The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  At first, she was thinking of letting someone more suitable adopt Ohiyo, or taking her to the animal shelter. But every time she put her in the pet carrier she had bought from the vet she couldn’t help letting her out and stroking her head as she licked her hands with her flickering tongue. Ohiyo, seeming to understand that this person who was petting her needed her, would sit shamelessly on Alice’s lap while she was writing or, even more brazenly, right on top of her notebook, and there was no way she was moving. The little lass knew Alice could not bear to push her away. All Alice could do was try to keep writing, or stare blankly out to sea. The sea was not the same color as when she was a girl. It was a bit darker and grayer now, rarely glowing with its own light. It was like some despairing middle-aged woman one occasionally runs into on the street, who’s been married awhile and has now started to put on weight.

  Sometimes Alice would think and think or write and write and end up falling asleep at her desk. At some point Ohiyo would always give herself a shake and spring out the window. Alice would worry she was gone for good, but she discovered Ohiyo had figured out the stunt of hopping from stool to stool to reach the shore. She’d also learned to swim. Watching through the backdoor window, Alice saw Ohiyo squeeze headlong into a thicket of grass. She didn’t know whether it was a coincidence, but the most solitude she could stand before getting suicidal was two or three hours, and just when Alice’s thoughts tended in that direction Ohiyo would make a nimble entrance. Her meowing was just the thing to ward off Alice’s thoughts of leaving the world, as if someone had deliberately bolted the invisible gate that led toward the land of death.

  For the longest time after entering the academy Alice used a computer to increase her productivity. When speech recognition became popular later on Alice followed suit. So it felt kind of awkward when she went back to writing by hand, and there were lots of characters she’d forgotten how to write. Editing was even more of a problem, because now she couldn’t just click undo. Sometimes she’d be on the last line and make a mistake and have to crumple up the page and start over. But Alice liked this feeling: the characters had to settle in her mind a bit longer before they could take shape on the paper, stroke by stroke, like stalks of grass rustling out of the ground until she cut them down with the mower and waited for them to grow again. No matter how hard she tried, Alice could not remember why she used to like writing fiction when she was younger. Maybe the feeling was gone never to return, like all the migratory birds that had stopped visiting the island. Observing herself slowly turning into a word machine these past few years, Alice had become extremely short-tempered, and took it out on the scholarly articles she was asked to review. You draw a salary for producing this kind of garbage? The nerve! she always thought. Eventually, Alice got a reputation in the academic world for being unfathomably harsh. “Don’t send her articles,” people would whisper. Soon she was isolated, the way a vicious fish might be put in a Plexiglas separation chamber in an aquarium.

  A few days before, Alice had gone to a new bookstore in town to get the right notebook. The prevalence of computers did not seem to have decreased the number of notebooks on the market. Lots of people still enjoyed having a booklet close at hand, jotting things in it when they felt like it. The store had a large selection. Alice took a liking to a notebook with a blue cover without any lettering. But the “paper” inside felt really neat to the touch. The clerk explained, “It’s made in Germany. It’s really cool. You can also buy a vial of this correction fluid. It’s an organic plant-extract, and you use it wherever you want to erase and rewrite. It erases just like that, no sweat. The paper is made out of hemp fiber but has the texture of traditional paper.”

  “Amazing, fake paper that’s just like the real thing.”

  “No, no, miss, this is real paper.”

  Well, the clerk was right. Maybe she’d fallen into a kind of intellectual trap. She’d started with a preconceived notion of paper and regarded anything that seemed “like paper” as fake paper or a replacement for paper. She felt that the whole world seemed to be of the same composition as this paper, but she could not say how, at least not until she got home and another thought occurred to her. About a dozen years before, people had started promoting “green living” or “slow living,” and so forth, but this was just the latest fad. The people of this island basically pursued whatever was popular, not because it was significant but because it was “the latest.” Saying “this is the latest” to Taiwanese people was like casting a spell on them, or like playing the melody of a magic flute that made whosoever heard it follow along. And this paper seemed to provide temporary repose to all such newfangled notions. But it was not a digital repose. It was writing out one stroke at a time the characters that appeared really necessary, worth preserving for all eternity.

