The Man with the Compound Eyes (36 page)

The man feels something flashing in front of his eyes, fleetingly. Someone puts out the light of his life. Someone has extinguished something.

“In fact, since then your son has only existed in her writing and daily activities, and you have been an accessory. You two have been the bearers of a traumatic memory, and its authors.”

The man sighs. Clearly, something leaves his body at that moment. “So my son’s later existence is meaningless?”

“Not exactly. At least for a certain period of time, by a kind of tacit understanding, he lived between you and your wife, didn’t he? He lived, like a chain. He didn’t die by the regular definition, only he wasn’t alive anymore. No other creature can share experience like this. Only human beings can, through writing, experience something separately together.”

The man with the compound eyes looks into the man’s glimmering eyes as they start to dim: this is a sign that he has reached fourteen and a half yawns.

“But at the end of the day memory and imagination have to be archived separately, just as waves must always leave the beach. Because otherwise, people couldn’t go on living,” the man said. “This is the price humanity must pay for being the only species with the ability to record memory in writing.”

The man discovers that the chrysalis in the man’s hand has begun to writhe, as if being trapped inside the cocoon is quite painful and it wants to end the pain.

“In all honesty, I don’t envy you the possession of this power over memory, nor do I admire you. Because humans are usually completely unconcerned with the memories of other creatures. Human existence involves the wilful destruction of the existential memories of other creatures and of your own memories as well. No life can survive without other lives, without the ecological memories other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which they live. People don’t realize they need to rely on the memories of other organisms to survive. You think that flowers bloom in colorful profusion just to please your eyes. That a wild boar exists just to provide meat for your table. That a fish takes the bait just for your sake. That only you can mourn. That a stone falling into a gorge is of no significance. That a sambar deer, its head bent low to sip at a creek, is not a revelation … When in fact the finest movement of any organism represents a change in an ecosystem.” The man with the compound eyes takes a deep sigh and says: “But if you were any different you wouldn’t be human.”

“And who are you, then?” The man uses the remaining fraction of his final breath to spit this question out, and it is as if a chorus of a million voices asks it.

“Who am I? Who am I indeed?” The cocoon in the man’s hand is throbbing violently now, like an emerging galaxy in the agony of formation. His eyes are flashing, almost as if they contain flecks of quartz. But if you looked carefully, you would see that they are not really flashing, that some of the ommatidia are wet with tears, tears so exceedingly fine they are harder to perceive than the point of a pin.

Pointing at his own eyes, the man with the compound eyes says, “The only reason for my existence is that I can merely observe, not intervene.”

The boy resolves to climb down the cliff.

He attaches the safety rope and slowly starts climbing down. Because he is light, the boy does not feel the weight of his body at first, but soon he feels his strength deplete. He’s never imagined his body is this heavy. He looks up, and all he can see is an endless stone wall. He has to wipe the sweat on his brow away with his arm, so it doesn’t sting his beautiful brown eyes, which from a certain angle look a bit blue.

When he is about halfway down, the boy’s foot slips. In a moment of panic he plummets. Luckily he returns to the wall, but by this point his energy is drained, and he can go no further, neither up nor down. At first his body feels hot, and the sweat keeps dripping down, but soon his motionless body feels the chill of the wind. He shivers.

Stuck there, the boy realizes his hearing is now keener than normal. In addition to the sound of the wind blowing, the leaves falling and insects beating their wings, he seems to hear his father talking to another man at the base of the cliff. He cannot understand most of what they are saying, but when he hears the other man say, “He didn’t die by the regular definition, only he wasn’t alive anymore,” he suddenly feels his body grow light. No, better to say that his original
sense of weight
disappears.

He cocks his head to one side, as if in contemplation, and decides to climb back up instead of continuing down. He is surprised to find that for some reason when he starts ascending he feels light as a feather, hollow in the middle.

The boy reaches the top of the cliff, walks into the tent, and opens his backpack. Inside is the pocket in which he keeps his insect specimen bottles. He takes them out, walks outside, opens them and dumps out the beetles, one by one. Initially the beetles are terrified. They all play dead, lying motionless on the ground, legs curled up. Then the boy turns the beetles over, one at a time. Several minutes later, a few of them tentatively crawl a short distance, then open their elytra to reveal transparent wings so thin as to be almost invisible. And then they flutter off.

Flap flap, flap flap, flap flap …

The boy stands at the edge of the cliff. The beetles are now mere specks in his beautiful eyes, but their elytra can still be discerned. “Such beautiful insects!” says the boy in a singsong voice. Just then, a huge beetle with charming green and yellow mottling on its elytra stops on a rock in front of him. “A long-armed scarab! A male long-armed scarab!” calls the elated boy.

“Look at that long pair of arms! See how large its elytra are!”

But from that moment on, he feels everything start to get “blurry,” not “blurry” in the regular, visual sense but a kind of blurriness that people could never imagine. It is as if he is transforming into a leaf, an insect, a birdcall, a drop of water, a pinch of lichen, or even a rock.

Flap flap, flap flap, flap flap …

It is as if there’s never been such a boy who climbed that massive cliff in that incredible scene, which is now, once again, received into one of the ommatidia, far smaller than pinpoints, of the man with the compound eyes, along with the panorama of all scenery. No scene now remains, except in memory.

