Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

Alice was instinctively suspicious of anyone she might meet in a situation like this. Her heart started racing involuntarily. She was anxious to find a place to hide out of sight of the path, not expecting how incredibly quickly the figure would approach. A tall, bearded man, with a slightly juvenile look came riding along on his bike, stopping by her side.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Alice managed.

“Going to the campground?”

“Yeah.”

“Hop on, I’ll give you a lift.”

“I’m all right.”

“Don’t be scared. Look, this is my staff ID. I saw you yesterday. You’re staying at Charlottenlund Fort Campground, aren’t you? I work there. You’ll be frightened walking alone, and soon it’ll be dark. You can trust me. The forest recognizes my bicycle.” Actually, Alice knew that around this time of year it would not get dark until after nine. But her heart was still racing, which made it hard for her to judge why she felt at a loss — was she nervous, or was there some other reason? She glanced at his bicycle, a road bike without a rear rack.

“On this? How will you give me a lift?”

The man took a detachable rack out of his backpack, mounted it on the seat post, and said: “You couldn’t be more than a hundred pounds; this thing can bear a person of a hundred and forty. No problem.”

So, wearing his backpack over his chest, the man gave Alice and her luggage a ride. Sitting on the rack, Alice rested her hands lightly on the man’s firm waist. Her heart hadn’t slowed a bit. The two of them hung out after they made it back to the camp, talking until dark. The man got a guitar out of his tent and sang songs for her, songs she had grown up listening to. They did not retire to their respective tents until it was too dark to see the windmill generator in the distance.

As she got to know Thom (a common Danish name, as she later discovered) a bit better, she learned that, after all, the beard was deceptive: she actually was a bit older than him, by three years. But in terms of life experience it was the other way around. He had cycled all over Africa. He had navigated a sailboat across the Atlantic and drifted onto some deserted island after the boat broke down. He had trained in Baji-style kung fu. He had run across the Sahara with an ultramarathon team. And he had participated in an interesting sleep experiment, which revisited the research done at Midnight Cave in Texas in 1972 by revising certain experimental conditions. He had spent six full months thirty meters underground.

“What’s it like underground?”

“What’s it like underground? Well, it was actually more like spending time inside a living being.”

Thom was widely experienced and adventurous. Solving problems and taking up challenges was his idea of fun. These were personal qualities generally lacking in the men from the island Alice had grown up on. It all made her a bit giddy. Especially since Thom had such gentle, sparkling eyes.

“You’ve done so many things! What’s next?”

“Mountain climbing. Not in Denmark, though. Denmark is a country without mountains. I’m training in professional rock climbing three days a week in Germany. I’m working here to save up for my climbing gear.”

Not understanding a word of Danish, Alice could only communicate with him in English. Neither was using his or her mother tongue, so they always seemed a bit hesitant. But the language they were speaking was beside the point. Her mind would always wander when she talked to him, even recalling lines of poetry: “For shade to shade will come too drowsily.” Oh no, Alice thought, this isn’t good.

Thom was also attracted to this petite, scatterbrained woman who would sometimes launch into Mandarin without warning. He ditched his next plan, to go canoeing up a fjord. Meeting Alice was as exciting and unpredictable as any wilderness adventure, and possibly more dangerous. Thom offered to serve as Alice’s tour guide. He carried his tent, she carried hers, and they went backpacking together, both feeling excitable and frolicsome, like kids. Three weeks later, Alice had made a tour of northern Europe and returned to Copenhagen to catch her flight. Originally Thom was just going to see her off, but at the airport she was pulling her luggage and he was pulling his, and just as she was about to board the plane he made a last-minute decision to go with her to terra incognita Taiwan, just to see what it was like. The flight Alice was taking was already full, so Thom had to take the next flight. Instead of going home, Alice waited all day in the airport in Taipei for his connecting flight to arrive from Bangkok. The moment they found each other at the arrival gate that evening, the question hanging over their hearts was answered, the doubt in their minds dispelled.

Alice got home to find her mailbox full, and among the mail was a letter informing her that her application for the teaching position had been accepted. So without any second thought Alice immediately started getting ready to move to Haven. She recalled why this was the only university she had applied to. Her romantic tendency had been acting up again: one half of her wanted to live by the ocean, while the other half wanted to rekindle her dream of being a writer. To do so she thought she should choose to live somewhere that seemed far from the crowd but was actually at a suitable distance for people watching. The week before Alice hastened to Haven, Thom had already gotten in touch with an alpine club and gone on an expedition to Great Snow Mountain. After he got back to Taipei and heard Alice talk about Haven this and Haven that, he decided to move there with her and see how it went.

At first they lived in the faculty housing on campus, but because they weren’t legally married they could only be assigned a cramped single’s residence. Living quarters designed by public agencies in Taiwan are generally uninhabitable. The condensation was so bad in summer that when the air cooled at dusk even the duvet cover would get damp. A flatlander on a hilly island, Thom went climbing everywhere, and started practicing rock climbing with some local friends. Although Thom had started too late in life to become a true mountaineer, his attitude seemed to be: see how high you can go.

“This place is really humid, not like Scandinavia.”

“Tell me about it. It’s a tropical island. Hey, don’t you need to worry about money?”

“That piece I sent back to Denmark has been published in a travel magazine. For now I’m all right. Do you really think I would’ve come all the way here just to sponge off you?” Thom winked his right eye. Alice had discovered that he did this when he was not being completely honest with her, so she did not ask to have a look at the magazine or inquire further into his financial situation or family background.

Wasn’t it great? You don’t have to know a person’s family to be able to live with him, Alice thought, as Thom enthused about his newfound passion for rock climbing: “Up on a cliff, you can only see part of the sky. You feel your paltry strength through your feet and you thrust your fingers into the clefts in the rock, but you can’t share anything you see or smell with anyone. You ever had that feeling? You can hear your heart beating, you sense your breathing is getting labored, and if you’re really several thousand meters up on a cliff you know you could die at any time. That’s the feeling.” Thom’s eyes were shining now. “Like you might be one moment away from a vision of God.”

Alice looked into his eyes, which had always charmed her so, and still did. But somehow the qualities that had attracted Alice to Thom in the first place were now her biggest worry.

As the days went by, Alice became more and more anxious that this sexy guy might up and leave her at any time. She wanted to let go of him, but a certain expression of his — melancholy, profound yet innocent — was just so appealing. She almost felt that the rot in this humid residence had seeped into her heart. She did not know what to do.