The Man with the Compound Eyes (38 page)

Just then the Wayo Wayo islanders were waking up. They had the impression that last night’s wind had been particularly strong. As a matter of fact, the night wind on Wayo Wayo was always strong, but what the islanders did not know was that every night for the past several hundred years, Wayo Wayo had been losing a hand’s worth of surface area and moving north one ten-thousandth of the length of a sand worm. And that this morning, a silent flotilla was monitoring some remote area of the great ocean and
lining up like a firing squad. Each crewman stood at his post, gazing toward the horizon. Before long a beam of light leapt up into the sky, flew level for several thousand kilometers, then dove. Just getting up, the Wayo Wayoans thought a massive shooting star had crashed into the sea.

The beam of light plunged beneath the waves and kept boring its way down into an abyssal trench. Never seen before by man, the trench was home to bizarre creatures who could have come from outer space. Suddenly, every creature in the entire ocean heard a deafening sound, like no sound that had ever been heard before, as if some mighty being were departing. A great gash opened up deep in the trench, and a shock wave was transmitted toward the two ends, raising a tsunami of unprecedented power. Of iron will, that wave pushed another piece of the Trash Vortex toward Wayo Wayo. In three minutes and thirty-two seconds, it would, like a gargantuan carpenter’s plane, peel away everything on the island, the living and the nonliving, into the sea.

On the island, only the Sea Sage and Earth Sage anticipated the event. The day before they had appealed to Kabang without receiving any reply.

“Why does Kabang not respond?” the Sea Sage and Earth Sage were deliberating.

“I don’t think he ever will.”

“Shall we warn the islanders?”

“Would it make any difference?”

The two of them fell silent for a while. The Sea Sage murmured, “I really want to know Kabang’s reason. I just wish I knew why.” The wrinkles on his face were so deep that his features seemed to be caving in.

“As you know, Kabang needs no reason for anything, even if His will is for Wayo Wayo to quietly abide in some small corner of the world,” said the Sea Sage.

“Even if His will is for Wayo Wayo to quietly abide in some small corner of the world,” said the Earth Sage. In unison, they repeated, “Even if His will is for Wayo Wayo to quietly abide in some small corner of the world.”

At the approach of the great garbage tsunami, the two Sages were sitting at either end of the island, one of them facing the sea, the other facing away, both watching everything happen with their eyes wide open. The Sea
Sage’s eyes began to bleed from overexertion, while the Earth Sage grasped the ground until the joints of his fingers shattered. When the wave smacked into the island, their bodies were instantly ripped apart, and even though they were both firm of will, they couldn’t help howling in agony. Everything on the island—the houses, the shell walls, the
talawaka
, the beautiful eyes, the woeful calluses, the salt-heavy hair, and all the stories about the sea—was consigned to oblivion in a heartbeat.

At the same time, as if they’d all hearkened unto an epiphany, the sperm whale avatars of the second sons of Wayo Wayo silently assembled into a cetacean rank and file of head to fluke and fin to fin and started cleaving the waves, hastening toward a certain end. Day and night they swam, with no time to change into spirits after dark, with no time at all to rest. The pod passed through the Tropic of Capricorn, through the eyes of three newly formed typhoons, through cold seas and warm, heading straight for land.

One morning a week later, a pod of several hundred sperm whales would be discovered beached on the shores of Valparaíso, Chile, with grim eyes, cracked skin and crushed ribs—ribs crushed by their own weight. Tears would track the cheeks of creatures that did not normally shed tears. Villagers would try at high tide to push some of the whales back into the sea, but the whales, obstinate and resolute, would swim right back on shore.

Cetaceanologists from around the world would rush to Chile in the shortest possible time, because this pod of sperm whales would be entirely male, quite an odd occurrence. Even more surprisingly, one of the whales would be a giant of almost twenty meters in length, a one-of-a-kind in this day and age. As experts would indicate, precocious puberty induced by overfishing had sharply reduced sperm whale body size. Based on recent records, they’d assumed there were no more such truly massive sperm whales left anywhere in the world.

Till the end of their days, the experts who would gather on the Chilean beach would tell one story over and over again: the experience of watching a host of giant creatures die. Blood would trickle out of the mouths of the huge whales, noxious air would spray in huge quantities out of their left nostrils—their blowholes, located on top of their snouts—and their tails
would flail in agony. As if they wanted to force memory from their brains, they would hammer the sand with their heads, leaving huge pits on the beach and making a heavy, hopeless monotone that would pass clear on through to the other side of Chile’s coastal mountains, giving the farmers working in the fields pain of the chest.

