Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

Actually, Thom had noticed several years before that the sea was getting closer and closer. When the house was being built, he measured and the closest the high water line came was 28.75 meters. A year later the sea seemed to have eroded a bit of the shoreline. Thom started measuring every month. He said, “The sea’ll be here sooner or later, but at this rate we’ll be long dead and gone by the time it floods the house.”

The water table along the shore had gotten salted up, rendering it undrinkable, so folks had to buy bottled water now. Several years before the government had offered DOW (deep ocean water) subsidies, which had to be pumped up through huge pipes and then desalinated. Some residents installed not inexpensive minidesalinators in their own houses. Unable to abide state support for corporations that exploited nature without ever giving anything back, Alice stubbornly refused to have anything to do with DOW. For one thing, these were the same corporations that had made a fortune on concrete and quarrying investments. For another, from the start they canvassed a bunch of experts to endorse DOW by declaring it would have zero impact on coastal ecology, but gradually the muckrakers started exposing problems. Some experts suspected that DOW extraction had disturbed the deep ocean water profile, leading to subtle changes in salt concentration, convection and even the sand in the seabed. And fishermen thought the fish had left for the same reason. But nobody dared say for certain what the consequences would be, of course, because the complex interdependency of any ecological system is beyond human imagining.

Thom and Toto had been gone a long time, but until the earthquake Alice kept up the family custom of going to draw water from the creek every once in a while. They had discovered this creek when Alice’s colleague Ming had taken them to photograph Moltrechti’s tree frogs at night. Though it wasn’t too far from the newly built Seaview Hotel, the place was off the beaten track.

While scrambling down into a ravine to get a shot, Ming said, “Whoever designed this hotel had dreadful taste, don’t you think? European buildings aren’t like this, are they, Thom? I sometimes think it’s really a shame that Taiwanese children vacation in tasteless holiday resorts like this. They’ll turn into tasteless adolescents and then adults. There are such interesting creatures right next door but nobody notices.”

“You’re too much of a pessimist,” Alice said.

“I’m not a pessimist, I’m a misanthrope.”

“Just as long as you’re aware of it.”

“But I completely agree with you on the terrible taste of the hotel,” Thom said.

So what if it was in poor taste? Didn’t the customers keep coming all the same? Alice thought Ming was acting like someone with an anxiety disorder. He was so negative about everything, and writing made him even more uptight. It had been a few years since his last novel, and he had writer’s block. She knew he’d gotten stuck, that he paid too much attention to the opinions of a handful of readers who criticized the fictional worlds he’d created. And he got overly worked up about the current literary scene. To Alice the only thing to do was wait. Good novelists were like escape artists, able to get themselves out of any bind, while a bad writer would get so stuck underwater that no one could save him.

The next day, Thom and Alice camped out in the clearing by the creek. Without Ming there it was a lot quieter. They drank tea made with water from the creek and looked up at the stars that studded the night sky, thrilling to the sight. The dust storms from China were getting more and more frequent the past couple of years, and even the relatively clear skies above eastern Taiwan were now filled with haze. They hadn’t seen such a clear starry night sky here in a long time. It was so touching, as if the universe were still watching over the planet, benignly and tolerantly.

“This is the best tea I’ve ever had in my whole life,” Thom said.

“So I’ll be coming here a lot to get creekwater for tea?”

“It’s too far.”

“Is not.”

“Is too.”

“Is not.” Thom smiled and let the matter drop. Alice smiled too. Later, every so often, Thom would come here himself and bring back water from the creek.

Actually, there’s nowhere in all the world that’s truly far, or near. Alice realized there was a contradiction in her sudden epiphany.

These past few days, Alice and the cat had been forging a subtle mutual trust to help each other through these difficult times. The cat began to be comfortable going to sleep in front of Alice with her underbelly exposed. Alice decided to take her to the vet for a thorough checkup. Six out of ten homes in cities around the island had been without power since the earthquake. Only residential areas with solar or wind power had been spared. Though the power supply was gradually being restored, Alice had to search in town for quite a while before she found an animal hospital with backup power.

“It’s a strong, healthy cat. And it’s really special that her eyes are different colors. That’s rare. I’ve never seen it in a stray,” the young vet said, before giving Ohiyo her vaccinations.

“Things could be worse, but lots of houses collapsed in the earthquake. Is yours holding up all right, miss?”

“It’s fine.” Alice was not young anymore, but men who did not notice the lines around her throat almost always assumed she was twenty-something, thirty at the most, maybe because she had remained slim and liked to wear plain white T-shirts. Sometimes she looked like a graduate student from a distance. Alice had never been proud of looking twenty when she was past forty. It was a fact that nobody could ever change.

Alice was originally planning to leave the cat there and let someone else adopt it, but when the nurse at the registration counter asked her the cat’s name, she blurted out, “I call her Ohiyo.” The nurse looked a bit doubtful, but still got her to write it out on the chart, not knowing which Chinese characters to use for the three syllables in the Japanese word. When Alice was writing the name out she somehow felt like giving it a try, to see whether she and Ohiyo could get along living under the same roof. She kept repeating “Ohiyo,” and the puny kitten lifted her head out of the box, as if responding to her name. She kept looking up anxiously, as if Alice was the only one she trusted in these strange surroundings. Every time Alice murmured “Ohiyo,” her little tail would quiver. Something noncorporeal came over Alice, shaking her long silent, suicidal heart back to life.

After the cat got its shots, Alice bought kitty litter, a litter box, some veterinary formula, and even a play stick. The cat might never understand why she would belong to someone and have a name once an ID chip was implanted. And Alice could not understand why on earth she was investing in new “property” for the sake of this tiny living thing when she had obviously spent the past little while getting rid of most of her own possessions.

Leaving the animal hospital, she saw a follow-up on the earthquake on the TV news. As Dahu had said, seismologists suspected this was not simply an energy release. The next report was news to Alice, though: a huge Trash Vortex in the Pacific Ocean was breaking up, and a big chunk of it was headed for the coast right near where she lived. Watching the aerial footage of the vortex, Alice could not believe her eyes. She could not believe her ears, either, when the report, drawing on an international news media source, adopted a tragicomic tone, declaring that in the vortex, almost everyone would be able to find almost everything he’d ever thrown away in his entire life.

When she got back home, Alice went into Toto’s bedroom to look for the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cats . Soon after Toto was born he was diagnosed with growth retardation. As a little boy he often got a mysterious cramping. There was no problem with his intelligence, but he seldom spoke in complete sentences until he reached three years of age. He was unable to express himself in Mandarin, English or Danish, except occasionally to call Mummy and Daddy. For him, speaking was like trying to force something too large for the passage up through his throat. They took him to a number of specialists. For the most part the doctors said that there was nothing wrong with Toto’s speech organs; most probably he suffered from some unknown brain disorder. Or maybe there were psychosomatic factors. They were certain there hadn’t been any postnatal trauma. And Alice and Thom had been model parents, absolutely, almost never leaving Toto alone and certainly never fighting in front of him. So what psychosomatic factors could there have been? Of course, it wasn’t as if Toto could not speak at all. In fact, sometimes he said the most amazing things. One time when he was climbing with Thom he caught a rare stag beetle, a female alpine yellowfoot. He took care of it for a while, and made a specimen of it when it died. One day over breakfast, Thom and Alice heard Toto say, into the feeding box, “I can’t see what you can see anymore.”