The Man with the Compound Eyes (31 page)

“What about the local townspeople and villagers?”

“Many of them are Pangcah. The word means ‘people,’ and it’s what the Amis aboriginal people around here prefer to call themselves. Most of the Pangcah in Haven are involved in the recovery work. I’m afraid that this is it for this stretch of coast and for the fishing ground too. Part of the sea culture of the Pangcah people has been ruined. To Han Chinese people, all the pollution means is that there’s no more money to make from the sea, but for the Pangcah it’s different: the sea is their ancestor, and so many of their traditional stories are about the sea. Without ancestors, what’s the point of being ‘Pangcah’?”

“Are you Pangcah yourself?”

“No, I’m Bunun,” Dahu said. “The word
bunun
means that we are the true ‘people.’ ”

Sara completely understood. Every people in the world, in the beginning, felt that they were the only “true people.”

For dinner they went to Dahu’s house. There they met a girl and a woman. The girl, Umav—what a charming name!—was Dahu’s daughter. But he only introduced the woman by name without indicating whether she was his wife. Sara felt that she seemed not to be. The relationship between Hafay and Dahu seemed like what was between her and Detlef, just not exactly. It was like an article without an explicit thesis. She was told that the dinner was made mainly with the wild vegetables that the Pangcah people often ate. But there wasn’t any seafood. Umav and Hafay could not speak English, so Dahu did most of the talking.

“There’s seafood in almost everything we eat, but there isn’t any seafood for now. You know how it is.”

“No worries. It’s a wonderful, lavish feast! And when you think about it, who knows if there’ll ever be seafood again? Maybe now’s the time to go veg,” Detlef said, laughing, and the others groaned and laughed along with him.

This island has already started to redeem itself, Sara thought.

Alice woke up in the night and hiked down the mountain with her flashlight. It was still drizzling. This was the eighteenth straight day of rain on the east coast. Apparently, some sections of road and railway in Tai-tung had been swamped by the sea, and some coastal villages in Ping-tung, the ones that suffered the most subsidence, had been evacuated.

The path wasn’t that easy to make out, but Alice was moving right along. She was growing less afraid of the mountain as she became more familiar with every little path she could take to get down, and with the rate of growth of every plant, every clump of grass along the way. So this was what a mountain was like, the same as a person: the more you know, the less you fear. But even so, you still never know what it’s thinking. And just like you never know what a person is going to do next, you never know what a mountain is going to do next, Alice thought.

Alice had mixed feelings when she reached the coast and stood at the shore, once so familiar but now so strange. Since this stretch of coastline was relatively populous, the preliminary cleanup had been finished, finally. But seawater does not stay in one place; the trash island was spread out over an expanse of sea larger than Taiwan itself, so that when the second wave washed in it crammed trash into every discernible gap. The Sea House was now about fifty meters from the high water line, when the water reached all the way up to the edge of the road and surrounded the house
with debris. Now the tide would begin to ebb. Alice took off her T-shirt and put it in a waterproof bag, then put on her swimsuit and waded down the slope of the road, which hadn’t subsided, at least not yet.

At first, the water only reached her calves, but soon it was too deep to stand and she stepped into nothing. Her body tensed up for a moment in the frigid water, then relaxed.

In the darkness the seawater was inky black. She’d never seen it this way before. The lights from the streetlamps danced on the waves like flashing threads weaving themselves into something people did not yet understand. Alice put on a diving mask, strapped on a mini Aqua-Lung and plunged. In the glare of her headlamp she saw myriad plastic objects floating in various poses, like the unknown organisms of an alien world.

Alice saw that the sea was two thirds of the way up the second floor when she swam near the Sea House. All the windows were broken, and a huge chunk of one wall had collapsed, along with most of the main wing. She could now see the situation inside the house from underwater. She “dove” in through an opening, found her room by memory and opened the door. It was a bit heavy due to the water pressure, but fortunately there was a hole at the base and she could still push it open. She swam down the hallway, finding Toto’s door ajar. His room was full of trash swept in by the tide, and his things had been washed out into the hallway or were hidden among the debris. She looked up and there it was, the mountain map Toto and Thom had drawn on the ceiling, same as always. But now Alice saw another route she hadn’t known about until now.

