Barren Coast

Louigi Verona
August 2013

The sun turned the island into a frying pan. Even the shape of the island was round, with a natural pier that resembled a handle. If you saw a puddle, it would be evaporating right in front of your eyes.

Poone, an old pirate, ignored the heat completely. But not I, a city flower. My skin, once white, was aching. My whole body was in pain. I wanted nothing. If I were to be compared to a helpless daisy, Poone would be a cactus. Bristly, thorny. Keeps all moisture to himself. Seldom pees.

My shovel hit something and I mopped my brow. Poone immediately looked over my shoulder. “What's this?”

“I don't know. I am tired.”

Poone pushed me aside and began digging himself. After a while he stopped. Then spit. “It's just a rock,” he said. “Get back to work.”

We arrived on this island a year ago. At first it was fun and even a bit romantic. A city flower like myself in the middle of an ocean, on a desert island, in search of a treasure? Unthinkable! Didn't even take a laptop with me.

“You idiot,” my buddy told me, “there are no power sockets, capisce?”

But I still envisioned the coming adventure as a feature film starring myself—handsome and gorgeous. What I didn't expect was dirt, a constant state of hunger, torn clothes, scratches and bruises all over my body.

And, of course, my film didn't have Poone in it.

Avaricious and seasoned, he had nothing to lose. He knew that it was his last chance to retire wealthy. Once we got on the cruise ship, he passionately pleaded with the captain to drop us off. Waving a tattered map in front of his face, Poone promised to pay him a fortune for the considerable detour.

In two weeks, on his way back, the captain would have to make yet another detour and pick us up with the chest. But two weeks had gone by, we've dug through the whole island, and there was no treasure.

And that's when the Event happened.

The majestic vessel was sailing away, now but a small dot on the horizon, and all I could do was stare. Never had my life been changed so abruptly and so completely...

The captain didn't pick us up. The cruise ship was barely visible on the horizon, when the captain approached us in a small boat. He didn’t disembark, but instead stopped close enough so that we could hear each other and asked about the treasure. Poone said that it turned out that there was no treasure here. That this land was empty, not a single coin in it. The map was wrong, or maybe it was a map of another island.

The captain did not take the news well. He realized that he had made a mistake, and for a moment his face became dark with rage, I could see it even from the shore. But then he collected himself. The decision was made. “Do you even realize what it cost me, you son of a bitch? Do you even realize that I just made another detour?”

As soon as we set foot on the island, I found it strange that there could be treasure here. Serenity. Pristine land. I realized how precise such a description could really be. It was as if the island was molded by Nature just a few moments ago. It seemed incredible that anyone could have ever been here.

Poone scoffed at this. “You whippersnapper! How long do you think there would be traces? Are you expecting footprints in the sand and a note from mom?”

But eventually I realized he was bluffing.

The old man immediately saw that the island was barren. He tried hiding his disappointment by buoyant digging, by tales about how it's customary for treasure maps to contain intricate puzzles, by a mysterious and deliberate trip into the thicket of the island, where we almost fell into a deep ravine. At some point it seemed that Poone himself began to believe his own stories, as if the treasure could actually be somewhere here, if only we could figure it all out!

But eventually he must have admitted the truth to himself, and we used the rest of the days to methodically dig holes. Let the captain see—we've worked diligently, we believed till the last moment that it was all for real...

On the morning after the Event the old pirate went mad. He threatened me with a knife and demanded we keep digging. We've churned through the whole beach, although it was clear that no one would ever bury a treasure chest so close to the water.

“I have a good reputation, you whippersnapper! He saw that we are still digging. He will return. We have to be ready!” he would shout, jumping around and waving his knife around.

I once tried bringing him to his senses. I took the map and suggested we verify it. Walk along the coastline and make sure that this is indeed the island pictured on the map. Poone seemed to connect with the idea and his eyes stopped darting all over the place. We went along the beach and spent several hours setting up landmarks and drawing lines on the sand… But either our cartography skills had not been up to the task, or maybe the map wasn't that reliable after all, but in the end we just couldn't figure it out.

When Poone fell asleep, I went back to the beach. Water stretched to the horizon. Light breeze rattled my hair. I didn’t even know where the north was, so I just stared into the distance. Somewhere far away people lived their lives. They went to work, boarded trains, checked their news feeds. I could almost hear the sounds of civilization: the voices of people on the streets, the low rumble of traffic, the honking of cars…

And then there was I, a city flower, standing on the beach in the heart of an ocean.