The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  I remember it was the evening of the fifteenth day after the rain stopped. Ina woke up in the middle of the night and went outside. I felt her get up, so I woke up too. I could vaguely hear her talking to someone, but who would there be to talk to so late at night in a place like this? I got up the courage to crawl over to a corner where the flap was raised enough for me to peek out. I saw someone standing in front of Ina. It was a man. That man was big and tall, and though I couldn’t see him clearly I felt he must be a young man, but he also seemed kind of middle-aged and youthful at the same time. He was just like a shadow, one moment big, the next moment small. I heard them, and they seemed to be talking about something. For a moment his eyes met mine, and those eyes were … how shall I put it? Ah, it’s hard to say. It was like a tiger, a butterfly, a tree and a cloud looking at you all at once. Aiya, I know it sounds crazy.

  I immediately rolled back to my spot and pretended to be asleep, but that man’s eyes filled my head. Ina came back in, crying for the first time in weeks. I sat up and asked her what was the matter. She said, “Kawas has spoken. Come with me.” Kawas in the Pangcah language means ancestral spirit. Ina said, “I know where he is.”

  Ina held my hand as we waded into the creek up to our waists and then leaped up onto a big rock, and from that rock onto another. The moon wasn’t too bright that night, but it was bright enough to see the rocks. If someone had seen us we would have looked like a pair of ghosts. Ina was sure-footed in the dark, and it was as if she had a flying squirrel’s eyes, no deliberation, no hesitation.

  Around about sunrise, Ina stood on a boulder, peered into a deep, dark pool and dove in. I was stunned. Her black hair spread out on the surface of the pool and then plunged, like it was a living creature. The hem of her skirt flared out underwater, like a white flower. I stood on the rock, crying. Suddenly I felt a chill: it was raining again, and the raindrops were flowing along my neck and down my back. But come to think of it, the creek was totally quiet while she was under. I don’t know how much time had passed when the white flower of my Ina’s dress was gathered into the murky depths and her black hair floated back up to the surface. Ina opened her eyes and, gasping for breath, said, “I … saw … Old Liao’s … face.” Ina told me to tell the rescue team where we were with the walkie-talkie they’d given us. They were there in no time. Ina told them where to look and they pulled Old Liao’s corpse up. He’d gotten trapped deep down in a crack in the rocks. His body was all swollen up, like a big wild boar.

  “What time is it?” Ina asked. She’d forgotten I didn’t have a watch.

  The watch I’d drawn on my wrist said 6:10, so I told her 6:10. I’ll never forget the gray sky that morning, like there was a mist over the river valley … And even now, telling you the story, I feel like I can’t see too clearly, seriously. I thought it was mist, but actually it was sand. The sun appeared as soon as the rain stopped, and the earth had turned to sand. I took it for mist, but if you walked through it would scratch your face. Ina walked up the shore without speaking. I found it hard to keep up, and for a time I couldn’t see her at all. I felt like I was the only one left in the whole entire world.

  Alice finished her cup of coffee. She looked at Hafay and suddenly felt that she finally understood some things in some of the novels she’d read. Hafay walked to the bar, poured Alice another cup, then thought better of it. She took the cup back and said, “It’s not good for you to drink so much coffee. You need a glass of wine.”

  Hafay’s teasing got a wry smile out of Alice.

  Hafay said, “Sometimes I think Ina didn’t take anything with her when she left the village because she thought it was safer to bring nothing, not even love. That was the first time I understood how you can still love a person who beats you up all the time.” Maybe Hafay said this not to Alice but to herself, as a conclusion she’d reached about her Ina as she remembered her.

  Alice nodded, not because she agreed with what Hafay had just said but rather because of something that had just occurred to her, a new conception of life: that life doesn’t allow you any preconceptions. Most of the time you just have to accept what life throws at you, kind of like walking into a restaurant where the owner dictates what you’re having for dinner. Looking down, Alice saw Hafay’s feet, for the very first time. Hafay usually wore sneakers or boots, but not when she was woken out of bed in the middle of the night. Now she was wearing slippers that exposed her toes. Her big toes seemed to be split in two, giving each foot an extra little big toe, a size smaller than a regular big toe. Alice looked away to avoid awkwardness, only to find the window covered in moths, moths of all different colors, many of them with eyespots of different shapes and sizes on their wings. It was as if they were staring at something.

