the duel

by Jesse Lifton

David walked through the piss-stenched bar. If God ever brought down another flood or fire of great perdition to wipe the filth clean, he ought do it on Hollywood Boulevard. That’s what David thought.

David walked through the throngs of something worse than hipsters. Oh, how Ginsberg would laugh, he thought. Lying, raving hysterical, naked on the streets— no. Just full of sucrose, David knew. Whatever sucrose could mean. Until he found his quarry. And Petrarch had once said, David remembered well,

“La, sotto giorni nubilosi e brevi,

Nasce una gente a cui 'l morir non duole.”

Though David had only read the words in Eugene Onegin, he knew them to be true. Under cloudy and piss-stenched days, he thought, grew a people for whom dying was no pain, though he knew it was and ought to be.

“You! Scoundrel!”

Hayden turned to look at him and sneered, small tattoo of a tear below his left limp little eye. Oh, what a faggot of a tattoo, David thought to himself. It isn’t right.

Hayden, in all his lowliness, took a breath of strawberry smoke and opened his hateful little mouth.

“What do you want?”

“A duel.”

Four weeks ago, David thought, as he placed with shaking fingers the small metal bullet into the chamber. Four weeks ago, I was shaken, he repeated to himself. I was shaken and put back down again and shaken once more, like a ragdoll, that Hayden could determine the fate of. When it happened, he was rotting to the spot, unable to move with eyes glad to be incapable of sight. From a statue’s face, he waited for terror to become shame.

He remembered that Hayden had told the girl,

“Walk with me.”

She was a young girl, he thought. And he thought it then too. But Hayden had always been prone to the ephebophilia that David treated as par for the course for their sort, men of great intelligence and standing. Such men should not abide by the morals of their own time, but the morals of an objective deontological system. It was what Immanuel Kant would advise. And what Immanuel Kant advised, David always took under the utmost consideration.

Hayden had agreed, which is why they got along so well. They had met in an upper-division ethics course, David remembered. Sitting at the back of the class, they would murmur to each other between lecture notes about the futility of utilitarianism and the stupidity of their professor, who was of the post-structuralist school of thought.

David thought to himself now, months down the line, with a loaded gun, that he ought to change the TV channel to something lit better. He moved to HBO Max but was paralyzed with the plethora of choices. It’s all just nothing, David thought, and turned the TV off entirely.

You see, Hayden had been of the Ephebolic persuasion. Which was a persuasion that David tried to understand for the sake of their continued friendship. Things like friendship came rarely to him. Which is why they must be treated with great care, David believed.

But David could feel safe in knowing that Hayden was nineteen, and the girls were sixteen, and it wasn’t wrong, he thought. It wasn’t immoral. It was just from a time far removed from their own. From the age of arranged marriage and great literary pursuits and L’Academie des Beaux Arts. He thought to himself that Hayden was quite a sophisticated soul to understand the perversions of so many great men.

At the party he thought, which he did dislike because of how loud and obnoxious the music had become, Hayden had gone beyond the pale. The girl, David knew, must only have been twelve. And was full of a child’s easy grace and confidence before she went upstairs with Hayden. And with this decision he had made an accomplice of David, he knew. And made a fool and ragdoll of David. This shame he could not abide.

For a week afterward, he had spent much time re-reading Kant, agreeing more than ever that sex made beasts of men. The universal maxim felt impossible to grasp, he thought, where once it had been the only principle he understood with full certainty.

The beauty of Kant’s project was that it might take what God decreed and liberate it from the grips of theology. David felt that such an elevation was needed, for ethics were above all else, he knew. Without the search for justice, there would be no world. It should collapse into itself under the weight of its own hypocrisy, he knew. And then the post-structuralists should win. They would win with the destruction of living, and the world, and embodied being.

With the gun in his back pocket, David considered the maxim a final time. I OUGHT NOT TO ACT IN SUCH A WAY EXCEPT UNLESS I COULD WILL MY ACT TO BECOME UNIVERSAL LAW.

And David felt just, and David thought, I will impose my will upon Hayden, and upon the world at large, so that all is put right again.

A duel was to be had, David decided. And waited for Hayden to reply. But with strawberry, serpentine tongue Hayden, the king of all disgust, said,

“What?”

As if David were a bug beneath his shoe, so David thought he must respond accordingly, as gentlemen ought to do, and so he said,

“If you do not duel me to restore the honor you have besmirched, I will shoot you dead.”

