The Man with the Compound Eyes (7 page)

Kee’s wife was swept away by a huge wave that appeared out of nowhere one day when they were at the beach for a walk. Reportedly, there had been a fairly powerful deep sea earthquake the previous day, resulting in a localized tidal wave. Kee was in the temporary public washroom put up by the local tourist bureau when the water sloshed in and flooded the place up to knee level. He looked out the window only to see his young wife on the distant strand get tripped up by the sudden wave and taken silently away.

Because there were no eyewitnesses, the police closed the case after an investigation of nearly two weeks, concluding it was an accident. They never expected that Kee would commit suicide the next day, and in a manner that was at once nothing special and highly unusual. He had sealed the doors and windows and started burning his manuscripts and letters. He succumbed due to inhalation of the smoke and fumes of his own writing.

Kee’s only son Wenyang was indignant when his father left his mother for a much younger woman. They had a falling-out, and Wenyang took his mother to Taipei to run a sporting goods business. Wenyang and Alice had a discussion after his father’s death, and he decided to sell off the estate.

“I don’t want anything, not the house, not the land. Professor Shih, all decisions concerning the publication of the collected works are at your discretion. Just as long as the royalties and the proceeds of the sale of the house are transferred to my mother.” He left the writer’s ex-wife’s account
with Alice. Actually disposing of Kee’s library would be the easy part. She just had to convince the university to assign an office for it. A real estate agent could sell the house in Haven, and Alice herself had fallen in love with the wooded shoreline lot where Kee occasionally went but on which he had only built a tiny thatched cottage. She transferred all the money in her “faculty rate” bank account to Kee’s ex-wife.

That is how Alice got the chance to read the diary entry Kee had made the day before he committed suicide. In the entry, he described the appearance of the wave: “At first sight it wasn’t just a wave crashing in so much as the sea itself surging up, silently and suddenly. Before I got a good look at it, it had returned whence it came. It did not make any sound. It merely confiscated a few things. That’s all it did.”

Thom was away in Chamonix on an international winter expedition to Mont Blanc the whole time. He suddenly turned up in the kitchen of their residence one morning several weeks later and started making breakfast.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Bacon omelette with onions?”

“Sure.” Alice was used to reunions like this. She pretended she didn’t mind, enraged at herself for being so weak. Thom told her about his adventure while they were eating. This time he had almost gone snow blind. (She suspected that he had taken off his snow goggles on purpose to pay homage to Michel-Gabriel Paccard, who became the first man to climb Mont Blanc in 1786. Thom was always replicating the “near-death experiences” of adventurers like Paccard). Alice started to segue toward the topic of home architecture.

“So when are you going to take me to Chamonix?”

“Anytime you want.”

“Are the houses nice?”

“Only you are fit to live in the houses I saw there.”

“Do you still remember the Summer House?” She cut to the chase.

“Sure. A charming little cabin.” He lightly kissed the ketchup away from the edge of her mouth.

“I want to build a house like that.”

“You do?”

“I’ve bought some land.”

“You’ve bought some land? You mean you’ve bought a piece of land to build a house on?”

The land was quite close to the ocean, by a coastal copse. The shoreline here was rocky for the most part, with only a thin layer of topsoil. Although it was registered as farmland, you would not be able to grow much. Alice read through Kee’s manuscripts, still no wiser as to why he had bought this property in the first place. Standing at the edge of the lot, Thom started letting his steps guide him toward the sea. Then he tore off his clothes and jumped in naked. It was like he had been separated from a lover for too long and needed to give her a big hug and some sweet loving to celebrate the reunion. Standing mutely in the middle of the lot, Alice watched his curly sandy locks bob up and down in the water, like a keepsake she might lose at any time. He came back up on shore, gave her a big kiss, and said: “Let’s build a house like the Summer House.”

Thom borrowed a stack of architecture books from the library and started doing research. He almost never went climbing. Alice had total faith in him. Though he was no genius he had drive, and could finish anything he started if he was willing to put his heart into it. But could she really keep a man like this?

