"The Duel" by Giovanni Dania

The Duel
Giovanni Dania

The el's air conditioner wasn't working that day. Carlos felt like he was breathing molasses; the air was humid, and thick with fossil fuel particulates. Someone had broken one of the windows at the rear of the car, but the smoggy breeze wasn't much better. It seemed that the sun had decided to move toward the horizon at a leisurely pace. Any where else in Miami this wouldn't have mattered; the geodesics blocked direct sunlight. Little Havana was unshielded from the ultraviolet onslaught.

The view was no improvement: Carlos looked down at the grubby streets with some despair. He saw rusted shopping carts, burning dumpsters, dead birds, squirrels, cats and the occasional crack head in various states of decomposition. A couple of kids were playing stickball with what appeared to be a human femur. But before he could take a closer look, the el racketed on.

And, as they left Little Havana, Carlos shivered with relief. There was less heat as they entered a domed area, but there was also less circulating air. There were some who, with just a sniff, were able to tell exactly where they were in town. Carlos had seen someone do it blindfolded once. But those were better times, or at least they had been for him.

He already knew what his mother would do when he got home. No welcome, no hug, no kiss on the cheek. She would give him the phone, watch him call his parole officer right then and there. Then she would hand him one of those employment newspapers you can get for free at most street corners. Then she'd lead him into the dining room, where his favorite meal would await him, still hot.

Arroz con pollo. Something he couldn't get on the inside.

This was the second time, and the stint was much longer. Judge went heavy with the sentence. Must have been the fact that some of the robbery victims had also been raped. Carlos was pretty sure most of his friends were either dead or inside, too, which can be just as bad as being dead. It didn't matter much to him, though; he harbored little desire to hook up with that crowd again.

This time he was going straight for real.

Below him, there was a man waxing his classic T-bird. Although illegal to drive, as were all gasoline-burning vehicles, its owner must have had a reputation to maintain by keeping it looking good. The damn thing probably can't start anyway, thought Carlos with a smile. The man was shirtless, a reckless testament of his faith in the domes. A dog was about to urinate on one of the tires, and the man readied himself to throw the can of car wax.

And the el racketed on, taking a turn into a more affluent area.

Carlos couldn't help thinking that so little seemed to have changed. He recognized every thing he saw, wasn't surprised by some new landmark. Although, from up here, what once was a video store could now be a day care center, and he'd be none the wiser. It all seemed the same, though, which was a fundamental difference, perhaps the only difference. The day care center could become a Chinese restaurant in another five years; the husk, the building, never changed.

It struck him then that he would always look like a rapist, even if he weren't anymore. He would always have the appearance of a thief, even if he'd decided to go straight. He was profoundly saddened by this thought for some nameless reason. They take a lot from you, he thought.

A couple of co-eds were jogging on the street below. As their young, nubile bodies jiggled, he shuddered. Something within him stirred, some dark, uncoiling monster from his past threatening to return. They'll have to demolish this day care center, he considered. He turned away, and began a study of his fellow passengers.

Seated to his right, at the other side of the car, was a priest, eyes firmly locked into the Bible in his hands. It took Carlos a few moments before realizing it was upside down.

In front of him, directly across from the doors, sat an older woman with a bag of groceries between her legs. She was reading one of those ridiculously small books, generally found at the supermarket register next to the breath mints and children's sunglasses, with ridiculously sentimental mush, like poetry about angels and meadows and Aryan-ideal mates in fig leaves holding hands. Her other hand held an oblong shape of matte black rubber-coated steel. He'd heard about those, but this was the first time he'd seen one. If the mace it spat (15 feet, he'd heard) didn't stop you, its electrical discharge might, and if that didn't work, you could always be bludgeoned into hazy submission with it. Carlos noted its heavy chain around her wrist. Story was that if it didn't recognize your prints when you held it, it would self-destruct, but Carlos had summarily dismissed that as utter bullshit.

At the other end of the car, Carlos saw a young man, younger even than him, attempting to take a discrete sip from a flask. While successful at the sipping part, his consideration of his fellow passengers was met with generally resentful glares.

Carlos looked back out with a smile, which presently disappeared as he realized of whom the young man had reminded him.

The guard had been young. Fresh out of high school. Shouldn't have happened to him. But that was the moment Carlos had decided to go straight. The incident was kept out of the papers; the guard had had no family, after all.

A minor riot had broken out. Carlos was three and a half years in, with eighteen months to go. Even afterwards, he'd never found out precisely how it had started. He'd heard rumors, but each contradicted the others. Some claimed the New Jihad had started it, some that it was the "M," the Mexican mob, la eme. Still others claimed that it was all masterfully concocted by the Tong to lay blame on others, while thinning out the ranks of each of its enemies. Of course, Carlos had noticed much activity surrounding the Chinese mafia during his stay, so they'd seemed the most probable cause to him. They'd actively pursued convicts who had had labs on the outside, or had been in any way involved with chemistry or biology, for recruitment. At any rate, Carlos had been sleeping, so he was one of the lucky ones who were safe in their cells once they'd been locked down.

