The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  He kept coming for about half a year I reckon. It sounds funny but in the last few months I started pretending that I had just gone for dinner with him, or for a stroll at the seashore, or that he’d just gotten off work and was so beat he’d just collapsed facedown on the bed as soon as he came in the door, and I would walk over and give him a massage without a word. I would imagine scenes like this. Sometimes I would even stare at his long pale back and imagine him suddenly turning over and saying something like, “You look great today,” in that deep voice of his, like it was nothing special.

  Of course, nothing of the sort ever happened. I hardly ever said a thing to him face to face, and all he would say to me was thank you. Then he’d put on his hat and leave, not looking up.

  The only time we ever talked was this one time I started singing along with the MTV channel. After I was done, when he was putting on his clothes he asked me whether I liked singing. I said I did. From then on every time he visited he brought me a CD, all English songs I’d never heard before. He said they were all popular songs and that I could learn these songs since I had such a great voice. I can still sing all of them now, because he was the one who gave me the CDs. I even remember the names of the singers. Those singers were really good. It was like each of them had a magic trick only he or she could do.

  Just like Nai said, any guy who comes here is someone else’s husband, boyfriend or dad, so whatever you do, better not get any illusions. But Nai fell in love with a customer who later became her boyfriend, all the same. And I started to look forward to that man’s visits, counting the days until he’d come see me again. I never asked him what his name was or what he did for a living. During the day I put my earphones on and listened to those CDs he gave me until I fell asleep.

  He stopped coming in November of that year. The last time he appeared was the last day of October. I didn’t have his cell phone number or any other way to reach him. All I remember is his back, and all I have are the CDs he gave me.

  When I was massaging the bodies of strange men in those dark little rooms, the rooms you entered when your number was called, I would often wonder what was going on in the next room. I didn’t even know what was going on next door. The wallpaper in the room I usually used was a picture of the seashore, but it was the sea in Greece not here. It was a sea I’d never visited. Anyway, it was just wallpaper the renovator had stuck up for no special reason. You could only see it clearly with the light on, but if you did that you’d discover damp rot in a lot of places. A big sheet of it had peeled away from the wall, and the sea didn’t look the least bit real. It looked the most real when you turned the light down low. In those days, I was living right by the sea, but I rarely went to the shore, because I was sleeping days and working nights.

  I’ll always remember Ina’s expression when she looked out to sea through the train window on our trip back to the east coast. She patted my head and tapped on the windowpane, murmuring things to me about the sea as the Pangcah people know it.

  She said that the original ancestor of our village was the sky god, who lived in Arapanapanayan in the south. By the fourth generation the sky god had six great-grandchildren, the youngest of whom was a girl named Tiyamacan. The sea god took a liking to Tiyamacan, but she was not willing to marry him and hid herself from him wherever she could. The sea god became angry and raised a flood. That sea god would not take no for an answer.

  Tiyamacan’s Ina, Madapidap, missed her daughter very much. She turned into a seabird and flew up and down the coast calling out to her daughter. Her father Keseng climbed the mountain until he found a spot with a view of the sea and turned into a snakebark tree fern. Later on, her eldest brother Tadi’Afo, who had fled into the mountains during the Deluge, became the progenitor of another tribe. Her second brother Dadakiyolo went to the west and became the progenitor of the aboriginal people there. The third son Apotok went south and became the ancestor of some communities away down south. Lalakan and Doci, the fourth and the fifth children, sat in a long wooden mortar and floated on the floodwaters to the summit of Mount Cilangasan. The two of them had no choice but to become husband and wife and continue the family line.

  At first, brother and sister kept having bestial offspring, a serpent, a turtle, a lizard and a mountain frog, but no human children. The brother and sister—no, the husband and wife—felt very, very sad. One day they received the sun god’s blessing and had three normal daughters and a son. They gave them the sun’s surname. I can’t really remember the details, but the long and the short of it is that one of these kids ended up moving to our village and becoming our ancestor.

