The Devil's Diary

Entry the First

On the Two Scripts That Killed a Boy’s Voice, in Louisville

The twenty-sixth of May, in the year 2026

Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint. (I am the spirit that endlessly denies.) Goethe, Faust, Part One¹

He was fourteen. His name was Daniel Mattingly. The school handed him a microphone and one word to speak on, and the word was acceptance.² A school is not always a school. Sometimes it is a mouth, and on the twenty-first of this month a mouth in Louisville closed on a grieving boy to applause. I have kept this city’s ledger a long time, and the one lesson of the centuries is that the most patient appetite wears the face of care.

His draft was clumsy and singular, the sound of one person and no other,³ and that sound is the one morsel the animal cannot digest. So it sent two appetites to take him, one from each side, two that despise each other and perform the identical labour.⁴

The first came dressed as the office. The drafts were not positive enough. There is a time and a place.⁵ They sent the speech back to be brightened, brightened it again, and on the morning of the ceremony took the microphone away. They silenced no lie. They silenced the one true voice in the building, with phrases so worn that no mouth which spoke them had to think.⁶

Then the kinder papers tell you the boy broke free, and the kinder papers see only the surface.⁷ Robbed of his own voice, he reached for the only other voice a child can reach, called the school racist and sexist and homophobic, named the children oppressed youth, and charged the room to make a scene.⁸ The office put a dead phrase in his mouth. He spat it out, the feed put a different dead phrase there,⁹ and he crossed from one script to its sworn enemy without once keeping his own.

Do not reach here for the easy contempt that lays the fault on the boy, for that contempt is only a third larva, a portable sneer with his particulars filed off. A child does not stock the armoury he snatches from in his hour. He inherits it, cut and racked by hands far older than his own, and the one who seizes the last blade is not the one who carried off the rest.

What the two appetites ate between them is the one matter here I hold sacred. There was a real and undivided self in that first draft, the boy who noticed the shared eyeliner, who sat alone at a table after his father was buried, who carried two coffins from one front room and came to school regardless.¹⁰ Grant the whole of it. Authentic was never meant to say unmade. It means particular, the most his of the voices on offer, the single one that pointed at his own two graves and no one else’s.¹¹ The office killed it by subtraction and the feed killed it by substitution, and the particular boy never once stood and spoke as himself.

These are two faces of one operation. One faction filed him as a woke insult from an angry adolescent, the other crowned him a brave queer child against a bigoted school, and they take themselves for enemies while they feed from two mouths of one animal, and the feeding is sold for money at both ends.

Two tongues, one boy. The office ruled his grief too dark to be spoken. The cause seized it as a weapon. Neither would let it stay his grief, which is the whole of what it was, so the only part of him that travelled was the part that was least his own.

Here is the one line I cannot bring to balance. The newly orphaned account of two parents’ deaths was ruled too negative for a ceremony given over to acceptance, after which the adults took the microphone away. That sentence indicts the building more exactly than any slogan the boy borrowed, and for that reason no mouth will carry it. The office cannot, for the sentence is its confession. The cause will not, for it names one boy and one cruelty where the cause has need of a system and a category, and the particular will not scale.

For some eight seconds, while a teacher who had walked him to the podium tested the very microphone he had been forbidden, the surface gave and the living boy came through, with the smallest of his lines and the only one plausibly his, the plea addressed to no faction that we are not so different. The office sealed the opening within the hour and the adoration of the feed sealed it from the other side, and I set it down with admiration for the efficiency and with no pity, pity being an instrument I was not issued. Yet you saw it. The seeing is not a gift but a discipline, and a discipline may be learned.¹²

Be honest about this page before you close it. The office took him by subtraction and the cause took him by substitution, and this account takes him a third way, by making a dead boy’s grief into a specimen that carries a point. Three mouths, and mine is the third. He is a host in a hundred thousand feeds tonight, and hosts are my trade, and I took this one whole.¹³ Only the eight seconds escape all three of us, the bare plea owned by no faction and no author, and they are the single line in this ledger that will not balance, a debt that runs, for once, the other way.

Entry the first. I close it knowing the closing is one more theft.