All this time, Alice had been trying to get Dahu to tell her where he’d found Thom’s body, but Dahu refused. Perhaps he had some sort of understanding with the police, because they wouldn’t say much, either, only the name of the mountain. They were evasive, claiming that the only person who knew the precise location was the one who discovered the body.

“It wasn’t us who carried him down,” said a fat cop who was handling the case.

When Thom and Toto first went missing Alice desperately wanted the rescue team to take her up. That was how she found out which route Thom
had registered. But obviously Dahu had found the body along a different route, and though the two mountains were connected, Thom still didn’t have the permit to climb that other mountain. So why did he die there?

Then, one day, when Alice was sitting in the hut writing, she suddenly remembered the ceiling in Toto’s room.

Now she was looking up at the map on that very ceiling. At first she was a bit lost, but having studied a lot of maps lately she quickly found the route. As she had suspected, Thom, maybe together with Toto, had conspired an alternate route without her knowing. They didn’t follow the route they’d registered at the backcountry office, the route along which the rescue team had naively searched. Actually, they took the route on the ceiling. Alice kept looking at the map, until she seemed to see a gate, a path, the sky, rocks, the source of a tiny spring, and rain.

Seawater. A mountain path.

The seawater was thick like sleep, and when Alice stepped out of it onto the shore she felt like a lonely whale that had snuck on shore. Her heart was broken like glass and sealed like a dead clam.

The next evening, Alice used a 3D projector to shine a map of the earth onto a piece of white paper stuck on the outside wall of the hunting hut. She told Atile’i, “This is called a ‘map.’ The place we live, Taiwan, or any place, can be drawn on a map like this, and you can use a map to tell other people how to get somewhere. So when you’re somewhere unfamiliar you can still find the way.” Alice saw confusion in Atile’i’s eyes and added, “If you know how to read a map.”

Alice used a laser pointer to indicate the position of Taiwan on the map and said, “This’s the island we’re on now. Can you point to the island where you come from? Wayo Wayo?” Atile’i smiled sadly.

“No, the earth, here.” Atile’i pointed at the ground, grasped a clump of dirt, and said, “Not, there.”

“Atile’i, you don’t understand. The map is this earth of ours shrunk down and drawn on a piece of paper. See, the whole world has been shrunk down and shone onto this piece of paper.” Alice felt there was something wrong with her explanation, but that was no big deal as Atile’i could not fully understand what she was saying in any case.

“The sea can also become a map?”

“I guess so. There are nautical maps.” Alice pointed at a spot in the South Pacific and said, “I guess that Wayo Wayo is somewhere around here.”

Alice shone the next map, this one a large-scale map of Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, showing contour lines and tortuous climbing routes. On it was a red route, which she had drawn from memory. It was the route on the ceiling, the path through the mountains that Thom and Toto had actually taken.

“We are here, and I want to go here. Do you understand? I want to go here.” Alice kept tracing the route with the laser pointer until Atile’i nodded to show he understood.

“Are you,” Alice pointed at Atile’i, “willing to go there with me? Come with me.”

“Is it far?”

“It’s not close, I don’t think.” Suddenly a giant silkworm moth flew over and stopped on the map, like a mark, or like a symbol, like an interjection. It opened the eyes on its wings and stared at her.

“Her?” Atile’i pointed at Ohiyo.

“Ohiyo will wait for me to come back, won’t you, Ohiyo? You’ll be here, waiting for us to return, right around here? Or you want to go stay with Dahu?” Ohiyo purred sweetly several times, to voice her protest. Obviously she wanted to be free to hang out in the mountains all by herself.

Alice had spent quite some time at the library going through all the climbing records for this route. She bought all the gear she thought she’d need, and got a pack for Atile’i and another tent. It wasn’t like the one Atile’i had been sleeping in; it was a new design, superlight and ultradry. With its streamlined shape and airflow system, an invisible air current would form over the tent, reducing the impact of rain on the roof and keeping the inside dry. She wanted Atile’i to go with her partly because she didn’t know who to send him to, but also because she knew she would have to rely on this kid to survive in the mountains. She selfishly assumed that since he’d evaded all the deathtraps on the ocean, he could probably help her get to the place marked in red on the map.

