Free Mr. Monk Gets on Board by Hy Conrad

Water.
    “Where are the backup batteries to my backup alarm clock?” Monk asked as he frantically searched and restacked his fortress.
    “You, my friend, are a lunatic,” Darby explained. “But you are not going to ruin this week for me. Understand?”
    In just a few more minutes, they succeeded in annoying each other enough that they both stalked out of cabin 457. I’m not sure what Monk wound up doing for food that night. As I said, I hadn’t seen him in the dining room.
    At some point—he didn’t recall when—Monk came back and found the cabin empty. He borrowed the bathroom for two hours, then squeezed into bed, pinning himself under the covers, blankets pulled up to his chin. He didn’t say so, but I imagine there was some whimpering involved.
    Later that night, Darby stumbled his way into his side of the cabin, coming home from one of the many shipboard bars, no doubt. The man collapsed into his own bed and promptly began snoring.
    Now Monk doesn’t appreciate snoring. Even his own snoring sometimes keeps him awake. Maybe if his roommate’s had been soft and perfectly timed like a metronome, Monk could have made an effort to endure it. But Darby’s snores were erratic and explosive, and Monk dealt with them as long as was humanly possible—approximately eleven seconds, according to his backup clock.
    His first try at a solution was to cross the black Sharpie line and gently shake Darby’s shoulder. This did nothing. The man barely moved, and his snorts were uninterrupted. Monk tried a harder shake. Then a harder one and another, until he felt like he was going to dislocate the fellow’s shoulder. His final push was enough to send Darby tumbling to the floor.
    Monk scuttled into the safety of the bathroom and slammed the door. But he could still hear. Darby’s tumble had had no effect on the sounds escaping his lips. Monk emerged in a quandary. Here was a man seemingly impossible to revive. And yet Monk had to wake him. Maybe a good slap to the head. But if the slap woke him up, wouldn’t he attack Monk? Most men would.
    Darby McGinnis lay faceup on the carpet. The vibration from the snores alone would have kept Monk agitated, so he couldn’t let this go on. No way. And then the idea of breath came to him. If this man couldn’t breathe, Monk reasoned, he couldn’t snore. He would have to wake up.
    It took Monk several excruciating minutes to wad up the tissues in just the right shape and size, and long enough so he would never have to touch Darby’s face. The first tissue slid effortlessly into the snoring man’s left nostril. This had no effect except to redirect the airflow. So it was time for the second tissue into the second nostril.
    The result of tissue number two was that Darby’s open mouth fell even further open and his volume intensified.
    Monk was left with no choice, at least in his mind. He found a washcloth in the bathroom, wadded it into a ball, slipped it into Darby’s mouth, then hurried back into his bathroom fortress. Just in case.
    It turns out that completely cutting off someone’s air supply can have quite an immediate effect. Monk was barely out of the way when Darby, the balding, aging frat boy, began jerking his head and sputtering for breath. He groggily gasped into his washcloth and, when that didn’t work, pawed at his nose, and when that didn’t work, became fully, desperately awake. But still drunk.
    In a matter of seconds Darby was on his feet, his mind not quite aware of his predicament. He grasped at the washcloth and pulled it out. But he was still oxygen deprived and still in a panic and suddenly aware of these foreign objects in his nostrils.
    All he seemed to know at that moment was that he needed air. And that led him to stumble toward the balcony and push open the glass slider.
    “He just banged up against the railing,” Monk confessed to me, his hands flailing. “It wasn’t my fault. Those railings are meant to handle a lot more weight than