The Man with the Compound Eyes

by Wu Ming-Yi

  Why not try it barehanded, with no gear?

  These questions fascinate him, stirring the blood in his veins. At some point the man gets up, fastens the chalk bag to his waist, changes into his rock-climbing shoes, and starts slowly climbing down the rock he sees in front of him. All inhibitions have been overcome; nothing can stop him now.

  In the darkness, the cliff is like a knife and a shadow, hard to grasp. The man has strained his senses and used up almost all his strength, only managing to get five meters down. It is still not too late to go back up. But the man does not go back … or, one should say, he doesn’t go back up. He continues his descent, first feeling around with the tip of his toes, and then shifting his weight when he finds a new foothold. He tries to maintain three points of contact and to avoid overburdening his shoulders and fingers on either side. If you could see him in the darkness you would exclaim, What a superb climber! He is bold and focused, his body consummately trained and possessing a simian aplomb.

  Right then, the man hears someone else on the cliff, and not that far away.

  A climber can hear the faintest of sounds when he concentrates his attention. Everything is audible: fingers thrusting into the muck, fingertips slipping over moss. If there’s food digesting in his gut or force being sent to his toetips he can hear it. But at this particular moment the man hears something else, the sound of breathing. Clearly there is another climber up there.

  Another person blind climbing? On the same cliff?

  That sound stokes his competitive streak. Unconsciously, his movements quicken. It is like a test of strength between the two men in the darkness. The other makes haste, too, and his every move is conveyed through the rhythm of his breathing and the occasional faint rustling of his clothes. Neither needs to be told which of them is one step ahead, which of them is the swifter at finding the next toehold.

  That’s when the man’s dreamscape reappears.

  In a moment of carelessness, his foot slips and his movements suddenly accelerate. The force of the fall pulls his left hand away from the wall for a hundredth of a second. With the man’s usual reaction speed, he should have enough time to grab hold of the rock again, but just at that moment, very unfortunately, something like an enormous beetle flies right into the bridge of his nose, momentarily dazing him and sapping his strength for a hundredth of a second. He starts falling. The clouds and constellations disperse, everything around him dissolves into darkness, and all that remains is void.

  His shattered helmet lies on the ground. The pain is excruciating, as if every bone in his body has been snapped. This is not a dream. An irksome rain begins to fall. It should be falling on the grass where he is lying, but somehow it sounds as if it’s falling into an abyssal lake.

  He can only get his eyes halfway open, and, blurry-eyed, all he can see is a shadow kneeling by his side. The shadow says, “Broken, every bone.” The man can’t tell from his voice whether he is the blind climber just now, but from his smell there is no doubt about it.

  “Am I dead?”

  “Pretty much. Fall in a place like this and you’ll be dead before anyone finds you.”

  This is absurd. It does not sound like the man has any intention of saving him.

  “Can you help me?”

  “No, I can’t help anyone,” comes the reply, impassive, unwavering, unhesitating.

  In spite of his physical pain, the man is quite conscious, and his vision gradually clears. He notices his counterpart is looking at him, but when their eyes meet it is less like he is looking at someone else and more like he is looking at himself. He closes his eyes again but finds himself haunted by the other’s eyes. What amazing eyes the fellow has, as if innumerable tiny ponds have converged into an immense lake.

  How come it looks like he has compound eyes? How could a person have compound eyes? Am I seeing things? the man thinks to himself. The man with the compound eyes has no intention to help or leave. He is just looking at the man quietly.

  Then, for some reason, drowsiness overwhelms him. He starts to yawn. At first he yawns once every half a minute, then once every fifteen seconds, then ten, then five, until he is yawning nonstop, with tears in his eyes. Then he passes out.

  Later he wakes, not knowing how much time has passed. He still feels sore all over, but is now actually able to sit up, and then stand. He can move without difficulty, except that any time he moves an injured part of his body he feels a heart-wrenching agony. It is as if all that remains of this body of his is a leaden despair. Noticing that the man with the compound eyes is still there, he tries asking for help one more time.