Dahu kept calling but couldn’t reach Alice at the cell he’d given her. So the morning he woke up in the Forest Church, he decided to drive up the coast to the Sea House, to make sure Alice was all right. Reaching the shore, he saw that the volunteer cleanup team had started the day’s work. Maybe it was a false impression, but the Sea House seemed to be sinking even further into the sea. He saw a man and woman, like a mother and son, facing the Sea House and pointing at things. Dahu went over and asked and they turned out to be the writer Kee’s widow and son.

“My mother just wanted to come by and see the old lot, and to check whether Professor Shih is all right,” the son said.

“She’s moved already, for her own safety,” Dahu said.

The writer’s widow seemed filled with regret as she said, “We used to plant vegetables here, looking out to sea. Who would have thought it would end up underwater?”

Dahu resolved to take a trip to the hunting hut, even though it might make Alice angry. When he got there, he was even more convinced that there was someone else living at the hut besides Alice, because there was a tent outside the hut, and a fixed-frame awning had been added on to the hut itself. He also discovered a kind of food cellar, and there were books and drawings scattered around the room. He could tell right away that some of the drawings, wild, and incredibly imaginative, were not from
Alice’s hand. So that was why he could never get through to her: Alice had not even taken her cell along. The cell was off and it was being used as a paperweight for those drawings instead. Dahu was going to take the phone with him, but on second thought decided to just set the phone with the solar cell up, turn on the transmitter, and leave Alice a note. This way, Dahu could still get in touch with Alice after she got back. And once she picked up the phone, he would also be able to track her no matter where she went.

But Dahu was still determined to form a rescue team to go into the mountains to find her. He did not know whether Alice really needed rescuing, but he tried to plan for the worst. That’s what his wilderness experience had taught him to do.

Right then, Atile’i was carrying Alice back down the mountain. Alice saw Dahu from far off and had Atile’i let her down so that they would not be seen. They hid until Dahu left; only then did Atile’i carry the debilitated Alice to the hut. The first thing Alice did was to turn on the phone and give Dahu a call.

“You’re back! I was at the hut just now but I didn’t see you. I was about to form a search party,” Dahu said, greatly relieved.

“I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong. No need to form any party.”

“Is there someone there with you? Where’ve you been these past few days?”

“Uh …” Alice wasn’t going to tell him, at least not yet. “I’ll explain it to you some other time.”

After hanging up, Alice looked everywhere for Ohiyo before finally finding her in the straw basket Atile’i had woven, her forepaws covering her eyes and her body curled up into a perfect ball, as if nothing had disturbed her rest.

For whatever reason, when she was looking at Ohiyo fast asleep, Alice suddenly got the urge to write, and she did not want to waste a minute. She sat back down in her Writing Pavilion underneath the awning, got out the notebook, and continued writing the novel she’d never been able to finish.

Atile’i could not help saying, “You’re sick. Why not … rest?”

“I want to do some writing.”

“What about?”

“Something that apparently happened, but maybe never actually did,” Alice said.

Sara took up residence in the tribal village of Sazasa starting the evening she stayed in the Bunun house in the Forest Church. She got up early every day and went to different sections of seashore to observe, take notes and write up her new research proposal. Detlef served as her chauffeur and occasionally went up into the hills to hunt or down into the fields to plant millet or sorghum with some of the villagers. The two of them were getting more and more acquainted with, but at the same time depressed about, the condition the coastline was in. Every day, Sara persisted in measuring the sea temperature at several specific sites. She’d discovered that the average temperature was 1.6°C higher than the previous record.

“This means that a continuous increase in rainfall is likely,” Sara said to Detlef.

“And the water pollution?”

“Awful. I guess only a few invertebrates will survive, and just barely. Dissolved oxygen levels are also down, and the plastic items exposed to the sun will keep releasing toxins into the sea, like a witch poisoning the water night and day. Look, the sea’s all discolored.”

Detlef looked and the sea was indeed a blotchy patchwork of red and brown. “The shallows are covered in algae.”

Detlef and Sara had fallen in love with the island. But now the happy-go-lucky people living in this relatively poor part of the island had lost even the right to go out to sea.

After Dahu confirmed that Alice was safe and sound, he kept up his coastal cleanup work and his Forest Church work with Anu. Alice would answer when Dahu called. When he went by the Sea House he would sometimes see Alice out and about, and occasionally Detlef and Sara would be there too. Sara was quite intrigued by this woman who’d been living in a hunting
hut in the hills ever since her house had gotten inundated. But though Alice was willing to exchange pleasantries, it seemed there was a window in her heart that was always shut. No matter how Dahu tested the waters, Alice remained unwilling to reveal the identity of the person who was living with her at the hut. “Give me some time,” Alice said.

Hafay was busy serving villagers and tourists
salama
coffee, and Umav was responsible for telling travelers various Pangcah and Bunun tales. She was enjoying herself, and was becoming more of a young lady every day. She’d grown bangs, and used a hair band to gather up her hair, revealing the moles on her ear lobes.

That’s how they passed the winter.

Spring had just arrived, and Detlef and Sara had to leave because Detlef had to give a guest lecture at a university back home. One evening, a few of them were sitting around shooting the breeze, and Hafay recommended Detlef and Sara take a trip south before they left. “It would be a shame if Sara never got the chance to observe the sea down the coast.” The plan quickly took shape: they decided to go in two vehicles, with Dahu and Anu driving. Alice was also invited, but as usual she made up an excuse and declined to go.

“The millet will ripen when it’s time,” Hafay said, to comfort Dahu.

When the car reached the entrance of the village, Dahu rolled down the window and said in Bunun to an old fellow crouching at the side of the road:
“Mikua dihanin?”
(What’s the weather like today?)