by Wu Ming-Yi
Thom said, “Seems like it was once a charming little fishing village. Now all you could do here is film a period flick.”
Alice gave him a cold stare and said, “Actually, it’s been plundered.” Maybe because she’d been standing in the mud too long, her feet were quite stuck when it came time to leave. Thom had to help pull her out. Watching the distant smokestacks belch black smoke, Alice suddenly recalled the tabi booties with the separate big toe that Grandma always wore to keep her feet from sinking into the mud.
Alice felt her head hit something when she dove into the ocean that day. Her arms and legs went instantly numb; the water was frigid. Then everything went black. The first thing that crossed her mind after waking up in hospital was Ohiyo. The devastated shoreline was playing on the TV news, and wouldn’t you know it there was Ohiyo.
“She must be looking for me. She has to be. Ohiyo is trying to find me!” Alice removed the IV: ouch! She’d always hated getting shots, and if she was awake and the doctor said she needed a shot she would definitely make a scene. Alice ran a bit, deliberately making a detour to give the nurse she’d just bumped into the slip. When she got to the entrance, she pretended to be going out for a stroll just like a regular patient. Luckily she was wearing her own T-shirt, just not the one she had been wearing when she had jumped out the window.
Dahu must have brought it for me. He knows I do not like to wear hospital gowns, Alice thought. She had jumped into a taxi before panicking when she realized she had no money on her. She sure hoped Dahu would be at the Sea House when she got there. But when the driver saw the mess on the shore he didn’t even ask her to pay.
“You live here, ma’am? You can’t live here anymore. The houses have all been flooded. Forget the fare, it’s on me.”
“No, I insist. I just don’t have money on me is all.” Alice took down his license and phone number and promised, “I’ll send it to you tomorrow!”
Moon and Stone were the first to see her there, and their barking caught the attention of Dahu and a few police officers. Dahu came right over. His shirt was extremely wrinkled, and he had obvious bags under his eyes. He looked like he’d had an unfortunate life. There were people there, maybe the police or from some disaster relief agency, cordoning off the Sea House with a ring of a yellow tape.
Dahu said, “They’ve just cleared a spot for the things that fell out of the Sea House. Anything that could be salvaged is there. I was watching.” He did not ask what Alice was doing there, why she wasn’t in hospital. Alice wasn’t surprised, because that was the way he’d always been. Dahu! Don’t you know women like a guy to take charge sometimes?
There was a rotten odor in the air Alice had never smelled before. Maybe it was seaweed mixed with the things that had been washed up on shore by the wave.
“Have you seen Ohiyo?”
Dahu shook his head. Alice wondered whether that meant he’d forgotten about Ohiyo or that he really hadn’t seen her. The coastal villagers were all gathered on the beach talking. Several people waved at her, but from that far off it was hard to say if they were unhappy, in low spirits or what. Whatever they were feeling, they seemed prepared for the worst.
Actually, when the ocean started rising a couple of years ago, the only residents on this stretch of shore who had not moved uphill were the owners of the Sea House and the Seventh Sisid, so there were very few homes left. Everyone was trying to get as far away from the ocean as possible, like it was the plague. Not that it was necessarily any safer in the hills. When they were building the big seaside amusement park and hotel, for instance, they ended up loosening the dip slope of the mountain, and now there were several spots where the shoulder of the highway would always subside after a heavy rain. As Dahu had put it, “The mountains here seem like they might trip and fall at any moment.”
Alice walked over by the Sea House. The coastguard and a few of the cops kept coming over to ask her questions, but she ignored them, speaking only to Dahu. “Is Hafay all right?”
“She’s fine, staying at my place for the time being. You’re welcome to come over, too.”
Alice fell silent, then said, “Dahu, can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“I need you to help me charge the car and park it around here for me. Can you do that? Then I’ll come and drive it away?”
“Sure, but you need to tell me where you’re going.”
