Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

“Are you sure that you’re not trying to impose a pattern on these deaths that isn’t there?” I said. “Think of the constellations. We look up at the sky and think we see a flat surface with these bright dots called stars that we can connect. We put that cluster together and say it looks like a dipper, or a bear. We put another together, and it seems to be in the shape of a fish, or a scorpion. We forget to imagine the stars in three dimensions. They aren’t clustered together—they’re light-years, billions of miles apart. They only seem like they could line up from our one, limited perspective, here on the planet earth.” I looked at him earnestly. “We think about our own problems that way, too,” I said. “We look at them in one dimension, and it seems that they are all connected. We think that there’s some image we can make out if we connect the dots. But more than likely the dots are not connected. They’re on separate geometric planes, light-years apart.”