get an A in the class. I told you about my first ethics paper over the phone, and anyway I got it back yesterday. My teacher said it was mature and precise, and I got 100%, so I knew you’d be happy to hear about that. I’ve had time to have some fun as well. Dean and Michele and I spend a lot of time together. I really like Michele, and Dean and I have become better friends than ever. I had some trouble with a teacher after last semester, and he’s given me a lot of really good advice. I hope you can meet them both soon, I know you’d…”

The letter ended there. Eric assumed Adam had been interrupted before he could continue writing it. His thoughts returned, once again, to the picture on Adam’s desk. “He would have finished this and sent it to his mother if he were still alive.” Eric reconsidered his theories, including this new evidence. This person, Dean, must have been the author of the journal. He must have been the stranger in Adam’s room, looking to reclaim his stolen assignment. He must have been the one who pushed Adam out of the window. Eric collected up the pages of the journal, folded them once in half long ways, and slid the bundle into the deep interior pocket of his coat.
Eric emerged from his dorm room, into the dark cold atmosphere of the campus. He had slept until around 2:00 Monday morning, and for all the excitement of the previous morning; there wasn’t a sign of anyone as far as he could see. Without thinking, he walked toward the place where Adam’s body had lain. Police tape surrounded the spot where the body had actually landed, and around the perimeter of tape there were hundreds of candles, some long since extinguished, which Eric assumed were meant to commemorate Adam. The candles’ soft light gave the area a haunted glow. There was a staircase leading up and away from the scene of the death. In the dim light Eric could make out the form of a person sitting alone at the top of the stairs. He knew who it was, and he climbed the steps to meet him.
Eric sat down next to Dean. For a moment neither of them spoke. Eric pulled the bundled pages from his coat and handed them to Dean.
“You were looking for these in Adam’s room today, weren’t you.” Dean didn’t reply. “You’re Dean aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m Dean.” There was more silence. Then Dean asked what Eric knew he was wondering. “Did you read this?”
“Yes.” Dean swallowed, and rested his arms on his knees, staring at the step between his feet.
“What now?” Eric thought a minute before answering.
“Listen, I’m going to tell you what I think happened, and you don’t have to say anything, Okay?”
“Okay.” Dean sounded sad. Eric hesitated, wondering if he was pushing himself toward a fate similar to Adam’s, but he continued.
“First of all, you wrote the journal, most likely for a spiritual formation class. Somehow Eric got a hold of it, my guess us he pulled it from the trash after you threw it out with the rest of your old assignments.” Dean made no sign of denial or confirmation, so Eric continued slightly bolder. “He must have told you that he’d read it, and I bet he wasn’t too subtle about it. He wasn’t stupid though, and I think that what he wanted from you was friendship because he probably realized that he didn’t have that many friends. Also, he wanted you to help him get close to Michele. So he blackmailed you into friendship, but yesterday morning, on his way to or from seeing Michele, you pushed him out the window because you couldn’t stand someone using something you couldn’t even control against you.” There was a pregnant pause. “I know I said you didn’t have to say yes or no, but if you wanted to I wouldn’t stop you.”
“Yes.” Dean continued to stare at the space between his feet, and a teardrop made a dark stain on the gray concrete.
“I know he was unbearable, everybody knows that, but he didn’t deserve to die.”
“No.” Dean was shedding more tears now, but there was no sound to accompany them.
“He had a mother you know, did you think of that?” Eric wasn’t speaking in a haughty tone, rather he sounded devastated. Dean just nodded. “I don’t want to be in the middle of something, and I’m not going to tell you’re secret, but answer one last question, and I’ll never talk to you again.” Dean nodded once more. “Did you mean to push him out the window, or was it an accident?”
“An accident.”
“I believe you.” They sat there for a while longer, then Eric stood to leave.
“Listen. Adam… he wasn’t that bad, okay? I mean, I knew why he did what he did, and I think really he just wanted friends, like you said. He was a better person than most people thought.” Eric looked back to Dean.
“I said I believed you, but I don’t forgive you. You’re not mine to forgive. And remorse now isn’t going to get you anything from me.” Eric turned back and continued down the stairs.


* * * *

Dean sat at the top of the stairs for a long time, holding the journal in his hands. He had been so worried that it would fall into the hands of someone who would expose its secret in some grandiose fashion. He was surprised at how easy it had been to keep a handle on things.


