The Man with the Compound Eyes (9 page)

“Hafay, I don’t mean to be nosy, but do you have family somewhere?” Alice turned her cup around in her hands. “If you don’t feel like talking about it, forget I asked.”

“Yeah, I had parents, and I loved a fellah once. I often thought about having a kid, no matter who the father was.”

Alice was looking out to sea, and Hafay too. They both knew that sometimes it’s better not to look right in someone’s eyes. “Hey, you know no one’s alone in this world. Don’t look at me now: when I was young I weighed all of a hundred pounds, and all male eyes would veer my way whenever I walked on by. But now time’s passed, and I’ve lost everything I had, ’cept I’ve gained a few extra pounds.” Hafay laughed cheerfully. Her laughter was contagious, and Alice even managed a laugh in return, just to be sociable.

“But you’ve got this restaurant.”

Hafay nodded. Yes, figuratively speaking, the Seventh Sisid had given Hafay a skeleton on which to hang her thoughts and memories.

The two of them were drinking
salama
coffee, a fusion of Brazilian beans with a dash of sorghum, and certain fragrant herbs picked wild in the hills. The typical customer didn’t pay too much attention to it at first sip, not expecting to be drawn farther and farther, sip by sip, into the
salama
trap. Customers would smell the aroma left in the cup after the last swallow, a melange of rainforest, dusk and the burnt smell after a forest fire, and from then on would drink nothing but
salama
at the Seventh Sisid, almost without exception. Alice put the cup under her nose and her face opened up, like a window that had always been shut but was now letting in a bit of light.

Hafay was still gazing out to sea when a gecko stopped on the glass. A glimmer appeared in her eyes. As if awakening from a long dream, she started to sing.

As Alice did not understand a word of Pangcah, all she could do was follow the notes and let images appear in her mind: mountains, trees, leaves and wind blowing through a valley. There was a small film of water around the coffee cups on the table.

Hafay did not see Alice for a while after the quake. It was not that Hafay never “saw” Alice, just that they never talked face to face. Looking out the window, Hafay could often tell whether Alice was home or not. There were signs. If the second-floor window was left open, for instance, Hafay knew Alice hadn’t gone out. Early one morning, as the seawater lapped around the house leaving water marks on the walls, Hafay saw Alice lean out the window, jump down onto the first in a series of stools, then onto the second stool and the third, wobbling like a seabird trying to stop on the ocean in a stiff gale. Alice got home at dusk, carrying various bags, large and small, only to find that all the stools had gotten bowled over by the waves and drifted off. Wanting to go over and ask if Alice needed any help, Hafay remembered that Alice never wanted help, so she just watched. Alice dragged a board over, put her bags on it and pushed it slowly toward the window. After leaping through the window, she hoisted the bags in one by one.

Was a house like this still habitable? Hafay wondered.

She was even more curious about the change that seemed to have come over Alice. Several nights before, Alice had almost reminded her of a meadowlark in the depths of despair, but now from a distance she looked somewhat different. Hafay could not say how, but it seemed that Alice was out of the woods, at least for now. People around you can tell whether you
have the will to live, and you can bet that someone who dies without warning has no one around her who cares. At this thought, Hafay felt like talking to someone, but there had not been a single customer in the Seventh Sisid all day. Hafay started to sing a little song to comfort herself, making up the words as she went along. The song was about a young Pangcah maiden named Hafay.

Maybe her voice carried, for soon after she started singing, Hafay saw Alice open the window, hold out a tiny black-and-white kitten, and wave at her.

Ohiyo
. Reading Alice’s lips, Hafay seemed to see her say
Ohiyo
, but she could not be sure.

Dahu waded over and knocked at Alice’s door the morning after the earthquake. He breathed a sigh of relief when Alice stuck her head out of the second-floor window. His daughter Umav waved from where she was standing, up on the road.

“Thank God you’re all right. I came two times already first thing this morning, but I didn’t see you. I noticed your car was gone, so I assumed everything was all right, but couldn’t stop worrying, so I came back to check up on you.”

“Was it serious? The earthquake, I mean.”

“Well, it wasn’t that strong, but it did a lot of damage. Many coastal areas in Tai-tung got flooded, maybe because of land subsidence. They’ve been talking about resettling my home village for a decade now, and this time we might really have to move. The weather bureau says that this isn’t the Big Quake the seismologists have been predicting, but it might be another foreshock, a kind of omen. This time only a couple dozen people were injured, with two or three casualties.”

Alice wanted to grieve for the victims but couldn’t feel anything. Over the last ten years, there had been more and more earthquakes and floods. Sometimes all of a sudden a drizzle so faint nobody would think to bring an umbrella would turn into a downpour. Or three typhoons would hit one after another out of season. Lots of river trekking spots had been
buried in landslides, and access roads outside levees had themselves become watercourses. Fishermen said that what with the new seaside embankments and concrete wave-dispersal tetrapods all around the island, even the coastal currents had become erratic, and the water temperature had changed, too, all year round. But we’ve got to get used to it, right? Alice thought.

“Are you coming up? You can get in through the window. Can Umav climb up?”

“Hah, the door won’t open anymore? Do you want to stay at my place …? I mean, it’d be safer.”

“I’m fine. The house is still here. I’d rather stay.”

“All right then.” Dahu knew Alice too well. She had made up her mind, and nothing he could say would make any difference. “So? Anything I can do?”

Alice thought for a second and said, “Well, if you go into town, could you pick me up some groceries?”

“No problem.”

Right then, the cat started meowing.

“What’s that?”

“A kitten. With a black-and-white coat. I took her in on the morning of the earthquake.”

“Is it all right?”

