Old Duke

I am in here, talking with God. Today, God speaks to me through velvety clam sauce, monkey chatter, and the sounds of old friends ribbing each other during a game of chess. Yesterday, it was the smell of Old Bay-seasoned Chesapeake crawdad and a fruit vendor hawking.

There is also threat. Deep space travel is maddening business. I am alone on a ship rocketing toward a new tomorrow, tended by God, a prodigious intelligence that meets my every need. If I can avoid succumbing to my unraveling mind, and remain sealed in this room to the end, I will survive to colonize another planet. If I listen to ’Old Duke’, my madness, and open the door, I perish.

I trim the hairy gray horseshoe that wraps from above-ear to above-ear, and shear clean the stalwart few at the summit.

I unbraid my beard and untangle it with the holy beard comb. My beard doubles in length and quadruples in volume. With reverence, I beseech the Godly Synthesizer Keybox for beard oil. What comes out smells of tobacco and… vanilla. “Opium musk” emblazons the flask. Not even God gets it right all the time.

Olfactorily accurate or no, I breathe in the celestial musk. Euphoria fills me like a vessel of holy wine. Exhaling, my doubts drain away.

“God, my warmest gratitude for this, the most bounteous gift of scented beard oiling solution… a joyous balm in your magnanimously proffered ischia,” I say, loudly, hoping to be heard over the raucous monkeys. “You are my isthmus to the mainland!”

The monkey assemblage drowns me out.

“Shut up, if you please!” I scream at them, emphasizing each word. “I am speaking with God!”

They stop their abominable chattering, look down at me, clever paws gripping. I hiss, bare my teeth and knurled claws. They lurch, arms and legs straightening. One swings away through the divine ventilation. The remaining decide I am no threat and resume their monkey business.

“What’s with the fucking monkeys? Screeching little bastards swinging around? I mean… well… it’s fine. Mysterious ways, and all that…”

I’m lucky it’s mostly canopy life. If there were capybaras sniffing around and sloths snuggling up in the cot, I would have done whatever Old Duke told me to do years ago.

A knock at the door.

“Mister um… Duke, would you like to participate in a survey?”

I scowl at the door, holy beard comb suspended at nipple level.

“No madness today! Thank you very much!” I say.

The voice at the door. Old Duke is after me. Twenty years is a long time to maintain sanity in here.

“Sorry to bother you, it’s just we’re in a time of transition, and trying to rally support for a new government. Tell us what you think about equal universal income, and term limits? Sounds top notch, eh? Sir?”

They always sound so different, so real. It’s damn hard to remember this is all in my mind.

“I have no time for your tricks, Old Duke! There is nothing out there but void.” No answer. I think for a moment I have banished the specter. I am wrong.

“Uh, no, it’s a nice day out here. I mean, there’s some political unrest on the ship, but it’s sunny. The market is humming and the monkeys are busy.”

I set down the heavenly beard comb, and close my eyes, touch fingertip to thumb in each hand, and straighten. I will need to synthesize a salmon frittata to ground myself after this bullshit.

“Vacuumous death awaits me through that door!” I scream.

“Um, Duke? Are you alright in there? How long’s it been since you took a walk?”

A valid point. I try to get ten thousand steps a day, but have fallen off. With a room seven paces on its long axis, that is 715 laps. I have neglected this ritual. Point, Old Duke. I walk to iron the nerves out: One. Two. Three.

“I banish you, Old Duke! You have no power over me!”

“Sounds like you’re losing it in there. Let’s get you outside, eh?” the voice says. How to ground myself?

“Mozzarella sticks! Or… cardamom brioche?” I say.

“Hold on, we will get you out of there.”

Is today the day I crack? I want to live. I will not submit to madness. If I open that door, I am lost.

It is quiet. I dare not hope that the threat has passed.

A shattering crack at the door. This is it!

“Thank you for your many years of divine beneficence.”

I had thought I would feel my hands on the red handle when I open the door, but I do not. I must be too far gone to know what my body is doing.

The door crashes open. I die.

A man stumbles into the room with an angled bar in his hand. Another man stands outside the door. We look at each other. I’m not dead.

“Holy shit,” he says. “How long has this ’Duke’ been in here? Look at that beard. Is he naked under that thing?”

A monkey looks in, upside down, through a corner of the door.

I feel not frozen, breathless agony, but a rising and falling chest. Have these guys been in an adjacent room? A woman with wrinkled brown skin ambles past the open door, carrying groceries, greeting someone out of sight. It’s not a room out there. It’s a passage within a larger space. Peering between the intruders, I see two old men playing chess.

I’m not alone here. The old men aren’t God, they are friends who play chess. The survey guy wasn’t a figment of my imagination. There is no Old Duke. I have been surrounded by people since the beginning. I didn’t open the door. They did. I’m either dead, and this is the afterlife, or I better get some pants on.