The Black Crow

In a dreariness sufficient to overwhelm any man unaccustomed to the interior weather of decay, there stood what might first be mistaken for a black crow perched low among the running trees, though it was in truth a local runaway youth named Chase Pawn, his countenance at once eerie and defunct, preserved in a glazy, overmaintained animation that trafficked in absolutely rotten, repetitive jokes and an unwholesome devotion to public acts of affected insanity—each performed with such foul randomness and childish affect as to render them actively repellent rather than merely strange.

The teenage boy known as Pawn had seen fit to attempt my acquaintance. I take this naming to be a posthumously demeaning misremembering, a mass convenience arrived at only after his name had been so thoroughly and irreparably tarnished that no one remained willing to defend it; nevertheless, this jaundiced and hulking solicitor of irrelevant and tiresome glee, psychotic not in depth but in exhibition, approached at a volume and proximity that collapsed all ordinary boundaries. He flooded the moment with crass, synthetic, exhausted tongues: speech reduced to metallic clanging and tell-tale gibberish, the sort of linguistic debris commonly mistaken for madness, though more accurately the byproduct of a man repeating himself until even error had lost its improvisational quality.

Altogether, there was nothing rare in him, nothing properly singular or instructive—one might call the performance lazy, unrehearsed, or merely expedient—and yet, beneath this thin pseudo-madness, there persisted a densely compacted record of half-truths and tall tales, laid down in such confused succession that it became impossible to tell whether the lies had been invented to preserve a self, or whether the self itself had arisen only as a late and increasingly fragile justification for the lies.

There had been numerous occasions on which young Chase had attempted to counterfeit his own demise, though more commonly he preferred the elaborate fabrication of his parents’ violent deaths—often insisting upon their gruesome killing and cannibalization—with a particular emphasis on the mother and father as figures of almost offensively upright repute. They were, by all ordinary accounts, beloved and straight-laced fixtures of the community, the mother especially, who had borne upward of a dozen children, each of them improbably successful, enviable in their diligence and in that tactile, unstudied grace by which competence advertises itself without speech. It was early—too early—that Chase discovered the city to be less a place than a surface, a pliable field upon which he might rehearse these rotting narratives at will, testing how much corruption could be impressed upon a public imagination before the impression itself began to erode, and with it whatever remained of his own distinction between invention and appetite.

At a very early age, he discovered in the family’s cottage a ventriloquist’s doll, its wooden face split by age and misuse, with a single name carved crudely into its back: Jacob. For years afterward it was as though his own arms had been grotesquely supplanted by that object, as though the doll had assumed jurisdiction over gesture itself, dictating not only what might be said but how the saying must be physically endured. In time, he rechristened it repeatedly—Ezekiel, or Punt, or Grateful, and several others besides—names assigned and discarded with no apparent ceremony, none of them enduring long enough to stabilize into character or function, none offering a child any reliable surface against which the world might be tested or understood. The doll did not become a companion, nor even a prop, but a shifting intermediary through which intention passed without ever fully arriving, leaving behind only a residue of motion and sound that belonged to neither the boy nor the thing itself.