  “Doesn’t matter if you don’t save me, but my son is up there, on top of the cliff. I beg you, please save him.”

  “I can’t save anyone,” replies the man, impassive, unwavering, unhesitating. “Not to mention that there’s nobody up there to save.”

  “Nonsense! My son is up there! I don’t care who you are, but please, please, I’m begging you, you’ve got to do something!” The man doesn’t know where he found the strength to shout.

  “You know very well …” the man says, his innumerable ommatidia flickering, his compound eyes like an undertow that would suck you in, drag you down and drown you, “… there’s nobody up there, at all. Nobody at all.”

  27. The Forest Cave

  A dinner with too much millet wine had put them all in a mood of disoriented rapture. So when Umav suggested they go spend the night in the Forest Church, everyone agreed it was a great idea, including Detlef and Sara, who hadn’t understood a word.

  Standing in front of Heaven’s Gate, a name Anu had given to the two massive weeping fig trees at the entrance to the Forest Church, everyone was shining his or her flashlight up and down the trees from various angles and listening to an intricate symphony, of the breeze blowing through the grove, owls hooting in the trees, muntjacs calling from mountains over yonder, insects chirping nigh, and Stone and Moon barking from time to time. Detlef and Sara still didn’t know what was going on. Having no idea of the Forest Church, they’d assumed this would be a light evening stroll, not a hike through a primeval forest.

  Then Anu, who’d looked drunk to begin with, walked to the front of the group, faced the “House of the Ancestors” to the one side of Heaven’s Gate and began performing a libation. People who don’t understand Bununese would on first hearing think it sounds like pieces of wood knocking together. It is a solid, seemingly rooted, arboreal language. His prayer complete, Anu took out the wine flask and shot glass he carried at the hip, poured the wine into the glass and sprinkled it on the ground. Then he poured another glass and passed it around so each could say a prayer in his or her own language and take a tiny sip of the wine. Dahu held Umav’s hand and they recited a Bunun prayer. Hafay prayed in Pangcah, Detlef in German, and Sara in Norwegian.

  “No problem, the forest can understand what everyone’s saying,” Anu said, immediately returning to his usual jocular self and lightening the somewhat solemn atmosphere a bit.

  “There might be big brothers and sisters here, so you need to poke the grass with a stick as you go along,” said Anu, his voice softening. “A big brother or sister is a poisonous snake. We mustn’t just say ‘snake.’ That would be disrespectful.” Then he turned his voice back up to its original volume and said, “Everyone follow me. Don’t shine your flashlight in people’s eyes, and listen to the footsteps of the person ahead.” Dahu translated Anu’s words into English for Detlef and Sara.

  Anu took everyone down his favorite hunting path. Over ten years before a developer had wanted to buy the land and build a columbarium on it. To protect a forest in which the Bunun had always hunted, Anu tried getting a bank loan to buy the land. He got more than he bargained for. He had no head for money management and was soon drowning in debt. There were a few times when he was ready to give up and sell, but fortunately later on he got support from some aboriginal villagers and Han Chinese friends and was able to make ends meet. The past few years the fo
rest had become a place for tourists to experience Bunun culture. Several years before, Anu’s youngest son Lian had gone into the forest to check the village water supply, and maybe because he forgot to pray to the ancestral spirits or because his prayers were not pious enough, a fig branch that had cracked in a typhoon came crashing down just as poor Lian was passing by. Lian was no longer breathing by the time he was discovered that evening. Long estranged from his wife, raising his sons alone, Anu would go into the forest every day to seek solace. Anu did not blame the forest. It was only doing its duty, by growing, shedding leaves, dying, or by fatally crushing a Bunun youth who just happened to be walking underneath.

