A reporter’s boss assigns him to cover three unconnected suicides. The news agency wants to syndicate the story to color magazines, “For the blood, so the red is visible.” All he’s given to go on are photos of the faces of the dead. As he starts to investigate, other suicides happen. An archivist colleague, a woman, supplies factoids from history, anthropology, biology, and philosophy- suicide by men, women, families, animals; thoughts on suicide from Diogenes, the Tosafists, Hume, Schopenhauer, Durkheim, Mead. A photographer assigned to work with him-also a woman-snaps pictures of the bodies and the family members of the dead, who speak of subterfuge, hypochondria, madness, a secret society, a body exhumed to be mutilated. During one of the interviews, in a widow’s tiny apartment, a huge dog hurls himself against a plate glass window again and again, lunging at the birds beyond.