Aside from the pounding, the beached whales would not make any other sound. Reminiscing in later days, the experts would all claim that they had heard the call of the whales when they beached. They would try to imitate the call in Mandarin, English, German, Klon, Galician, Dhivehi. Some language prodigy would even try in the dead languages of Manx and Eyak. But nobody would be able to imitate it accurately … for each would feel a terrible pain in the throat, like choking on a fishbone.

Then Valparaíso would shudder like an injured whale, as whale by whale by whale by whale by whale by whale would breathe its last upon the beach. The ones that would die first would bloat up under the oppressive sun, decompose and suddenly explode one after another. Their innards would go flying through the humid, stuffy air and spray down like rain on the cetaceanologists, the fishermen and the children who would have come to gather whale bones. The smell, a putridness no one would have ever smelled before, would make one and all pass out or crouch down and start vomiting.

And by the time they would recover their wits, the entire pod would have already expired, leaving the experts to tally the dead: in total there would be three hundred and sixty-five whales. A Swiss cetaceanologist in his seventies named Andreas would kneel down and weep, would actually weep himself to death. His mortal cries would touch the hearts of everyone on the beach, and everyone would join in and cry along with him. Their tears would drip onto the beach, soon to be recovered by the rising tide.

But the concentration of salt in the sea would not thereby increase, not in the least.

It was right at sunrise that Wayo Wayo was engulfed by the tsunami. Atile’i was facing away from the island, playing on the speaking flute as he rowed into the fragmented Trash Vortex, never looking back. The tune he played was incomprehensibly tender and ineffably anguished. After seeing Atile’I
off, Alice swam back to the roof of the Sea House, stood on a broken solar panel, and tried to find Atile’i on the horizon. As the prow and the rain tarp were both made of materials from the vortex, camouflaging the craft and allowing it to proceed by stealth through a sea of trash, Alice looked for quite some time before she spotted him. His silhouette had become small as a gull’s. Soon Alice started to sing, maybe for Atile’i, maybe for herself. It is one of the songs Thom had sung for her toward the sea the evening she first met him. She still remembered him telling her about the Dano–Swedish War of 1808–1809 and the artillery battery at Charlottenlund Fort, a relic of that conflict.

“This shore really saw war. The cannons really fired their balls. Soldiers really died on this beach. And boats really sank in that sea. This here is no ornamental cannon.” He told her he’d lived in a cave over thirty meters underground, piloted a sloop across the Atlantic, and was now preparing for the challenges of rock and mountain climbing. Then they made love. Thom’s penis penetrated deep inside her body, shining like a torch. In that little tent, she looked over his shoulder and saw the world aglow. In a certain instant, gazing into his pale blue eyes, she seemed to see a million worlds.

“May the sea bless you,” Alice says in a voice much smaller than the point of a pin. The youth has left, has entered the sea. And at this moment the weather on the sea is anything but fair: as rain clouds gather in the distance, Alice can tell that a storm is coming, the likes of which none of the islanders, who have weathered innumerable storms in their time, has ever seen before.

Alice swims back to the shore. The cleanup crew is already there. People run over to offer help when they see her there soaking wet, but Alice just walks in the direction of the hunting hut, keeping her head lowered so they will not be able to get a good look at her face. Now she is walking alone up toward the path through the loveless and pitiless forest. She met Atile’i for the first time along that path; she used to take it with Thom to get water from the stream. She walks and walks, and the moisture on the stalks of grass gradually soaks through her shoes and wets her toes, slowly gets into her eyes. Suddenly Alice feels something furry brush past her leg.

Ohiyo. It’s Ohiyo.

Alice is happy she still has someone to say
Ohiyo
to. Without Alice noticing, Ohiyo has grown into a beautiful adult cat. Alice has to do something for this little survivor.

The cat raises her amazing little head, opens her eyes, one blue and the other brown, and, responding to Alice’s call, looks right back at her.

Wu Ming-Yi was born in 1971 in Taiwan, where he still lives. A writer, artist, professor, and environmental activist, he has been teaching literature and creative writing at National Dong Hwa University since 2000 and is now a professor in the Department of Chinese. Wu is the author of two books of nature writing, the second of which,
The Way of Butterflies
, was awarded the China Times Open Book Award in 2003. His debut novel,
Routes in the Dream
, was named one of the ten best Chinese-language novels of the year by
Asian Weekly
magazine.
The Man with the Compound Eyes
is his first book to be translated into English.

About the Translator

Darryl Sterk has translated numerous short stories from Taiwan for
The Chinese Pen Quarterly
, and now teaches translation in the Graduate Program in Translation and Interpretation at National Taiwan University.