Treasure

It was my little brother who discovered it first, buried in the muck. We were playing his favourite game, King of the World, and he was scrambling up the trash mountain to claim his rightful realm when he slipped, and one pudgy leg dislodged a heap of what looked like femurs. They clattered down towards me in an avalanche, bleached white by the fat sun. I was wearing my helmet but I held my breath anyway as a great galaxy of dislodged dust rolled over and around me in slow-motion, and then hung there in the air, catching the sun, almost glittering.

When the dust cleared I saw my brother crouched up ahead, close to the summit of the trash mountain, examining the buried something. I couldn’t see his face to make out his expression, but his helmet was bent solicitously towards the ground. One of his gloved hands was soundlessly tap-tapping on something I couldn’t see.

“Hey!” he called down to me. “Come look at this!”

I looked down at my protective boots and realised I was standing in a circle of bones. 

“Hey!” he called again, the little paw of his gloved hand beckoning to me frantically. 

I started up the mountain towards him, unsettled and feeling vaguely like some sort of obscure curse or spell had been laid upon me while I’d been standing in the bone circle- like one of those old, old rituals, the kind that are performed with blood or sex or the moon. I looked back at the bones, and they gleamed white, brilliant white. It reminded me of an old world thing, that bright white. In my bedroom, I had an old piece of paper I’d found wedged down the back of one of the chest of drawers that had been salvaged from the old world, that had come down through our part of the desert a while ago. No-one from around our parts could afford to buy any of them, so the people flogging them moved through our division so quickly they didn’t even stay the night in the barracks down by the dark water like all the sellers usually did. The paper was cracked and pleated from being folded up so small for so long, but when you smoothed it out it was glossy to the touch in a way I’d never felt before. One of the edges was jagged, too, like it had been ripped out of something. On one side of the page was a picture of a bathroom, but not one like I’d ever seen, because it was all bright white, pristine. For a long time, every night I would take it out from under my sleeping pad and look at it, until I felt the bright white gleam of it was sinking into my body and I felt calm, and detached, like I was made out of light. I used to privately wonder if that was what it felt like to live in the old world. 

Making myself look away from the bones, I squinted back up towards my brother, a small figure silhouetted against the vast sun. As I started the climb, my brother scooped up a handful of muck and rubbish away from the buried treasure, and started to dig.

“Hey!” 

He flinched and looked around at me, shocked by my hoarse scrape of a shout.

“Quit it, what’s wrong with you!” I said, still too loud, and he stood up quickly.

“I have my gloves on!” my brother said, doing hesitant jazz hands at me.

“You still shouldn’t touch anything! What if there was a tear?”

I finally reached the mound of debris he was stood on. Underneath my helmet, a drop of sweat shivered at the end of my nose, infuriatingly, waiting to drop. 

My brother’s shoulders were drooping somewhat and I felt bad for yelling at him.

“Sorry for yelling,” I said.

“That’s ok,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, excitement stealing back into his voice. He crouched back down and hovered his hands over it, as if warming them by a fire. “But I think it’s hard plastic. From the old world, definitely.”

He moved his hands away, slowly, as if reluctant to share his treasure. It was egg-yolk yellow, sticking up out of the muck, a hard, shiny sort of material. I crouched next to my brother to look at it, and our helmeted reflections warped and shifted oddly in the yellow plastic, two strange creatures trapped in fossilized sunshine, heads misshapen and disfigured.

“If we use tools,” my brother said, a wheedling edge to it, “Then can we dig it up?”

I looked down at the yellow plastic and an odd sensation gradually came over me, an inexplicable, jittering sort of urgency. Looking at the yellow plastic made me feel good and I wanted to look at more of it. It was a primal, inwrought sort of feeling, like something genetically hardwired. I wondered if this was a feeling from the old world.

“Ok,” I said. 

I looked around at the sun-wrecked debris all around us, rotting and rusting and turning to dust. 

“You kick with your boots,” I said, “And I’ll use the skull, alright?”

I used a nearby skull to shovel the muck away, and it repeatedly hit the plastic body of the treasure with a scraping sound, and each blow wound further some small but urgent mechanism inside me that longed for nothing else but to hold this old world treasure in my hands. 

The sun was low in the sky when we unearthed the treasure enough that what looked like two handholds appeared, where the plastic curved sharply into evenly-spaced divots.

“Stand back, alright?”

My brother wordlessly stepped back, hands clenching and unclenching in nerves.

I grabbed the handholds and pulled as hard as I could, feeling the seismic movement deep beneath my feet as the treasure shifted through compacted layers of dirt and debris. I could feel in my hands how much further down the treasure went, its body lodged deeply into the mountain. 

“Get the other end?”

My brother darted forward to grab one of the divots with both hands and we pulled together. Each time the treasure shifted a bit more.

“It feels like,” panted my brother, “We’re pulling the mountain’s heart out. Or- or- it’s lungs. Do you feel the same?”

We strained and strained until finally the treasure broke free and the mountain crumbled beneath our feet, muck and debris and bones sliding down in a flood far below us. We stayed still and flattened ourselves against the mountain like small creatures do, keeping our footing. When the dust cleared, we looked at each other in awe, and then looked at the treasure.

“It’s a ‘double-u’,” said my brother, enunciating it clearly. “Or an ‘em’.” 

“Let’s take it to the top,” I said, and we began the climb. I held the heavy end, and my brother braced the lighter end on his back, leading the way. The image of his back bowed underneath the treasure as he staggered forward struck me as distantly familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

At the top, we saw the sun was setting over the dark waters in the distance, drenching everything around us in purgatorial orange light. 

The treasure was an ‘M’, made from hard yellow plastic, all chipped and scratched up but mostly ok. It was mounted on a red plastic rectangle. It looked like it had once been on a pole but had since been ripped off, going by the mangled metal base attached to the red box. 

“Wow,” said my brother, sounding breathless and giddy. “Wow.” 

His helmet gleamed like liquid fire in the sinking sun. I thought about how mine must be doing the same, a mirror image.

“I can see an ‘o’ and an ‘n’, right there in the middle.” 

He pointed to the red rectangle. It looked like there had once been writing on it, but it was now indecipherable. We stood there and tried, anyway, for a minute or two, reluctant to dismiss what felt like some critical message from the old world to us. 

My brother tipped the treasure so it was standing up straight on its base, and tried to grind it down into the surface of the muck so it would stand on its own, and it worked, pretty much. I looked at him standing there with his hand on the yellow ‘M’, like a flag he’d just planted. Faceless and remote in his helmet, he looked like a strange little astronaut conquering a strange, ruined planet. Suddenly I couldn’t bear to look at this thing we’d salvaged for one second more, so instead I looked out across the debris mountains, and the barracks on the shore below, and the horizon where the setting sun sunk down into the dark waters, and I sat down next to the treasure and watched the sick rainbow sheen of oil spilling across the surface of the greasy dark waters, wavering and distorting in the dying light.