Broken Condom Beach ... A tropical paradise...

For a second, I awed at the island’s scenery. The sky above was like a big box of blue. The crystal-clear sea appeared calm, free of sharks. The whole place was perfect and pretty as a postcard.

Then I pushed forward. The sun bathing me in its golden rays. Swaying coconut palms powering my mojo. The afternoon was hot and the air soupy but not stifling. Then a pleasant scent of campfire in the distance began tickling at my nose.

“Left, right, left. Left, right, left,” cried out Kanye.

For four months, on my fortune teller’s advice, I’d been following Kanye from 7-Eleven to 7-Eleven. For four months, I’d been fecklessly hunting for the QR code to disarm the ticking timebomb in my chest.

But today would be different. And boisterously, I flung my feet forth, in my sandals, digging my toes into the soft, warm white sands.

Kanye grunted, ran 10 paces, like a cricket bowler, got right up to the end of the sea and flung his phone into the water as we arrived at the rocks.

Here the beach had hardened, and the sand had petered out. Here the sands ended in a long path of large rock formations. Some of the rockery jagged. Some circular and smooth.

It was so unlike Stonehenge.

“Can’t get blood from a stone, see,” chortled Q. Q’s squawky voice reminded me of a 1930s movie gangster, and his face was like a lightbulb, his tunic the color of money ... The same color as Kanye’s wrestler’s singlet...

We began to climb the rocks. One was shaped like a penis, another as a vagina. The two unique rock formations in close proximity to one another.

“Oumuamua! Yes...” called out Q as he patted the penis rock.

The rocks remained mostly the same height and were tall enough to climb, jump between. Kanye was skipping between them, with a breezy ease, like hopscotch. Here and there treacherous gaps cut between the rocks.

“Just one slip, and a leg, an ankle could snap. Easy as stepping on a twig,” warned Q, bringing a brief sense of solemnity. But the uncomfortable moment quickly passed, and we were again off jumping and scampering like a pack of happy squirrels.

Kanye was leading the way. He was in his element. There were no stops in his progress. Q and I went slower, were feeling like tortoises. “Slow and steady,” whimpered Q, his bulbous brow slicked with sweat. Then a cottony cloud disintegrated and the sun bore down.

“The greatest heat lamp ever,” murmured Q. His face becoming gray with fatigue. Then he stopped in his tracks and squatted and hung his head over the lip of a low incline-shaped rocky mass. Peering below, he wowed at the translucence of the sea, saying how it was clear as coconut water. Then he cringed at the seaweed, scattered formations of algae-covered rocks lining the seafloor.

“This sea’s an open mouth. A mouth missing most of its teeth,” muttered Q, ruefully.

The sea couldn’t have been more than a meter deep, but the coastline had risen into a high cliff hanging overhead, nothing but jungle behind it. Then I looked to my right and then to my left and could see only rocks. Massive clumps of cable car-sized rocks. Infinite, uneven piles of purply, gray, brown and black rocks. The rocks stretching out as far as the eye could see.

That distant scent of campfire was gone, too, replaced by only an omnipresence of salty sea air. There was no easy way back. Or forward. And not a single 7-Eleven was in sight.

But Kanye wasn’t fazed.

“It’s a small titty-shaped island. Eventually we’ll find our way,” was his reasoning. But the Q-ster wasn’t convinced. He had the look of a man who’d just found out his wife was cheating on him. Still though, he wouldn’t be a crybully and he pressed forward, stringing behind us, wheezing and panting in shuddery breaths.

Further on we went. Q, stuttering and gasping, kept pleading to turn back, but Kayne kept surging forward, jumping and moving like Super Mario.

Despite his display of an almost inconceivable agility, eventually Kanye’s movements started slowing. A large scrape on his left leg was oozing blood. The side of his singlet torn. But he pressed on, flung himself forward.

Q was really slowing down by this point. His tunic hung in shreds off his shoulders; one of his sandals was missing; and both his knees were grazed, blood streaking down his shins. His hands had been bruised and bloodied, the flesh ripped. Yet his face retained a certain synthetic innocence.

“Another case study in false flags, crisis acting!” bellowed Q, in a strained voice. The coherence of his syllabication was lessening. And he stopped again and stood rooted to the top of a silver rock that was shaped like an uneven capital O.

Kanye and I both knew it. Q wanted to slam the door and hide in his bedroom. Click his heels and be back in Kansas. But the rocks were inanimate. And the sea had its own hunger, priorities and prerogatives.

Shadows puddled at his heels and collected under Q as he stood silent and sour. In his sulking, he began blanching, giving him the appearance of a pasty ghost.

“So you’re just going to stand there and be miserable?! Quit like a coward? You’ll never break the internet!” shouted Kanye, his voice edged with annoyance, his eyes aflame with antipathy.

Q remained frozen in his halo of sullen insolence. He was choking back sobs and snorts and was ranting about Taylor Swift armed with a weedwhacker chasing the dwarf from Game of Thrones through Central Park. Then about Anthony Weiner, in a bearskin, doing push-ups after chewing on Hillary Clinton’s toes...