The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  Though Alice wasn’t so passionate about field guides, she always thought they were amazing things. A field guide seemed different from a work of literature. There’s no spoor to guide you when you take a walk in the fictional woods, and repetition is a sin. While natural science seems to have developed through humanity’s gift for identification, and then using our reason to create principles for the classification of the myriad creatures of the world, placing special emphasis on certain subtle anatomical unities when discriminating kinds. Alice intuited that there was something poetic in the field guides, and if you read them carefully you could identify the principles by virtue of which human beings understood the world as well as some hints about human nature. Maybe someday Toto might become a certain kind of poet. Did he not deliver some poetic-sounding lines to these insects?

  To Alice it seemed that the bigger Toto got the more species he recognized, that every time they went out he got a little taller and more mature. He was starting to explore the world in all its amazing intricacy and extreme regularity. Alice would read the same books as Toto and remember the same insects. Whenever she had a question she would e-mail Ming. Apparently a lonely fellow, Ming always gave her a quick reply. The only thing she couldn’t manage was mountain climbing. She could climb the hills around town to get water, but she had a phobia of mountains above a certain height.

  Alice would never forget an accident Toto had in grade two. He got bitten by a snake one day while playing in the bushes. Not knowing what kind of snake it was, they took Toto to several hospitals to inject him with various antidotes, none of them at all effective. Toto was in a coma for nearly a week. Alice prayed with all her might to all the gods she’d ever heard of, until finally he woke up. She sometimes felt that Toto had really died that time. For a long time, Alice would not let him take part in any outdoor activities, but for a boy like Toto this was just a form of torture. Even more importantly, Thom didn’t approve: he thought that no matter how dangerous it might be Toto should try to survive in the wild as much as possible.

  Alice was flipping through the Illustrated Cat Encyclopedia, imagining Toto was still by her side listening to her explanation. The classification system this encyclopedia used was really interesting: you cross-referenced the length of the coat and the shape of the face. Alice kept turning the pages but could not find a cat that resembled Ohiyo. Was it because she was too young, and her distinguishing features had not appeared yet? “It’s just an ordinary cute little black-and-white ‘mee-kuh-ssi,’ ” said the nurse—a Mandarin approximation of the English word “mix.” Which just meant it was a crossbreed. But as far as Alice knew, housecats were all one species. After all, couldn’t any couple of housecats mate and produce a litter of mixes? It seemed people only divided cats into breeds as a way of investigating the cat world or establishing a ranking system for the cats. The logic of the system was human, while the cats had their own logic and pecking order and played by their own rules.

  So were inferences about nature really concerned with the laws of nature? Or merely human laws?

  Alas, but this was the kind of linguistic vortex into which Alice’s literary training was always causing her to slip. Before she knew it, she had spent the whole afternoon leafing through the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cats and almost all the other field guides on the shelves. Now she got the feeling that the world was composed more like a field guide than she had realized. Maybe she had gotten it wrong as a young woman in assuming the world was full of random occurrences. Maybe the world was neatly and intricately arranged, and everything was actually a twist of fate.

  The next day, Alice stayed home watching Ohiyo. She’d never thought that you could get so engrossed just observing the various activities of a cat: Ohiyo asleep on the bookshelf, eyelids heavy, limbs dangling; Ohiyo padding near a leaf beetle that had flown in the window; Ohiyo with her huge round eyes open wide gazing attentively at Alice.

  “So adorable.” Alice sighed. Everything had to change when you raised a cat. It was just like having a child. That evening Alice went to sleep with Ohiyo under her arm. Ohiyo was purring, dreaming about who knows what. But later that night, Alice had a dream of her own.

