The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  “This cliff wasn’t here originally. It was only because of an earthquake that the mountain allowed the cliff to appear.” The man sees that the boy is wavering. “When I was ten years old, your grandfather took me free diving. You know, in the ocean, without a scuba tank, and he told me, only if you go to places nobody’s ever been can you see the colors nobody’s ever seen.” The boy nods, though he does not completely understand what this means.

  The man has not left the island this whole year. When he’s found himself at a loose end he has taken the boy to the practice climbing wall. He’s seen what a quick study the boy is indoors, and everyone who’s seen him outdoors has been amazed. It’s like the kid was born with a rock climbing certification. Every time someone praises the boy the man is thrilled, as if he himself has been praised, and maybe this is why many people who know the man feel he is an oversized kid himself. The man surveys the cliff, looks for a new route. This is his custom, never to climb the same wall in the same way twice. Even when he brings his son who has just turned ten along with him.

  The boy starts to get out his equipment, arranging his things one by one. He puts on his climbing shoes, safety rope and helmet. The man traces out the route in his mind, takes a deep breath and finds the first toehold.

  “I lead and you belay, all right? Watch where I climb. I’ll keep my movements small, and choose rocks you’re able to reach. Got it?”

  The boy nods and asks, “Will the long-armed scarab be able to climb up, too?”

  Surprised by the question the boy had sprung upon him, the man thinks it over and says, “Of course.”

  While the boy waits below, the man ascends slowly, finding the route in the pattern of the rock. He uses rock wedges to make anchors, clips a quickdraw onto each anchor, and hangs the lead rope into the quickdraw as a belay, all the while looking down to check up on the boy, who is craning his neck, trying to trace the route the man is taking. Then the boy starts climbing. Faintly feeling the boy’s weight on the rope, the man has a wonderful sense of well-being.

  “No problem, you can do it,” the man says quietly, as if he’s afraid to startle the cliff itself. The boy sometimes looks up at the vertical path shining above him, and at other times he looks at the cliff face all around him. He finds himself in an alien realm. He is on the verge of tears, though not because he is afraid. No, this seems like a completely new kind of crying the boy has never experienced before.

  They finally make it to the top as dusk approaches. The man and the boy yawp euphorically into the valley. Though the boy doesn’t usually speak, his call is loud and clear. Looking down from here, they can see the forest canopy, a green sea gently swaying. The sound reaches the top of the trees and startles a few birds, which dart up and dive back down into the sea.

  They excitedly get the stove ready to brew tea and cook a vacuum-pack meal. Their secret trip is now half done. Actually, the point of the trip is not to climb the mountain. For the man, it is purely so that his ten-year-old son can experience the cliff. It’s also a chance for a father and son, who’ve been drifting apart, to renew their relationship.

  After the picnic, the man explains the signs in the stars, adding, “You can see a million times more stars up here than you can down on the plains. Maybe you’re thinking, But aren’t the stars there, no matter what? Sure they are, it’s just a question of visibility. Visibility means how far you can see. You remember when we went to a wetland one time to see migratory birds? The sky was foggy, because there were fine particles floating in the air. I remember your mother saying that gazing at the stars these days is like wearing a pair of fogged-up glasses.”

  Only the man speaks. The boy never replies, as if he simply does not exist. The man has regretted his decision to come to the island, but now he’s past the point of no return. He once dreamed about being an explorer. In his younger days, he cycled around Africa, piloted a sailboat across the Atlantic, ran an ultramarathon across the Sahara, and even took part in an interesting sleep experiment, spending fully half a year thirty meters underground. He followed his wife—his girlfriend at the time—here to Taiwan. At first everything was great: she accepted his sudden disappearances, which lasted from two weeks to a month. But after she became pregnant everything changed. The man remembers a time when he was totally willing to stay for the sake of the child, to build a home to raise his son in. And he had built it. Things were perfect then: the child was on the way, they were living in a unique house, and his wife was tender and affectionate again. Then he discovered that he still felt a longing to leave home.

