PROLOGUE

Snaefellsnes Peninsula, Iceland 

Benedikt tossed the empty bottle of Brennivín onto the passenger seat and stared at the large rainbow in front of his windshield as the road bent to the east. The colors grew deeper and richer, dripping, as if from a faucet, into the Atlantic Ocean until, as suddenly as they appeared, they began to fade. He changed lanes with a grunt. The damn rainbow had been following him the entire trip toward Reykjavík, playing hide-and-seek with the sun and rain.

He reached for the paper bowl balancing between his legs and brought it to his mouth. The meat soup was already cold, but he slurped the rest of it anyway before crumpling the paper and throwing it out the window. He wiped his arm across his face, unwedging a piece of carrot, which he plucked from his wiry beard and popped down his throat. Not the most memorable of last meals, but it would have to do.

A spattering of sheep came into view as he passed the exit toward Reykjavík and continued east. The animals appeared unbothered by yet another burst of driving rain that would no doubt end as quickly as it began—followed by another rainbow and then another. Benedikt hated Iceland in the fall.

A few more cars joined him on the road, and he took a shortcut through the lava fields—or maybe it was a long cut, he couldn’t remember. What he did know was that he could steer clear of most tourists this way, except for the intrepid ones. He thought of the two college students from Berlin who had fallen into Gullfoss Waterfall two summers ago, bringing home a broken vertebrae and head injury as souvenirs in addition to their T-shirts. Idiots.

The pages of his notebook on the passenger seat flapped in the breeze, and he tucked it underneath his folded raincoat. The sun was shining brightly again, the blue sky intruding on his mood, but at least the rainbows had gotten tired of him, and he was able to drive the rest of the way without seeing another rear its brightly colored head.

When he reached Thingvellir National Park, he pulled off the road, the grumble of the parking lot gravel beneath his tires like the whir of an airplane jet . . .

Damn, forgot to call in sick.

What did it matter? With the state of the economy, there were dozens of men and women waiting for his shitty minimum-wage airport job, a fast track to nowhere. They could have it. A monkey could do what he did for a living. Maybe one day a monkey would.

He parked the car and pulled the notebook toward him, the cover etched with the logos of rock bands he had never heard of, a feeble attempt to impress the cool kids in compulsory school. What a waste of time. He should have thrown it out years ago. He flipped it open to a blank white page more blinding than the sun, which was beginning to set on the horizon. How appropriate. He picked up a pen from the center console and pressed its point to the page, but the words jumbled in his brain. He was never much good at writing. He was never much good at anything. He shook his head hard, as if the very motion would jiggle the words into place, but it only managed to make him dizzy. He began to write anyway.

Dear World,

I guess this is goodbye.

He paused to figure out what else to say. Perhaps he should have done some research into famous quotes or put more thought into this. After a few minutes of nothing coming to him, he looked down at his notebook and realized he had doodled the head of a puppy at the top of the paper. He looked at his hands, calloused from all the luggage handles that had passed through them. Drawing was the only thing his father had ever taught him how to do. Not fish. Not farm. Just draw. And not even well. One of the puppy’s ears was longer than the other. A broken puppy for a broken man. No wonder he was flat broke. Not much call for a puppy artist these days.

He scribbled it out and considered starting a new sheet of paper but didn’t feel like rewriting what he’d already written, so he continued.

I never expected much from you, which was more than you gave me. I’m sure no one will miss me. There’s no one left to.

His mind drifted to Fanney Grímsdóttir and the way her pigtails bounced from side to side as she walked to school. Boy, had he wanted to get inside that one. He had heard that Fanney married a man from America and was now living on a dude ranch in a place called Idaho. He had looked for it once on a map.

Raindrops appeared on his windshield again, and he was reminded of all the T-shirts hanging in the tourist traps of Reykjavík: If you don’t like the weather in Iceland, wait five minutes.

If they didn’t like the weather in Iceland, Benedikt thought, they should stay home in their own country. He never saw the point of international travel. Mustn’t everywhere look the same? Sky. Ground. Bad drivers. Shopping malls. Plus, wherever you went, there you were. There was no escape.