  So Anu had a peculiar feeling whenever he regarded this particular stand of fig, phoebe and autumn maple trees. It was not something he could tell the people around him about. He always imagined that one of the aerial roots hanging down from one of the weeping figs was his son’s avatar, a notion that fortified his resolution to guard the forest. When he took visitors on eco-cultural tours here, he would ask them to experience the forest one sense at a time. They would close their eyes and touch a tree root, lean on the tree and smell a wild mushroom, taste prickly ash leaves, and listen to a certain birdcall to judge how far away it was. It was as if by getting these people to do these things, at least a few of them would be able to smell, touch, hear or sense his son’s spirit. To him, in some form or other, Lian was still alive.

  He led the group before a giant boulder in the crushing embrace of a gnarled old tree that had perched on top of it, wrapping its twisted roots around it. Underneath the rock was a small cave where Bunun hunters waited out the rain. Dahu was himself a guide, and Hafay and Umav had been there many times. Anu said, “The cave knows everyone here but our guests.” He wanted Detlef and Sara to go in and let the cave “get to know them.”

  There was space for two grown-ups in the cave, though for westerners of Detlef and Sara’s height it was quite a squeeze. Dahu retold his joke about how being over 170 cm tall was a disability among the Bunun, adding that Detlef, who was close to 190 cm, must be severely height challenged. A man of this height would tend to get tripped or tied up by the vines and creepers as he runs through the forest, seriously limiting his pace.

  “Actually, there’s caves like this everywhere in the forest, some in rocks, some formed by rainstorms and rockslides. But don’t ever take shelter in caves in trees and rocks above a certain altitude. Those caves tend to be bear dens. If the bear happens to come back and finds an uninvited guest, it’ll catch you,” Anu said, “and take you to the police station.”

  After this burst of banter, Anu let them rest there for the time it takes to have half a cigarette, then guided them to another place where he had tied a rope up a huge fig tree to a height of about two and a half stories. The forest floor was slippery from all the recent rain, and Anu kept reminding everyone to be a bit more careful.

  Anu quite liked these two unassuming foreigners. Detlef had an academic background, but he didn’t act like a big professor who would throw his weight around. He was like a worldly wise elder, while Sara was a person with the courage to try new things. Anu knew he’d have no trouble getting along with Sara from the moment she downed the first glass of millet wine he poured for her.

  “Anyone who drinks his wine in one gulp, no matter how it tastes, is probably a friend,” Anu’s father had told him once when he was young.

  There were no lights on anywhere nearby. Now Anu wanted the two of them to experience what it was like to travel the forest by night, so he advised everyone to turn off his flashlight and follow the person in front by holding hands or listening for the sound of breathing.

  Which was why no one noticed when Hafay, who was last in line, stayed behind and ducked into the cave under the rock.

  Hafay’s heart was pounding the first time Umav brought her to the Forest Church. She felt she’d finally found a vessel that could contain her, a shell in which she could hide like a hermit crab. From then on, when no one was watching, Hafay would go into the forest by herself and crawl into the cave and rest like a bear in hibernation, thinking of nothing at all.

  Though she was aboriginal, Hafay had pretty much spent her whole life in the city, and even after returning to the east coast she still passed most of her time in Haven. When she opened the Seventh Sisid, Pangcah friends invited her to join her age set, participate in the local Pangcah tribal order, and live there with them. But after taking part in a few age set activities, she still didn’t feel like she fit in, no matter how friendly the people were, even when she was dancing. Sometimes she would run into former customers. So, to avoid embarrassment, Hafay started to withdraw from tribal village life.

  But the first time she set foot in the Forest Church, the damp air and the smells of the roots and the grass made her feel that she was in her element. She liked the way the weeping figs survived by growing aerial roots that went down, down, down until they reunited with the earth and helped prop up the parent tree. She liked the scarred old trees even more. A split in the bark was sealed and healed by the tree’s own sap. As if all pain would pass.

  If Ina were still alive she would like it here.