  Occasionally, when the man felt so physically restless he couldn’t stand it anymore, he would leave the house and go climbing or leave the island on some adventure with his friends. His wife would say it was okay but would give him the silent treatment when he returned, like he was a stranger. Later on he would just come and go without saying anything. Sometimes he didn’t know whether to stay or go. Maybe that’s why he turned to the consolations of sex. With his outstanding appearance, he has had no trouble finding Taiwanese girls willing to go to bed with him. A couple of times he even slept with his wife’s students. Though he regretted it after, sex has come to dominate his life, brutally and overpoweringly, a bit like a disgusting piece of gum sticking to the bottom of his shoe.

  “But I feel like the stars I see up here are as real as the ones I saw as a boy. When I’m climbing it’s like I’m a kid again. Maybe that’s part of why I enjoy it so much.” The man kept talking and talking, more like he was talking to himself than to the boy. He sighed and said, “Sometimes things haven’t gone away, it’s just that we just can’t see them.”

  The night sky clouds over and the man takes a flashlight and goes looking with the boy for beetles in the grove by the edge of the cliff. They have not brought much equipment, so he improvises an insect lure by propping up another flashlight on the ground and shining it onto a white T-shirt. It isn’t that effective, attracting only a few moths, but one of them is an erebus, a kind of butterfly with huge eye spots on its wings. The boy turns on the new electronic field guide he has brought along with him to show the man. The two of them are completely content.

  “Tomorrow we’ll go down the cliff and spend the night in the forest. I’ve asked some insect experts, and we should be able to find long-armed scarabs in the forest. Haven’t you already found quite a few stag beetles? We can spend the day there, then hike down. I’ll take you down another side of the mountain, a shortcut through the valley. It’s fantastic, an awesome route. The forecast said there’d only be four days of sunny weather. Then it’s supposed to start raining, and rain isn’t good. We’ve got to get home before it rains.”

  The boy nods. The fact that he seldom speaks makes him appear older than his actual age. The boy picks up the flashlight and goes to look around the camp. First he chooses trees with the light, then focuses on a few of them and searches up and down. He finds five or six different kinds of stag beetles. He knows which species of stag beetle likes what kind of tree. He catches one of each and goes back to the tent, to make a detailed record of the species, the size and the time and place of discovery in his notebook. He immediately puts them in insect jars.

  He goes to sleep shortly after he gets back into the tent. He dreams he is walking alone down a fern-lined forest path, toward a faint light way up ahead. He keeps going until he comes to a stream. There is a mob of Formosan sambar deer crossing the stream, their legs so delicate that even the moonlight would weigh them down. Yet they leap so nimbly they seem to play the stream like a piano. He chases them but the deer disappear, as if they’ve turned into a school of fish. On the other side of the stream, the boy faces a wood, but then he feels something behind him. He smells something moist, something very, very near.

  Having gotten this far in the dream, the boy starts to wake up. He opens his eyes and discovers it’s raining, and that the man isn’t by his side. He guesses the man has gone out to do something. He waits with his eyes wide open.
The rain patters on the flysheet, and droplets condense on the inside wall of the tent, indicating that it is much colder outside than in.

  Two fewer days of sunny weather, the boy thinks.

  The man still hasn’t returned the following day. His shoes are gone, and so is some equipment. The boy puts on his raincoat and looks in vain for signs around the camp. The sullen rain clouds in the distance envelop the entire mountain in gloom, and the smells of rain and grass mingle. The rain will fall harder.

  The boy thinks he should probably turn on the transmitter. But on the second day of the trip the man has asked him to turn it off, saying they couldn’t be tracked because they were going to make a secret trip to the big cliff. Now that he’s gone, the only way people will come rescue Dad or me is if I turn on the transmitter, thought the boy. But then he thought, Dad can free dive to a depth of two hundred meters and single-hand a sailboat across the Atlantic, and nothing could happen to a dad like that. If Dad comes back I’ll get in big trouble.

