Ill Will

by Dan Chaon

“I’m so sick of being watched every minute with a fine-tooth comb.”

But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination—that, in fact, we were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden. Memories were no more solid than dreams.

What if we were not, actually, the curators of our own lives?

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.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. –ARISTOTLE

I never understood why people from the 1980S thought there would be flying cars. It just seemed really dangerous and impractical to me, but they all talked about it, so it must have been a thing. Meanwhile, my dream for the future was that it wouldn’t involve mass extinction and large-scale water shortages and cannibalism.

And there was that sense that heroin gave you—not happy, not hopeful, not even interested. Just free from thinking that things were logical. Free from thinking that the world was benevolent or something, or that it cared at all. I always thought it was how you would feel in the womb, before you knew that there was such a thing as being born.

Even if you just have five minutes left, you’re still moving into the future, you’re still thinking about what you’re going to do next, making plans, there’s a part of you that’s still saying everything’s going to work out somehow…”

The desire to feel as if I’m accomplishing something.