  Right then, she could almost see something out on the ocean, something approaching the coast, heading their way.

  10. Dahu, Dahu, Which Way to Now?

  “You guys couldn’t even put a bend in my dick! What kind of search and rescue team are you?” Dahu caught up with Black Bear and took the lead again. Dahu was used to cracking harmless jokes with the younger members of the search party. They were used to it, too. They knew Dahu mostly resorted to humor when the search seemed hopeless, when they needed a burst of laughter to lift their spirits and boost morale. Now was such a time.

  Black Bear was in charge of orienteering and tracking, but now he had the expression of the hunted, not the hunter. Dahu knew he’d lost confidence. In the mountains, confidence is sometimes more important than endurance, and if you lose it in your mind your body will feel it immediately. Your limbs will start quitting, and the mountain will know you’re faltering. And that’s when it gets dangerous. So Dahu quietly walked on ahead, replacing Black Bear in the pole position. He patted Black Bear on the shoulder and motioned for him to fall back and rest a bit.

  You couldn’t blame Black Bear or anyone else, though, because this was the sixth day of the search, and so far they’d found nothing, no sign of Thom or Toto on any of the trails in the area. That was the strangest part. All Dahu needed was the slightest trace, the tiniest clue, and he was sure he’d be able to tell which way they’d gone.

  “Dahu, which way to now?” asked Black Bear. Dahu didn’t have an answer. He could have told them which way the sambar buck they had seen twelve hours earlier had gone. Why not now? How come he had no idea where to look? Dahu almost lost patience with himself, but experience told him to stay calm, because getting upset would only affect his judgment. The only possibility Dahu could think of was that Thom might somehow have stepped off a cliff. But there should be something left behind on the dense tree canopy below, or some sign of stress from a fall: he’d be able to tell if there were any broken branches, because the color was different. But there wasn’t anything, no sign at all, and another search party had gone through the valley without finding a thing.

  “Is it possible that they didn’t even take this route?” asked Machete, another team member.

  “Who knows? Maybe it’s got something to do with all that rain. Shit, was it ever heavy,” Dahu said.

  The helicopter had nothing positive to report. Thom’s transmitter seemed to have failed completely. There had been no signal for nine days, and the initial signal was from along the route Thom had registered. Then they’d lost it. Dahu thought a device failure was unlikely, because seasoned climbers like Thom would bring more than one. Besides, today’s transmitters run on solar power, and with the current technology the odds against a multiple device failure were astronomical.

  Of course it wasn’t impossible. But Dahu couldn’t help wondering whether this was the tragic outcome that that series of bad omens had augured. Or if the worst was yet to come.

  When Dahu got the call to form an alpine search and rescue team the silvergrass had just bloomed: Bunun people consider this a bad time to undertake a long journey. Besides, when Dahu called Alice right before he left, he heard his daughter Umav sneeze over the phone. There was another suhaisus hazam, a
nother bad sign, when he got outside: a flock of has-has birds (Japanese white-eyes) flying left. It was like the coincidence of almost all possible bad signs. Yet over the past few years Dahu had begun to doubt whether masamu (taboos) had to be adhered to. After all, a taboo that applied when the has-has fly left didn’t make any sense. There were flocks of has-has flying all around in the mountains, and as they tend to dart around in flocks, flying left is commonplace. “And what day and age are we living in, anyway?” Dahu asked himself. If they canceled the original plan because of a taboo like this, wouldn’t it be a bit too …? Dahu harshly censored the irreverent word that had appeared in his mind. After all he was a Bunun, and disbelieving in the taboos was in itself a great taboo, not to mention his disrespectful language. If his father were here he would surely tell him that even though he had a master’s degree in forest ecology he still had to respect the mountain spirits.

