by Wu Ming-Yi
Alice had tendered her resignation, returned her faculty ID. She could finally let out a big sigh of relief: now the torment of this life would end and she could try her luck in the next. Alice had gone to grad school to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. She had sailed into this faculty position after getting her Ph.D. With her delicate appearance and sensitive disposition she seemed in Taiwan’s conservative society typecast for the role of the writer. A lot of people envied her; after all, for a literary person, this was the smoothest road one could possibly take. Only Alice knew the truth: that becoming a good writer was no longer the issue, that she simply had no time to write. Stifled by administrative duties, she had not had a breath of fresh, literary air these past few years. Oftentimes it was already sunrise before she was ready to leave the office.
She decided to give away all the books and things in her office to her students. Trying not to get all emotional, she treated each of the students she had mentored to a meal as a way of saying goodbye. Sitting in the dreadful campus cafeteria, she observed the different expressions in their eyes.
“So young,” she thought.
These kids imagined they were on the way to some mysterious destination, but there wasn’t really anything where they were going, just an empty space like a basement, a place that was heaped with junk. She tried to keep a glimmer of sympathy in her eyes, to let her students think that she was still listening and interested in what they had to say. But Alice was just a shell through which air was blowing, all words like stones being tossed into an empty house that didn’t even have windows. The only thoughts that flickered through her mind were memories of Toto and possible ways of ending her life.
On second thought, that seemed a bit unnecessary. The sea was right on her doorstep, wasn’t it?
Alice had not bid farewell to practically any of her colleagues. She was afraid she might reveal the knots of revulsion toward the world that life had tied in her soul. Driving through town, Alice felt things looked about the same as when she first came here over ten years before, but she was struck by the sense that this was no longer the land of gorges and villages that had drawn her here. Halfway down the east coast, separated from the overdeveloped west by the Central Mountain Range, Haven had once seemed a refuge. But now the huge leaves, the clouds that would gather all of a sudden, the corrugated iron roofs, the dry creek beds she would see along the road every couple of miles, and the vulgar billboards—all the things she had at first found so endearing—were gradually withering, growing unreal, losing their hold on her. She remembered her first year in Haven: then the bush and the vegetation came quite close to the road, as if neither the terrain nor the wild animals feared the sight of man. Now the new highway had pushed nature far away.
Originally, Alice reflected, this place had belonged to the aborigines. Then it belonged to the Japanese, the Han people, and the tourists. Who did it belong to now? Maybe to those city folks who bought homesteads, elected that slimeball of a mayor, and got the new highway approved. After the highway went through, the seashore and the hills were soon covered with exotic edifices, not one of them authentic, pretty much as if a global village theme park had been built there as a joke. There were fallow fields and empty houses everywhere, and the fat cats who owned these eyesores usually only appeared on holidays. Folks in the local cultural scene liked to gush about how Haven was the true “pure land,” among other cheap clichés of native identity, while Alice often felt that except for some houses belonging to the aboriginal people or buildings from the Japanese era, now maintained as tourist attractions, the artificial environment had been intended to spite the natural landscape.
Which reminded her of this one conference coffee break when her colleague Professor Wang started spouting off about how sticky the soil in Haven was, how “stuck-on-Haven” he felt, and not for the first time. What a disingenuous comment! Alice couldn’t help telling him, right to his face, “Don’t you mean stuck-in-Haven? There’s fake farmhouses and fake B&Bs all over the place; even the trees in the yards of these places are fake. Don’t you think? These houses! Ug. What’s so great about it if all it does is cause phonies like that to stick around?”
Professor Wang was at a loss for words. For a moment he forgot to wear the mantle of the senior faculty member. With his drooping eyelids, gray hair and greasy appearance, he looked more like a businessman than like an academic. Honestly, there were times when Alice could not tell the difference. Professor Wang eventually managed, “If you say so, then what should it really be like?”
What was it really like? Alice ruminated on the drive home.
