The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  All this time, Alice had been trying to get Dahu to tell her where he’d found Thom’s body, but Dahu refused. Perhaps he had some sort of understanding with the police, because they wouldn’t say much, either, only the name of the mountain. They were evasive, claiming that the only person who knew the precise location was the one who discovered the body.

  “It wasn’t us who carried him down,” said a fat cop who was handling the case.

  When Thom and Toto first went missing Alice desperately wanted the rescue team to take her up. That was how she found out which route Thom had registered. But obviously Dahu had found the body along a different route, and though the two mountains were connected, Thom still didn’t have the permit to climb that other mountain. So why did he die there?

  Then, one day, when Alice was sitting in the hut writing, she suddenly remembered the ceiling in Toto’s room.

  Now she was looking up at the map on that very ceiling. At first she was a bit lost, but having studied a lot of maps lately she quickly found the route. As she had suspected, Thom, maybe together with Toto, had conspired an alternate route without her knowing. They didn’t follow the route they’d registered at the backcountry office, the route along which the rescue team had naively searched. Actually, they took the route on the ceiling. Alice kept looking at the map, until she seemed to see a gate, a path, the sky, rocks, the source of a tiny spring, and rain.

  Seawater. A mountain path.

  The seawater was thick like sleep, and when Alice stepped out of it onto the shore she felt like a lonely whale that had snuck on shore. Her heart was broken like glass and sealed like a dead clam.

  The next evening, Alice used a 3D projector to shine a map of the earth onto a piece of white paper stuck on the outside wall of the hunting hut. She told Atile’i, “This is called a ‘map.’ The place we live, Taiwan, or any place, can be drawn on a map like this, and you can use a map to tell other people how to get somewhere. So when you’re somewhere unfamiliar you can still find the way.” Alice saw confusion in Atile’i’s eyes and added, “If you know how to read a map.”

  Alice used a laser pointer to indicate the position of Taiwan on the map and said, “This’s the island we’re on now. Can you point to the island where you come from? Wayo Wayo?” Atile’i smiled sadly.

  “No, the earth, here.” Atile’i pointed at the ground, grasped a clump of dirt, and said, “Not, there.”

  “Atile’i, you don’t understand. The map is this earth of ours shrunk down and drawn on a piece of paper. See, the whole world has been shrunk down and shone onto this piece of paper.” Alice felt there was something wrong with her explanation, but that was no big deal as Atile’i could not fully understand what she was saying in any case.

  “The sea can also become a map?”

  “I guess so. There are nautical maps.” Alice pointed at a spot in the South Pacific and said, “I guess that Wayo Wayo is somewhere around here.”

  Alice shone the next map, this one a large-scale map of Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, showing contour lines and tortuous climbing routes. On it was a red route, which she had drawn from memory. It was the route on the ceiling, the path through the mountains that Thom and Toto had actually taken.

  “We are here, and I want to go here. Do you understand? I want to go here.” Alice kept tracing the route with the laser pointer until Atile’i nodded to show he understood.

  “Are you,” Alice pointed at Atile’i, “willing to go there with me? Come with me.”

  “Is it far?”

  “It’s not close, I don’t think.” Suddenly a giant silkworm moth flew over and stopped on the map, like a mark, or like a symbol, like an interjection. It opened the eyes on its wings and stared at her.

  “Her?” Atile’i pointed at Ohiyo.

  “Ohiyo will wait for me to come back, won’t you, Ohiyo? You’ll be here, waiting for us to return, right around here? Or you want to go stay with Dahu?” Ohiyo purred sweetly several times, to voice her protest. Obviously she wanted to be free to hang out in the mountains all by herself.