  This thought calms him down. He retreats back into the forward vestibule of the tent and starts fixing a meal. None too skilfully, he lights the camp stove, gets the food out of the backpack and chooses oatmeal. Less than twenty minutes later, he has everything ready. There is still four days’ worth of food, and he can just drink rainwater when the water they’ve brought runs out, and he also knows where the water purification tablets are. No problem. The only thing he has to face is silence. Exactly, just silence. All by himself. The hardest part is being alone. Everything will be all right just as long as he doesn’t get scared.

  He spends the next day waiting, and by dusk the rain is falling harder and harder. Visibility is now almost nil. He feels colder and colder, because lots of things are soaked. He thinks about turning on the transmitter again, then reflects, If Dad still hasn’t come back tomorrow I can turn on the transmitter then. What difference will half a day make? That evening the boy lies in the tent listening to his heartbeat, but actually his mind is far away. He is dreaming again, each new dream a sequel to the last.

  The boy turns his head to look, and it turns out one of the sambar deer is behind him now, sniffing at him. He turns all the way around and finds himself facing the wet nose of the biggest deer. He retreats a few steps, and the deer turns and runs off, its tail flashing like a firefly. Running after it, the boy discovers he is running along a cliff, and the deer has turned into a goat. The goat runs into a forest that looks a lot like the one they went through on the way up to the cliff. At the end of the forest the goat stops and stands its ground. He now sees there is a mob of deer there, and also a tribe of goats. The boy cannot tell which deer and what goat he was just chasing.

  The trees, deer and goats are all looking at the boy.

  After a while the boy realizes there is a man standing behind the deer and the goats, lightly stroking one of the ears of one of the goats. The ear is pointy and furry, like it’s heard many secrets.

  “Where’s my dad?” the boy asks.

  That man motions with his chin. The boy looks. He discovers the mountains are now far away, and he is standing at the edge of that huge cliff, one step away from oblivion. The great waves of the green sea below billow out before him boundlessly.

  24. The Coastal Highway

  The first thing Sara thought of when she smelled that reeking beach was Professor Stewart’s breath. He’d taught her English Colonial History; it was a smell of visceral decay. Never before had she seen such an exhausted, defenseless, vulnerable sea. Sara could not think of a better word for it than “exhausted.”

  In fact, she’d had the same feeling riding along in the car down the new highway, which had only been opened a few years before. Studying the map, she discovered that the old road had gone along the coast with the Pacific Ocean on one side and the mountains on the other, while the new road went straight through the most beautiful mountains on the island. They passed through quite a few tunnels that made Detlef marvel, What a technical achievement!

  Detlef made a point of taking it slow. Jung-hsiang had lent them this Mitsubishi SUV, which gave them mobility. Once in a while, when the road curved back along the coast, the Pacific flashed in the distance, but it was not the deep blue sea they had looked forward to. With the trash floating on the water, the angle of the light reflecting off the surface kept changing, even causing a few resplendent rainbows to form. But when they got a chance to take a closer look they saw the seawater was a heavy, leaden color, not a true blue. And every once in a while, they could see the railway and the train. At dinner the night before, Jung-hsiang had mentioned that along many sections the track foundation had been scoured away, and that the authorities were looking into backing away toward the mountains again. In some places they would just have to dig. Jung-hsiang wanted Detlef’s professional opinion on whether they could get through this range, and had asked him to attend to the terrain along the way.

  “I’m afraid the main issue right now is the necessity of the project, not the technical challenge. It’s about what kind of island you want,” Detlef had replied.

  Detlef and Sara stopped at Chung-teh to see the famous Clearwater Cliffs. The sea was battering the base of the soaring bluffs with various kinds of debris. Hordes of tourists were issuing continual exclamations of amazement as they admired the magnificent view from inside their cars. Sara was more than a little shaken by the scene. The cliff itself was glorious, but she couldn’t get over how these tourists turned a blind eye to the sorry state the coast was in, regarding it as a mere spectacle. She turned on her paper-thin tablet and looked up this stretch of coastline on Wikipedia.

