The Man with the Compound Eyes (14 page)

Millet usually did the night shift from eight till six and caught up on sleep during the day. Dahu originally planned to apply for a position in a research institute and study the Bunun relationship to the forest, but later he decided to return to his home village for a stint as a substitute elementary teacher. Who’d have thought he’d up and decide to move to Haven and drive a taxi, just to be able to see Millet more often? It made perfect sense for him to go pick Millet up after work, waiting at the entrance of the spa at six every morning.

At first Millet refused to go to bed with him. All the senior girls had
warned her never to fall for a customer. “Unless you’re sure it’s just a fling, just don’t go to bed with him. If you do, you can wail and moan all you want, but all you gonna hear is I-told-you-so,” said Ling, an older girl who’d taken Millet under her wing. Ling had gone into the business to raise her two kids after the sudden death of her husband due to a drug overdose. She would turn the light down while servicing customers, and would never look at them.

But as the days wore on, Millet couldn’t help letting Dahu into her heart. He was a good listener, never groped her, and came almost every day to pick her up after work. Millet gave Dahu her cell number and a key to her studio apartment near the spa. The past few years of Millet’s life had been spent helping her mother pay back her father’s debts. She divided her time between her apartment and the “office.” Sometimes Dahu would bring home lunch and quietly watch Millet while she caught up on sleep. Dahu felt that Millet, false eyelashes removed, became herself again, the girl with the nearly perfect, seeming freshly sprouted toes, the only part of Millet he’d been able to see through the breathing hole in the massage table.

Dahu drove the taxi, but he still missed the mountains, so he started to meet some other climbing enthusiasts and joined a search and rescue team. When there was an emergency in the mountains, Dahu would drive the taxi up and participate in the rescue operation. With his rich knowledge of mountains and forests, Dahu soon had quite a reputation. He helped avert a number of alpine tragedies. There were people from all walks of life on the team: tour guides, junior high school teachers, and a steak vendor and tonic hawker from the night market. Once the call to assemble went out, they would all drop whatever they were doing and gather to form the team. In their leisure time, they became climbing buddies. Many of them were mountaineering legends in their own right. Some were Han Chinese, some aboriginal—Pangcah and Amis, Bunun, Sakizaya and Truku. They shared a love for the mountains. None of them was willing to give up the mountains for all the money in the world.

Dahu missed those days with Millet so much that he didn’t dare let himself get sentimental, or he might start ruining or revising those fragile
and dangerous memories. Dahu missed Millet so bad, but he tried hard to forget, not wanting to get the present tangled up in the past.

Night fell and still no sign. The mountain Thom had registered to climb wasn’t that difficult, but it linked up with a few peaks that were actually a lot more treacherous than many famous climbs. The “famous climbs” were all well-traveled, had a continuous stream of hikers on them. The spot you set out from was often not too far from the summit. The essence of the experience, finding a new route up the mountain, had been lost, and all that remained was hiking, sheer physical exercise. These mountains weren’t like that. They remained mysterious, intuitive, like true mountains. Dahu often thought that when you start climbing a true mountain, common sense no longer applies. Anomalies always cropped up on the rescue missions he went on. There was this one time when several students got trapped on Nanhu Mountain. The rescue team kept finding discarded clothes along the path at a time when the temperature in the mountains was close to freezing. A young rescuer asked: “Could it be a distress signal?”

“Not necessarily. There are lots of recorded instances in Taiwan and abroad of lost climbers found without much clothing left on. Hypothermia gives people hot flashes. I don’t think it’s a distress signal. I think it’s a sign that they’re lost, that they’ve lost any sense of direction and are no longer in their right minds. We have to hurry.” Dahu was right. When they found the students, they were almost unconscious and nearly naked.

Dahu sometimes went on international search and rescue trainings. Friends he met on these affairs had told him that when people are lost and haven’t seen a single soul for days on end, many will deliberately avoid rescue personnel because they can’t tell the difference between fantasy, illusion and reality anymore. Some retained their physical vitality but would not respond when called. Some would even hide like startled beasts. So on the current mission, sometimes Dahu called out their names, while at other times he just kept quiet, watching for signs. He asked the other searchers to keep it down as well. Not a few times he had the feeling
something was out there
, but it was always fleeting.