  “Without the mountain what forest would there be for you to study? The forest is for us to hunt in and revere, not for us to research,” Dahu could imagine his father saying in that booming voice of his.

  But as this was a matter of life and death, Dahu set out anyway. Even if something unfortunate should happen to him, doing his duty was more important than respecting the taboos, especially considering his duty on this trip was to Thom … Or maybe he was doing this for Alice. Dahu hollered for Moon and Stone to get on his motorcycle, one sitting on the gas tank up front, the other on the seat behind. Moon and Stone were black Formosan mountain mutts. With a crescent streak on her chest, Moon looked a bit like a Formosan black bear, often called a moon bear, while Stone had a lopsided mouth, because the first time he’d gone hunting his lip had gotten torn by the tusk of a wild boar. No matter how much bigger or stronger the quarry was, Stone would always stand his ground when attacked, never giving an inch. Moon and Stone were Dahu’s loyal companions of the alpine forest grove. But now they too were going in circles in the mountains. Occasionally the two of them would raise their heads, as if the scent of the target they were tracking had floated up into the sky.

  Sometimes a person does not know where to go, or how he has ended up where he is. Dahu remembered how he’d decided to move here to Haven over ten years ago. It was all on account of Millet. Dahu had just graduated with a master’s in forest ecology from a respected public university, which was a rare event in the village he came from. Actually, it was unprecedented. “Grad school for the forest, eh? What about fishing? Is there a master’s degree for ‘shooting the gun,’ too?” Dahu’s friends all made fun of him. At the time aboriginal people tended to do native language-related or sociological topics for their degrees, but Dahu was only interested in the forest.

  Dahu soon decided he should finish his mandatory military service before starting anything new. One time he and a few fellows from his company got sent into Haven on an errand and started drinking. Then they up and decided to visit one of the “gentlemen’s spas” in front of the train station for a “special massage.” They knew they didn’t really need a massage. What they really needed was what the sign euphemistically referred to as an “essential oil detox.” Dahu noticed his heart was beating faster than usual as he was walking up the dimly lit stairwell, maybe because he was drunk. The stairwell led to a dark hallway with doors that opened on little partitioned rooms. He was with two buddies, and each of them got his own room. About ten minutes later, a girl knocked on the door. “Will I do?” Dahu nodded, without actually having gotten a good look at her.

  His friends had explained the general procedure over drinks. “The ‘beautician’ will give you an essential oil massage for about half an hour to an hour, then she’ll tell you to turn over. She’ll dim the light. This is when you get the ‘special therapy.’ When the time comes, don’t be too shy. Just enjoy yourself, eh.”

  Lying facedown on the massage table, Dahu was looking through the breathing hole at the toes peeking out of the girl’s high heels. They were exquisite, almost like they’d been specially created. Dahu’s pulse hadn’t slowed a bit. He felt like a sambar deer with a hunter hot on his heels. The girl asked him where he was from, what he did for a living, her manner businesslike, but her voice was so soft he felt he was walking through a pathless wood. While they were chatting, Dahu found out the girl was from Tai-tung, just like him.

  But during the “special therapy,” Dahu was so nervous he could not get fully erect. Her back turned, the girl was pumping him up and down with her hand, but Dahu had not ejaculated by the time the bell rang. He hadn’t even touched her. He’d just been looking up at her waist-length hair. From this angle she looked quite young, maybe as young as twenty. But when they got talking about how old they were, the girl was upfront about her age: she was already twenty-eight.

  “Baby face.”

  “Yeah, baby face.”

  “Uh, what’s your name?”

  “I’m Millet, Number eight. I do hope to have the opportunity to serve you again soon.” Like a memorized line of a customer-service girl at a telecom company, Dahu thought. This was the first time he’d gotten a good look at her. She had a short purple dress on and quite a few bracelets on her arms. She looked just like a typical young woman on the streets of Taipei. She had a roundish face, not too fleshy. Her nose was somehow stubborn looking. From her skin color, she didn’t look much like an aborigine, but her eyes sure did. Before leaving, Dahu was still peeking down at her toes, which appeared even more bashful now, as if they were sorry they’d walked in. What pretty toes! thought Dahu.