  “Yes, I guess it is, in that sense.”

  Alice bought a stack of notebooks in one go. Sitting by the Sea Window, she would write poems in the shape of a mouse’s tail, in imitation of Alice in Wonderland. Sometimes she’d draw Ohiyo fast asleep, or copy out Toto’s insect notes: highland red-belly swallowtail butterfly (Mount Li), Chinese hairstreak (Mount Ninety-Two in Nantou County), jewel beetle (Plum Mountain in Chiayi County), midnight luster stag beetle (Mystery Lake), moon-gazer stag beetle (Lala Mountain) … Alice discovered that insects sometimes had very charming names. They got more and more familiar until she pretty much had them all memorized. Now it was like her mind contained a forest, a mountain.

  Today Alice would try writing fiction again. For a while, she thought she could keep writing stories on this paper. She would finish one, erase it and write another, over and over again. One day a reader might think he was reading a single story when he was actually reading countless stories. But right at this moment, all she had in her mind was an opening:

  Nobody has ever seen the forest she now beholds, like a forest in a novel that has grown into a real wood.

  That was as far as she had gotten. Didn’t matter, though, because in any case she was no longer writing with a particular end in mind. Besides, maybe a single sentence could be considered a complete story. She put down her pen and poked her head out the window, wanting to enjoy the nice weather, only to discover a bunch of people setting up tents on the beach all the way from her house to the Seventh Sisid, some even pointing cameras right at her place. She couldn’t believe her eyes. When the cameras noticed the lady of the house sticking her head out, it was like they’d found a new quarry: all of them turned toward her as if they were synchronized.

  Alice was momentarily dazzled, by the hue of the sun and the glare off the water. The light turned into a kind of strange vibration. It confined her, confused her. Her chest was ready to burst; something inside her yearned to escape. Then, in the midst of a mind glitch, she suddenly dove out the window, like a dolphin.

  These days wherever Dahu went, he would think of the scene that day in the mountains: a gorge shrouded in a milky mist, a young man appearing out of nowhere like rain.

  Could someone really “go back” to the mountains? Dahu was watching Umav, who was unclipping her hair to check whether her bangs were even with rapt, undivided attention.

  They were eating at the Old Shandong Noodle House. A regular patron, Dahu ordered the usual: a plate of noodles and a bowl of meatball soup. And Umav had beef dumpling soup. Though Umav had Bunun features, her skin was extremely fair. Aboriginal kids like Umav had been born and raised in the city. The TV they watched and the kids they met mixed fashions and lifestyle trends from Taiwan, the United States, Japan, Korea and a few other countries; they learned their fashion sense and way of life from the internet. Dahu wondered whether Umav’s generation was a new breed of Bunun. Umav reclipped her hair and started jamming away at the air keyboard on the edge of the table. Dahu waited for a pause in her performance before asking: “What’s the tune?”

  “ ‘The Happy Blacksmith.’ ”

  “Oh, ‘The Happy Blacksmith.’ ”

  A few years befor
e, Dahu had followed the latest trend in children’s education and sent Umav for piano lessons. This appeared to be her favorite activity. But Dahu was utterly ignorant. He did not know who had composed “The Happy Blacksmith” or what the notes were. Since he’d never met a blacksmith in his entire life, he wondered why the blacksmith would be happy instead of sad. Come to think of it, the blacksmiths in some of the movies he’d seen all looked pretty glum, at least when they were striking the iron. Anyway, maybe there weren’t any blacksmiths left at all anymore.

  On TV, the beautiful anchorwoman was reporting on an incredible news story in a broadcaster’s standard Mandarin. The volume was turned way up, but the speaker seemed to be broken and the sound kept breaking up. All you could make out from the spluttering speaker was words like “trash,” “island,” and “Pacific.” The anchorwoman’s voice was strident and shrill. For some reason TV stations today seemed to favor such loud news anchors.

