The Duel
[The Friday Flash] In an America that still practices dueling, an internet argument escalates into a deadly contest.
I didn’t wake up at 4 AM, buy a gun, and drive to California to kill anyone. I did it to prove a point. You can’t say whatever you want without consequences. Hateful words impact our country. Police brutalize minorities. Immigrants thrown into camps. Trans people denied healthcare. Someone needed to stick up for them. Someone needed to fight. I just can’t figure out how it ended up being me.
It started last night. That much I remember. Two hours doomscrolling Reddit, and I stumbled across the worst take imaginable. Something so hateful, ignorant, and bigoted that a simple downvote couldn’t quell my indignation.
True, I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was vile enough that I commented a piece of my mind. What followed in the next three hours were ideological skirmishes spread across multiple theaters of war. When the Reddit mods locked the thread, we argued over DMs, then a Discord server, and finally some Twitch streamer agreed to moderate a live debate.
Then things blew up. I’d never gone viral before. The closest I’d ever come was a tweet about Nancy Grace’s eyebrows that got 47 likes. But this reached an entirely different level. Thousands of live viewers, the chat scrolling too fast to read, my inbox flooding with attaboys and death threats. I was on fire, too, with a well-reasoned rebuttal for every faulty argument.
And then that asshole said the words.
“I challenge you to a duel.”
I couldn’t refuse. Backing down meant losing the debate. So, of course I accepted.
Okay. Maybe I could have refused. Crawled back into the anonymity in which I’d spent most of my life. I even floated the idea of ghosting to the commenters cheering me on—-to noncommittal responses. It’s up to you, man, they said. It depends on how much conviction you have in your beliefs.
How much conviction in my beliefs? You’ve got to be kidding me. My beliefs brim with conviction. Of course, I’d kill for them. Die for them. Even if I couldn’t recall which specific belief I was fighting for.
I pulled my Prius into the agreed location. An abandoned diner off some county road. It was one of those prefabs, chrome spaceship-looking things they used to ship across the country on railcars. Fitting to fight in front of this tombstone to Americana.
The ambulance was already waiting in the parking lot. That asshole and I had gone halfsies on the bill, which had already bankrupted me. Maybe if I won, I could start a GoFundMe.
I popped open my car door and grabbed the pistol lying on the passenger seat. A 22-something. Walmart said it was the best they could sell me on short notice.
Shit. I hadn’t bought a holster. Did you need one to duel? Maybe I could just hold it at my side. No, that was probably cheating.
I tried to fit the muzzle in my skinny jeans when my opponent approached. He was a heavy-set guy, which I guess lent me an advantage. Bigger target. But I didn’t know when I accepted the challenge the he ran some kind of gun review YouTube channel. Was that a thing? What did people even say? Yup, this one kills people real good.
He had a custom quickdraw holster with a revolver in it. I’d always thought of them as old-timey guns, but apparently they’re a good choice for duels. Easy to draw and never jam. Shit, maybe I should have watched those reviews.
It also turned out that the guy was a career duelist. He had six under his belt, won four, and even killed a guy on one. There was a video, but I didn’t have the stomach to watch it.
“We doing this?” he asked, one of his groupies trailing behind him with a camera phone.
I jammed my gun into the waistband and gave him my best Josey-Wales grimace. “We’re doing this.”
“Alright,” he said, almost as if he didn’t even care. “We’re just waiting for the social worker to show up.”
A couple dozen of his YouTube fans gathered around the parking lot, some of them peeking into the diner windows and laughing at something. No one on my side had come. Guess I hadn’t inspired anyone enough to come watch me die on a Tuesday morning.
Most countries had outlawed dueling long ago. Barbaric, they called it. Legalized murder. In America, dueling was a storied tradition dating back to Alexander Hamilton. A safety valve for our collective disdain. The Second Amendment’s ultimate check against the First.
Finally, the social worker arrived. She wore a bulletproof vest and carried a clipboard with a hefty stack of forms.
“How we doing this morning?” she asked with the cadence of a DMV clerk.
“That depends on how the next hour goes,” I replied with a nervous laugh, then I tipped my head toward her vest. “Do people really shoot at you?”