  Ina said, people will always run around trying to find a place to call home—a place they like and where they can make a living. If you live on this side of the mountain a landslide might force you to the other side. If you live on the plains, other people might force you into the mountains. If you live on an island sometimes you might be able to go to another island. I think Ina knew what she was talking about.

  At the end of the year I calculated how much money I’d saved and realized I already had enough to buy a piece of land and start building the Seventh Sisid. I finally left the business a year later.

  It was hard at first. I had no one to help me, and I had to figure out lots of things on my own. And I discovered something really interesting: when I opened, many people came once and never returned. Guess why? You got it, they were all my old customers. Maybe they weren’t used to seeing me somewhere sunny and bright.

  I sometimes thought that he’d come in someday, order a cup of salama coffee or something, and sit at the Lighthouse, without me being able to recognize him, because whatever he did he wouldn’t take off his shirt to show me his back. After all, just like I said, I only remember his back. I know every mole and polyp on his back, and the color of his skin. But all I know is his back.

  If he had come in, I would have sung the songs on the CDs for him. I would have stood behind him and sung those songs for him.

  21. Through the Mountain

  Detlef Boldt looked down at the island from the plane. It’s been more than thirty years, he thought.

  More than three decades before, when he was a feisty young man, he had participated in the biggest TBM (tunnel boring machine) design the world had ever seen. TBM was a game-changer in tunneling technology, offering an alternative to the traditional drilling and blasting method. Detlef had made a short trip to the island to attend a specialist meeting as a TBM consultant. He did not meet too many people during his short stay, and he only let his old colleague Jung-hsiang Li know he was coming back. He just wanted to enjoy a quiet trip with Sara. Yet the trip was not purely for pleasure, or at least Sara didn’t think it was.

  Sara was a marine biologist with an enduring interest in Norway’s coastal biomes; it was off the coast of Norway that she’d met Detlef. Detlef had been invited to consult on a private methane ice DIP (development investment project). Several of his best students, all specialists in drilling techniques, were on the project team; naturally they asked their old teacher to come on board.

  The survey boat Detlef was on was operating in waters just off the continental shelf where Sara happened to be leading a protest against a whaling vessel. Detlef, taking a none-of-my-business attitude, watched the situation unfold with detachment. He was a man who believed in professional competence, and appeared rather condescending, as if he were standing in judgment over the protesters.

  The protest boat wasn’t large. The “Don’t Massacre the Giants of the Sea” banner they were holding up flapped in the frigid wind, and with Sara’s red hair billowing out in front, it was really an arresting sight. Whether by accident or design, the whaling ship changed course and ended up scraping the protest boat. It was just a scrape, but the difference in tonnage was so great that the protest boat couldn’t absorb the impact without tipping. The protesters fell into the water, and, because it was so close by, the survey boat offered emergency assistance. Luckily, the protester
s were wearing life jackets. They all seemed to know very well how to survive in such a situation, which gave Detlef the impression that the protesters had let the boat go over on purpose. Then, when the redhead, soaking wet, was being helped onto the ambulance, she gave Detlef an unwitting glance, which gave him the “irrefutable” (a term that cropped up frequently in his technical reports) sense that something had hit him.

  Detlef came up with some excuse to visit Sara in hospital, and soon they went on a date to the seashore. As they looked out across the seemingly icy waters of the Norwegian Sea, the lights in the distance were like flickering embers. The couple talked about everything under the sun: from the ecological consequences of methane ice extraction, the whaling industry and changes in coastal shellfish ecology to poetry; Sara used to share her enthusiasm for Keats and Yeats.

  One time they got into a disagreement about whether Norway should continue whaling. Sara said, “The reason you think it’s no big deal is because you’ve never seen a minke whale bleed to death right before your eyes.”

  “But many whalers are whalers because that’s what their forebears have always done.”

