Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

The shot started panning across Alice’s house, stopping for a few seconds. Then a head appeared through the window. That was Alice.

Seemingly before she’d had time to react, Alice in the shot jumped out of the window and dropped into the sea. There was barely any splash to be seen on the screen. It was like a perfectly executed dive by a trained dolphin.

Atile’i sang to calculate the time he had been away from Wayo Wayo. According to the Sea Sage, in the olden days the islanders wrote a song for every star, and because the stars were just too many in the sky nobody could truly learn all the island songs. Someone who said he had sung a new song was surely a liar, for the islanders assumed that the song already existed and had suddenly been recollected. All songs on the island of Wayo Wayo were old songs, which is the reason why you sometimes start crying when you hear an unfamiliar island melody.

These days Atile’i had been singing one island song from the moment the sun was born to the moment it passed away. He kept singing until he couldn’t remember how many songs he had sung, nor did he know which songs his parents and people in the village had taught him and which he had improvised. The songs he sang went on and on, like the sea itself. While he was singing, Atile’i often thought that all would be well if Rasula were here: she would harmonize with his melody, and then together they would sing a new song. He didn’t notice at first, but he had started pinching his throat so he could sing Rasula’s part. When the song ended the sound of the sea breeze made him feel like an empty cave, or like a translucent shell some crab had shed and left behind on the beach.

At the same time, Atile’i noticed that his body was changing: his gums often bled and his joints ached, too. He could not swim as smoothly as before. Sometimes he even felt dizzy, like he was back on land. (Never had Atile’i felt dizzy at sea).

Several days later Atile’i discovered a suppurating wound on his left leg, right over the spot where he had drawn the island of Wayo Wayo. He took this to be a bad sign. Lately the weather had been getting warmer, so warm that he could no longer escape the torrid midday heat by hiding out in his “house.” Worse, the whole island emitted a blinding glare and exuded a horrible rotten stench that blended with the raw smell of the ocean. Atile’I kept vomiting, and his body became weaker and weaker. Atile’i also noticed a huge increase in the number of insects on the island, with flies and mosquitos everywhere, and the currents had become erratic, too. Was the island approaching another world?

Atile’i had learned long ago from the Sea Sage that there was another world besides Wayo Wayo, and the past couple of days the idea that he was approaching this other world had been occurring to him. He tried to suppress the thought while anticipating the possibility that he was approaching the place whence the white man came, the place whither the hell bird and the ghost ship hastened. The problem was, did Kabang still rule over this other world? Atile’i didn’t have the slightest idea, and there was nobody he could ask. So when he discovered people visiting the island every so often, no matter how far away they were, he chose to dive and wait it out beneath the island. He had dug lots of “wells” all around the island that went all the way down to the sea, so that he could take cover at a moment’s notice. Yet once in a while Atile’i still imagined himself getting trapped and taken away by another race of man: the idea of this happening had him in its clutches, like a sickness.

Lately the hell bird and the ghost ship had been appearing far too often! He saw them almost every day. Several times while underwater Atile’i had even encountered “men” tightly clad from head to toe in black attire. Atile’i did not know if they’d seen him. He just looked for a place to hide. He was much better at swimming than they were, but because they held glowing things in their hands that darted hither and thither like slithery sea snakes, he suspected they might have caught a glimpse of him. Are they looking for me? That’s impossible, for in all the world, only men of Wayo Wayo know that I exist, right? No, Kabang also knows, and so does the ocean, Atile’i thought.

Today was the peak of Atile’i’s unease. He was burning up, almost too weak to stand. He intuited that he had been spotted by a hell bird with a single wing on its head. The hell bird raised swirling squalls all over, until it actually stopped in the northwest, which Atile’i knew to be one of the island’s firmest spots. It was about a day-and-night’s journey on foot. Although it was quite far from Atile’i’s hideout, he knew he might be discovered very soon. He was not surprised the next day to hear noises coming from that direction. He summoned his last ounce of strength, picked up his spear gun, and uncovered the “land lane” near his house that led all the way down to the sea. He dove right on in.

Right then it started hailing. Great chunks of hail knocked fish leaping out of the water senseless, and in no time the ocean was covered with stunned or lifeless fish. Atile’i was floating in a seething sea of lifeless fish, as if he himself had transformed into an enormous fish.

This was a summer the islanders would never forget. It all started one gloomy morning at the cusp of dawn when hail began falling to the south of Haven. Woken out of the deepest dreams, people walked outside or stood by their windows and looked out, bewildered at a seemingly shrunken world. Lit by the streetlamps, shooting hunks of hail pounded the seashore, glowing like mini-asteroids with a silver-blue light. Although the sound of the hail battering the corrugated iron roofs, the asphalt road, the stone steps by the beach, the streetlamps and the cars parked by the side of the road must have been deafening, somehow people’s memories of the scene that morning were like silent movies: nobody recalled hearing a thing.

The hail immediately blasted several holes in the roof of the Seventh Sisid, and the first ray of dawn beamed down onto Hafay’s coffee pot, as though the light had shattered it. Many of the reporters in the press contingent camped out on the beach were hurt. Arrangements had been made for senior correspondents to stay in a five-star hotel in town, so most of the reporters on the beach were relatively young; but one senior reporter fond of gesticulating on camera like she was playing mah-jong had somehow failed to make it back to the five-star hotel the night before. Still in the same outfit, she was stunned by a piece of hail the moment she stepped out of the tent and was immediately rushed to hospital. The incident later became tabloid fodder. Once squawky, she reportedly became unusually quiet, soft-spoken and lucid after the incident, and was soon relieved of her regular duties.

The teams at the beach were reporting live while dodging chunks of hail, so that the scenes the nationwide audience saw that morning were somewhat chaotic, with shaky video and reporters holding various objects over their heads for protection. Many viewers found the morning news at once shocking and hilarious.

The hailstorm stopped as soon as it had started, but because of the hail everyone missed the moment they’d all been waiting for, when the Trash Vortex hit the shore in several giant waves. The hail was also the reason why everyone scrambled up onto the road and escaped the deluge. For in the moments after the hail stopped, the storm clouds kept changing shape, with white, lead-hued and purplish-gray clouds gathering into a magnificent soaring thunderhead. It was a cloud like a floating myth, like an overwrought line of epic verse. When they remembered it later on, many coastal aboriginal villagers said they had never seen a cloud formation like that before, that it was more impressive than the vibrant sky on the eve of a typhoon. The cameramen were shooting this astounding sight, and all the while the monster wave was rolling toward the shore in the faint light of dawn. Many thought the wave explained why they did not seem to remember hearing anything during the hailstorm: though its source was near, the sound of the hail was nothing compared to the sonic force augured by the wave. That wave spoke with a cosmic voice, as if the risen moon had been silently storing up sound ever since time began and now let it out, all at once, in one great burst. By the time people figured out that the sound was coming from the sea, the wave was already upon them.