“Gangbangers sometimes get violent when they don’t like my call. But no, it’s just a formality. I’ve never had that problem at a white-boy duel.”
My opponent was Indian, and I was a quarter Hispanic technically, but I understood her point. This was definitely a white-boy duel.
“May I see your driver’s license?”
I handed it to her.
“Raise your right hand.”
I did.
“Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that you agree to participate in this duel?”
“Yes.”
“And do you agree to hold all participants harmless, including your opponent and the State of California, in the event you suffer injury or death during these proceedings?”
“I do.” You may now kiss the bride. And your ass goodbye.
“Alright.” She stamped her papers. “Just going to talk to your opponent and then we’ll get started.”
“Wait,” I stammered. “That’s all? Aren’t you supposed to check if I’m of sound mind?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you of sound mind?”
“I think so.”
“Listen, hon, if you don’t want to go, speak up. I’ve got to teach some parolees how to write a resume this afternoon, and I don’t have time to hold someone’s hand all morning while they contemplate their mortality.”
“No, I want to do it.” I needed to do it. “It’s just weird the government lets us shoot each other.”
She shrugged. “Better than one of you boys shooting up a school.”
I flipped through last night’s conversations on my phone in A last-ditch effort to remember what cause I was probably dying for. It was just paragraphs upon paragraphs of rhetoric word salad. You’re begging the question. That’s a straw man argument. Stop making ad hominem attacks. It was like Socrates having a stroke.
Maybe I should have used my last few hours to call my parents. No, they’d just try to talk me down. Besides, they’d already lost their favorite son. In their eyes, the pinnacle of my existence was giving Dereck a kidney, and even that couldn’t save him.
The social worker waved us over. “Once you’re in position, I’ll count down from three. This sound will be your cue that you’re permitted to turn and fire.”
She held up her phone, which played a piercing chime. DING!
“Duels are civilized affairs in the State of California, so you’re both required to shake hands before we begin.”
His palm was oddly sweaty. Or maybe that was mine.
“Good luck,” he said flatly.
“Uhm—you, too,” I stammered.
“Now, turn around and walk ten paces,” the social worker said. “Come on. One, two, three, four. Bigger paces, Skinny Jeans. Five, Six, Seven. There we go. Eight, Nine, Ten.”
I was right against the window once she finished, beneath the shadow of a big sign that read “Joey’s” whose neon had long ago lost its luster.
“I will now begin the count. Three…”
I squinted, blocking the light shining off the glass. The diner’s innards were stripped bare, down to its factory components. Just the chairs, counter, and gas stove bolted to the walls and floors.
“Two…”
Only one item of decoration remained — a sepia photograph of the diner’s grand opening. A balding man posed with his line cook beneath a sign that read ‘Whites Only.”
“One…”
The country was full of people ready to drag us back there. I’d lay down everything to stop them. Chick-fil-A. Harry Potter. My very life. The tree of liberty is fertilized with the blood of patriots. Now, it was my turn to fight. Whether that meant saying my piece, or drawing it.
DING!
BANG!
“Shit…”
Turns out, people get the wrong idea about dying. Death doesn’t happen in slow motion. Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes. It’s quick. Instantaneous. Blink and you’ll miss it. And I fucking blinked.
I saw the flash. Heard the gunshot. His or mine, I couldn’t say. Then, lights out. Battle lost. Life over. Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
My one advantage over Alexander Hamilton was that medics had improved at restarting hearts since 1804. A few hits with the paddles and I lived again. At least, technically speaking.
I spent the next few hours in a purgatorial fugue. It was nice. I could think free from that gnawing voice shouting how I should behave. My conscience, I guess. Or Tumblr.
Mostly, I reminisced about Dereck. How he got along with everyone from the hipsters back home in Oregon to the Mississippi rednecks he lived alongside doing Teach for America. When he died, the only internet footprint he left behind was a Myspace page with only one grainy 480p profile picture. Yet still, he’d made the world kinder during his brief time there.
My heavy eyes opened to the afternoon sun glimmering off a linoleum floor, which smelled vaguely of piss.
“You’re awake,” the nurse said, scribbling something on his chart.
“How bad?” I asked groggily.