The red dot marked a lofty precipice. The folks at the professional alpine
association said it was a route few people would take, because the only interesting thing on it was a huge cliff that appeared after the big quake. Newly formed, it was none too stable and might be dangerous. It wasn’t like this was a traverse you’d have to take through the area; there wasn’t even a trig point on the summit.

“Ma’am, if you’re not going rock climbing, you’d have no reason to go there,” a coach at the climbing club said.

Alice chose a day in the midst of about the only sunny spell they would likely enjoy in the next three months to set out. The weather forecast was for five or six days of fair skies, if they were lucky.

Alice set out toward the trail with Atile’i in tow. She deliberately took a detour that was not drawn on the map. She’d heard it would allow them to bypass the backcountry checkpoint. It went by an aboriginal village and a power plant along the left-hand side of the riverbed. It was a Sakizaya community that had been in the news quite often in the past few years. The Sakizaya villagers had been working on an eco-cultural tourism project, and everything was on the right track until a series of landslides forced them to suspend operations. But solo climbers still preferred this route up the river valley, which led into the Central Mountain Range.

The next day they were already deep in the mountains. The path traversed gorges and sheer drops, typically precipitous terrain for the island’s canyon-cut eastern flank. Though Atile’i had been living with Alice all that time in the hunting hut, this was the first time he had really witnessed the mountains in this way. Several times, while observing the changing alpine mistscapes, he knelt down and placed his head on the ground and made the special Wayo Wayoan hand gesture that symbolized the adoration of the earth.

The pair kept walking at dawn of the third day when clouds blew in and it started raining in the shadow of the mountain. Soon the rain obscured the lie of the mountain, giving them the momentary impression they were on a modest suburban hill. As the sun’s rays grew stronger in the afternoon, the peaks in the distance became hazily visible again, until the light penetrated the clouds and revealed the ridges between the peaks. Yet at lower altitudes fog and mist still concealed the valley, giving the set of summits
in the distance the guise of an island floating in an ethereal sea of clouds. At the sight of this vista, Atile’i suddenly fell in love with the island, just like he had always loved Wayo Wayo.

“Mountains?” he asked, pointing in the distance.

“Yes.”

“So many?”

“Yes.”

“God is there?”

“What?”

“God is there?”

Is God there? Some Taiwan aboriginal myths involving mountains came to Alice’s mind. The first Atayal ancestor was supposedly born on Mount Dabajian. The Tsou had fled to Jade Mountain after the Deluge. And the Bunun, too, had their own Holy Mountain. Almost all the tribes did. But was a holy mountain a god? Alice would rather describe it as a source of sustenance and as a refuge. The mountains had no particular place in the folk religion of her ancestors, the Han people of Taiwan, but belief in the communal Earth God was ubiquitous. So in a certain sense, at a certain point of time, the mountains had, loosely speaking, been “gods.” Alice was reminded of slogans people had made up in response to the rash of landslides that had been striking whenever a typhoon hit, sometimes burying whole aboriginal villages, sometimes swallowing vehicles, sometimes merely knocking roads out and leaving entire villages isolated. There’d been calls for a return to nature and a renewed respect for nature and even an appeal to “worship the mountain god again.” But maybe it was already too late. Even if once the mountains had been divine, all the gods would have departed by now, Alice thought.

“God was there, but not anymore.”

“God is there, in Wayo Wayo’s sea. The mountain is small, but God is also there,” Atile’i solemnly declared.

Unlike Kabang, Yayaku, the Wayo Wayoan mountain god, was a chastised deity. Wayo Wayoans believed that there were many other gods who were not quite as mighty as Kabang but who were in charge of fate
and destiny, each in His own domain. The reason Yayaku had been punished was that one day when Kabang resolved to wipe out a certain kind of whale that had given offense, Yayaku astonishingly extended the hand of mercy. He created a kind of kelp that grew as high as a mountain, let those peerless whales hide inside, and exhorted them not to come out until after Kabang had calmed down. But Kabang finally found them when a playful whale calf snuck out of the seaweed grove. Kabang quaked with anger and unleashed His vengeance upon Yayaku. Yet at the same time, Kabang had realized it would be rash and improper to exterminate a kind of living creature, and thereupon He rescinded His fatal decree.