The Man with the Compound Eyes (6 page)

Toto was born the third year after Alice and Thom met. Guess you could say he was an accident, or that it was fate. She and Thom had never thought of having a child. They did not think it possible, psychologically or physically, and a child was not a part of either’s life plan. Thom and Alice disagreed on a lot of things, but they both felt that bringing a child into this world was a kind of punishment, a form of suffering.

Preparations for Alice and Thom’s house had been finalized when they found out Toto was on the way, but it wasn’t too late to calculate his future into the design. Thom had drafted the plans himself. The exterior was based mainly on Erik Gunnar Asplund’s three-in-one Summer House, with some adaptations. Thom added a second story to the cabin on the right-hand side, and raised the ceilings in the two blocks in the main wing. The original Summer House was a cosy cottage lying low in the forest; Thom’s design looked rather different. The structure also had to be different, because Asplund, building on a fjord, hadn’t had to worry about the resolute tides and wayward winds of the western Pacific.

The summer they met, Alice and Thom went traveling together from Denmark to Sweden. The third day in Stockholm, they made a special trip to see the City Library, another of Asplund’s creations. As soon as she walked in the library Alice gasped with surprise. It seemed as if the shelves
had been arranged to the lovely rhythm of Claude Debussy’s Quartet for Winds, level upon level, floor upon floor, as if they led all the way up to heaven. This was the most beautiful “book repository” Alice had ever seen.

Haven County had beautiful scenery, but except for some heritage sites the cultural landscape was horrendous. The new train station was ghastly, the library nearby even more so. Alice remembered the Taipei municipal government had built a nice library in Pei-tou, but that was just a container without too much in the way of content. Asplund, by contrast, had grasped the true meaning of a library. Though the circular wall of books seemed to weigh down on you like history, it was not overbearing or oppressive. With the little open windows around the rotunda above letting in rays of sunlight, Alice had the sense she was participating in some sort of religious rite as she stood on tiptoe to reach up for a book on the top shelf. Her hands trembling, Alice felt like a handmaiden of light and like the lady of the books.

Alice especially liked the Story Room. It seemed to have the power to turn back time. It was on the ground floor, in a children’s corner inside the library. When you walked in, it was like a fairy kingdom in a mountain cave. There were murals of scenes from Swedish folktales on the walls, with the reader’s chair (which seemed to give whoever sat in it the ability to tell magical stories) in the center of the room. Children were sitting on the crescent benches on either side of the chair, or right on the floor in front. Warm light shone on the murals, making it seem as if the slightest breeze would start the elves talking. The children’s eyes were gleaming as they listened to the story. For the first time in her life, Alice thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she had a child of her own.

“Only in places like this have spirits ever appeared,” Alice said.

Realizing Alice was under Asplund’s spell, Thom had an idea. “Any plans for tomorrow? Want to visit another building by the same architect? It’s a private residence, though, not a public building.”

“We had plans, but they just changed.”

The next day they set off from the campground, rode the bus for almost two hours, and walked for over ten minutes from the bus stop until they reached a path through the woods. It was summer. The sunlight sprinkled
down through the leaves, dappling the path, like a sign. The ambience made Alice feel so much younger, especially with Thom there. She felt like a maiden who could weave a new life for herself with thread spun from her lover’s smile.

At the end of the forest was a trail winding leisurely up a hill. It was quite a long hike, but the view was so beautiful that one did not feel the least bit tired. At the top a meadow opened up: to the left, obdurate, unyielding, a crag; to the right, a famous fjord; and straight ahead the Summer House. Though the owner was not in, they could still look on politely from afar. But Alice would often remember that moment in later years. It was as if she had witnessed something, not just a house but daily life itself.

“Will I ever live in a house like that?” Alice asked, a bit slyly and flirtatiously.

“Of course,” replied Thom, matter-of-factly. For a moment Alice did not quite feel like herself; usually she would never speak in such a way to such a visibly younger man.

And now the only consolation Alice had was this house in the sea. She remembered how they met. In retrospect, it was her romantic nature making mischief. That summer, after finally completing her infinitely tedious Ph.D. in literature and sending off an application for a job she thought she had no hope of getting, she packed a tent, a camera and a laptop and took a trip to Europe. Alice actually intended to write a book about her travels,
Tales of a Lady Wayfarer
perhaps, and launch her literary career. Maybe it would be a best-seller and she would not have to enter the academy.

