The Man with the Compound Eyes (15 page)

Suddenly Dahu felt faint, far-off shadows drawing slowly near. He looked up, hoping to see more clearly, only to find it was raining. Every thread of rain was glowing, as if the moon itself had turned to rain, like the moon was falling all around him.

Hafay always felt her best cleaning up the Seventh Sisid first thing in the morning. The aromatic melange of seawater outside and sea-grass mats and wooden chairs inside was reminiscent of the smell of cookies, and this rather childish odor allowed Hafay to forget her cares for a while.

On the first Sunday in July, Hafay saw a couple of new faces in the Seventh Sisid. A man and a woman came in right when Hafay opened, sat at the Lighthouse table, set up a camera, and didn’t move the whole morning. The man wore a cameraman’s vest that was literally covered in pockets and a huge backpack; he was big and strong, and had dark skin, a buzz cut, and single-fold eyelids. He looked like the kind of guy who likes working out and pays attention to detail. The woman was skinny, and with heavy eye makeup that made her face seem a bit unreal. And she was wearing silver high heels, in a place like this! She seemed made for TV. Well, I guess, Hafay admitted grudgingly, she is beautiful, but just barely.

The woman had turned on her tablet right after sitting down and had been staring at the screen ever since, like she wanted to avoid looking at her partner. He had set up a telescope and a professional video camera, with a sticker deliberately covering the brand name. Hafay only needed one look to know they were definitely not there for the bird-watching. A few friends of hers who often went bird-watching had mentioned that,
what with upstream factories diverting water into their weirs and discharging waste into the river, over the past few years the fish population at the estuary had collapsed and the birding had even gone to hell at the river mouth. Besides, looking out from the Lighthouse today there weren’t any birds at all, only a gray expanse.

“Here on holidays?”

“No, we’re here on business. Our job today is watching the sea,” the man said.

“Well, I’ve been here watching the sea for many years now, and it’s really not a simple thing. Please take your time,” Hafay joked. Maybe they were here to do a story on Alice’s house. The past couple of years really quite a few of these media people had made the trip. She turned on the stereo and put in a CD from a long time ago. It was the aboriginal singer Panai’s song “Maybe Someday.” Panai was really popular with young people at the time, and one time Hafay heard Panai sing live at the seashore. It was so intense. To Hafay it seemed that though Panai was trying to be laid-back when she sang this song, there was this heavy vibe, as if maybe someday would never come.

The man ordered the daily special. Hafay called today’s special Three Hearts, because she made it out of screwpine hearts, silvergrass hearts and shellflower hearts. She had gathered the vegetables the day before. For the main course you could choose wild boar shank or steamed fish. The man came over to the cashier and presented his name card. As she expected, he was a videojournalist for some TV channel, and the woman was an on-location correspondent.

“You can call me Han.”

“My name’s Lily,” said the woman with the heavy eye makeup, long false lashes and turquoise eyes.

“What are you reporting on? We do not want the attention.”

“Hey, don’t get us wrong, ma’am. This is a great restaurant, and it’d be perfect for a feature. But we’re not working on a fine dining piece right at this time. We’re mainly here because we heard that this is where the trash island might hit.”

“The
what
island?”

“It’s been all over the news. It’s not really an island. I should call it the Trash Vortex. Ah, you don’t seem to have a TV here.”

“Nope.” Television was one of the many things Hafay disliked, and she did not subscribe to a newspaper, either.

Lily batted her false eyelashes and started to explain: “Some thirty years ago, scientists discovered ocean currents had been carrying people’s garbage into a huge floating trash dump. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? It’s just so fascinating: this heap of trash is floating this way, and the whole world is watching. You’ve got to help us, ma’am.”

“What do you want me to do?” Hafay couldn’t understand what was so fascinating about it.

“Let us shoot from here. You’ve got a great view. And when the time comes we’d like to interview you and get you to share your thoughts.”