“She’s fine. Wait a sec.” Alice disappeared, soon reappearing at the window holding a frail kitten with a black-and-white coloring and a black head, as if it’d donned a black mask. She waved at Umav with the kitten’s right forepaw and said, “Look, Umav! Say hi, Ohiyo.”

Umav exclaimed, “Oh, it’s a kitty!” Any child, no matter how shy, turns into a different person when she sees an animal. Umav couldn’t help herself.

“Wow, her eyes are different colors!”

“Yeah, they’re different colors, like different kinds of weather: one side’s fair, the other foul. If you do go into town, Dahu, would you get me a bag of cat food? Umav, you can come play with her anytime.”

“Can do. I’m taking Umav to see the doctor, but we’ll come back for a visit. Umav, say goodbye to Auntie Shih and the kitten.”

Umav waved and asked, “Are we really coming back?”

“Sure.” Back up on the road, holding Umav’s hand, Dahu thought he’d better ask again. “You know an earthquake could strike any time, and come summer there’ll be typhoons. This house isn’t safe anymore. You have to think about moving to our village.”

Alice assumed the water would recede after a while, but it didn’t. That afternoon, Dahu brought over various canned foods, and Umav played happily with Ohiyo for the longest time. Now it was Dahu and Alice who couldn’t think of anything to say, and didn’t know what to do. They just looked quietly on at the kitten and the girl.

“Auntie Shih, do different colored eyes see the world the same way?”

Alice shrugged. The question was beyond her. “Is there anyone who sees exactly the same thing out of either eye?”

Umav looked to be giving this question serious thought.

Over the next few days, Alice could only go out to get water when the tide was out, wearing her rubber boots. To get out at high tide as well, she arranged a row of stools from tall to short, so when she wanted to go out she could lean out the window and step onto the first stool, then hop onto the second, then the third, and so on. On a windless day, Alice’s reflection must have seemed like a seabird flying past to underwater creatures. The problem was that the waves would bowl the stools over, and she would have to arrange them all over again when she got back. One day she discovered that the stools were not falling over anymore, because someone had put iron bases on and spiked them to rocks on the seabed. Dahu must have come and done it while she was out.

Actually, Thom had noticed several years before that the sea was getting closer and closer. When the house was being built, he measured and the closest the high water line came was 28.75 meters. A year later the sea seemed to have eroded a bit of the shoreline. Thom started measuring every month. He said, “The sea’ll be here sooner or later, but at this rate we’ll be long dead and gone by the time it floods the house.”

The water table along the shore had gotten salted up, rendering it undrinkable, so folks had to buy bottled water now. Several years before the government had offered DOW (deep ocean water) subsidies, which
had to be pumped up through huge pipes and then desalinated. Some residents installed not inexpensive minidesalinators in their own houses. Unable to abide state support for corporations that exploited nature without ever giving anything back, Alice stubbornly refused to have anything to do with DOW. For one thing, these were the same corporations that had made a fortune on concrete and quarrying investments. For another, from the start they canvassed a bunch of experts to endorse DOW by declaring it would have zero impact on coastal ecology, but gradually the muckrakers started exposing problems. Some experts suspected that DOW extraction had disturbed the deep ocean water profile, leading to subtle changes in salt concentration, convection and even the sand in the seabed. And fishermen thought the fish had left for the same reason. But nobody dared say for certain what the consequences would be, of course, because the complex interdependency of any ecological system is beyond human imagining.

Thom and Toto had been gone a long time, but until the earthquake Alice kept up the family custom of going to draw water from the creek every once in a while. They had discovered this creek when Alice’s colleague Ming had taken them to photograph Moltrechti’s tree frogs at night. Though it wasn’t too far from the newly built Seaview Hotel, the place was off the beaten track.

While scrambling down into a ravine to get a shot, Ming said, “Whoever designed this hotel had dreadful taste, don’t you think? European buildings aren’t like this, are they, Thom? I sometimes think it’s really a shame that Taiwanese children vacation in tasteless holiday resorts like this. They’ll turn into tasteless adolescents and then adults. There are such interesting creatures right next door but nobody notices.”

“You’re too much of a pessimist,” Alice said.

“I’m not a pessimist, I’m a misanthrope.”

“Just as long as you’re aware of it.”

“But I completely agree with you on the terrible taste of the hotel,” Thom said.

So what if it was in poor taste? Didn’t the customers keep coming all the same? Alice thought Ming was acting like someone with an anxiety disorder. He was so negative about everything, and writing made him even
more uptight. It had been a few years since his last novel, and he had writer’s block. She knew he’d gotten stuck, that he paid too much attention to the opinions of a handful of readers who criticized the fictional worlds he’d created. And he got overly worked up about the current literary scene. To Alice the only thing to do was wait. Good novelists were like escape artists, able to get themselves out of any bind, while a bad writer would get so stuck underwater that no one could save him.

The next day, Thom and Alice camped out in the clearing by the creek. Without Ming there it was a lot quieter. They drank tea made with water from the creek and looked up at the stars that studded the night sky, thrilling to the sight. The dust storms from China were getting more and more frequent the past couple of years, and even the relatively clear skies above eastern Taiwan were now filled with haze. They hadn’t seen such a clear starry night sky here in a long time. It was so touching, as if the universe were still watching over the planet, benignly and tolerantly.

“This is the best tea I’ve ever had in my whole life,” Thom said.

“So I’ll be coming here a lot to get creekwater for tea?”

“It’s too far.”

“Is not.”

“Is too.”

“Is not.” Thom smiled and let the matter drop. Alice smiled too. Later, every so often, Thom would come here himself and bring back water from the creek.

Actually, there’s nowhere in all the world that’s truly far, or near. Alice realized there was a contradiction in her sudden epiphany.