“Um, okay, but some other time, I promise. Are our friends around here all doing all right?”
“They’re all well. But everyone’s worried that the sudden hail and the wave are bad signs.”
Bad signs. There had been enough bad signs. Too many. So many that they no longer counted. Alice picked up a blue backpack she’d bought with Thom in Oslo and started packing things she might need. Crossing the cordon, Alice found the home first-aid kit by the Sea House—only one wall had collapsed. Luckily she also found her wallet and cards, which she’d put in a drawer. The sleeping mat she had just bought for Ohiyo and the waterproof hard drive containing photographs of Toto were there, too. She kept picking things up, feeling like here was her life, scattered all over the place. On the verge of tears, she hurried to speak to try to distract herself.
“What happened? Where’d all those things come from?”
“From the sea. The Trash Vortex brought all of it. You remember all those news reports about the Trash Vortex? Plastic refuse thrown away around the world drifting around with the ocean currents, gradually gathering together, until eventually …”
“Oh, that. I remember that. That was big news. Didn’t the government say it would do something about it?”
“You believe the government?” Then, seeming to remember something, Dahu slapped himself on the thigh and said, “Is Ohiyo the black-and-white cat you found?”
“Yeah, I thought you remembered.”
“Aiya, when you suddenly appeared I was so relieved that my mind relaxed for a while there. I didn’t realize what you were asking. There’s a camera guy who apparently got footage of her.”
“Right, I saw it in the hospital. It was on the news.”
“I’ll go find him. He was staying at Hafay’s before the wave. I know what he looks like,” Dahu said, running off into the crowd.
Alice looked off toward the Seventh Sisid. Perched on a rock, it seemed left out in the cold. It was half a lifetime of labor, Hafay’s heart and soul. It was as much part of Hafay as the Sea House was of Alice.
Alice had almost finished packing by the time Dahu returned with a tall man with a buzz cut. They nodded and exchanged greetings, then the man flipped open the monitor on his camera. In the footage, Ohiyo was walking along the refuse-strewn beach and mewling, apparently quite distraught. This was the clip that they had played on the television news. The next part had not gotten airtime: Ohiyo hopping from the beach up onto the road, walking in the direction of the path to the stream where Alice often went to draw water. At the end of the clip Ohiyo disappeared into a thicket of grass.
“I’m a cat person, and this kind of footage is compelling, so I tracked it awhile. It looks like it went that way.”
“Thanks. Dahu, I’m off to find Ohiyo.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, I’m fine by myself, and they need you here. If you can, help me tidy up the stuff that fell out of my house. And take good care of Hafay. See if our friends here need any help. Aiya, what am I saying? You’re already doing these things.”
“All right. But you have to tell me where you’re going to be. I can’t just let you go like this.”
A cop wanted to stop her from leaving, so she looked over imploringly at Dahu.
Dahu came up with a plan. “Here, you take this,” he said, getting out his cell phone to give to Alice. Then he did all the talking for her, saying, “It’s all right. Let her go. Nothing’s going to happen to her. Look, she’s fine. I’ll make sure she goes to the station to report her losses.” The policemen all knew Dahu. This one just waved he
r on, not wanting to argue.
Dahu turned to Alice and said, “You have to answer when I call, all right?” Alice nodded and jogged off. Moon and Stone kept following her.
“Go back! Back! Back to the shore,” said Alice, shooing them away.
Alice walked up the path to the stream hollering, “Ohiyo! Ohiyo!” It was getting dark out, had started drizzling. She slipped the waterproof cover onto her backpack, and put on her raincoat. The path was really slippery, but Alice had walked it a million times. All she could think about was finding Ohiyo as soon as possible, as it would get cold at night and something might happen to her. Alice kept calling Ohiyo, Ohiyo, until she rounded the bend and saw that a huge section of the side slope had slid down and almost buried the path. As it was still a bit light out, Alice assessed the terrain and tried climbing over. But the slide was higher than it looked, so she tried to squeeze through the grass on the other side of the path instead. Then she heard the sound of beating wings.
