Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

He visited almost every other week, and he always asked for me. I came to recognize his scent and physique. He wasn’t like most guys who go to a place like that. I mean … most guys want to get their rocks off, whether they’re young soldiers or middle-aged married men. Many of them start pawing you right after you go in because they’ve paid their money. But he wasn’t like that, for some reason. He was always very gentlemanly, and regarded me as a masseuse except when I “relieved” him. Lots of times he didn’t even ejaculate. The alarm would go off and he’d wipe himself down with a hot towel, say thank you, and leave.

He kept coming for about half a year I reckon. It sounds funny but in the last few months I started pretending that I had just gone for dinner with him, or for a stroll at the seashore, or that he’d just gotten off work and was so beat he’d just collapsed facedown on the bed as soon as he came in the door, and I would walk over and give him a massage without a word. I would imagine scenes like this. Sometimes I would even stare at his long pale back and imagine him suddenly turning over and saying something like, “You look great today,” in that deep voice of his, like it was nothing special.

Of course, nothing of the sort ever happened. I hardly ever said a thing to him face to face, and all he would say to me was thank you. Then he’d put on his hat and leave, not looking up.

The only time we ever talked was this one time I started singing along with the MTV channel. After I was done, when he was putting on his clothes he asked me whether I liked singing. I said I did. From then on every time he visited he brought me a CD, all English songs I’d never heard before. He said they were all popular songs and that I could learn these songs since I had such a great voice. I can still sing all of them now, because he was the one who gave me the CDs. I even remember the names of the singers. Those singers were really good. It was like each of them had a magic trick only he or she could do.

Just like Nai said, any guy who comes here is someone else’s husband, boyfriend or dad, so whatever you do, better not get any illusions. But Nai fell in love with a customer who later became her boyfriend, all the same. And I started to look forward to that man’s visits, counting the days until he’d come see me again. I never asked him what his name was or what he did for a living. During the day I put my earphones on and listened to those CDs he gave me until I fell asleep.

He stopped coming in November of that year. The last time he appeared was the last day of October. I didn’t have his cell phone number or any other way to reach him. All I remember is his back, and all I have are the CDs he gave me.

When I was massaging the bodies of strange men in those dark little rooms, the rooms you entered when your number was called, I would often wonder what was going on in the next room. I didn’t even know what was going on next door. The wallpaper in the room I usually used was a picture of the seashore, but it was the sea in Greece not here. It was a sea I’d never visited. Anyway, it was just wallpaper the renovator had stuck up for no special reason. You could only see it clearly with the light on, but if you did that you’d discover damp rot in a lot of places. A big sheet of it had peeled away from the wall, and the sea didn’t look the least bit real. It looked the most real when you turned the light down low. In those days, I was living right by the sea, but I rarely went to the shore, because I was sleeping days and working nights.

I’ll always remember Ina’s expression when she looked out to sea through the train window on our trip back to the east coast. She patted my head and tapped on the windowpane, murmuring things to me about the sea as the Pangcah people know it.

She said that the original ancestor of our village was the sky god, who lived in Arapanapanayan in the south. By the fourth generation the sky god had six great-grandchildren, the youngest of whom was a girl named Tiyamacan. The sea god took a liking to Tiyamacan, but she was not willing to marry him and hid herself from him wherever she could. The sea god became angry and raised a flood. That sea god would not take no for an answer.

Tiyamacan’s Ina, Madapidap, missed her daughter very much. She turned into a seabird and flew up and down the coast calling out to her daughter. Her father Keseng climbed the mountain until he found a spot with a view of the sea and turned into a snakebark tree fern. Later on, her eldest brother Tadi’Afo, who had fled into the mountains during the Deluge, became the progenitor of another tribe. Her second brother Dadakiyolo went to the west and became the progenitor of the aboriginal people there. The third son Apotok went south and became the ancestor of some communities away down south. Lalakan and Doci, the fourth and the fifth children, sat in a long wooden mortar and floated on the floodwaters to the summit of Mount Cilangasan. The two of them had no choice but to become husband and wife and continue the family line.

At first, brother and sister kept having bestial offspring, a serpent, a turtle, a lizard and a mountain frog, but no human children. The brother and sister — no, the husband and wife — felt very, very sad. One day they received the sun god’s blessing and had three normal daughters and a son. They gave them the sun’s surname. I can’t really remember the details, but the long and the short of it is that one of these kids ended up moving to our village and becoming our ancestor.

Ina said, people will always run around trying to find a place to call home — a place they like and where they can make a living. If you live on this side of the mountain a landslide might force you to the other side. If you live on the plains, other people might force you into the mountains. If you live on an island sometimes you might be able to go to another island. I think Ina knew what she was talking about.

At the end of the year I calculated how much money I’d saved and realized I already had enough to buy a piece of land and start building the Seventh Sisid. I finally left the business a year later.

It was hard at first. I had no one to help me, and I had to figure out lots of things on my own. And I discovered something really interesting: when I opened, many people came once and never returned. Guess why? You got it, they were all my old customers. Maybe they weren’t used to seeing me somewhere sunny and bright.

I sometimes thought that he’d come in someday, order a cup of salama coffee or something, and sit at the Lighthouse, without me being able to recognize him, because whatever he did he wouldn’t take off his shirt to show me his back. After all, just like I said, I only remember his back. I know every mole and polyp on his back, and the color of his skin. But all I know is his back.

If he had come in, I would have sung the songs on the CDs for him. I would have stood behind him and sung those songs for him.

Detlef Boldt looked down at the island from the plane. It’s been more than thirty years, he thought.

More than three decades before, when he was a feisty young man, he had participated in the biggest TBM (tunnel boring machine) design the world had ever seen. TBM was a game-changer in tunneling technology, offering an alternative to the traditional drilling and blasting method. Detlef had made a short trip to the island to attend a specialist meeting as a TBM consultant. He did not meet too many people during his short stay, and he only let his old colleague Jung-hsiang Li know he was coming back. He just wanted to enjoy a quiet trip with Sara. Yet the trip was not purely for pleasure, or at least Sara didn’t think it was.