  Just a month before, unable to go on alone like this, Alice had traveled to Japan for a course of “dream grabber” therapy. The dream grabber was a technology developed several years before by a team led by Professor Yukiyasu Kamitani, director of the Computational Neuroscience Lab at the International Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute. They used MRI to record people’s dreams. At first they could only display brain activity as simple geometrical shapes, but gradually they were able to image the data in the dream waves. The images weren’t photographic or videographic. They were more like the enigmatic patterns on a television screen when there is no signal. But the therapy was not available to just anyone off the street. It was a medical treatment, so you needed a referral from a medical specialist. Kamitani had done the research hoping to counteract the dream interpretation shows that flooded the airwaves and the internet, not anticipating that after he started offering his service the television and internet producers would copy him and add “dream grabber” shows of their own. All Kamitani could do was lobby for legislation controlling the use of such images. But the situation was already a mess. After all, in this day and age everyone needs something to grab hold of.

  It was Reiko Matsusaka who had introduced Alice to the therapy. She was a translator and professor at a women’s university in Tokyo. Years earlier, Alice and Reiko had collaborated on the translation of one of Ming’s novels into Japanese. Both young scholars with a fervent passion for literature, the two of them had become online friends, meeting to discuss the intricacies of Chinese–Japanese translation. For instance, Reiko couldn’t understand the idiomatic Taiwanese expression “make-it-big-truck,” so Alice explained how Taiwanese people bought small trucks in the hopes of striking it rich and even asked the author how many cubic feet the engine would have and what model it might be on her behalf. Alice also guessed at the particulars of the male characters in the novel, because Reiko told her there were several different ways for a Japanese man to say “I.” It was so much more complicated than in Chinese.

  Reiko gave Alice a Skype call after learning of her situation from a fellow scholar. At first Alice refused even to consider the therapy, but then something Reiko said changed her mind. “The dream grabber won’t solve your problems for you, but it seems that quite a number of people discover little clues or issues that make life worth living again.”

  Despite years of correspondence, Alice’s trip to Tokyo was the first time they met in the flesh. Reiko had a round face, a medium build and a very Japanese smile. A bit eccentric, she wore a pair of glasses with molded plastic frames (though for all Alice could tell they could be expensive handmade spectacles) along with a pair of rather sexy fishnet stockings. To Alice the outfit seemed extremely mismatched. Surprisingly few scholars floating around in fishnets, are there?

  The therapy was supposed to take a whole week. On the first day a session with a psychologist was scheduled. That evening, Alice stayed at the clinic, which was just like being in a five-star hotel, except with brainwave detectors in the pillows and the mattress. The second and third days it was just like being on vacation. She revisited Yoyogi Park and the Ueno Zoo. She also wanted to go back to the Tamagawa Zoo, where she had taken Toto, but unfortunately they were closed for some animal escape drill. On the fourth day Alice’s dreamscape data from the first three nights was compiled.

  Alice regretted coming as soon as she saw her dreamscape. The doctor and technicians could not decipher the dots and lines on the screen, but Alice could. That is the way memory works: often you’re the only one who can recognize what something means. The dreamscape viewing was supposed to be followed by a session with an experienced counselor, but Alice simply said farewell to Reiko and caught a flight back to Taiwan instead. Reiko did not particularly ask Alice why she was leaving so sudden
ly when she saw her off at the airport. Alice just noticed she had changed into a pair of extremely eye-catching purple pantyhose.

  Alice woke up from the dream they’d recorded in the clinic in Tokyo. Still half asleep, she saw from the clock over the bed that it was about four in the morning. Ohiyo was sound asleep. Do cats ever need a lot of sleep! Ohiyo was sleeping by a digital album she had knocked over. Alice did not have to look to know it was the album beginning with one of Toto’s baby pictures. Alice tried stretching out her hand to get at it without waking Ohiyo but could not get at it. She could only play the images she knew only too well in her mind’s eye. It occurred to her that Toto might just be sealed off in a deathless world somewhere, that he might be alive as if in a photograph, in a place death could never enter. Was Toto somewhere like that, carrying his specimen case as he searched for something he had never seen before?