A few moments later, tens, no hundreds, of butterflies or moths that must have been hiding in the grass until Alice disturbed them flew to the other side of the slide in an undisciplined but seemingly coordinated fashion. The sky was dark now, making it hard to tell their colors. All she could see was that each was the size of her palm. It all happened so suddenly that Alice could not help crying out. And right when she did, she heard a cat’s meow, as well as what sounded like the call of a muntjac. The call was really close, seeming almost to come from the ground beneath her feet.
Alice, who had fallen back onto her butt, managed to free herself from the vines and stems she was tangled up in and get round the slide. The first thing she saw on the other side was Ohiyo emerging from the grass to greet her. Then her heart skipped a beat when she saw an adolescent, a youth with skin like mud, lying on the ground, apparently immobilized, pinned down by earth and rocks. There were tears in his terrified eyes.
An image resurfaced in Alice’s mind, of one time when Dahu caught a muntjac. He and Thom had killed the beast with a gun, then taken turns carrying it down the mountain. They showed Alice a photo of the muntjac in the trap. It was still alive. The animal had a broken leg, and a look of despair, Alice sensed its desire to live. That night she refused to make dinner for them. She felt angry at the men for their nonchalant attitude, and because they had brought back the photo like a trophy or an interesting topic of conversation.
The young man now trapped under the slide had the same expression as that muntjac.
14. Alice
When Atile’i saw the woman appear before him, he remembered the Roaring Rite the Earth Sage had taught him. The Earth Sage said, if you encounter anything you are unable to understand, then roar with the strength that lies beside your beating heart and you will speak with the voice of your true self and even evil spirits will flee. Atile’i tried roaring now, but as soon as he opened his mouth and yelled his heart and leg began to ache, as if someone had taken a stone knife and minced his spirit into fish paste. That’s how painful it was! So after yelling a few times Atile’i started to cry.
The Earth Sage said, “To let a single tear fall is to submit, to plead for help, to render all rituals inefficacious.”
At first the woman seemed frightened by Atile’i’s Roaring Rite, for she screamed and fell off the earthen mound. Then she scrambled back up again and embraced the animal that seemed so strange to Atile’i’s eyes. Soon, maybe because she discovered Atile’i could not hurt her, the woman started examining him; and when she realized his leg was confined, a look of concern appeared on her face. After a while, she forced a smile, as if to offer him reassurance, and then she started helping him move the rocky earth off his leg. Maybe because of the pain, or maybe for some other mysterious reason, Atile’i’s tears kept falling. He was like a sea turtle that has been stopped from going back where it belongs.
The woman was not the same as the white people Atile’i had imagined or seen in books. She had another kind of translucent skin, sort of like a jellyfish. The woman was not tall, and might even be a bit shorter than Atile’i. After freeing him, she kept talking and gesturing, but he could not understand a thing. The only thing he could be certain of was that the woman probably did not bear him ill. Her movements and tone of voice told him that. Atile’i tried to say a few words to her in reply, but she did not understand, either. Then, out of gratitude, he started to imitate the birdcall he had learned while lying there just now to take his mind off the pain. Atile’i pursed his lips and let air through his lips and throat to produce a sound that was at times resonant, at times warbling. This was the sound of thanksgiving. The woman looked at Atile’i with surprise, as if she had seen a bird that could speak a human tongue.
“A sound can fly over any land, like a wave on any sea,” Atile’i remembered the Sea Sage saying. Without a doubt, the Sea Sage was truly wise.
