Are Your Memories Yours?

It was a little unsettling to read Dan Chaon's psychological thriller 'Ill Will' (2017). Hazy childhood memories blocked out by trauma, recovered memories of adults, Satanic rituals and exploration, etc. More so, it's a horror story of what might go on behind unsolved homicides. (Reviews here, here, here, and here.)

Protagonist 41-year-old psychologist Dustin Tillman is losing his wife to cancer, and has to raise two teenage sons by himself. His adoptive older brother Russell ‘Rusty’ Bickers has been released from prison after 29 years, exonerated of murdering their parents, uncle and aunt decades ago in the summer of 1983. There was a sensational trial whereby sexual abuse and Satanic occult rituals were thrown up.

It's now 2014; Dustin can't remember what exactly happened the night of those murders when they were so young.  His twin cousins Wave and Kate were present too, and their parents were murdered alongside his. They had to give their testimonies too. Wave then distanced herself from Kate and Dustin. He worries about what Rusty would do to reclaim lost time. He remembers how abusive Rusty was as a child. Dustin finally finds out that his younger son, Aaron, is wrestling with a heavy heroin addiction.

A parallel plot runs when Dustin's patient, Aqil Ozorowski. He’s ostensibly a police officer placed on medical leave, but with no available medical records. Aqil insists that they investigate a series of youth drownings (in rivers) which that he thinks to be the work of a serial killer. All these add up to Dustin being snowed under a ton of emotional pressure and baggage. In the end, Aqil was his only friend and was along with him for the last ride to Chicago. Aqil is creepy, and we discover that he is really, the serial killer of young boys. He literally preyed on Dustin and his son.

The narrator changes from Dustin to the younger son Aaron Tillman. He also forms a phone relationship with Rusty after he got out jail. Towards the middle of the book, we readers begin to understand why Wave are not on friendly terms with Kate and Dustin. More accusations flow, and we learn a different perspective of their parents' murders, and more telling, how Dustin might actually be the villain. Then Aaron goes missing. The narrator becomes Rusty. Rusty apparently has a kill-list, and thinks himself as the murderer who got caught before he actually killed anyone. Towards the end of the book, after more tragedies happen, everyone dies, and it becomes a third-person narrative, telling the story from the perspective of older son Dennis Tillman.

So did Dustin kill everyone? Or his dad or uncle did, and then he just came in to move things around and made the crime scene change? After a while, as a reader, I can't tell what is fact or hallucination in this world anymore. I was quite tickled by how books are printed nowadays. They set the layout to emojis too. To me, it's unnecessary, but I suppose it's whatever that sells the books in order to catch readers' attention.

I DID NOT do it. 

I know I did not do it. When I looked at it logically, I had no reason to kill them. I had no motivation, I actually loved my mom and dad a lot, and my aunt and uncle were fine. 

Yet there have been fragments of things. Contradictory images. The truth—my real memories—had always been infected by fantasies or daydreams; the two things kept flipping, shiting, so I had never been certain what was being recalled and what was being imagined.  

This was the thesis of my dissertation, in some ways: that experience is so subjective that multiple things actually do happen. That we can't experience objective reality. Not exactly a useful stance for a court of law, my professor, Dr. Raskoph, said. 

The mind has its unknown mercies and ministrations, many sealed chambers, she said once, and she smiled and put her palm on the back of my hand. We were talking about self-hypnosis, about hypnosis as therapeutic practice. Some people's entire lives are directed by trying not to remember something.  

And so now, of course, it comes to me. When I think of what Rusty might have told Aaron, the old dream comes back, settling itself around me, and it's still as vivid as it ever was.