Several days later the rescue team returned with nothing to show for its efforts, not even a corpse. This was a heavy blow for both Dahu and Alice. The hardest thing for Dahu to bear was the look of disappointment in Alice’s eyes. For a month after the incident, team after team of volunteers had gone into the mountains without making any progress. How was it possible? Dahu just didn’t get it. The paper described it as an unsolved mystery. After all, all the usual alpine tragedy involved was people dying in the mountains: there was always a body. But this time it was like looking for clouds that have turned to rain and fallen on a river, something impossible to identify or trace.

As often happens in such enigmas, the search and rescue operations trailed off. The world was like an unimaginably immense machine that wouldn’t stop working because a few people went missing. But on account of his lingering suspicions and his promise to Alice, Dahu decided to go into the mountains one last time. This time he had a new route he wanted to try, and some new ideas.

Not all aboriginal groups in Taiwan live in the mountains, but the Bunun are certainly a mountain people. Dahu, a second son, inherited his uncle’s name. “Dahu” means soapnut, a shrub that is plain and resilient, pretty close to Dahu’s own temperament. But no matter how tough he was, it was hard for him to face Umav by himself. He remembered how unstable Millet had become after conceiving Umav. No longer able to work at the spa, her income of a hundred thousand NT dollars a month suddenly dried up. But in this town, the only pleasure in life for a young woman like Millet was dolling herself up. Besides, like many masseuses, Millet had started using drugs while she was in the business. Dahu tried to force her to quit several times, but though Millet seemed dependent on Dahu’s tenderness and reliability, she still felt that there had to be more to life than this. She would take it out on Dahu, and Dahu would only face her with an attitude of resignation. Millet could not stand herself like this. She needed to forget herself, and the only way to do that was to keep buying drugs on the sly from a customer.

As for himself, Dahu wasn’t too strong, either, yet he was unwilling to appear weak. All he did was drive longer hours to avoid conflict. One day
he came home to discover the scooter gone, and when he opened the door he heard Umav sobbing in her crib, but no one else was there. Then Dahu saw the note Millet had left. She hadn’t written much, just,
I’m going to Taipei. Take good care of Umav
. It should have been easy to find her, but he did not go looking. Instead, he bought a safety seat at the Carrefour and kept driving the taxi. He put Umav in the passenger seat and talked to her as he worked.

Umav’s eyes would light up like the eyes of a sambar deer when she listened to her father’s stories, but the moment a story ended her eyes would turn to stone. After Umav fell asleep, her tiny bosom would rise and fall, but sometimes the rhythm of her breathing would change and she would wake up and burst out crying. Though still an infant, she seemed to know some things. She was like a wounded bird. Every day Dahu worried about the world his daughter would have to face when she grew up, because he knew that for a wounded bird in a real forest death was inevitable.

Dahu walked solitary along the path, then started wandering off. The way ahead got less and less distinct until finally it was just an animal trail. Dahu knew he had entered the “alpine interior.” It was a far cry from the mountain paths packed firm by many feet, mountain paths with ropes climbers have tied and plastic markers they’ve left behind. Moon and Stone kept running in and out of the woods. They would bark to let their master know where the target was. There was nothing more important to a Bunun man than choosing keen and brave Formosan mountain mutts. They were your companions in loneliness, not just hunting dogs. Father had told him to pay close attention to a dog’s eyes and tail: if the tail doesn’t perk up the dog is craven, and if the eyes don’t sparkle it’s not intelligent. Either that or it can’t calm down. A dog that doesn’t stay calm can’t really see danger in the forest.

Moving fast through the forest was Dahu’s forte. He often joked with friends that for a Bunun man growing taller than five foot eight is a disability, because if you’re too tall you can’t shuttle easily through the trees. Moon and Stone were one step ahead of him. They had discovered a water source, a stream in the wilderness that made a silvery sound, like it was talking to you. Dahu got out his portable cooking stove and made
a pot of tea. Dahu took in the view and drank the tea and seemed to forget for a while the troubles that he had brought up the mountain with him. It wasn’t quiet, though. It never was in the mountains, especially near water. Dahu had discovered that many creatures would sing their own unique songs with uninhibited delight when they found water.