  From then on Dahu often drove to Haven on his own. He would go in with his head lowered and tell the manager, “Number eight, Millet.” Gradually the two of them were getting familiar, and sometimes Millet would go out with Dahu for a midnight snack. She’d complain to him if she had a bad customer. She told him some fellows would demand a discount if they hadn’t been able to “shoot.” “The matchmaker can’t promise a son, am I right?” said Millet in not very correct Taiwanese as she got out a cigarette. “There ain’t no sure things in life.” Her skin was a lot lighter now, maybe from working indoors for so long.

  Millet usually did the night shift from eight till six and caught up on sleep during the day. Dahu originally planned to apply for a position in a research institute and study the Bunun relationship to the forest, but later he decided to return to his home village for a stint as a substitute elementary teacher. Who’d have thought he’d up and decide to move to Haven and drive a taxi, just to be able to see Millet more often? It made perfect sense for him to go pick Millet up after work, waiting at the entrance of the spa at six every morning.

  At first Millet refused to go to bed with him. All the senior girls had warned her never to fall for a customer. “Unless you’re sure it’s just a fling, just don’t go to bed with him. If you do, you can wail and moan all you want, but all you gonna hear is I-told-you-so,” said Ling, an older girl who’d taken Millet under her wing. Ling had gone into the business to raise her two kids after the sudden death of her husband due to a drug overdose. She would turn the light down while servicing customers, and would never look at them.

  But as the days wore on, Millet couldn’t help letting Dahu into her heart. He was a good listener, never groped her, and came almost every day to pick her up after work. Millet gave Dahu her cell number and a key to her studio apartment near the spa. The past few years of Millet’s life had been spent helping her mother pay back her father’s debts. She divided her time between her apartment and the “office.” Sometimes Dahu would bring home lunch and quietly watch Millet while she caught up on sleep. Dahu felt that Millet, false eyelashes removed, became herself again, the girl with the nearly perfect, seeming freshly sprouted toes, the only part of Millet he’d been able to see through the breathing hole in the massage table.

  Dahu drove the taxi, but he still missed the mountains, so he started to meet some other climbing enthusiasts and joined a search and rescue team. When there was an emergency in the mountains, Dahu would dr
ive the taxi up and participate in the rescue operation. With his rich knowledge of mountains and forests, Dahu soon had quite a reputation. He helped avert a number of alpine tragedies. There were people from all walks of life on the team: tour guides, junior high school teachers, and a steak vendor and tonic hawker from the night market. Once the call to assemble went out, they would all drop whatever they were doing and gather to form the team. In their leisure time, they became climbing buddies. Many of them were mountaineering legends in their own right. Some were Han Chinese, some aboriginal—Pangcah and Amis, Bunun, Sakizaya and Truku. They shared a love for the mountains. None of them was willing to give up the mountains for all the money in the world.

  Dahu missed those days with Millet so much that he didn’t dare let himself get sentimental, or he might start ruining or revising those fragile and dangerous memories. Dahu missed Millet so bad, but he tried hard to forget, not wanting to get the present tangled up in the past.

  Night fell and still no sign. The mountain Thom had registered to climb wasn’t that difficult, but it linked up with a few peaks that were actually a lot more treacherous than many famous climbs. The “famous climbs” were all well-traveled, had a continuous stream of hikers on them. The spot you set out from was often not too far from the summit. The essence of the experience, finding a new route up the mountain, had been lost, and all that remained was hiking, sheer physical exercise. These mountains weren’t like that. They remained mysterious, intuitive, like true mountains. Dahu often thought that when you start climbing a true mountain, common sense no longer applies. Anomalies always cropped up on the rescue missions he went on. There was this one time when several students got trapped on Nanhu Mountain. The rescue team kept finding discarded clothes along the path at a time when the temperature in the mountains was close to freezing. A young rescuer asked: “Could it be a distress signal?”