Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

“You believe the government?” Then, seeming to remember something, Dahu slapped himself on the thigh and said, “Is Ohiyo the black-and-white cat you found?”

“Yeah, I thought you remembered.”

“ Aiya , when you suddenly appeared I was so relieved that my mind relaxed for a while there. I didn’t realize what you were asking. There’s a camera guy who apparently got footage of her.”

“Right, I saw it in the hospital. It was on the news.”

“I’ll go find him. He was staying at Hafay’s before the wave. I know what he looks like,” Dahu said, running off into the crowd.

Alice looked off toward the Seventh Sisid. Perched on a rock, it seemed left out in the cold. It was half a lifetime of labor, Hafay’s heart and soul. It was as much part of Hafay as the Sea House was of Alice.

Alice had almost finished packing by the time Dahu returned with a tall man with a buzz cut. They nodded and exchanged greetings, then the man flipped open the monitor on his camera. In the footage, Ohiyo was walking along the refuse-strewn beach and mewling, apparently quite distraught. This was the clip that they had played on the television news. The next part had not gotten airtime: Ohiyo hopping from the beach up onto the road, walking in the direction of the path to the stream where Alice often went to draw water. At the end of the clip Ohiyo disappeared into a thicket of grass.

“I’m a cat person, and this kind of footage is compelling, so I tracked it awhile. It looks like it went that way.”

“Thanks. Dahu, I’m off to find Ohiyo.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, I’m fine by myself, and they need you here. If you can, help me tidy up the stuff that fell out of my house. And take good care of Hafay. See if our friends here need any help. Aiya , what am I saying? You’re already doing these things.”

“All right. But you have to tell me where you’re going to be. I can’t just let you go like this.”

A cop wanted to stop her from leaving, so she looked over imploringly at Dahu.

Dahu came up with a plan. “Here, you take this,” he said, getting out his cell phone to give to Alice. Then he did all the talking for her, saying, “It’s all right. Let her go. Nothing’s going to happen to her. Look, she’s fine. I’ll make sure she goes to the station to report her losses.” The policemen all knew Dahu. This one just waved her on, not wanting to argue.

Dahu turned to Alice and said, “You have to answer when I call, all right?” Alice nodded and jogged off. Moon and Stone kept following her.

“Go back! Back! Back to the shore,” said Alice, shooing them away.

Alice walked up the path to the stream hollering, “Ohiyo! Ohiyo!” It was getting dark out, had started drizzling. She slipped the waterproof cover onto her backpack, and put on her raincoat. The path was really slippery, but Alice had walked it a million times. All she could think about was finding Ohiyo as soon as possible, as it would get cold at night and something might happen to her. Alice kept calling Ohiyo, Ohiyo, until she rounded the bend and saw that a huge section of the side slope had slid down and almost buried the path. As it was still a bit light out, Alice assessed the terrain and tried climbing over. But the slide was higher than it looked, so she tried to squeeze through the grass on the other side of the path instead. Then she heard the sound of beating wings.

A few moments later, tens, no hundreds, of butterflies or moths that must have been hiding in the grass until Alice disturbed them flew to the other side of the slide in an undisciplined but seemingly coordinated fashion. The sky was dark now, making it hard to tell their colors. All she could see was that each was the size of her palm. It all happened so suddenly that Alice could not help crying out. And right when she did, she heard a cat’s meow, as well as what sounded like the call of a muntjac. The call was really close, seeming almost to come from the ground beneath her feet.

Alice, who had fallen back onto her butt, managed to free herself from the vines and stems she was tangled up in and get round the slide. The first thing she saw on the other side was Ohiyo emerging from the grass to greet her. Then her heart skipped a beat when she saw an adolescent, a youth with skin like mud, lying on the ground, apparently immobilized, pinned down by earth and rocks. There were tears in his terrified eyes.

An image resurfaced in Alice’s mind, of one time when Dahu caught a muntjac. He and Thom had killed the beast with a gun, then taken turns carrying it down the mountain. They showed Alice a photo of the muntjac in the trap. It was still alive. The animal had a broken leg, and a look of despair, Alice sensed its desire to live. That night she refused to make dinner for them. She felt angry at the men for their nonchalant attitude, and because they had brought back the photo like a trophy or an interesting topic of conversation.

The young man now trapped under the slide had the same expression as that muntjac.

When Atile’i saw the woman appear before him, he remembered the Roaring Rite the Earth Sage had taught him. The Earth Sage said, if you encounter anything you are unable to understand, then roar with the strength that lies beside your beating heart and you will speak with the voice of your true self and even evil spirits will flee. Atile’i tried roaring now, but as soon as he opened his mouth and yelled his heart and leg began to ache, as if someone had taken a stone knife and minced his spirit into fish paste. That’s how painful it was! So after yelling a few times Atile’i started to cry.

The Earth Sage said, “To let a single tear fall is to submit, to plead for help, to render all rituals inefficacious.”

At first the woman seemed frightened by Atile’i’s Roaring Rite, for she screamed and fell off the earthen mound. Then she scrambled back up again and embraced the animal that seemed so strange to Atile’i’s eyes. Soon, maybe because she discovered Atile’i could not hurt her, the woman started examining him; and when she realized his leg was confined, a look of concern appeared on her face. After a while, she forced a smile, as if to offer him reassurance, and then she started helping him move the rocky earth off his leg. Maybe because of the pain, or maybe for some other mysterious reason, Atile’i’s tears kept falling. He was like a sea turtle that has been stopped from going back where it belongs.

The woman was not the same as the white people Atile’i had imagined or seen in books. She had another kind of translucent skin, sort of like a jellyfish. The woman was not tall, and might even be a bit shorter than Atile’i. After freeing him, she kept talking and gesturing, but he could not understand a thing. The only thing he could be certain of was that the woman probably did not bear him ill. Her movements and tone of voice told him that. Atile’i tried to say a few words to her in reply, but she did not understand, either. Then, out of gratitude, he started to imitate the birdcall he had learned while lying there just now to take his mind off the pain. Atile’i pursed his lips and let air through his lips and throat to produce a sound that was at times resonant, at times warbling. This was the sound of thanksgiving. The woman looked at Atile’i with surprise, as if she had seen a bird that could speak a human tongue.

“A sound can fly over any land, like a wave on any sea,” Atile’i remembered the Sea Sage saying. Without a doubt, the Sea Sage was truly wise.

Atile’i, too, remembered what happened after he dove into the ocean, afraid someone would discover him. His body was abnormally warm, the water relatively cold, so when he dove in the frigid seawater it initially felt scalding hot. He swam for his life, like a wounded barracuda spotted by a shark. He swam for he did not know how long, until his chest ached terribly and his spirit was ready to leap out of his throat. Then a great force flooded in from behind. Sensing the approach of a huge wave, he went promptly limp and let himself get tossed about. Atile’i clearly saw that the wave was pushing him toward land, and all around him were the strange things from the island. Underfoot and underarm, behind his back and before his eyes, Atile’i was wrapped up in a mixture of shore and sea, as if he was just another piece of the island.