  Ina died because she just would not take her girlfriends’ advice. After her life settled down again, Ina fell in love with another customer, assuming every guy was like Old Liao, who had loved her in his own way. Hafay did not get too worked up when she finally got the call from the madam at the massage parlor, maybe because she had already foreseen Ina’s death when Ina dove into the creek and finally found Old Liao’s body. Except this time Ina ended up dying underwater, as she had countless times in Hafay’s dreams. The black flower of Ina’s long hair bloomed forever, and Ina would never float back up again.

  The girls in the massage parlor said that Ina had gone out with Big Tom. Nobody knew who Big Tom was, except that he was a new guy Ina was seeing. And nobody knew how or why she’d died. Only one thing was certain, that the money in Ina’s account had all been withdrawn, and by Ina herself, so that the police had no leads, no way of pressing the investigation. Luckily Ina had opened another account for Hafay, so her life did not have to start from zero.

  Now, under cover of darkness, hiding out for the time being in the cave, Hafay felt so much better. It was dark in here but not like in the little rooms in the massage parlor. This small cave insulated you from the sound outside, so when you first came in you heard your own heart beating as well as a slight ringing in your ears. Hafay had drunk quite a bit tonight, and she just needed to be by herself in the cave for a little while, for a brief respite from the rain.

  Dahu noticed Hafay was not with the group when he was helping everyone rope climb up that humungous weeping fig. But he guessed she had gone into the cave for some alone time, something he often did himself. That cave was inviting. It made you want to crawl in and see what it was like. He decided to keep quiet so as not to disturb her. Whatever the forest was doing to her he did not need to interfere.

  Anu was telling the two foreigners the tale of the Vavakalun. Over the past two decades he had told this story a thousand times at least. But every time Anu tried to tell it for the first time.

  “In the old times, the Bunun people used to choose big rocks and trees as landmarks. One time the ancestors chose a big tree as a boundary marker. A while later they looked and thought, Hey, that’s strange, that marker appears to have moved. And it doesn’t look quite the same as it did before. Well, as soon as they paid attention they discovered that when this kind of fig tree is mature it dangles its aerial roots all the way down to the ground. Sometimes the parent tree dies but the aerial root survives and becomes a new tree. When it’s been too long since the previous visit, the tribespeople might mistake the new tree for the old one. That’s why we call it Vavakalun, meaning a walking tree.”

  Anu asked Detlef and Sara to touch the roots to see if they could “hear the tree sucking water out of the ground or dividing into two.” They caressed the roots ver
y obligingly. This kind of tree, with its twisting, branching roots, was totally new to them, because it was a species seldom seen in northern countries.

  There in the darkness, feeling the root system of the tree on the boulder, Detlef had realized that one day the roots would crack the rock. There should be some kind of noise when the roots got inside the rock, and when it was finally split asunder there might be an earsplitting sound. Of course, as an engineer, Detlef had confidence in his own expertise, but he had never been so impressed as he was now by what the power of nature, so much greater than his own, was capable of. In this case, the forces involved were beyond calculation. Including the force exerted by the leaf-cutter ant that had just crawled onto the back of his hand.

  Detlef searched in the darkness, and at some moment his eyes found hers and they gazed at one another a brief while.

  The hike had not been that strenuous, but actually they’d been walking down a shadowy hunting path through a miniature tropical wilderness. Detlef had been noticing myriad tiny sounds along the way. He often said that he wasn’t really good at anything, except that he had really good hearing. In this respect he had a gift. He had grown up in a cultivated family. His father was a business manager, his mother a middle-school teacher, and he, an only child, had always been academically inclined. With his exceptionally keen hearing, his favorite activity as a boy was to find something apparently silent and try to “dig” by pressing his ear close to it, trying to hear the subtle sound it was actually making. One time, late at night, he stole out into the garden and dug up an anthill in the flower patch until he was standing in a pit two meters deep. His parents were astonished when they got up the next morning and found a big hole in the garden and Detlef covered in dirt. But they did not scold him, they even let him keep digging wherever he wanted. He got in the habit of testing the terrain wherever he went, crouching down and touching the ground, or propping himself against a rocky outcrop.