Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

Around about sunrise, Ina stood on a boulder, peered into a deep, dark pool and dove in. I was stunned. Her black hair spread out on the surface of the pool and then plunged, like it was a living creature. The hem of her skirt flared out underwater, like a white flower. I stood on the rock, crying. Suddenly I felt a chill: it was raining again, and the raindrops were flowing along my neck and down my back. But come to think of it, the creek was totally quiet while she was under. I don’t know how much time had passed when the white flower of my Ina’s dress was gathered into the murky depths and her black hair floated back up to the surface. Ina opened her eyes and, gasping for breath, said, “I … saw … Old Liao’s … face.” Ina told me to tell the rescue team where we were with the walkie-talkie they’d given us. They were there in no time. Ina told them where to look and they pulled Old Liao’s corpse up. He’d gotten trapped deep down in a crack in the rocks. His body was all swollen up, like a big wild boar.

“What time is it?” Ina asked. She’d forgotten I didn’t have a watch.

The watch I’d drawn on my wrist said 6:10, so I told her 6:10. I’ll never forget the gray sky that morning, like there was a mist over the river valley … And even now, telling you the story, I feel like I can’t see too clearly, seriously. I thought it was mist, but actually it was sand. The sun appeared as soon as the rain stopped, and the earth had turned to sand. I took it for mist, but if you walked through it would scratch your face. Ina walked up the shore without speaking. I found it hard to keep up, and for a time I couldn’t see her at all. I felt like I was the only one left in the whole entire world.

Alice finished her cup of coffee. She looked at Hafay and suddenly felt that she finally understood some things in some of the novels she’d read. Hafay walked to the bar, poured Alice another cup, then thought better of it. She took the cup back and said, “It’s not good for you to drink so much coffee. You need a glass of wine.”

Hafay’s teasing got a wry smile out of Alice.

Hafay said, “Sometimes I think Ina didn’t take anything with her when she left the village because she thought it was safer to bring nothing, not even love. That was the first time I understood how you can still love a person who beats you up all the time.” Maybe Hafay said this not to Alice but to herself, as a conclusion she’d reached about her Ina as she remembered her.

Alice nodded, not because she agreed with what Hafay had just said but rather because of something that had just occurred to her, a new conception of life: that life doesn’t allow you any preconceptions. Most of the time you just have to accept what life throws at you, kind of like walking into a restaurant where the owner dictates what you’re having for dinner. Looking down, Alice saw Hafay’s feet, for the very first time. Hafay usually wore sneakers or boots, but not when she was woken out of bed in the middle of the night. Now she was wearing slippers that exposed her toes. Her big toes seemed to be split in two, giving each foot an extra little big toe, a size smaller than a regular big toe. Alice looked away to avoid awkwardness, only to find the window covered in moths, moths of all different colors, many of them with eyespots of different shapes and sizes on their wings. It was as if they were staring at something.

Right then, she could almost see something out on the ocean, something approaching the coast, heading their way.

“You guys couldn’t even put a bend in my dick! What kind of search and rescue team are you?” Dahu caught up with Black Bear and took the lead again. Dahu was used to cracking harmless jokes with the younger members of the search party. They were used to it, too. They knew Dahu mostly resorted to humor when the search seemed hopeless, when they needed a burst of laughter to lift their spirits and boost morale. Now was such a time.

Black Bear was in charge of orienteering and tracking, but now he had the expression of the hunted, not the hunter. Dahu knew he’d lost confidence. In the mountains, confidence is sometimes more important than endurance, and if you lose it in your mind your body will feel it immediately. Your limbs will start quitting, and the mountain will know you’re faltering. And that’s when it gets dangerous. So Dahu quietly walked on ahead, replacing Black Bear in the pole position. He patted Black Bear on the shoulder and motioned for him to fall back and rest a bit.

You couldn’t blame Black Bear or anyone else, though, because this was the sixth day of the search, and so far they’d found nothing, no sign of Thom or Toto on any of the trails in the area. That was the strangest part. All Dahu needed was the slightest trace, the tiniest clue, and he was sure he’d be able to tell which way they’d gone.

“Dahu, which way to now?” asked Black Bear. Dahu didn’t have an answer. He could have told them which way the sambar buck they had seen twelve hours earlier had gone. Why not now? How come he had no idea where to look? Dahu almost lost patience with himself, but experience told him to stay calm, because getting upset would only affect his judgment. The only possibility Dahu could think of was that Thom might somehow have stepped off a cliff. But there should be something left behind on the dense tree canopy below, or some sign of stress from a fall: he’d be able to tell if there were any broken branches, because the color was different. But there wasn’t anything, no sign at all, and another search party had gone through the valley without finding a thing.

“Is it possible that they didn’t even take this route?” asked Machete, another team member.

“Who knows? Maybe it’s got something to do with all that rain. Shit, was it ever heavy,” Dahu said.

The helicopter had nothing positive to report. Thom’s transmitter seemed to have failed completely. There had been no signal for nine days, and the initial signal was from along the route Thom had registered. Then they’d lost it. Dahu thought a device failure was unlikely, because seasoned climbers like Thom would bring more than one. Besides, today’s transmitters run on solar power, and with the current technology the odds against a multiple device failure were astronomical.

Of course it wasn’t impossible. But Dahu couldn’t help wondering whether this was the tragic outcome that that series of bad omens had augured. Or if the worst was yet to come.

When Dahu got the call to form an alpine search and rescue team the silvergrass had just bloomed: Bunun people consider this a bad time to undertake a long journey. Besides, when Dahu called Alice right before he left, he heard his daughter Umav sneeze over the phone. There was another suhaisus hazam , another bad sign, when he got outside: a flock of has-has birds (Japanese white-eyes) flying left. It was like the coincidence of almost all possible bad signs. Yet over the past few years Dahu had begun to doubt whether masamu (taboos) had to be adhered to. After all, a taboo that applied when the has-has fly left didn’t make any sense. There were flocks of has-has flying all around in the mountains, and as they tend to dart around in flocks, flying left is commonplace. “And what day and age are we living in, anyway?” Dahu asked himself. If they canceled the original plan because of a taboo like this, wouldn’t it be a bit too …? Dahu harshly censored the irreverent word that had appeared in his mind. After all he was a Bunun, and disbelieving in the taboos was in itself a great taboo, not to mention his disrespectful language. If his father were here he would surely tell him that even though he had a master’s degree in forest ecology he still had to respect the mountain spirits.