The guard had put up a pretty good fight, though. It had taken five Jihad members to put him on his back. In retribution for some imagined slight, or to seek closure in one act for five hundred years of oppression, who knows, they promptly decapitated him, kicked the head around for a bit, then with the vigor of bloodlust went whooping about to find more victims.

To be frank, none of this would've mattered to Carlos, except they'd done this right in front of his cell. He'd heard a sick sucking noise as the lungs had reflexively expanded, drawing pointless air through the guard's severed larynx. Then the gurgling as the air was slowly expelled, the dead lungs simply following the laws of physics by relaxing to equalize pressure with the outside atmosphere.

They'd kicked the head right up to his cell door. Carlos had seen the young guard try to draw breath, try to scream through phantom vocal cords. Carlos had wondered how long a dismembered head would take to die. He'd knelt, sworn a solemn oath, and declared that he would never again do anything to cause him to return.

By the time he'd looked up, the frightened eyes of the guard were closed. It hadn't mattered, however; Carlos still could see them on occasion in his mind's eye.

Carlos found he could no longer voluntarily look at the front end of the train. He studied the view out the cracked window with renewed and zealous curiosity.

The el racketed on, entered what once had been the industrial sector, airport, duty-free zone. This was the only other area in Miami, aside from Little Havana, that wasn't domed off. It still seeped of its former self, underscoring the sad truth of what it was now. Carlos imagined gleaming aircraft taxiing, disgorging and swallowing tourists and businessmen, and unhitched trailers filled with shiny new American cars in gated areas waiting to be loaded onto ships bound for exotic foreign locales that didn't build their own vehicles. Of course, as he reminisced of a quaint past he'd never actually been a part of, he made simultaneous note of the fact that pretty much any travel had become obsolete. For a vague reason he didn't wish to pursue, he felt a pang of nostalgia at that.

As the el got closer to what had been the Delta terminal, Carlos met a curious sight at its steps. A pair of men brandishing swords were at each other. Their every movement seemed part of an intricate dance brought down through myriad generations of dancers and fighters, refined and evolved over centuries of ritual and protocol. Something in their baroque steps, their parries and counters, spoke to some primal part of Carlos' soul with the immediacy and familiarity of absolute recognition, as if somewhere deep in his genetic code he knew these moves as well. As the el neared, Carlos could make out sweat beads on their foreheads, and he started sweating as well.

Caught up in their deadly waltz, he never realized he'd gotten up from his seat, startling the priest into near-shock, the woman reading the horseshit pamphlet into more wound-up paranoia, and the young man into risking another shot from his flask. The priest dropped his Bible and silently cursed himself. The woman pulled her legs closer, cracking a couple of eggs and transmogrifying the bread in her grocery bag. The young man, he just snapped his flask shut and slipped it theatrically into the breast pocket of his jacket with an appreciative and decidedly indiscrete "Ah!"

Despite the tension released in the train car, there was still a battle below. To Carlos' ignorant eye, the combatants seemed of roughly the same skill, and he could not venture a guess at which would be the victor. One thing he did know with complete certainty: they were going all the way, death being the punishment for sloth, carelessness, any number of errors one might commit while trying to survive.

Curiosity overcame the other passengers, and they craned their necks to see what Carlos was studying so intensely. The shopper, not being particularly interested in bloodshed, turned and continued reading her booklet. Carlos saw that her grip on the self-defense unit had tightened. The priest and the youth, on the other hand, began placing wagers, turning to Carlos with askance, wanting to know if he wanted in on the action. As his interest in the fight was academic, he politely replied in the negative. The bettors, however, mistook this lack of interest for a judgment call, and scowled briefly at him before returning their gaze to the sight below.

Carlos would have figured that at least one of the two would have been tired by now, but it seemed that their thrusts and feints had rather intensified. He felt himself in their positions, empathized with both of them, felt their fatigue, their sweat, their blood. Despite their being essentially equal, the clothing of one was peppered with scratches and tiny spots of blood. This was the priest's horse, Carlos surmised, because the youth seemed the livelier of the two in the car, even offering the priest a conciliatory pull from his flask. It won't be long now, thought Carlos.

An interesting thing happened, just then; the one who had seemed destined to lose accidentally dropped his epee. The other fighter smoothly kicked it away, but the unarmed one executed, whether through desperation or design, a series of flips that brought his hand within inches of his weapon. The other rushed him, spinning his sword like a baton, and even up here Carlos heard their battle cries. His fellow passengers, excepting the shopper, of course, were in the ecstasy of anticipation. Time stopped, and no one breathed.

But the el turned, and racketed on, leaving them all in frustrated wonderment at who had won.