  Alice had spent quite some time at the library going through all the climbing records for this route. She bought all the gear she thought she’d need, and got a pack for Atile’i and another tent. It wasn’t like the one Atile’i had been sleeping in; it was a new design, superlight and ultradry. With its streamlined shape and airflow system, an invisible air current would form over the tent, reducing the impact of rain on the roof and keeping the inside dry. She wanted Atile’i to go with her partly because she didn’t know who to send him to, but also because she knew she would have to rely on this kid to survive in the mountains. She selfishly assumed that since he’d evaded all the deathtraps on the ocean, he could probably help her get to the place marked in red on the map.

  The red dot marked a lofty precipice. The folks at the professional alpine association said it was a route few people would take, because the only interesting thing on it was a huge cliff that appeared after the big quake. Newly formed, it was none too stable and might be dangerous. It wasn’t like this was a traverse you’d have to take through the area; there wasn’t even a trig point on the summit.

  “Ma’am, if you’re not going rock climbing, you’d have no reason to go there,” a coach at the climbing club said.

  Alice chose a day in the midst of about the only sunny spell they would likely enjoy in the next three months to set out. The weather forecast was for five or six days of fair skies, if they were lucky.

  Alice set out toward the trail with Atile’i in tow. She deliberately took a detour that was not drawn on the map. She’d heard it would allow them to bypass the backcountry checkpoint. It went by an aboriginal village and a power plant along the left-hand side of the riverbed. It was a Sakizaya community that had been in the news quite often in the past few years. The Sakizaya villagers had been working on an eco-cultural tourism project, and everything was on the right track until a series of landslides forced them to suspend operations. But solo climbers still preferred this route up the river valley, which led into the Central Mountain Range.

  The next day they were already deep in the mountains. The path traversed gorges and sheer drops, typically precipitous terrain for the island’s canyon-cut eastern flank. Though Atile’i had been living with Alice all that time in the hunting hut, this was the first time he had really witnessed the mountains in this way. Several times, while observing the changing alpine mistscapes, he knelt down and placed his head on the ground and made the special Wayo Wayoan hand gesture that symbolized the adoration of the earth.

  The pair kept walking at dawn of the third day when clouds blew in and it started raining in the shadow of the mountain. Soon the rain obscured the lie of the mountain, giving them the momentary impression they were on a modest suburban hill. As the sun’s rays grew stronger in the afternoon, the peaks in the distance became hazily visible again, until the light penetrated the clouds and revealed the ridges between the peaks. Yet at lower altitudes fog and mist still concealed the valley, giving the set of summits in the distance the guise of an island floating in an ethereal sea of clouds. At the sight of this vista, Atile’i suddenly fell in love with the island, just like he had always loved Wayo Wayo.

  “Mountains?” he asked, pointing in the distance.

  “Yes.”

  “So many?”

  “Yes.”

  “God is there?”

  “What?”

  “God is there?”

  Is God there? Some Taiwan aboriginal myths involving mountains came to Alice’s mind. The first Atayal ancestor was supposedly born on Mount Dabajian. The Tsou had fled to Jade Mountain after the Deluge. And the Bunun, too, had their own Holy Mountain. Almost all the tribes did. But was a holy mountain a god? Alice would rather describe it as a source of sustenance and as a refuge. The mountains had no particular place in the folk religion of her ancestors, the Han people of Taiwan, but belief in the communal Earth God was ubiquitous. So in a certain sense
, at a certain point of time, the mountains had, loosely speaking, been “gods.” Alice was reminded of slogans people had made up in response to the rash of landslides that had been striking whenever a typhoon hit, sometimes burying whole aboriginal villages, sometimes swallowing vehicles, sometimes merely knocking roads out and leaving entire villages isolated. There’d been calls for a return to nature and a renewed respect for nature and even an appeal to “worship the mountain god again.” But maybe it was already too late. Even if once the mountains had been divine, all the gods would have departed by now, Alice thought.

  “God was there, but not anymore.”

  “God is there, in Wayo Wayo’s sea. The mountain is small, but God is also there,” Atile’i solemnly declared.