  The Old Shandong Noodle House was a greasy spoon, but Dahu found this kind of restaurant had the tastiest side dishes. The proprietor wasn’t from Shandong at all. He was a local, born and bred in Haven. He changed the name after his son married a girl from Shandong. After she arrived Dahu thought the taste of the dumplings changed, and later he realized it was the skin that had changed, not the filling.

  Dahu got the remote control, turned it down a bit, spread out the greasy newspaper on the table and found that the report he’d just seen on TV was front-page news. The headline read, COAST IN CRISIS! TRASH VORTEX ABOUT TO ENGULF TAIWAN.

  [staff report] Taiwan is about to be sucked into the Trash Vortex! In 1997, the oceanographer Charles J. Moore was the first to discover that a vast tract of the north Pacific was strewn with plastic trash, forming what can be described as the world’s largest garbage dump. Others have called it the Plastic Continent or the Trash Vortex. The vortex had been kept in place by swirling underwater currents, typically ranging from 500 nautical miles off the coast of California all the way to Japan.

  Moore has described how he discovered the vortex one year while en route to the start of the Transpac sailing race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. It was the day before the big race and without realizing he steered his craft into the “North Pacific Gyre.” He thought he had stumbled into some kind of alternate dimension. In the gyre the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it. Moore was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish. His ship plowed through the stuff day after day, taking about a week to reach the other side. At the time Moore believed there was over a hundred million tons of flotsam circulating in the north Pacific, divided into eastern and western garbage patches in orbit around Hawaii. That was in 1997. Now it’s even more massive, totaling at least two hundred million tons.

  Mr. Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He launched the Algalita Marine Research Institute. To him, containing the Trash Vortex had the same symbolic significance as humanity’s efforts to combat global warming. And he was willing to lead the fight. Marcus Eriksen, the former research director at Algalita, says that historically the trash entering the North Pacific Gyre has biodegraded. But modern plastics and composites are so durable that intact items thrown away half a century ago can still be found in the Trash Vortex today. A number of charitable foundations have reserved funding for scientists analyzing its composition or searching for a solvent that would “obliterate” the garbage, but the search has proven elusive, because any solvent that can dissolve plastic would release toxic chemicals into the water, potentially hastening ocean death in and around the vortex.

  Based on scientific analysis, about a fifth of the trash is from ships and oil rigs, while the rest has been dumped into the ocean by Pacific Rim nations. Because the confetti of plastic rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water’s surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. It can only be seen passing along the hull of a ship. The tiny plastic pellets of which the vortex is composed act like chemical sponges, absorbing hazardous chemicals like hydrocarbons and DDT, which then enter the food chain. People have also discovered lighters, toothbrushes and plastic syringes in the stomachs of the dead seabirds and sea turtles that mistook these things for food. Dr. Eriksen said that what goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It’s that simple.

  The Algalita Marine Research Institute went bankrupt after over a decade of operation, but the Trash Vortex is still floating around in the ocean. It has now fragmented into several parts, one of which is headed west across the north Pacific. Taiwan lies right in its path. Several years ago, the Ministry of Environmental Resources and the US government discussed the possibility of skimming or turning the vortex in the event of an emergency, but the job was simply too big, and even if it had been possible to sweep it up, nobody knew where the waste should be buried. At the present juncture, the Kuroshio current is pushing part of the vortex toward Taiwan. The Ministry has put out an evacuation advisory notice for east-coast residents, because nobody knows what harmful substances the nonbiodegradable waste in the vortex might contain.

  This is unbelievable, Dahu thought. He told Umav, “There’s a trash island floating this way.”

  “What trash island?”

  “It’s made of stuff like this,” said Dahu, yanking at the plastic tablecloth. “We keep throwing this kind of thing in the ocean. Gradually a heap of garbage formed, and when it got big enough it turned into an island.”