“Sorry, I don’t do TV.” Hafay waved her hand dismissively. “Will there be other reporters showing up?” she asked anxiously.

By the afternoon, all the local inns and B&Bs were full of reporters. There were even quite a few foreign correspondents. Every so often helicopters and paragliders would fly by. Journalists of all shapes, sizes and colors covered the beach; some were even setting up tents. But except for Han and Lily, Hafay refused to serve any of them. She wished Han and Lily would leave, too, if possible, but she wouldn’t kick them out. She’d only turn away new customers. Han and Lily were thrilled when they heard about the house rule. “This way we’ll get exclusive footage. These days, no matter what the story, everyone interviews the same people and even gets the same camera angles. It really kills us when we can’t get anything unique.”

Then Lily, who was still holding the tablet so she could stay online with the news studio in Taipei and the helicopter flying overhead, said, “The news copter has flown out on the open ocean and surveyed the edge of
the vortex, but the tidal currents near the shore have been so strong lately; they’ve been pushing the trash offshore. So we really don’t know when it’s going to hit. The experts we consulted with predicted that once the low pressure system forming over Luzon starts moving north the airflows will cause the edge of the vortex to fragment. Part of it might spread to Japan, and another part may get sent here.”

“Go up in the helicopter and you’ll get the shots you want,” Hafay said.

“Sure, we’ve got aerial footage already, but the wind’s been too strong the past few days. And it costs a lot to fuel the news copter, so we can’t run it all the time. What we really want to capture is the moment when the vortex hits the shore, and then get local reactions to the incident,” Han said. “Oh yeah, is there a boat in the area we could charter?”

“Maybe Ah Lung can take you out. I’ll give you his number.” Ah Lung was a local fellow who made wood sculptures and fished at the shore.

Hafay took in the familiar stretch of sea, but try as she might she couldn’t understand what Lily and Han were talking about. It was like when she couldn’t understand an arithmetic problem as a girl. All those things we tossed out assuming the tide would take them away and the ocean would digest them were now floating slowly back?

“Is there anyone living in that house over there?” Lily pointed at the only house in the line of sight of the Lighthouse. Hafay didn’t have to look to know that they meant Alice’s place.

“Sure is.”

Alice was getting used to things she just couldn’t understand coming in with the tide.

Finding Ohiyo was like opening a door and letting in a ray of light. Every morning, she would wake up to the sound of Ohiyo’s meowing, and after pouring her food she’d sit at her writing desk by the Sea Window and zone out, or scribble whatever came to mind, without any particular aim. She wrote in a notebook rather than use a computer. She was not writing so much as performing a kind of ritual to the ocean, as if praying to it and beseeching it. Ohiyo’s appearance seemed to have given her faith that if serendipity had brought Ohiyo to her, then maybe it had delivered Toto
to something else, maybe something that had ended up taking him in. This possibility dispelled her suicidal thoughts, at least for now.

At first, she was thinking of letting someone more suitable adopt Ohiyo, or taking her to the animal shelter. But every time she put her in the pet carrier she had bought from the vet she couldn’t help letting her out and stroking her head as she licked her hands with her flickering tongue. Ohiyo, seeming to understand that this person who was petting her needed her, would sit shamelessly on Alice’s lap while she was writing or, even more brazenly, right on top of her notebook, and there was no way she was moving. The little lass knew Alice could not bear to push her away. All Alice could do was try to keep writing, or stare blankly out to sea. The sea was not the same color as when she was a girl. It was a bit darker and grayer now, rarely glowing with its own light. It was like some despairing middle-aged woman one occasionally runs into on the street, who’s been married awhile and has now started to put on weight.