Atile’i, too, remembered what happened after he dove into the ocean, afraid someone would discover him. His body was abnormally warm, the water relatively cold, so when he dove in the frigid seawater it initially felt scalding hot. He swam for his life, like a wounded barracuda spotted by a shark. He swam for he did not know how long, until his chest ached terribly and his spirit was ready to leap out of his throat. Then a great force flooded in from behind. Sensing the approach of a huge wave, he went promptly limp and let himself get tossed about. Atile’i clearly saw that the wave was pushing him toward land, and all around him were the strange things from the island. Underfoot and underarm, behind his back and before his eyes, Atile’i was wrapped up in a mixture of shore and sea, as if he was just another piece of the island.
Atile’i thought his spirit would depart when he hit land, but fortunately it remained in his body when the wave retreated. He hid inside a big rock. That rock was very strange: it was hollow, and around it were similar rocks, as if rocks also had the gift of imitating one another, just like people. He was shivering now, maybe because he had been soaking in the water too long. He had an instinctive desire to run toward dry land, assuming this was his only hope of survival. There was a group of people in the distance wearing strange clothes and carrying strange tools. Atile’i was careful to avoid them, doing his best to imitate the grass as he moved.
Inside a clump of grass, Atile’i had his first opportunity to size the place up. It was really peculiar: the land on one side was extremely high, and the land beyond the high land higher still, as if it led all the way up to the sky. The Earth Sage would never believe me if I told him. But was this Earth Sage’s turf, too? Did he even know about the existence of such a large expanse of land?
Atile’i started to run toward the highland. He ran and ran, until he felt his body was not listening to him anymore. In the time it takes for a fish to get caught on the hook, he felt something press down upon his leg. Before he knew it he could no longer move.
“I’m caught! I am caught by many stones. Oh venerable Kabang, please save me,” Atile’i muttered.
Atile’i could only lie helpless on his side, immobile. He remembered the way to dispel pain that the elders had taught him: imagine that you are a fish. Elders often said that of all the creatures the fish was the least afraid of pain, for a hooked fish can still strive mightily with a fisherman for a long time before its life passes away. If a person got hooked, he would likely submit in the blink of an eye.
“A man of Wayo Wayo only gives up when his blood stops flowing, just like a fish, for we are people of the sea,” the Sea Sage had said.
Lying on the ground, Atile’i carefully observed this new world. In every respect, in its colors, scents and sounds, it was different from Wayo Wayo. Of course it was also different from the island on the sea. So this was what the world was like: you pass through something and come out the other side, and the world there is somewhat similar but not quite the same. Atile’i was pleased with himself for coming to this realization.
Then he heard the sound of the woman’s footsteps. Then he saw the woman.
&n
bsp; After releasing Atile’i from his earthly bondage, the woman kept repeating the same things over and over again to him. From her gestures, Atile’i guessed that she wanted him to stay put. Atile’i did not remain there in order to wait for her. In fact, he had no choice in the matter, because his leg was broken, and a person with a broken leg cannot go anywhere. Worse, a man with a broken leg could never become a good fisherman, and his diving would suffer as well.
“Never again will I have the chance to become a real Wayo Wayoan man,” Atile’i thought, despairing like a gull caught in a gawana.
15. Dahu
Hafay felt a hot flash the moment the hail started coming in through the roof. Even her bones got goose bumps. It was the same feeling she’d had the night before the flood destroyed the village that year in Taipei. She looked over and those two foolish reporters were still shooting. Hafay had no time to think. She yelled for them to get upstairs immediately, but they still looked like they had no idea what was going on.
“Hurry up or it’ll be too late,” Hafay shouted, right before the wave hit.
Experience told her that the second wave is often the worst, so as soon as the first wave receded Hafay got them to run up to the road. Han picked up his camera, piggybacked Lily, and waded toward shore without looking back. Hafay followed close behind, and hard on her heels the wave was silently flooding in another time.
This time it was the sound of the wave that left people paralyzed.
Standing up on the road, or what was left of it now that most of the foundation had been scoured away, Hafay looked back just in time to witness one of the walls of the Seventh Sisid collapse, as if to the rhythm of the retreating wave.
“Oh Ina,” Hafay murmured to the sea.