  8. Rasula, Rasula, Will You Really Go to Sea?

  Before Atile’i went to sea, Rasula prepared a bottle of fine kiki’a wine, a local delicacy women and children made by letting the rhizome of a certain tuber ferment in their mouths into a viscid liquor. The process sometimes required three days of chewing. The taste of the wine varied with the smell and composition of the saliva of the person who chewed it. The mellow wine from Rasula’s mouth had been the toast of the island since she was a girl. Mixed with the starch of the tuber, her saliva produced an aroma men found captivating. Instead of making you drunk, it tended to induce the most indescribable palpitations. Some men who had drunk it even claimed that their futures had flashed before their eyes.

  After Atile’i had shot his seed, Rasula took out the wine she’d chewed for him and advised him to sip her wine slowly so as to remember her smell, the look in her eyes, the warmth of her nether parts.

  But where was Atile’i now?

  The men of the island all desired Rasula but none dared make a move on her. Nobody knew who her father was. Her Yina (the Wayo Wayoan word for mother) Saliya’s weaving was the best on the island, but, lacking the protection of a husband, Saliya had no way to obtain an allotment of land, and women were not allowed to go to sea. The only way she could get land, fish and other forms of upkeep was to do public service in the village. Mainly, she wove saltgrass sandals for the islanders. Rasula would often help Saliya pick vines in the woods and collect saltgrass by the shore: the vines were for the sole, the saltgrass for the upper. Saliya’s weaving talents were not limited to sandals; she could also make fishnets, nets that not even the Ima Ima fish, the strongest fish that swam in the waters around the island, could escape. Saliya might well have woven enough nets over the years to cover the entire island.

  Men would often take a detour past Saliya’s house after a hard day of fishing and help with repairs around the house, maybe leaving a fish or two, or maybe a sea cucumber or a tasty octopus. It was only after she had her first period that Rasula realized that they were actually there for her mother’s hands, not only for the sandals, the fishnets or out of a desire to tell stories. Rasula had heard their tributes to her mother’s hands:

  They revive the dry grass.

  They can calm a fierce squall.

  When Saliya was young she was as beautiful as Rasula, or even more lovely, because Saliya had a pure, Wayo Wayoan beauty. Saliya in Wayo Wayoan meant “a spine with a graceful delphine arc.” As a maiden, she could simply sit at the seashore facing away from the village with her hair hanging down her back and it was enough to make the island’s heart break.

  Rasula’s favorite activities were watching seagulls bearing the moon aloft and collecting freshly molted crab shells, but now she was like a seabird with wounded wings, gazing at the sea but unable to leave the island. Saliya could totally understand what Rasula was feeling. She quietly regarded her child, suspecting that another little spark of life had appeared within her soul. Being unable to spend a lifetime with the man she loved was the fate of many a Wayo Wayoan woman, but to bear his child was the grace of Kabang. This was because the child might be a boy, and a boy could help them start a new family.

  One day when mother and daughter were sitting in the doorway weaving sandals, Rasula suddenly struck up a conversation.

  “Yina, why aren’t women allowed to go to sea?”

  “This is the rule of the ancestors, the law of nature. Women can only go to the seashore to collect shellfish. But you must never forget that shellfish with spines are not to be touched.”

  “Why did they make this rule, and what if one breaks it?”

  “Oh, my dear Nana (the Wayo Wayoan word for daughter), you well know that a girl who breaks this rule would turn into a spiny urchin which none would dare approach.”

  “Have you actually ever seen someone change into a spiny urchin?”

  “There are urchins everywhere.”

  “No, Yina, I mean have you ever seen a real live person turn into an urchin?”

  “No, Nana, and neither has anyone else, for she would sink into the sea before the change comes upon her.”

  “Yina, I don’t believe you.” Rasula heaved a long sigh, with a faraway look in her eye. Saliya looked at Rasula and in her heart answered her sigh, thinking: It wasn’t my wish for you to have such a pair of pearly eyes, daughter of mine.