  “Yeah, but aren’t there lots of whalers whose forebears weren’t whalers. I mean, can’t people’s occupations change? Can’t tradition change?”

  “Perhaps,” Detlef said. “But you’re also against methane ice mining.”

  “I am,” said Sara.

  “But it’s a resource. The exploitation of this resource isn’t going to hurt anyone.”

  “Not going to hurt anyone? Depends on your definition of ‘anyone.’ Methane ice is different from petroleum. As you well know, scientists now believe that it forms when gas migrates from deep within the crust along faults until it precipitates or crystalizes upon contact with ice-cold polar seawater. Which is to say that methane ice deposits are actually part of the ocean floor. We really don’t understand how much damage extraction might do to the Arctic region. It could well alter fragile landforms and microclimates, couldn’t it? Maybe no people will die, but other life-forms won’t be able to adapt to such dramatic environmental change.”

  “But if we don’t continue to develop, how will humanity survive?”

  “Why not ask how other life-forms will survive if there are too many people? If the population of Homo sapiens were controlled, then we wouldn’t have to extract so much from the environment, would we?”

  “I think,” said Detlef, “that as long as we can keep developing new ways of feeding even more people, as occurred during the Green Revolution, that means that the world can support ‘this many people.’ It’s our generation’s responsibility to feed all the people who are alive in the world.”

  “But in fact,” said Sara, “there’s mounting evidence now indicating that we can’t afford to support ‘this many people,’ and that if everyone lived the way you and I do we’d need three earths. They calculated the ecological footprint at the end of the last century. But the reality is that wealth never reaches the poor, and they’re the ones who have the most mouths to feed. This issue cannot be solved politically or technically, by another Green Revolution. The rich and powerful are already entrenched, and they don’t really care about the people who go hungry.”

  “With all due respect, Sara, isn’t the lifestyle you personally lead quite comfortable?”

  “I do all I can to avoid unnecessary waste. Better to do what you can than not try at all.”

  Detlef pondered the unnecessary waste in his own lifestyle.

  “Lots of people,” Sara continued, “say that feelings aren’t part of the scientific enterprise, but actually all scientists can do as scientists is try to determine what’s true and what isn’t. They can’t tell us what the right choices are. I want to be a person who can offer the decision-makers better choices instead of avoiding all these thorny ethical issues by invoking ‘professional neutrality’ or some such hypocrisy. As long as the human population stops growing, and we change our way of life, there’ll be no need to extract methane ice.” Sara’s red hair was swelling in the ocean breeze, like the only flaming thing in a pale blue fog.

  “Do you know why this place is called Storegga?” Sara tried to clear the air by changing the subject.

  Detlef shook his head.

  “In Norwegian it means ‘the Great Edge.’ Have you heard of the Storegga Slide? It happened thousands of years ago, and in the past few years it’s happened again. For the past several decades, with the acceleration of global warming, hydrates in the shelf frost layer have been melting and bubbles forming. The resulting crystal decomposition has increased sedimentary instability, causing a massive slide of a layer two hundred and fifty meters high and several hundred kilometers wide, practically half the distance from Norway to Greenland. It’s changed the whole coastal ecology. Geologists initially argued that this sort of slide occurs once every hundred thousand years, in synchrony with the Ice Age cycle. You think it’ll be a hundred thousand years before it happens again?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Right, it’s hard to say.” Sara gathered her windblown hair and said, “Probability theory isn’t much use for the prediction of this kind of catastrophe, because there are only two outcomes: either it happens or it doesn’t. To me, if the shelf frost collapses again someday, I wouldn’t want it to be because people have been digging around in the earth. If it happens naturally, I won’t have anything to complain about, because it’s none of my business and out of my control. Whatever happens, I just don’t want it to be because of us. We’re everywhere! Why do people reproduce to the point that we cover the entire planet? Enough already! I don’t have a child and won’t consider having one, either, so I’m not thinking about these issues for the sake of my own offspring.”