  She had been on the island for two days, and only had brief impressions of the place, but she’d already noticed that the islanders were inured to breathing this air and were now trying to get used to the sight of this sea. The pristine Pacific Ocean as she had seen it in so many images had now vanished. Sara was reminded of a documentary series called The World’s Oceans her father had played for her when she was in elementary school.

  “Look, this is our Pacific. Isn’t it sublime?” At the time Sara thought that the only sea of the Norwegian people was the Norwegian Sea, given by the grace of God. Her geography teacher had told them that due to the balmy North Atlantic Current, the Norwegian Sea was the only ocean in the Arctic that was navigable year round. “Our Norwegian Sea,” he said. Sara still remembered the look in his eyes. But for her father, every sea was “our sea:” “our Indian Ocean,” “our Atlantic,” “our Pacific.”

  Sara’s father had the same name as the first explorer to reach the South Pole. Many assumed he had changed his name because he loved adventure, but when he introduced himself he always stressed that it was the other way around, that he came to love the wandering life on account of his name. Between 1903 and 1906 the great Roald Amundsen had become the first explorer to sail through the Northwest Passage. He located the magnetic north pole along the way. But never in his wildest dreams could Amundsen have imagined that, after 2010, as a result of global warming, the land of ice and snow would gradually shrink and the Northwest Passage would be navigable year round, with no need to worry about which month was the melting season. It would have been like discovering Amazonia only to watch the rainforest shrink. Sara’s father often felt that it was for the best that Amundsen the explorer was already dead, that he did not have to witness all this.

  Sara’s father had been an architect, but out of love for the sea he had abandoned his first career in the prime of life to become a fisherman. Because he was too often away, her mother had finally hardened her heart and left Sara at a friend’s house in the harbor. Sara could not remember much about her, just like it’s sometimes hard to remember when you made up your mind to do something. After the divorce, Amundsen kept taking his boat out into the fishing grounds every year to chase the shoals of smew, gadus, blue cod and herring, sometimes even all the way to the western edge of the North Atlantic. He’d heard that fishermen in search of cod had discove
red the New World earlier than Columbus, but had kept it a secret in order to guard their fishing ground.

  Most of Amundsen’s companions did not see how sad he was after his wife’s sudden departure, only noticed that he started bringing Sara on board with him more often. Little Sara’s childhood was spent at sea. Maybe this was one of the main reasons why she would go on to have the talent and the confidence to become a marine ecologist many years later.

  Amundsen insisted on hunting one whale a year, but only one. He usually only selected such titanic adversaries as fin whales or sperm whales to uphold his modest pride and dignity as a Norwegian fisherman. Fin whales are rorquals, and most people would assume that rørhval, the Norwegian word for rorqual, meant “groove whale,” rør meaning “groove” and hval meaning “whale.” This made sense, because the rorquals have throat grooves. But Amundsen often told people he thought this was wrong. He read rør as cognate with rød, meaning “red,” because when a rorqual’s throat grooves expand they fill with blood and appear red. For him, the true meaning of rørhval was a great red-bellied whale in the deep blue sea. And Amundsen found the idea of hunting such a whale irresistible.

  The international community had put quite a lot of pressure on Norway’s whalers, but Amundsen remained his old self. He would often tell people, “I hunt with a traditional harpoon, not with a whale gun or a bomb lance. It’s like a struggle for survival. What’s wrong with that? Not to mention that I only hunt one a year!” Amundsen practiced the art invented more than a thousand years ago by the Basques and improved by the Norwegians. When the lookout up in the crow’s nest spotted a whale, the harpooners would row out in smaller boats, surround it and launch their harpoons into its back. A rope on each harpoon was attached to a big hollowed-out gourd, which increased drag and caused the fleeing whale to exhaust itself more quickly. When the whale started spouting blood, the harpooners would aim at its weak spot and end the life of a great spirit.