He clicked on his windshield wipers, which thumped as he continued to write.

I don’t even know why I’m writing this letter, which will probably get wet and smudged in the damn rain.

Perhaps killing himself would have been better planned for summer, when a tourist could stumble upon a perfectly dry suicide note.

Sincerely,

Benedikt Rafnkelsson

He leaned back in his seat and reread the words before setting the notebook and pen down. He turned off the ignition, his wipers stopping mid-wipe, looking like hands on a broken clock. What had his mother always said? Even a broken clock was right twice a day.

He grunted again and tossed his keys into the well of the backseat. If someone were going to steal his car—although the thought was laughable with Iceland’s low crime rates—Benedikt was going to make them at least work for it.

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and checked on the Instagram post he had made earlier that day, a selfie in his apartment. Still no likes, even with all the hashtags. It was all bullshit. You had to be a celebrity to get any attention, or do something so ridiculously stupid or racist, to have anyone pay you any mind. He quickly took a photo of his suicide note, posted it with the caption Why bother, and tossed his cell phone out the window.

The sky was growing darker, the raindrops leaving larger splats on his windshield. Another downpour was imminent. Benedikt reached into the glove compartment, where the pistol he bought with what was left in his bank account lay on its side. He grabbed it and placed it into the pocket of his raincoat, which he pulled over his arms and buttoned. Then he ripped out the page from his notebook, folded it, and stuck that into his pocket, too, and opened the car door.

The gravel was already turning to mud, making the walk toward the rocks tedious. It would have been far easier to do the deed in his shitty apartment—and far drier, too, he thought, pulling up the collar of his raincoat—but that was the last place he wanted to die. It was bad enough he had to live there, the dump.

Plus, Thingvellir was the only place that held a semi-happy childhood memory. It was the place where his asshole of a father had fallen to his death in a drunken stupor when Benedikt was barely a teenager and was the only time his family had ever made the local newspaper. Dying there would carry on the family tradition. He felt for his gun in his pocket. There would be no jumping today; there was no reason to risk breaking his vertebrae and living to tell the tale. A gunshot to the head would make sure Benedikt went quickly—albeit not so gently—into that good night.

He avoided the metal staircase that had been built for clumsy, litigious tourists and walked along the jagged rocks instead. The rain was making the path slippery and his journey more time-consuming than he had hoped, and the sharp edges were slicing through his old shoes and hurting his feet. Figures. Trying to die was proving to be just as difficult as trying to live.

The only bright spot so far was that not a single tourist was in sight. Had it been summer, Thingvellir’s parking lot would have been filled with buses the size of submarines, and down below, Silfra would be overrun with scuba divers. How many tourists had Benedikt overheard through the years rave that swimming there had been nothing short of transformative? He gazed at the crystal-clear water of Thingvallavatn Lake, where Silfra’s rift carved the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. Transformative, huh? From up here, it just looked fucking cold.

Legend had it that Thingvellir once was a drowning pool for women, who were tied up in a sack, pushed out, and held under water not far from where Benedikt was standing. He had a feeling the place wasn’t too transformative for them either.

He reached into his pocket, grabbed his pistol, and checked the barrel. One bullet. That’s all he needed. Well, that’s all he could afford, but no need to focus on the negative. He took off his raincoat and dropped it in a heap on the rocks like a pile of shed skin. He wondered who would stumble upon the note in his pocket, or if anyone would even find it, and what they would do with it. Perhaps he should have left it in the car, with the keys. They’d probably wonder why a guy who wanted to die so badly bothered to walk all this way when he could have just offed himself in the car. Maybe he should have written an explanation in the suicide note about his family legacy. Fuck them. They could look it up.

He stepped forward, getting as close as he could to the cliff, and placed the barrel of the gun to his temple.

Here goes nothing, he thought.

His hesitation surprised him.