And so David felt proud, though the girl next to Hayden laughed, and Hayden himself—O virtue of solitude—said with great hatred,

“I’m not dueling you, you autistic little freak.”

And so David decided there was one course of action, against all laughter, which he ignored as gentlemen ought to.

“You will meet me at the beach tomorrow as the sun rises, or I will find you and strike you down, cur.”

A knight could not have said it better. And with that David strode away with a firm belief that Hayden would not show, and he would be made into a murderer, David knew. And yet, in the back of his mind, Kant soothed, as patrons always do. And held him by the neck and whispered he was to be held in the darkness of the valley before he could be liberated into the new world of justice. David thought. And knew.

In the dark of the night, David picked at the edge of his pistol and aimed it and aimed it again. And lying on his bed he thought, I ought to buy a mattress that’s firmer. David’s father always claimed the benefits of a firm mattress. A firm mattress or a plank of wood beneath the bed. David’s mother had called him Le Petit Dauphin, he remembered, because he could not get comfortable on his childhood bed, and insisted on sleeping next to her instead. Dreams plagued him then, as a child, as they did during this night as well.

The same type of dreams. Rotten farewell to them, David thought, and refused to close his eyes. The world had grown fuzzy and vacant the older he had become. The world had grown lame with misunderstanding. A horse with a bad leg. His sister wanted him to buy her a small toy with a demon’s mouth for Christmas, he knew, called a Labubu. La-bu-bu. The old radio turned on to K-Earth 101 Rock Radio, and David turned it off.

Universal Law meant that all should act, he thought and then the thought carried off and left him alone and cold in his dorm room, tremors wracked and wondering. The sound of a party, he thought, from the frat across the street.

The sun lightened after a lack of contemplation. What need was there to contemplate? David understood his intentions.

The beach dragged his footfalls down and tar covered seaweed had brought in the flies early, David knew. Swarms of black-bellied wings a blight on his face and form. He walked and the beasts followed. From waving arms by the ocean’s creasing wave, which lapped at his tennis shoes, to the long and sloping wooden staircase with loose nails. The sun continued to rise, and David began to lose hope in a gentleman’s resolution. Hayden would not show, he thought.

But Hayden did show. He walked down the stairs half in trepidation, black sweatshirt a beacon against the morning light.

“You’re late.”

David declared and thought he heard a snort from Hayden, who looked at him with unreadable eyes and an unreadable mouth. Pitiful sigh and then the removal of his own gun from the back of his pants. David thought he must be feeling fear, or something like it, at the sight. Perhaps, he thought, I am eager. I lay beneath anticipation to see my world resolved and healed over new.

“I challenge you to a duel to resolve the dishonor you have brought upon a young girl. We will take four steps away from each other; then we shall turn to face one another and shoot.”

Hayden said nothing. He must be a creature sent to test me, David thought. Or a soul I must heal. Time would reveal all. David cleared his throat and turned to face a field of mustard flowers, a blanket of pearlescent yellow backdropped against the husk-like landscape of the hills that surrounded their campus, burnt down, he knew, from a fire two years ago. A place, he thought as he took his four steps forward without trepidation, hand sweating upon the cool metal of the gun, where only condiments may grow. And then he turned around, and fired to the sky, the noise defaming he thought, distantly, the blowback from the gun causing him to fall to his knees.

What a world is this, he thought. And looked up to see Hayden’s shocked and shaking eyes, watered over, and down again to see his leg bleeding, collapsed beneath the weight of his body. A hole he could not feel. What a world is this, he thought, hopelessly again. How silly.

He began to recite,

“I will her saviour be!

With ardent sighs and flattery

The vile seducer shall not dare

The freshness of her heart impair,

Nor shall the caterpillar come

The lily's stem to eat away,

Nor shall the bud of yesterday

Perish when half disclosed its bloom!”

Hayden remained where he was for the length of his speech, which was good. His leg did not hurt at all. He sat down in the sand and thought to himself again that perhaps all knights must be made a fool of. All knights, he thought, looking out at the wide-open sea, calm waves reflecting a lavender sky. Boats in the distance, their sails no longer waving. And he began to cry, although David could not tell you why he was crying.

BIO: Jessie Lifton is a poet based in California. Her work has been featured in Apocalypse Confidential, Bizarre Publishing House, and Bruiser Magazine. She can be found on Twitter @jessiechrxst.