* * * *

The next day classes had been canceled. The campus seemed quiet and empty, despite the many students who went about their business, already beginning to forget that the student they so disliked had died the previous day. General consensus was that it had been an accident, though what the police were making of it all, nobody knew for sure.
Eric checked his mailbox in the morning, and found it empty. Later he ate a mediocre meal in the school’s cafeteria. When he was leaving the cafeteria he saw someone he recognized standing at the mailboxes. It was Adam’s mother; Eric remembered her from the photograph, and he assumed she was collecting whatever mail was left in her son’s mailbox. She looked as though she had cried a great deal in the past day. Eric was struck with an idea that seemed both dishonest and loving. He took Adam’s letter out of his pocket, where he’d kept it folded up since early that morning. Using one of the black pens designated for leaving feedback to the cafeteria workers, Eric imitated Adam’s uneven handwriting as best he could. He wrote the simplest conclusion he could think of.

“…like them both so much. I think you’d be really proud of me, mom. I know things haven’t always been the easiest, and maybe I didn’t make it any easier for you, but you know that I love you so much, and I’m working hard to make you proud.”


Eric refolded the letter, content that the two segments looked similar enough to pass as one continual letter. He then approached Adam’s mother, unsure how he might go about what he was trying to do.
“Excuse me ma’am.” She turned to him and greeted him with an attempted smile, though her eyes were red and overcome with grief. “You’re Adam’s mother, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.” Eric has never heard someone who sounded so sad. He teared up, but forced himself to carry on with his merciful deception.
“Um, Adam left this in our notebook, we share a notebook because we’re class partners,” Eric was inventing now, because he’d not thought of a reasonable excuse for having so personal a letter in his possession, “I think he meant to write more some time, but… well he’d want you to have it I think.” He handed the letter over to Adam’s mother, and she seemed instinctively to know what it was.
“You must be Dean, then.” Eric was taken aback but pretended as though it was merely surprise at being known.
“Yes, I’m Dean.” He added quickly, “Adam and I were Chemistry partners, and I don’t know what he’s told you but he was practically carrying me through that class!” Eric laughed a hollow laugh, and realized he may have gone too far, but he sobered and looked Adam’s mother square in the eye. “We’re all going to miss him, Adam. He was a good guy. Have you seen the candles?” She nodded, and tears began to leak from her eyes once more. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” Was all Eric could think to finish with, but he sounded as sincere as he possibly could. His well-intentioned lie had become truth.


* * * *

That night Eric climbed into bed and fell asleep quickly.
He dreamt of Dean sitting alone at the top of the stairs after Eric had left him. Dean sat for so long, staring at the candles on the concrete below. Then he rose and walked to his dorm, through the halls, and into his own dorm room where his roommate was fast asleep. Dean sat down at his desk and laid the very beat up journal pages on the desktop before him. From the lowest drawer on Dean’s right, he withdrew a single white page, as beat up as the rest of the journal from which it had been separated. Across the very top of the page was scrawled a professor’s hurried writing: “I commend your honesty. The issues you’re dealing with are very serious ones. For you to remain enrolled at this school you will need to see a counselor. My best wishes and prayers are with you.” Below this the professor had signed his name. Below the handwritten note, centered in the page was typed:

“Assignment”
“Course”
“Date”
“Student’s name”

Eric, dreaming, saw what Dean remembered as he thought back on previous events. He saw Adam talking frantically to Dean, thrusting a single white page into his hands, terrified by the handwritten note across the top. He saw Adam and Dean climbing the stairs to Michele’s floor that Sunday morning, so Adam could tell her that despite his original proclamations, he was not truly interested in being anything more than friends. He saw Adam crying next to the window on the fourth floor landing, following his confession to Michele. He saw Dean trying to tell Adam that it was going to be Okay. He saw Adam shove Dean away, lose his balance, and fall violently against the window.

Then Eric dreamt again of Dean sitting in his room, his recollections ended for the time being. Dean placed the page on top of the others.

28-Day Spiritual Growth Journal
Introduction to Spiritual Formation
September 17-October 15, 2007
Adam Marshal

Dean placed the whole stack in the lowest drawer and pushed the drawer shut.

When he woke from dreaming, he remembered nothing. It was dark outside, and Eric wondered how long he had slept.