The rain stopped again, and the thought of another rainbow popping up was enough to make him pull the trigger, but instead his thoughts began to swirl: images of Fanney, of his boss’s ugly face, of his mother letting him try fermented shark for the first time as a child at the dinner table. If Benedikt had known then that fermented shark would be a delicacy he would never be able to afford again, he wouldn’t have spit it out onto the floor.

The pistol grew heavy in his hand.

What the hell was taking so long?

His damn mother. There she was again in his mind’s eye, this time not as a young, vibrant woman but in her sickbed, her skin as thin and white as crepe paper. How many days had she lain there wasting away while he sat at the pub? Or lay in a brothel? Or was anywhere else so he didn’t have to hear or see or smell her?

Bennie, can you lower the TV?

Bennie, can you close the window?

Bennie, can you pick up my medicine?

It was always something.

In the distance, the full moon was bright and looking oppressive and judgmental. He glanced away and focused on Iceland’s famous waterfalls, which were glistening in the setting sun across from the new cell tower, which looked about as misplaced as a phone booth in a desert. Benedikt remembered how vigorously the local farm owners had protested its erection. Little did they know they were fighting a losing battle; worries about brain cancer were no match for quicker internet access to porn.

C’mon, Bennie, let’s make it snappy.

His mother was back, this time standing at the front door of his childhood home waiting to take him to school. She liked using those American phrases that she picked up from old sitcoms—like make it snappy or burn rubber—which made her feel fluent and worldly, although the television screen was about as far as her travels had ever taken her.

He shook his head and she vanished, thank God, but in her place appeared beautiful Mrs. Jónsson from his playschool days. Even though her appearance was coming at an inopportune time, Benedikt could look at that ample bosom all day.

“Try a little harder to play nice with the other kids, Benedikt,” she’d said in her gentle tone. “I’m sure you’ll see that they’ll want to play with you too.”

Benedikt knew even then that that was a crock of shit. The smart kids made fun of him. The rich kids made fun of him. No amount of nice was going to change that.

“Why do you have to be so angry all the time?” Fanney had asked. It was the day of their school pictures, and her pigtails had been brushed out and pulled back from her face with two bright pink hair clips. “You’ll make an awful husband,” she’d said, like he would ever sign up for that slavery voluntarily. Living alone was one of the few things that Benedikt seemed to do right.

Fanney was correct about one thing, though. He was angry, but could anyone blame him? In the game of life, he had drawn the short straw. Sickly as a child. Learning disabilities as a student. A mother who would rather stare at herself in the mirror than give him the time of day. A father who, when he wasn’t piss-drunk, was recovering from being piss-drunk. And then after his father died things just got worse: A crappy job to support his widowed, unskilled mother whose beauty couldn’t pay the bills or save her from lung cancer. Years spent driving to work with a gas-guzzling, decades-old shitbox. The university kids, so smug with their textbooks and monogrammed shirts, eyeing the grease and grime on his work shirt. Benedikt’s airport wardrobe had come from a runway, too, just not the one with anorexic celebrities sitting stageside.

The gun shook in his hand.

He pushed down that little voice that was bubbling up inside, the one that was saying that maybe Mrs. Jónsson was right. Maybe he could have tried a little harder. In his studies. With his fellow students. With his mother. Maybe somewhere in the span of his twenty-five years on the planet he could have tried to redeem a life that had been mostly thrown away. He gazed down into the waters of Silfra. Maybe this place really was transformative.

He shook his head. He knew better than that. That wasn’t the way it worked. The haves had. The have-nots never would. If you weren’t a social media influencer at the age of twelve, you might as well resign yourself to a life of bank fees and obscurity. It was too late for him. People his age were already entrenched in their lives—marriage, children, careers, money invested for them by mommy and daddy. When Benedikt looked to the future, all he saw was a dead end, not a blank check. He tightened his forefinger inside the trigger guard of his gun, closed his eyes, and . . .

BOOM!

The sound knocked Benedikt off his feet. Mostly because it didn’t come from his gun.