Her first stop after landing in Copenhagen was the Charlottenlund Fort Campground on the outskirts of town. The campground really gave you a sense of history. There was a big old cannon covered in waterproof camouflage tarpaulins. There was even a stable. Alice had planned to make this her base for a weeklong visit in Copenhagen. One evening she missed the last bus and had to walk all the way back through the sparsely populated suburbs. Alice felt a bit fazed. Worse, she took a wrong turn, and had to
walk across a forest park to get back to the campground. Much bigger than a typical “park,” it was more like the Black Forest (it actually was a black forest). The trees might be centuries old or even a millennium or more, and there were fallen logs blocking the path, which was none too visible in the first place. The forest park was a different world in the evening. There were no dog-walkers or joggers anymore. The only thing she could hear was the hooting of the owls. Just as she was starting to get really anxious, there was a pale beam of light in the distance, and a crackling sound.

Alice was instinctively suspicious of anyone she might meet in a situation like this. Her heart started racing involuntarily. She was anxious to find a place to hide out of sight of the path, not expecting how incredibly quickly the figure would approach. A tall, bearded man, with a slightly juvenile look came riding along on his bike, stopping by her side.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Alice managed.

“Going to the campground?”

“Yeah.”

“Hop on, I’ll give you a lift.”

“I’m all right.”

“Don’t be scared. Look, this is my staff ID. I saw you yesterday. You’re staying at Charlottenlund Fort Campground, aren’t you? I work there. You’ll be frightened walking alone, and soon it’ll be dark. You can trust me. The forest recognizes my bicycle.” Actually, Alice knew that around this time of year it would not get dark until after nine. But her heart was still racing, which made it hard for her to judge why she felt at a loss—was she nervous, or was there some other reason? She glanced at his bicycle, a road bike without a rear rack.

“On this? How will you give me a lift?”

The man took a detachable rack out of his backpack, mounted it on the seat post, and said: “You couldn’t be more than a hundred pounds; this thing can bear a person of a hundred and forty. No problem.”

So, wearing his backpack over his chest, the man gave Alice and her luggage a ride. Sitting on the rack, Alice rested her hands lightly on the
man’s firm waist. Her heart hadn’t slowed a bit. The two of them hung out after they made it back to the camp, talking until dark. The man got a guitar out of his tent and sang songs for her, songs she had grown up listening to. They did not retire to their respective tents until it was too dark to see the windmill generator in the distance.

As she got to know Thom (a common Danish name, as she later discovered) a bit better, she learned that, after all, the beard was deceptive: she actually was a bit older than him, by three years. But in terms of life experience it was the other way around. He had cycled all over Africa. He had navigated a sailboat across the Atlantic and drifted onto some deserted island after the boat broke down. He had trained in Baji-style kung fu. He had run across the Sahara with an ultramarathon team. And he had participated in an interesting sleep experiment, which revisited the research done at Midnight Cave in Texas in 1972 by revising certain experimental conditions. He had spent six full months thirty meters underground.

“What’s it like underground?”

“What’s it like underground? Well, it was actually more like spending time inside a living being.”

Thom was widely experienced and adventurous. Solving problems and taking up challenges was his idea of fun. These were personal qualities generally lacking in the men from the island Alice had grown up on. It all made her a bit giddy. Especially since Thom had such gentle, sparkling eyes.

“You’ve done so many things! What’s next?”

“Mountain climbing. Not in Denmark, though. Denmark is a country without mountains. I’m training in professional rock climbing three days a week in Germany. I’m working here to save up for my climbing gear.”

Not understanding a word of Danish, Alice could only communicate with him in English. Neither was using his or her mother tongue, so they always seemed a bit hesitant. But the language they were speaking was beside the point. Her mind would always wander when she talked to him, even recalling lines of poetry: “For shade to shade will come too drowsily.” Oh no, Alice thought, this isn’t good.