  Unlike Kabang, Yayaku, the Wayo Wayoan mountain god, was a chastised deity. Wayo Wayoans believed that there were many other gods who were not quite as mighty as Kabang but who were in charge of fate and destiny, each in His own domain. The reason Yayaku had been punished was that one day when Kabang resolved to wipe out a certain kind of whale that had given offense, Yayaku astonishingly extended the hand of mercy. He created a kind of kelp that grew as high as a mountain, let those peerless whales hide inside, and exhorted them not to come out until after Kabang had calmed down. But Kabang finally found them when a playful whale calf snuck out of the seaweed grove. Kabang quaked with anger and unleashed His vengeance upon Yayaku. Yet at the same time, Kabang had realized it would be rash and improper to exterminate a kind of living creature, and thereupon He rescinded His fatal decree.

  But Kabang was still contemplating how He should punish Yayaku, at once to put the minor god in his place and boost His own prestige. Kabang had given Wayo Wayo to the people, but over time the rocks on the island would become sand, and the sand would be blown away by the wind and carried away by the sea and the island would get smaller and smaller. Thus, Kabang resolved to oblige Yayaku to take on the form of a little bird and the quotidian task of collecting the grains of sand that blew away in the wind or floated away in the sea and replenishing the island with them. Because the waves never rested and the wind never tired, Yayaku never enjoyed a moment of respite. But Yayaku was industrious and managed, when the gods of sea and wind were not exerting themselves quite so much, to pile up a mountain. In possession of this mountain, the islanders could cut down a certain number of trees without fearing that Wayo Wayo might someday disappear. This was why the islanders worshiped Yayaku as the Mountain God.

  “So your mountain god is a bird?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wouldn’t it just be too cute to have a little bird as the mountain god,” Alice thought aloud, gazing at the youth standing before her. She couldn’t fully understand him, but there was more to what he was saying than just the words. His expressions, gestures, tones and dynamics made him a natural storyteller. His body had been milled, polished, scarfed and forged, as if by magic, a magic that would make people believe that any story he might tell, no matter how absurd, bizarre and unbelievable it might seem, must have actually happened in real life.

  “Adorable? No, Yayaku has no feeling. He is cold.”

  They kept finding their way, and at dawn on the fourth day, they could see some peaks in the distance that Alice recognized from the map. She knew they were approaching the “forest” on the map. But by this time Alice was starting to show fatigue, so they took even more frequent breaks. Alice taught Atile’i how to read a map while they were resting. The key concept, which Atile’i soon grasped, was the use of a sign to stand for some natural feature. The next step was determining orientation, allowing the mind to match the observed landscape and its corresponding representation on the map. Atile’i’s ability in this respect greatly exceeded Alice’s. The only thing he could not get was proportion. The ocean was clearly vast. How could such a small image serve as a surrogate?

  They made a fire to cook a meal. Alice had brought many vacuum food packs, which you could just heat up and eat. This evening they had spaghetti with pesto sauce and hot coffee. Atile’i had gradually gotten used to the food the Taiwanese islanders ate.

  “So, what did you eat most often at sea?” Alice asked.

  “Fish.”

  “How’d you catch them?”

  “I used things on Gesi Gesi to make a spear gun, and oyster shells as hooks.”

  “You ate them raw?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t use fire?”

  “Fire? No.”

  “No fire. Oh, right, it would be too difficult to make a fire on the ocean. What about writing? Do the people of Wayo Wayo have writing?”

  “Writing? Like this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Writing, we have not. The Earth Sage says, speech is everything.”

  “Too bad you don’t have writing. There are many things that can only be expressed using the written word.”

  “No need. Wayo Wayo has no writing, but we can express things all the same.”

  “But how can you compose poems without writing?” Atile’i didn’t answer, having failed to understand.

  “What do you call the moon again?”

  “Nalusa.”

  “Oh, kaga mi yiwa Nalusa,” Alice said in Wayo Wayoan.

  “Tonight there is a moon,” Atile’i translated into Mandarin.