Sometimes Alice would think and think or write and write and end up falling asleep at her desk. At some point Ohiyo would always give herself a shake and spring out the window. Alice would worry she was gone for good, but she discovered Ohiyo had figured out the stunt of hopping from stool to stool to reach the shore. She’d also learned to swim. Watching through the backdoor window, Alice saw Ohiyo squeeze headlong into a thicket of grass. She didn’t know whether it was a coincidence, but the most solitude she could stand before getting suicidal was two or three hours, and just when Alice’s thoughts tended in that direction Ohiyo would make a nimble entrance. Her meowing was just the thing to ward off Alice’s thoughts of leaving the world, as if someone had deliberately bolted the invisible gate that led toward the land of death.

For the longest time after entering the academy Alice used a computer to increase her productivity. When speech recognition became popular later on Alice followed suit. So it felt kind of awkward when she went back to writing by hand, and there were lots of characters she’d forgotten how to write. Editing was even more of a problem, because now she couldn’t just click undo. Sometimes she’d be on the last line and make a mistake
and have to crumple up the page and start over. But Alice liked this feeling: the characters had to settle in her mind a bit longer before they could take shape on the paper, stroke by stroke, like stalks of grass rustling out of the ground until she cut them down with the mower and waited for them to grow again. No matter how hard she tried, Alice could not remember why she used to like writing fiction when she was younger. Maybe the feeling was gone never to return, like all the migratory birds that had stopped visiting the island. Observing herself slowly turning into a word machine these past few years, Alice had become extremely short-tempered, and took it out on the scholarly articles she was asked to review. You draw a salary for producing this kind of garbage? The nerve! she always thought. Eventually, Alice got a reputation in the academic world for being unfathomably harsh. “Don’t send her articles,” people would whisper. Soon she was isolated, the way a vicious fish might be put in a Plexiglas separation chamber in an aquarium.

A few days before, Alice had gone to a new bookstore in town to get the right notebook. The prevalence of computers did not seem to have decreased the number of notebooks on the market. Lots of people still enjoyed having a booklet close at hand, jotting things in it when they felt like it. The store had a large selection. Alice took a liking to a notebook with a blue cover without any lettering. But the “paper” inside felt really neat to the touch. The clerk explained, “It’s made in Germany. It’s really cool. You can also buy a vial of this correction fluid. It’s an organic plant-extract, and you use it wherever you want to erase and rewrite. It erases just like that, no sweat. The paper is made out of hemp fiber but has the texture of traditional paper.”

“Amazing, fake paper that’s just like the real thing.”

“No, no, miss, this is real paper.”

Well, the clerk was right. Maybe she’d fallen into a kind of intellectual trap. She’d started with a preconceived notion of paper and regarded anything that seemed “like paper” as fake paper or a replacement for paper. She felt that the whole world seemed to be of the same composition as this paper, but she could not say how, at least not until she got home and another thought occurred to her. About a dozen years before, people had
started promoting “green living” or “slow living,” and so forth, but this was just the latest fad. The people of this island basically pursued whatever was popular, not because it was significant but because it was “the latest.” Saying “this is the latest” to Taiwanese people was like casting a spell on them, or like playing the melody of a magic flute that made whosoever heard it follow along. And this paper seemed to provide temporary repose to all such newfangled notions. But it was not a digital repose. It was writing out one stroke at a time the characters that appeared really necessary, worth preserving for all eternity.

“Yes, I guess it is, in that sense.”

Alice bought a stack of notebooks in one go. Sitting by the Sea Window, she would write poems in the shape of a mouse’s tail, in imitation of
Alice in Wonderland
. Sometimes she’d draw Ohiyo fast asleep, or copy out Toto’s insect notes: highland red-belly swallowtail butterfly (Mount Li), Chinese hairstreak (Mount Ninety-Two in Nantou County), jewel beetle (Plum Mountain in Chiayi County), midnight luster stag beetle (Mystery Lake), moon-gazer stag beetle (Lala Mountain) … Alice discovered that insects sometimes had very charming names. They got more and more familiar until she pretty much had them all memorized. Now it was like her mind contained a forest, a mountain.