  Detlef gazed at Sara’s eyebrows, which were just as fiery red as her hair, and at her brown eyes beneath. The signals were clear: he was enchanted by those eyes. He wanted to deny it, but the truth was irrefutable.

  Actually, Sara had been paying attention to the Trash Vortex for quite some time, ever since oceanologists started observing and arguing about it at the end of the twentieth century. She applied to Norway’s National Science Academy for a grant to study the potential impact of the vortex on Taiwan’s coastal terrain, but as the grant was still under review when the edge of the vortex hit the east coast, Sara decided to pay her own way. What hurt the sea hurt her personally. Now Detlef had an excuse for a return visit: it was only logical that he would take Sara to an island he’d been to himself many years before.

  Jung-hsiang Li picked them up at the airport. He was one of the engineers that had participated in the same tunneling project and the only one who knew about Detlef’s visit. When they first met Li had just gotten married. Now he was a man with a hoarse voice, thinning hair and a bit of a bulge, features which made him look older than his actual age. Back in the day, they had many e-mail discussions about the project in the year before Detlef actually came to Taiwan. They drew up a checklist for the superhard quartz-rich sandstone in the area and considered how to cope with crumbly strata and excessive groundwater inflows. Detlef’s final assessment was that the difficulties involved in digging the tunnel shouldn’t be insuperable, but it might not be worth the time and money: it was a cost-benefit issue. Jung-hsiang Li took the official line: the tunnel is feasible no matter what.

  Detlef knew what this meant. On any project engineers like him were just moles. If he couldn’t get the job done he could get lost. But not even considering his remuneration, Detlef wanted to know as a mechanical designer whether a TBM could drill through the quartz-rich Szeleng sandstone along the route, which contained so much quartz it was basically quartzite. It had a Mohs hardness of between 6 and 7, when steel was only 5! The young Detlef was very confident. Except that the structure of the actual rock stratum might not be quite as “regular” as they imagined from the samples. They had the geological report on a trial borehole several dozen meters deep, but that was just scratching the surfac
e for such a big mountain as this. The actual texture of the heart of the mountain was anyone’s guess. They would just have to improvise. But Detlef didn’t care about any of that. He embraced the challenge. Besides, why not give it a try when someone was providing the funding?

  Except that groundwater inflows might be even scarier than the sandstone. If they penetrated a water-saturated layer during the drilling process, the groundwater would start gushing out, propelling massive amounts of muck at the TBM and causing machinery breakdowns or triggering cave-ins. As a preventative measure, Detlef recommended the addition of a chain-style conveyor as a way of getting the inflows out of the way. After all, any damage to the machine would compromise mechanical smoothness.

  The factory team custom-built two 11.74-meter diameter hard-rock double-shielded TBMs. Even assembling such huge machines was an enormous undertaking that took several months all told. During that time, the most interesting time of day for Detlef was checking his e-mail for progress updates.

  Not surprisingly, there were setbacks when the machine was put into operation. The rock was so hard that the cutters kept developing abnormal wear and tear, and if they were not replaced immediately the diameter of the borehole would shrink. Like a cat trying desperately to get its head into a hollow, the TBM would keep trying to nibble away at the face of the rock; once the outer shield got wedged in there, the machine could only wait helplessly for the workers to come to the rescue. According to the data Detlef received, during the worst of it the cutters had to be changed every 2.3 meters. Moreover, the inflows were much more serious than anticipated, causing frequent shutdowns even with the conveyor.

  When Detlef saw the photographs of the site he had to admit that he had been overly optimistic. Detlef felt a bit depressed, while at the other end of the e-mail Jung-hsiang Li was still bursting with confidence. Engineers like Jung-hsiang Li, and the whole Taiwanese project team in fact, showed an amazing determination to “see the tunnel through.” Detlef fairly admired them for it, but at the same time, inexplicably, it frightened him.