  “Ah, indeed, your Mandarin is much improved, tonight there is a moon. And what’s the sun again?”

  “Yigasa.”

  “Yigasa,” Alice repeated.

  “Yigasa shines with its own light, which Nalusa borrows to be bright,” said Atile’i, reciting the lyrics of a Wayo Wayoan nursery rhyme.

  “Yigasa shines with its own light, which Nalusa borrows to be bright,” Alice said. “Aiya, that’s poetry.” But Atile’i still didn’t understand what poetry meant.

  That evening, shortly after the two of them had gone to sleep, Atile’i woke up, immediately pulled Alice over, covered her mouth to signal silence, and motioned for her to leave via the rear opening. Atile’i sensed that something was out there, but Alice saw nothing except an expanse of silent gloom. Alice’s blood and heartbeat were still sluggish, and because she had not slept enough her legs were still in a dreamland. Atile’i on the other hand was preternaturally alert. He gazed intently into the darkness.

  Soon, in the shadows of the trees, he made out a looming form. It seemed to hesitate but was actually resolute. When it moved close to the tent, Alice felt as if a bucket of water had been dumped on her head. Now she was completely awake.

  “Bear!”

  The bear looked over toward the voice. It stood up on its hind legs like a man and craned its neck to catch the scent, revealing the pattern on its chest, like a crescent moon in the vast night sky of its body. Attracted by the smells, it hesitated before roughly “opening” the tent, spilling their food out on the ground. Then it tasted every item on the menu.

  Alice and Atile’i tried to hold their breath. Alice wanted to leave while she still had the chance, but Atile’i felt they should stay put and kept a tight hold on Alice. Though it made Atile’i nervous, this bear before him was a magnificent, alert and tenacious animal, as beautiful as all the animals he had ever seen. Wayo Wayo did not have such animals, not even close. Atile’i was spellbound.

  With dawn approaching, the bear stood up again, stomped on the tent, crushing it, and extended its snout and sniffed, looking much taller than a grown man. Alice was clasping Atile’i’s hand, her hands cold as dew. The bear slowly retreated into the forest, and the forest opened up again, readmitting the shadow into its fold.

  The bear hadn’t made a sound, had given neither provocation nor pursuit. It had just rummaged around for things it wanted and returned to the forest. But Alice and Atile’i both seemed to have died and come back to life. They had scented something ancient, like the mountain itself but somehow not quite the same. Something divine. If it had wanted to, it could have taken their lives away.

  Only now did Atile’i slowly turn t
o Alice and say, with the utmost care: “Clearly, God is there!”

  26. The Man with the Compound Eyes II

  When the man wakes up he doesn’t feel the pain he would have expected. He’s just had a dream in which he tried on a night of absolute night to “blind climb” his way down the mountain wall. Because all was darkness he had to use every cell in his skin to feel the texture of the cliff. It felt just like the first time he entered his wife’s body. Both of them had experienced a subtle trembling, as if they were replenishing something in one another’s souls.

  Two-thirds of the way down, as a result of overexertion, his nails felt sore, his toes numb, and his eyes were stinging with sweat because he was not wearing a headband. But the more physically ill, the more intense the mental thrill—a paradox those who have never engaged in this kind of activity cannot understand. The man breathed deeply until little by little confidence returned to his fingertips.

  But in the moment it did, his fingers parted from the face of the cliff. It was as if he suddenly switched perspectives and saw himself falling, getting smaller and smaller. The clouds and constellations dispersed, everything around him dissolved into darkness, and all that remained was void.

  It was a dream, after all. Careful not to make a sound, the man walks out of the tent to the edge of the cliff. The cliff is not as absolutely dark as it was in the dream. But leaves, backs of tree frogs, bent stems and droplets of water in leafy hollows … are all gleaming in the moonlight, making the cliff appear darker than it actually is.

  Why not try climbing down? No, my boy is in the tent. What if something happens?

  Why not give it a try? No, I can’t.

  A blind climb? I can’t!