  “Yina, I don’t believe you. I want to build a talawaka of my own.”

  “What? No, you can’t. A talawaka is not for a woman to own.”

  “I want to build a talawaka.”

  Saliya knew that when Rasula had made up her mind she was as irretrievable as a stone sunk to the bottom of the sea, and so she said nothing more.

  When a man made a talawaka, Rasula would stand off to the side and quietly observe. Sometimes when she was chatting with Nale’ida she would ask lots of questions about the techniques of talawaka construction. She knew that Nale’ida was deeply in love with her, and that if she had conceived Atile’i’s child Nale’ida would be obliged as Atile’i’s older brother to care for her. This was another Wayo Wayoan custom. But she did not love Nale’ida back. Atile’i and Nale’ida were like Yigasa (the sun) and Nalusa (the moon). She loved Atile’i’s sunny disposition, not Nale’ida’s lunar nature. There was nothing she could do about how she felt, for no one can pit her heart against the sea. She let Nale’ida visit her at dusk simply because she wanted to listen to him tell stories of the sea and tell her more about the principles of navigation.

  But you had to give him credit: Nale’ida, who looked like Atile’i except for his nose, talked a lot of sense. “The sea cannot be taught. You learn it with your life,” he said. But even though Nale’ida loved Rasula the way a fisherman loves an enormous fish, he still did not dare break the taboo against lady guests riding in a talawaka.

  Without telling anyone, Rasula began gathering and preparing the building materials on her own. She cleared a place in the woods a fair distance from her house, keeping the unformed, fetal talawaka covered during the day, coming only at night to work on it in secret. Weaving was no trouble, as she had inherited Saliya’s nimble hands; moving the bigger branches out of the woods was harder, though she could do it with a bit more patience and a few bruises on her arms and legs. Rasula’s talawaka was taking shape. She used a file made from a sea urchin to do the finishing work and carve an image of the seafaring Atile’i on the hull.

  The island was small, but Rasula did everything with the utmost secrecy, so almost everyone remained ignorant of her seafaring scheme. Nale’ida was blinded by love, the other men who visited the house by burning lust. The only one who knew, her mother Saliya, chose silence, believing that Rasula would quit. Saliya could tell Rasula was pregnant from her posture and smell, and assumed that when she discovered the soul of a little Atile’i inside her she would give up as a matter of course.

  Thrice the moon died and thrice it came back up to life. Early next morning, Rasula burrowed under the covers and to her mother said: “Yina, tomorrow I’m going out to sea.”

  “Going out to sea?”

&nbs
p; “Yes. My talawaka is ready. I’ve heard many stories of the sea. Atile’i was my teacher, and Nale’ida, too, has taught me well, so even though I’ve never gone to sea I know its ways. Now all I need is your blessing, and nourishment for the trip, that I may find Atile’i safe and sound.”

  “Atile’i’s dead and gone, Nana.”

  “He is not dead. I know. I feel it.”

  “Nana, do you realize there’s a little soul in your body? Atile’i is in your belly.”

  “Yina, I know. I want to show Atile’i the Atile’i growing inside me.”

  “Nana, do you know where Atile’i is?”

  “I know that he is somewhere on the sea.”

  “The sea is too big, Nana. You are dooming yourself and the Atile’i in your belly to death.”

  “You know, Yina, that living on this loveless island is about the same as death.”

  “You think I do not love you, Nana?”

  Rasula did not cry. She was like a sinking ship, getting heavier and heavier. The water was pouring in, not flowing out.

  “Forgive me, Yina, forgive me.”

  Saliya could’ve gotten the villagers to stop Rasula, but she did not. She knew that restraining her daughter would merely cause her to wither away before her eyes. Let be, let be, Kabang must have arranged for Rasula to die at sea, her tomb an ocean wave.