“You’re in the ICU. We removed the bullet, but there’s a problem with your kidney.”
“I donated—”
“Your other kidney. The bullet grazed it, and it’s suffering severe tissue damage. You’ll need a transplant immediately. The OR is prepping for you now.”
“You found a donor that quick?”
The nurse glanced from his clipboard with a quirk in his clenched jaw. “Oh. I assumed you knew each other, since you arrived together.”
“What…?” I jerked backward, pain snaking across my side and my IV rattling. “No! Oh, fuck no.”
“Well, I can get you a DNR if you refuse. It probably goes without saying that you’ll die soon without this transplant. The donor said he wanted to speak with you if you awoke.”
“I’m not talking to that cocksucker, and I’m sure as hell not taking his kidney.”
The nurse shrugged at the bed beside me. “I’ll leave the curtain up, then.”
I collapsed back onto my pillow as the nurse left. Oh, fuck me.
A shadow stirred on the bed behind the curtain. “Sup?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Trying to give you a kidney. Also, you shot me in the knee.”
“Why would you give me your kidney? We just tried to kill each other.”
“Not really. I mean, assumptions of the risk aside. Duels boost views, but actual casualties throw ice water on your channel. I learned that the hard way. People don’t want to watch some twink college freshman get his head blown off.”
“So, it’s all a grift? You shoot at people for clicks, and don’t believe what you say?”
“No, I believe it. On my first duel, I was fired up. After a while, it’s just the job. Yeah, some lefty streamers get away without dueling—say it’s part of their stance on gun control or something—but on my side, you’ve got to throw down the handkerchief. Sure, it may be routine for me, but there’re always new viewers who just lost their job or a family member disown them. They want someone willing to fight.”
This was never a battle for the country’s soul. It was political theater for the mentally deranged. Color-coded knights jousting for their leige’s honor.
“You know what’s fucked up? I was so rattled when we dueled I couldn’t even remember what we were arguing over.”
“Immigration.”
“Immigration.” I shook my head. “What the fuck do I know about immigration?”
“Last night, you sure acted like you knew everything, throwing out all those statistics.”
“You don’t need to be Noam Chomsky to Google immigrant crime statistics. Maybe you should try it.”
“Nah, Anyone can twist studies into saying anything. I’m about the victims. Innocent women stabbed on a jog.”
“Those murders occur regardless of immigration policy. It’s anecdotal.”
“Powerful anecdote, though. Just like me saving your life.”
“First, I never said I’d take the kidney. Second, you challenged me to the duel.”
“I had no choice. You called me racist.”
“Because you said racist shit. Do you think this performative kindness negates all the toxic shit you say?”
“Performative? Dude, I’m giving you my fucking kidney. What’s it gonna take to convince you guys that we’re decent people?”
I let out a heavy breath as my stomach reeled with nausea. The painkillers in my IV aside, I was getting way too worked up for someone who’d just been shot. “I don’t get it. Two idiots shoot each other, and it influences thousands of opinions on actual issues. That debate meant nothing, and the shooting meant even less.”
“On the internet, everything means something. Especially things that mean nothing. It’s all content.”
“You’re a sociopath who’s wrong about everything.” I sighed. “Why did I ever believe you were worth debating?”
“Lots of people do. It’s made me pretty rich. You could start a channel, too now. I run an online course that’ll help you get started. I’ll give you a discount.”
“Fuck off. I’m dying, remember?”
“Take the kidney. That’s no way to go, man. You know how it kills you? All the poison in your body builds up—”
“I know how it kills you,” I said bitterly.
I was never a knight, only a jester performing to validate people’s worldviews. The culture war roped in millions without the courtesy of a gentlemanly challenge. People who just wanted decent treatment. Who was I to escalate their conflicts for my aggrandizement?
“Okay…” I muttered. “I’m done. You win.”
I was ready to be rid of this poison. From here on, I’d only fire a gun to save someone’s life, and I’d only share my opinion with people willing to listen. There must be a reasonable median between speaking up and acting out. Because the quest for likes led only to hate. It was time to find another grail. Truth, maybe? Justice? Human rights? I wasn’t sure.
I’d figure it out when I woke up.