Thom said, “The exterior can be like the Summer House, but the whole concept has to be different. I want to build a house that suits these surroundings.” He rotated the house slightly. The side of Asplund’s Summer House that had faced a Scandinavian fjord now faced the Pacific Ocean, but at a thirty-degree angle in order to deflect the stiff ocean breeze. Also, sunlight reflecting directly off the water might bother people instead of creating the kind of comfortable atmosphere that would make them want to take their time getting out of bed in the morning, and a thirty-degree turn would illuminate every corner of the house, affording ample but not glaring light. Thom raised the ceiling in the attic of the right-hand cabin by a meter so that the window would have a full view of the Pacific.

Listening to Thom’s explanation, Alice started imagining herself writing at the window. She said she wanted to call it the Sea Window. Thom also explained the rationale for keeping the little cross passages between the cabins in Asplund’s original design: each would be granted a certain semidetached independence while maintaining a friendly rapport. “You’ll live in the right-hand cabin. The one on the left will be mine. I’ve moved it back slightly so I’ll have a view of the sea, too.” That sense of distance appealed to her.

For the main cabin, Thom put various plants inside and out, so when you looked in from the outside you’d see a charming tropical living room. Rather sneakily, Thom went and stayed in all the B&Bs up and down the coast. With total self-confidence, he reported back to Alice, “I think many people who build houses don’t understand that people ‘live’ in their houses. Particularly in Taiwan, where you have people building places just to serve as B&Bs, because most guests will only ‘stay for a night.’ A house you really live in for ten or twenty years is different. I want to build a home we can live in for a long, long time.” This last declaration made Alice fall madly in love with him all over again.

Given the warm climate in eastern Taiwan, there was no reason to keep the famous fireplaces in the original Asplund design. Thom found the fake fireplaces in many B&Bs in Taiwan silly and pretentious. But under Alice’s guidance he became quite enamored with Taiwan’s once ubiquitous rural “hearth culture,” and added a traditional stove room to the modern kitchen.

“We’ll really be able to use it. Only a house in which you can make authentic local cuisine is a true home.”

Thom spent another full year on the electrical system. He compared many different brands of solar panel. He adjusted the angles and covered the tops of the sloping eaves with panels, creating a solar awning for each of the three porches, under which a person could cool off, meditate or take a nap. He also went online, ordered a small desalination machine from a German firm and designed a salt-and-fresh dual-plumbing system. He planted salt-tolerant local plants like the pongam oil tree and the white-bloom mangrove, spacing them out outside the line of sight of the windows.
He even calculated the growth rates so the shade of the mature trees would not fall on the solar panels fifty years hence.

A year and a half later, Thom had finished the graphic design, the 3D mock-up, and the blueprints for the electrical and plumbing systems. Alice had been watching and listening to him put the little house together, her heart faintly trembling the whole time. She had a sense of reckless bliss, a bit like turning on the tap and watching water come pouring out.

Before construction began, Alice pledged all her assets to secure a big loan from the bank. Building the house allowed her to extricate herself from her stuffy, unimaginative academic life and let her orient herself toward a specific goal. Then the day they started digging the foundation, Alice went to the hospital because she felt nauseous. The doctor recommended that she take a pregnancy test.

Alice would later say that Toto and the Sea House were the same age, which was basically true. Thom’s attitude toward Toto’s impending arrival was about the same as any father’s. He was thrilled. He added a place for Toto in both the left-hand and right-hand cabins, so both mum and dad would have time alone with him.

Toto was conceived before building began, and born before construction was complete. He was three months old when Alice finished planting the garden. She put Toto under the eaves and started planting herbs around the house for butterflies to eat. She had an acquaintance named Ming, a colleague at the university, who had written some literary essays about butterflies. Alice asked him to list species that would be appropriate for a coastal property and teach her how to plant them.

Thom loosened up the dirt road that had been packed hard by the bulldozer, and planted a windbreak on both sides to create a tree-lined path down to the shore.