It was April. Everywhere was a sluggish, damp smell in the air, like the smell of sex. Alice was driving south. To the right was the Central Mountain Range, a national icon. Occasionally—no, more like every day—Alice recalled the way Toto had looked standing up on the car seat, gazing at the mountains with his head sticking up through the sunroof. He wore a camouflage hat, like a little soldier. Sometimes her memory would dress him in a windbreaker, sometimes not. Sometimes he would be waving, but not always. She imagined that Toto must have left the foot-sized indentation in the car seat that day. That was the last impression she had of her husband and son.
Dahu was the first person she called for help after Thom and Toto went missing. Dahu was Thom’s climbing buddy. A member of the local rescue team, he knew these hills like the back of his hand.
“It’s all Thom’s fault!” She was frantic.
“Don’t worry. If they’re up there, I’ll find them,” Dahu reassured her.
Thom Jakobsen was from Denmark, a country without any true mountains. He was a flatlander who became a climbing fanatic soon after arriving in Taiwan. After finishing all the local trails with Dahu, he went abroad to train himself in traditional alpine climbing techniques. He wanted to prepare for an ascent on a mountain of over seven thousand meters, three thousand meters higher than the highest peak in Taiwan. Taiwan became a place he only visited on occasion. Alice, feeling herself getting older day by day, was almost no longer able to handle not knowing if or when Thom would return. But even when he was by her side his expression would wander far away.
Maybe that was why lately Alice tended to think first of Toto, then of Dahu, and only then of Thom. No, she hardly ever thought of Thom. He thought he knew everything there was to know about mountains, forgetting there were none back where he was from. And how could he? How could he take their son climbing and not bring him back? What if he had gotten sick that day or forgotten to charge the battery or even slept in a bit longer? Everything would have turned out different, Alice often thought.
“Don’t worry, we’re only going insect hunting! I won’t take him anywhere dangerous. We’ll be fine. Everyone knows the route we’re going on.” Thom had tried to reassure her but she heard a hint of impatience in his voice.
Most people could not believe that at ten years old Toto was already a skilled rock climber and mountaineer who knew more about alpine forests than the average forestry graduate. Alice understood Toto belonged to the mountains and tried not to stand in his way. Maybe Dahu was right that fate is fate, and that when the time comes, fate can fly like the shaft that finds the wild boar.
Dahu was a close friend of Alice and Thom’s. He was many things: a taxi driver, a mountaineer, an amateur sculptor, a forest conservationist and a volunteer for some east-coast NGOs. He had a typically stocky Bunun build. He also had a charming gleam in his eyes; best not gaze right at him or you might think he has fallen in love with you, or that you have gone and fallen for him.
A few years before, his wife had abandoned him, leaving behind their daughter Umav and a note. She just wrote how much money she had withdrawn from the account and what she had taken from the house as well as the words THESE ARE MINE, without offering an explanation. Like a relinquished pet, Umav was just another item on that list of possessions left behind for Dahu. At first, Dahu would send Umav to stay at Alice’s place for a few days at a time. H
e had the best of intentions, but the truth was he had no idea how to cheer up his daughter, and Umav and Alice only ended up making each other even more depressed. Alice would realize she had not said anything to Umav all afternoon. The girl would have spent the whole time looking bleakly out to sea, clipping and unclipping her bangs, unable to get her hair right. So Alice bluntly asked Dahu not to bring his daughter over anymore. Later, after the rescue mission failed to find any trace of Thom and Toto, she also stopped answering his regular sympathy calls.