Thom was also attracted to this petite, scatterbrained woman who
would sometimes launch into Mandarin without warning. He ditched his next plan, to go canoeing up a fjord. Meeting Alice was as exciting and unpredictable as any wilderness adventure, and possibly more dangerous. Thom offered to serve as Alice’s tour guide. He carried his tent, she carried hers, and they went backpacking together, both feeling excitable and frolicsome, like kids. Three weeks later, Alice had made a tour of northern Europe and returned to Copenhagen to catch her flight. Originally Thom was just going to see her off, but at the airport she was pulling her luggage and he was pulling his, and just as she was about to board the plane he made a last-minute decision to go with her to
terra incognita
Taiwan, just to see what it was like. The flight Alice was taking was already full, so Thom had to take the next flight. Instead of going home, Alice waited all day in the airport in Taipei for his connecting flight to arrive from Bangkok. The moment they found each other at the arrival gate that evening, the question hanging over their hearts was answered, the doubt in their minds dispelled.

Alice got home to find her mailbox full, and among the mail was a letter informing her that her application for the teaching position had been accepted. So without any second thought Alice immediately started getting ready to move to Haven. She recalled why this was the only university she had applied to. Her romantic tendency had been acting up again: one half of her wanted to live by the ocean, while the other half wanted to rekindle her dream of being a writer. To do so she thought she should choose to live somewhere that seemed far from the crowd but was actually at a suitable distance for people watching. The week before Alice hastened to Haven, Thom had already gotten in touch with an alpine club and gone on an expedition to Great Snow Mountain. After he got back to Taipei and heard Alice talk about Haven this and Haven that, he decided to move there with her and see how it went.

At first they lived in the faculty housing on campus, but because they weren’t legally married they could only be assigned a cramped single’s residence. Living quarters designed by public agencies in Taiwan are generally uninhabitable. The condensation was so bad in summer that when the air cooled at dusk even the duvet cover would get damp. A flatlander
on a hilly island, Thom went climbing everywhere, and started practicing rock climbing with some local friends. Although Thom had started too late in life to become a true mountaineer, his attitude seemed to be: see how high you can go.

“This place is really humid, not like Scandinavia.”

“Tell me about it. It’s a tropical island. Hey, don’t you need to worry about money?”

“That piece I sent back to Denmark has been published in a travel magazine. For now I’m all right. Do you really think I would’ve come all the way here just to sponge off you?” Thom winked his right eye. Alice had discovered that he did this when he was not being completely honest with her, so she did not ask to have a look at the magazine or inquire further into his financial situation or family background.

Wasn’t it great? You don’t have to know a person’s family to be able to live with him, Alice thought, as Thom enthused about his newfound passion for rock climbing: “Up on a cliff, you can only see part of the sky. You feel your paltry strength through your feet and you thrust your fingers into the clefts in the rock, but you can’t share anything you see or smell with anyone. You ever had that feeling? You can hear your heart beating, you sense your breathing is getting labored, and if you’re really several thousand meters up on a cliff you know you could die at any time. That’s the feeling.” Thom’s eyes were shining now. “Like you might be one moment away from a vision of God.”

Alice looked into his eyes, which had always charmed her so, and still did. But somehow the qualities that had attracted Alice to Thom in the first place were now her biggest worry.

As the days went by, Alice became more and more anxious that this sexy guy might up and leave her at any time. She wanted to let go of him, but a certain expression of his—melancholy, profound yet innocent—was just so appealing. She almost felt that the rot in this humid residence had seeped into her heart. She did not know what to do.

Alice had spent a long time researching a local writer named Kee and become close friends with his much younger wife. Kee’s second wife fell
in love with him during an interview (but that’s a story for another day). She had short hair, spoke slowly and liked to wear sandals. Though not exactly beautiful, she had a certain fresh quality. She was especially fond of the fiction of Paul Auster. Love causes people to make strange judgments, including to try to rise above sex across a thirty-year age gap and the difficulties involved in any marriage. People who thought they were having a platonic affair were shocked when the old fellow divorced his wife to marry her. Friends thought that either Kee would end up leaving behind a young widow and a pile of manuscripts or his second wife would eventually get tired of living in seclusion with the old man and awaken from the literary spell he had cast on her. Nobody guessed that Kee’s young wife would leave the world one step ahead of him.