The small apartment in Echo Park had been transformed into his newest obsession of Jaws.
The walls, once bare, were now papered with a cartographer's fever dream. A detailed map of a fictional New England island named "Amity" was the centerpiece, surrounded by anatomical diagrams of Carcharodon carcharias—the great white shark.
Sketches of its serrated teeth, its powerful caudal fin, and the cold, black doll's eyes were pinned beside Duke's own scrawled notes: "The shark is never the villain. The shark is just a shark. The villain is the never ending water, the ignorance and the greed."
This was the Pequod where he was going to hunt his whale.
The clack-clack-clack of the Royal was a constant, a sound as relentless as the tide he was writing about. He wasn't just transcribing a movie; he was trying his best to recreate a world, brick by brick.
The process was a kind of possession. He found himself channeling the three main characters.
Chief Martin Brody became his anchor. The outsider, the former New York cop who'd moved to a seaside town for a quieter life, only to find himself facing a terror the locals refused to acknowledge.
Brody's fear of the water felt very similar to Duke's fear of his own future; his stubborn, bureaucratic courage was the same grit that Duke hoped to maintain until his big break. Brody was the conscience, the everyman. He was the most important character because he was the reader. Without him, the story was just a monster movie.
Then there was Matt Hooper, the oceanographer. He was the intellectual, the technocrat, armed with knowledge and gadgets, trying to apply reason to a primal nightmare. Writing Hooper he remembered some of the managers he meet in his previous life, a man who believed every problem had a data-driven solution.(I personally hate these kind of people cause of how awful algorithm are at making movies)
But the character that he truly liked was Quint. The grizzled shark hunter.
Duke sat down to write Quint's monologue about the USS Indianapolis, he always loved that scene. The horror of the sinking, the long days in the water, the men picked off one by one by the sharks bled onto the page.
Quint's brutal pragmatism, his Ahab-like obsession, his deep-seated trauma—Duke understood it all in his bones.
To write the terror, he forced himself into the real world. He spent days at the Los Angeles Public Library, the quiet sanctity of the reading room a stark contrast to the chaos in his head.
He pored over old newspapers, medical journals, anything he could find on documented shark attacks.
He read dry, clinical accounts of tissue damage and tidal patterns, scribbling notes to add verisimilitude. He'd smile a wry, private smile, knowing that he was arguably by now one of the world's leading expert on the mythology of the great white, a creature that, for now, was more legend than studied fact.
One afternoon, a familiar tap-tap at his door broke his concentration. It was Jesse, a friend from the VA, a six-pack of Schlitz in hand.
"Brought you some provisions, man. You look like you haven't seen the sun in a month," Jesse said, stepping inside.
His eyes widened as he took in the wall of sharks and maps. He let out a low whistle, a grin spreading across his face. "Whoa, Duke. What in the hell is all this? You writing a book about a fish?"
Duke stared, struggling not to smile back. "I didnt you were getting released so soon, i could have picked you up."
"With what? Your imaginary car?"Jesse's grinned. "So whats all these shark things? If you wanna meet one of these is difficult since they dont live here in the coast, but i can get you a snapping turtle for a fee, but i warn you they're illegal in this state."
Duke stood up and showed him the maps and anatomy drawings. "This is research for a book im writing."
Jesse looked a little uninterested and just pulled a beer and started drinking."So, are girls in Cali treating you nice? I mean maybe a girl or two could keep these sharks away, you could be drawing the anatomy of some college girls."
He also started drinking. "Havent really been coming out of the house unless for work as of late."
"Boring. "Jesse said, his tone shifting to something more calm, almost trying to sound persuasive. "You know, next time i'm going to take you to a party with those hippies." He sounded conspiratorial. "They got good weed, alcohol, and if the girls know youre a vet and you say you dont support the war they become surprisingly active."
"I want to focus as of now on finishing the book." Duke replied subtly rejecting Jesse's idea.
Jesse stood up and walked to the manuscript, "How many pages are in here?"
"Around 320-360 pages i think." Duke responded, "But i dont know how to send it to the publishers."
"You shouldnt send the whole manuscript since you can only apply for one publisher at a time, else you can be considered to be doing multiple submissions and run the risk of being blacklisted." Jesse in a rare moment of intelligence said something useful.
Duke turned to look at him in confusion.
Jesse shrugged his shoulders, "My uncle's an agent, i kind of know the process."
"So... do you also know how am i supposed to send it?"
He looked at the manuscript for a moment and said. "Write a query, a page where you explain the book, you can send that to multiple publishers and they dont mind it."
........
Jesse left after talking for an hour more or so.
Duke went right back to the typewriter.
Finally, after some time it was done. The zero draft, then the rewrite, then the final, painstakingly typed manuscript. It sat by the door, a ream of paper over four hundred pages thick, held together by a heavy rubber band. It had weight. Mass. It felt significant.
The next morning, he packaged Multiple Querys, addressed it to several major New York, Texas, California, publishers he'd meticulously selected, and carried it to the post office. This was different from mailing a pulp story into the void.
He paid for the postage, the clerk slapping the stamps on with a practiced disinterest. Duke carried the envelopes to the big blue mailbox on the corner. He hesitated for only a second, feeling the weight of them one last time—all his hope, his fear, and his hope for a better future, condensed into paper and ink.
Then he let it go. The thud it made as it hit the bottom of the bin was a sound of finality, and of hope. The beast was in the water. Now, he could only wait.