One time Father told him a story while they were out hunting. One of the main reasons why he liked going hunting with Father was that he was a good storyteller. Seeing him with the gun slung across his back, telling stories while they checked the traps along the route made Dahu happier than anything. They were resting by a stream and Father said, “Dahu, did you know that in the olden days streams never used to talk?”

“Why did they start talking so much later on?”

“Well, life was actually really hard in the old village deep in the mountains. People were too busy hunting and planting. They didn’t like to dance much, actually, but sometimes they sang. Nobody recorded their songs, though. One day a boy and a girl went up the mountain to do some work. In fact, they’d been secretly in love for a long time. They felt so happy to have the chance to go into the mountains together that they started taking turns singing songs they made up themselves. Well, they came to a stream, and over that stream was a log bridge. It was real narrow, but they still tried to cross it together. Unfortunately, maybe the boy wasn’t paying enough attention or maybe the girl wasn’t paying enough attention. Probably thinking about something else, eh? Whatever the reason, while they were crossing the girl fell off the log. The boy tried to save her, and he fell into the stream, too.”

“Did they die?”

“It wasn’t like dying, Dahu. You must understand that sometimes people aren’t alive, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve died. That’s the way it was for this couple, and they became the voice of the stream.”

People aren’t alive, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve died? Dahu didn’t get it.

“Folks say that from then on, the stream would always make a whispering sound. Listen, doesn’t it sound nice? Later, when Bunun people hunted or worked on the land, they would sometimes, often or always
listen to the sound of the stream for a long time. Later some Bunun folks imitated that sound, and that’s how
pisus-lig
(harmony) came to be.”

Dahu’s father was a good singer and hunter, but a failure in life on the plains. He often got depressed, lost control of himself, and got into fights with guys at the factory over little things. So on holidays he liked to take the gun and face the wild boar up in the mountains and reminisce about the glory and the terror of the Bunun hunters of old. Dahu would always remember the look in his father’s eyes the first time he took him on a group hunting expedition. The dogs were tracking the prey, and Father was directing the hunters to form a ring around it. Dahu’s sweat kept dripping into his eyes, so much he could barely see the path. He had to rely more on hearing and intuition to scramble to his own position. There were gunshots all around him, which sounded like birds above the forest, flying, circling and sometimes leaving without a backward glance.

Dahu wanted to sing, but there wasn’t anyone to sing along with him, and after a few phrases the feeling just wasn’t right. He took out some jerky for Moon and Stone and picked some watercress for himself to raise his spirits. He washed it down with tea. In the forest, Moon and Stone were family. He thought it over and decided he should make camp a bit higher this evening. There shouldn’t be any danger of a landslide at the place he had in mind, and it was close to water. He looked over at Moon and Stone and said, “Oh forget it, let’s have a good night’s sleep and keep looking tomorrow. Even the moon needs to take a rest. Isn’t that right?”

Dahu looked up at the sky, the stars and the trees, thinking of the time when a village elder had told him, “You must often speak to the sky, the stars, the clouds and the forest, because they may be avatars of
Dihanin
(the host of spirits). If you don’t speak to them,
Hanito
(evil spirits) will descend upon you when you’re alone.” Dahu wanted to speak to them but did not know what to say.

Nearby there was the dog-like barking of a muntjac and the buzzing and chirping of a chorus of insects. Some drab owlet moths appeared out of nowhere and started crawling around on his night light. A while later Dahu discovered that more moths had gathered, lots of them. Some were
giant moths like the ones he’d often seen as a child. He’d heard a climbing buddy who knew a lot about insects call them emperor moths. There was another pale turquoise-colored moth with a long beautiful tail called an Indian Luna. And there were still other moths with eyespots on their wings, like innumerable eyes staring at him. Moths like that were usually giant silkworm moths. They don’t fly around much, just stick quietly to tree trunks, like they’re part of the bark.