Before he realized what was happening, he was lifted up, the ground rushing past him, and landing hard on a stretch of rock, his shoulders and hips scraping against the earth. He rolled and rolled, and when he came to a stop, he pulled himself into a ball, covering his head as rocks and dirt swirled around him.

What was happening?!

When it quieted, Benedikt opened his eyes and looked around. He was surprised to find that he was a good distance from where he had been standing before. Maybe fifty yards or so. He looked for his car. It, too, had moved; it was on its side and across the road.

His ears were ringing, and he shook his head to rid himself of the noise but realized it was coming from outside, like the buzzing of a distant bee. He looked for his pistol, which he didn’t remember dropping. It was nowhere in sight.

Slowly, he stood up, putting his arms out like a tightrope walker, in case the earth decided to move again. There was more noise now: sirens, screams, howls coming from afar, but he was still alone, as before.

Had it been an earthquake?

A volcanic eruption?

Rocks continued to drop from the peaks of the nearby formations, plunging somewhere below. Something had happened, but what? Across the lake, the cell tower was gone.

He glanced at the sky. And so was the moon . . .

Impossible, he thought, frantically searching above, thinking it must be shielded by a cloud, but everywhere else was clear and calm, the stars awake, the aurora borealis blazing its familiar faint green path of light.

His shoulders and sides ached. He lifted his shirt. It was difficult to see in the waning sunlight, but he thought there was blood. And that damn buzzing noise—it was getting louder and louder.

And there was something else.

His head was spinning, like a bout of vertigo.

Benedikt squinted his eyes again, looking past where the cell tower had stood. Instinctively, he got down on the ground, grabbing handfuls of earth because the horizon was . . . moving. Shifting from side to side like a seesaw or a spinning penny coming to a rest. And the noise. He could place the sound now. A rush of water.

It was coming from the edge of the cliff. From the lake below. What is that? Slowly, he crept on all fours as a swift breeze blew, making the scratches on his skin tingle. When he got to the edge, he tightened his grip on the dirt, which caked up in his hands, and peered down at the lake.

Adrenaline shot through him.

The water was rising.

Quickly.

He turned to run, but Thingvallavatn Lake spilled onto the cliff’s edge with the force of a river. Benedikt tumbled backward with the current, clawing at the ground and managing to grab onto a small boulder. He pulled himself onto a higher set of rocks as the water rushed downhill toward the parking lot and converged with more water that seemed to appear from nowhere, filling up the area like a basin.

It was difficult to see now. And quiet, the water muting whatever other sound there was. Benedikt looked around. There was nowhere to go. But up.

Something caught his eye at the top of a nearby cliff, a muted light embedded inside a curvature of rock.

“Hello,” he called. “Is someone there?” He pulled himself up as the water continued to rise, filling in every nook and cranny below him. Benedikt clambered higher, digging his fingers into whatever gaps he could find, keeping his eyes on that light, which seemed to gain more definition the higher he climbed.

“Hello!” he shouted. Was it a mirage? His mind playing tricks on him? The Brennevin kicking in?

The sky was black now. What he would give to see another damn rainbow.

Just let go, a voice inside him said. Hadn’t that been why he had come to Thingvellir? To die? He thought of the cold, unseen water filling his throat and lungs, as it had done to those bound and doomed women long ago—the painful, slow, asphyxiating death.

He kept climbing.

It was raining now, or so Benedikt thought, since it was too dark to see. He stumbled toward the light from above, feeling heavy and waterlogged, until he finally reached the top of the rock formation, which was shaped like an arch connected by two large, craggy pillars. Between them was a mass of white air swirling in place, like a billowing lace curtain.

He blinked his eyes, the wet dirt in his eyelashes making his lids stick together. He held up his hand as if to touch the light, and a surprising warmth grazed his fingers like a handshake.

Benedikt looked down at the water churning below but there was nothing to see.

And there was nowhere left to climb.

He took a deep breath and, as the water broke the surface of the rocks at his feet, he closed his eyes and stepped between the pillars into the warm, white light.