Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

It had been exhilarating for the news crews to report live on the hail. So when the great wave finally hit the shore and swept away everything in sight, they were all momentarily transfixed, as if their feet were shackled to the road.

At first Lily and Han were thrilled to be able to capture the moment when the hail was coming through the ceiling of the Seventh Sisid, but Hafay felt something wasn’t right when she looked out to sea. She rushed the two reporters up to the attic to safety. Her keen Pangcah intuition was soon proven right when the wave sloshed in, as if suddenly raising the height of the sea. It almost dragged the Seventh Sisid into the ocean when it receded. Knowing the wave would not just let it go at that, Hafay told Han to carry Lily, who was bawling hysterically, up to the road. Han dropped everything but his camera and tore up the beach with Lily on his back.

Grabbing the photo on the counter of her and Ina on the way out, Hafay evacuated just before the wall facing the Sea House fell. Everything else — her herbal medicine jars, her coffee stash, the cask in which she brewed millet wine, her mattress, a stack of letter paper and a stone she had brought back from the shore of that creek in Taipei — spilled out on the sand. As if in response, the Sea House itself half-collapsed, and all its contents — photos of Toto, the books on the shelf, Ohiyo’s little cardboard box, Thom’s climbing ropes, Alice’s first, self-published book of poetic juvenilia, and some old clothes she hadn’t had time to toss in the donation bin — got dumped onto the beach and mixed together with a hodgepodge of smelly plastic refuse that the wave had strewn upon the shore. It was as if all the world’s garbage had been collected here.

The wave only produced one or two crests before it subsided and allowed the beach to reappear. But buried in a grotesque agglomeration of junk, the beach was radically altered, giving people the misapprehension they had landed on a distant planet. Han reached the road, consigned Lily to the care of a group of onlookers from a nearby aboriginal village, and immediately started shooting the uncanny scene. In a shot near Alice’s Sea House, he noticed a dead bird and zoomed in for a close-up: it was a rare Chinese egret. Once an avid bird-watcher, he had personal reasons for holding the shot longer than the average videojournalist would have. He held it until a sodden black-and-white cat scrambled out through a crack in a fallen wall and scurried across the frame from left to right.

Alice was not in the shot of the Sea House. She’d regained consciousness in a hospital bed just in time to witness the live feed of this scene on television. She only hesitated a few seconds before pushing aside a young nurse who had just come in and, like someone who’s just seen something, rushing toward the front entrance.

Walking along the mountain path, Alice had been thinking she smelled something. How to describe it? That smell mingled the warmth of sunlight, the invasiveness of seawater, the stink of raw fish and the harshness of musk. It was an odd amalgam of contradictory odors that could never go together.

Alice now knew it was the youth’s smell. It was so strong that she seemed to be able to smell him even when he wasn’t by her side. Now Ohiyo was trying to squirm her way out of Alice’s embrace. Alice held her close, afraid she’d run off if put down, and walked a bit slower. Cats are really soft little creatures. Holding her reminded Alice of this one time in kindergarten when she had found a black kitten walking home from school. She took care of it for three days without telling anyone. When she got home on the third day, the kitten was gone, but nobody in her family, not her mum, dad or elder brother, would admit to tossing it out. Alice refused to eat; it got so serious that she fainted and had to be sent to the hospital to get an IV. She only started eating rice gruel again one evening when she discovered her mother in tears by the hospital bed praying for intercession of the Bodhisattva Guanyin. The kitten never did come back. From then on, whenever she saw a black cat on the street, she would think it was the one that had walked off or gotten thrown out.

She and the youth finally made it within sight of the Seaside House. He saw a crowd of people around when they were still a ways off, and motioned for Alice to look. Those were reporters and people who were there to clear the beach. Alice hesitated, then walked up a nearby rise and found where her conspicuous yellow car was parked.

“Looks as if Dahu charged the battery for me,” Alice said to herself.

She took a deep breath. So many fateful events in such a short time! As if something had been pushing her from behind. The path was slippery. A drizzle was falling, so faint it was barely visible to the naked eye. A flock of Japanese white-eyes flew by Alice and the youth up ahead from the right.

Alice tried to recall exactly what had happened that day when the cameras focused on her window. It wasn’t out of anger, nor was she trying to escape. Still less was she really trying to end her life. She’d been waiting for Ohiyo to get back from her walk, and it is very important to stay alive when you have a reason to wait. Maybe she just temporarily lost control of her own body.

Alice had always been like this. Similar things had happened to her a few times in university. One time her date had stood her up on Valentine’s Day. Befuddled, she paid the bill and bumped into the French window on the way out, startling everyone in the café. Back home, still not in her right mind, she had left the gas on, giving her family an awful fright. Her extreme reaction was just too much for her boyfriend, who soon proposed breaking up. Her mother remembered that as a girl Alice had gotten on really well with her maternal grandmother, so she decided to let Alice go stay with her grandmother for a while.

Alice never found out why her boyfriend had not kept the date. She could not even recall what he looked like. It was living in the fishing village she remembered. She could just close her eyes and the images would appear in her mind, gliding toward her: the village street; at the end of the street the temple to the sea goddess Matsu, built facing the sea; the mudflats crisscrossed with ruts from the buffalo carts, and the raw ocean breeze … Was this vision the earliest reason for her later insistence on living by the seashore?

When her mother took her home as a girl, Grandma would often take Alice oyster picking. She’d pick the oysters off the racks, put them in hempen sacks, then load the sacks onto the water buffalo cart one by one. The cart felt totally different on the mud: it was like rolling over something extremely soft, something living. Only long after did Alice realize that it felt really similar walking on the forest floor.

When Alice visited that time in university, some petrochemical firm had already moved in and reclaimed land for a refinery in another little village to the south. Life changed after the plant was finished: Grandma’s oyster field silted up more and more every year, occasionally an oily film slicked the ocean, and the sky was always hazy. Grandma had to drag the water buffalo into the icy sea every few days to check the racks or pick oysters. Oyster picking is toil, and the winter wind off the ocean is chill, but sitting in the cart laden with oysters on the way back, with the wheels leaving much deeper tracks in the mud, you had such a steady, satisfied feeling. After picking the oysters, Grandma would spend the whole afternoon sitting on a chair “shucking” them. Those tough-looking oysters were actually soft inside. In a few short months Alice got used to oyster soup, oyster omelette, oyster crisp, mud crab and yam greens planted in the backyard. The days passed, and at some point so did her boyfriend’s face.