But there was a series of strong typhoons the year the house was finished, and the foundation of the coastal highway, which had already been rebuilt ten meters inland from the old road, started to scour. Not long thereafter a whole stretch of road collapsed unexpectedly, and the Bureau of Public Works had no choice but to retreat another thirty meters and build a new
“coastal” highway at a slightly higher elevation, drilling through a few mountainsides to do it. In the aftermath of the Great Flood that struck Taiwan on 8 August 2009, whether or how much of the island would be underwater ten years hence became a hot-button issue. But to many folks, this was still “outside the realm of possibility.” Alice thought that the lives the flood had taken would only give the survivors a fool’s confidence that there was no disaster people could not handle. Some folks shrugged it off by anthropomorphizing the disaster and running off at the mouth about the “cruelty” and “inhumanity” of nature.

After hearing Alice’s thoughts on the matter, Thom would occasionally promote his own Danish viewpoint, that, “Actually, nature isn’t cruel at all. At least, it isn’t especially cruel to human beings. Nature doesn’t fight back, either, because nothing without conscious intent can ‘fight back.’ Nature is just doing what it should, that’s all. If the sea will rise then let it rise. When the time comes we’ll move house and all will be well. If we don’t move in time the worst that’ll happen is that the sea will serve for our watery tomb, and we will become fish food. Not so bad if you think of it that way, is it?”

“Not so bad?”

At first Alice found it hard to understand what exactly Thom was saying. After all, she had invested everything she had in this property, and she had even gone into debt. But gradually she seemed to understand. In the end she just had to get on with her life, fleeing when it was time to flee, fighting when it was time to fight, and dying like a meadowlark when it was her time.

For the past year the sea had been like a random memory. In no time it had arrived on her doorstep, and since Christmas last year, she’d been forced to give up on getting in through the front door at high tide. Twice a day, Alice was put under temporary house arrest before being released a couple of hours later. At high tide, the sea would skirt the drainage ditch, encircling the house. When it receded it would leave various things behind at the back door: dead porcupine fish, driftwood in fantastic shapes, part of the hull of a ship, whalebones, ripped clothing, et cetera. The next day
at low tide Alice would open the door and have to step over various dead things before she could get out of the house.

The local government had informed Alice that she was living in a dangerous building and should vacate and move somewhere else. But Alice was adamant that, “If the house collapses due to flooding I’ll take responsibility. Please don’t encroach upon my freedom: I’ve got a legal right to live here.” A tabloid magazine even published a story about a lady professor living a cloistered life in a solar house on the beach. The only thing that story had going for it was that it included some of Thom’s architectural ingenuity, including those swiveling solar panels that followed the sun across the sky.

Dahu, Thom and Alice’s Bunun friend, who was originally from Tai-tung in southern Taiwan, and Hafay, the Pangcah owner of a local bar, tried several times to get Alice to consider moving, but eventually they gave up.

“Your head really is as hard as a boar tooth,” Dahu said.

“You said it. That’s the way I am.” Alice sat in her house and looked out at the misty sea, as if she was sitting inside the body of some living organism. This little house was so nice. In all her life, she had never had such a wonderful time as in the past few years. It had been so wonderful that it seemed like a perfectly smooth glass globe, or like a holly plant without a single brown leaf. It was all a bit too perfect, a little too good to be true.

In the end she never wrote at the Sea Window. She would just sit there quietly. The sea had no memory, but you could still say that it remembered things: the waves and the stones all bore the traces of time. Sometimes she despised it for all the memories and the pain it brought her. Sometimes, out of futility, she believed in it and depended on it, like a fish facing a baitless hook, knowing full well it’s going to hurt but going after it anyway.

Alice lay there quietly, sensing the moonlight on her eyelids and the tide rolling in on her eardrums, like glass shattering somewhere far away. Outside the raindrops were falling big as stars, cloaking the earth in a humid, restless and surging air.

Even though the weather bureau had predicted the possibility of a big quake within the year, many people had a sense of despair, a feeling that
“it’s finally here,” when an earthquake struck this evening. During the quake every inch of the house was moaning and groaning, but Alice was ready to let it bury everything and have done. She had no urge to flee at first. Only later when the quake intensified did she feel an instinctive desire to find shelter. Remembering her suicide plan, she couldn’t help a grim smile. The house Thom had designed and built was stronger than she had imagined: aside from a slight skew in the beams, it was fine, just refusing to collapse. At high tide the next morning, the water had not only surrounded the house but also reached almost all the way up to the highway. Looking down from the road, the house appeared to be floating on the sea.