Alice resolved to wall herself in. The only thing she looked forward to was sleep. Though sleep was just closing her eyes, at times she could see more clearly then. In the beginning she made a point of meditating before bed so that Toto would visit her in her dreams. Later she tried not to dream about Toto, only to discover that not dreaming about him was more painful than dreaming about him. Better to dream of him and bear the pain of waking up and realizing he was gone. Now and then, lying awake late at night, she would pick up the flashlight and tread into Toto’s room to check on a boy who was not there, wanting to see whether his breathing was regular. Memory confronted her like a boxer whose power punches were too quick to dodge. Sometimes Alice wished she still felt lust; as anyone who has once been young will know, desire is the best antidepressant in the world, dulling the force of memory and keeping a person in the present. But the Thom who appeared in her dreams no longer offered her desire. Holding a climbing ax in his right hand, he would hack away at his left hand as it morphed into a mountain wall. He never said a single word. Each time she tried to grasp the meaning of a dream, she would call the police to see if there was any news. “I’m sorry, Professor Shih. If we hear anything, you’ll be the first to know.” The police had gone from wholehearted to halfhearted, as if taking her calls had become a matter of routine. Once in a while there was even a hint of disgust in the voice on the other end of the line. “It’s that woman again. She’s just not gonna leave us alone,” Alice imagined the policeman saying to his partners after hanging up the phone.
This April it had been constantly raining and unseasonably warm. There were supine beetles everywhere under the campus streetlights at night. Now there was a scarab inside the car. Alice rolled down the windows, but it could not find a way out. It just kept smacking against the windshield, its blue forewings faintly glowing.
These past few months, Alice discovered how dependent on Toto she had become. It was only for his sake that she had bothered to eat breakfast and keep a regular bedtime and learn how to cook. Alice had also learned to be more careful, since her safety was her child’s safety. Anytime he went out, she had to worry that some goddamn drunk driver might smash his warm young face into the sidewalk, or that his classmates might bully him, or even his teachers, as people who spend a lot of time around children can sometimes be shockingly cruel. Alice remembered the girl with the dirty uniform she and her classmates used to gang up on. They taunted her day in, day out. They would splatter her dirty clothes to make them even dirtier, as if to show how clean their own clothes were by comparison.
Alice passed a bridge over a floodplain to the left. The bridge had been washed out a few years before. The new bridge had been built higher up in the hills, almost three kilometers further inland. A burst of honking forced Alice’s attention back onto the road.
A few minutes later, the car rounded a stretch of coastline, formerly the most famous in Haven. Years before, a developer had gone in, shoveled away part of the mountain, filled it in, firmed it up and built an amusement park. And then, with the full backing of that mayor who was knee deep in corruption charges, the developer kept right on digging away at the mountain wall on the other side of the site. But a major earthquake over nine years ago had caused the foundations of most of the facilities to shift, rendering the rides inoperable. The company filed for bankruptcy to avoid having to pay compensation. What with the rising sea level and the encroaching shoreline, the uncleared cable-car pylons and Ferris wheel looked stranded now. To one side, on a boulder that must originally have been part of the mountain, sat an angler, his boat roped to a pylon. Alice kept driving along the New Coastal Highway, until finally her own distinctive abode came into view in the distance, as sunlight sprayed down on the land through a light rain. Despite the drizzle this was the best weather in weeks.
Her house was by the sea. But since when had the sea gotten that close?
Alice opened the door, which now served no meaningful purpose, and looked around at the last of her possessions: the sofa, the mural Thom and she had collaborated on, the Michele De Lucchi chandelier, and the dried-up house plants. She and Thom had selected everything together. The hollow in the pillow, the facecloth in the bathroom and the storybooks on the shelf all bore the marks of Toto’s presence. Making a final inspection, Alice realized she had not figured out what to do about the aquarium. It would just be too cruel to leave the poor fish to wait, bewildered, helpless and speechless, for death once she died first. Sitting on the sofa, she remembered a student of hers named Mitch who really liked keeping fish. But she no longer had a cell, and she had cut the phone line. She mulled it over and decided she would just have to make one last trip to the university to arrange for Mitch to get the plants and fish. Of course, Mitch could take all the equipment if he wanted. Alice got back in the car. Thank God there was still about thirty kilometers of juice in the battery.