  “Are my slippers on the island?”

  “Possibly.”

  “What about your binoculars?”

  “Probably.”

  “What about Mummy’s headband?”

  Dahu didn’t reply. Umav found a headband somewhere when she was very small. He knew it was Millet’s as soon as he saw it. It was a little thing he had forgotten to throw out, maybe on purpose. Umav asked him whether it was Mummy’s, and he shook his head. Umav said it was, and he said it wasn’t. “Yes it is,” she said, and put it away before he had a chance to reply. But it had floated off somewhere in the flood. Dahu thought Umav had forgotten all about it.

  At the mention of his binoculars Dahu recalled again what had happened that day.

  After taking Alice for a hike along the rescue route, Dahu had a sudden intuition about another route he could try. He went up alone, only to suffer a string of bad luck. What bugged him the most was the loss of his trusty binoculars, which had been with him through thick and thin for over a decade, until they fell into the creek in a moment of carelessness while he was arranging things in his backpack. They were brand-name binoculars he’d bought back in his student days, eating nothing but instant noodles for months in order to save up the money. Because they’d fallen right against the base of the cliff, it appeared he would never retrieve them. In a huff, Dahu decided to call it a day. He took out a betel leaf he had picked at the foot of the mountain and folded up the two ends. Then he used his Swiss army knife, first to poke a hole in each end of the leaf, then to sharpen the end of a strip of bamboo, which he passed through the holes in the leaf to make an improvised platter. He had picked arrow bamboo shoots on the way up. Now he prepared them one by one: you pinched the tip and swiveled the base around to remove a vertical strip down the sheath, then the whole sheath would just come off. He wanted to make a soup.

  Just as he was about to build the fire, he seemed to see a human form walking toward the edge of the gorge.

  Usually in a situation like this Moon and Stone would give chase, but that evening the two dogs didn’t move a muscle, like they hadn’t noticed anything. Dahu shouted and it was like they’d suddenly realized what was going on. Dahu went after him, but he did not run, afraid that if the fellow was a mountain climber, Dahu might frighten him and cause an accident. Instead, he tried talking to him: “Hey there, what’s up? I’m just up here hunting. Care to join me for a drink? I’ve got some f
ine tea with me, and there’s wine as well.”

  He and his dogs tried to approach the man, but the man kept his distance. Apparently he was of medium build, but he also seemed to be a muscular young man. Dahu was ready to give up, thinking it was just some guy, probably someone in the habit of coming up alone just like him. Why not leave him alone? But when Dahu stopped, he was certain he sensed the man waving at him. Before Dahu had a chance to react, Moon and Stone went after him. Dahu had to follow along.

  The chase proceeded in a tacit, single-file arrangement: the man, Stone, Moon, with Dahu pulling up the rear. It carried on for about half an hour before the man ducked under a bush. Dahu, about a dozen meters behind, could barely make out the man’s movements in the faint moonlight. Dahu reached the bush, hesitated for a second, then crouched down and went in. Up ahead, Moon and Stone were barking like crazy, like they’d suddenly seen something. It started raining harder and harder, with the raindrops pattering down on the tree canopy above. Dahu hastily put on his water-resistant jacket.

  The space under the bush was too low even for a Bunun. Dahu was crouching so much he had to prop himself up with his hands. He was almost crawling part of the way. Finally he was able to stand up straight, right when a dark cloud hid the moon from view. Dahu groped around in the darkness and found that he had arrived beneath a huge rocky outcrop. Moon and Stone had run off somewhere, so Dahu felt along with his hand to see whether the path ahead was level or not. It turned out not to be: there was a pit right in front of him, as wide as a man’s outstretched arms. To one side was the huge root of a cypress tree, and the tree shade made it even harder to see the pit, which looked deep, even bottomless, in the darkness. Momentarily unable to keep his breathing regular, he got some rain up his nose and coughed so hard his chest hurt. Had that man lured him here to show him this pit?