Alice called Mitch from the department office. Mitch soon arrived with a girl by his side. They all got into Alice’s car. Mitch had an athletic build but appeared nebbish, a bit of a doormat. A lit major, he seemed a classic case of passion without talent. Mitch introduced his girlfriend as Jessie. The girl had a mischievous look in her eyes, a sweet smile and extremely fair skin, and was covered in accessories, but her appearance was about the same as any young woman walking down the street. Jessie was wearing a pair of skinny jeans. She said she had taken two courses from Alice, and though Alice had no particular impression of her, the girl seemed somehow familiar. The car was silent and stuffy the whole way back; Jessie and Mitch pretended to take in the scenery along the way to avoid having to talk to Alice.
The three of them treaded in mutely through the back garden. When Alice opened the door, Mitch gasped with surprise, crouched in front of the aquarium and asked, “Hey, isn’t that a shovelnose minnow?”
“That’s right.” Those fish had been raised by a friend of Dahu’s to be reintroduced into the wild. He had given Toto the ones he didn’t release.
“Wow! You don’t find these in the wild anymore. Can I see what’s in the cabinet?”
“Sure.”
Mitch opened the cabinet below the tank. Thrilled, he said, “It even has a cooler and a pH control! Awesome!”
“It’s all yours.” Mitch’s exclamations were getting on Alice’s nerves.
Mitch could hardly believe his ears. He confirmed she was serious and called a classmate. Soon three big strong boys arrived in an SUV and bustled the equipment into the back. Alice noticed Jessie quietly glancing at the digital photo frames hanging on the walls and at the spines of the books on the shelf.
“If you see a book you like please feel free.”
“Uh … for real?”
“A few books won’t make any difference.” In the end Jessie only took a collection of short stories by Isak Dinesen in the original. Head cocked, Alice asked, “You read Danish?”
“Oh no, it’s just, um, for a memento. Danish looks really neat.”
Before getting in the SUV Jessie came over and asked: “Professor Shih, will I see you around campus?”
“Probably not.”
“I was just wondering if I could send you stuff I write? I’d totally understand if it’s not okay.”
Alice had nodded, then shaken her head. Now, without any emotion, she remembered who the girl was.
After Mitch and Jessie left, Alice wandered into Toto’s room and flopped onto the bed, which once had that familiar smell. Now Alice did not have to worr
y about the fish dying, only about how she would die, which somehow did not seem to matter as much. She stared up at the map on the ceiling of the hikes Thom had taken Toto on. They had drawn it together. Often she’d be cooking while they were in here hatching secret plans. Mountain climbing was always their thing, and all these years, no matter how hard Thom tried to convince her, she just would not go. She would not go to church, either.
“Sometimes in life you should be able to say no,” Alice thought.
Alice would never forget her first climbing experience. More a hill than a mountain, the Emperor’s Hall was located in the rocky country to the southeast of Taipei. At the time intercollegiate coed socials were popular, and Alice got dragged along to one by a classmate. Never a sporty person, she was all right for the first half of the climb, but once she went past a little temple she had to pull herself along with a rope and clamber over roots, until she made it to this ridge where there was nothing to hold onto. People kept encouraging her, and at the time Alice was too timid to refuse. She carried on for another few minutes and then broke out in a cold sweat and suffered a panic attack. She did not scream to get some gallant boy to help her along, as a typical girl might have done. The tears just started falling. Why of all places did they have to come here? One boy offered his arm but she refused. The fellow looked polite but was actually empty-headed (as she had discovered riding on the back of his motorbike). Instead, she made her own way back down, half-walking and half-crouching. She had never gone hiking since.
The map had intersecting red and blue routes labeled with different colored flags. She did not know what the colors meant and could only try to imagine the alpine vistas Thom and Toto had seen. Who knows how much time they spent on it or what was going through their heads when they were drawing it? She followed the routes with her eyes. Although she never went climbing, she had often looked at the map and planned treks with Toto, as if playing a game. She knew the map just as well as Toto and Thom, but for some reason she had always had a funny feeling that a few routes were not drawn quite right, though she could not say why. Alice kept staring until her eyes glazed over. It started getting dark outside, and the routes on the ceiling gradually withdrew into shadow. Alice pictured Toto sitting on his high stool or standing on Thom’s shoulders as he traced out a route, until finally she lost track of time and sank into a deep sleep.
