Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

The night sky clouds over and the man takes a flashlight and goes looking with the boy for beetles in the grove by the edge of the cliff. They have not brought much equipment, so he improvises an insect lure by propping up another flashlight on the ground and shining it onto a white T-shirt. It isn’t that effective, attracting only a few moths, but one of them is an erebus, a kind of butterfly with huge eye spots on its wings. The boy turns on the new electronic field guide he has brought along with him to show the man. The two of them are completely content.

“Tomorrow we’ll go down the cliff and spend the night in the forest. I’ve asked some insect experts, and we should be able to find long-armed scarabs in the forest. Haven’t you already found quite a few stag beetles? We can spend the day there, then hike down. I’ll take you down another side of the mountain, a shortcut through the valley. It’s fantastic, an awesome route. The forecast said there’d only be four days of sunny weather. Then it’s supposed to start raining, and rain isn’t good. We’ve got to get home before it rains.”

The boy nods. The fact that he seldom speaks makes him appear older than his actual age. The boy picks up the flashlight and goes to look around the camp. First he chooses trees with the light, then focuses on a few of them and searches up and down. He finds five or six different kinds of stag beetles. He knows which species of stag beetle likes what kind of tree. He catches one of each and goes back to the tent, to make a detailed record of the species, the size and the time and place of discovery in his notebook. He immediately puts them in insect jars.

He goes to sleep shortly after he gets back into the tent. He dreams he is walking alone down a fern-lined forest path, toward a faint light way up ahead. He keeps going until he comes to a stream. There is a mob of Formosan sambar deer crossing the stream, their legs so delicate that even the moonlight would weigh them down. Yet they leap so nimbly they seem to play the stream like a piano. He chases them but the deer disappear, as if they’ve turned into a school of fish. On the other side of the stream, the boy faces a wood, but then he feels something behind him. He smells something moist, something very, very near.

Having gotten this far in the dream, the boy starts to wake up. He opens his eyes and discovers it’s raining, and that the man isn’t by his side. He guesses the man has gone out to do something. He waits with his eyes wide open. The rain patters on the flysheet, and droplets condense on the inside wall of the tent, indicating that it is much colder outside than in.

Two fewer days of sunny weather, the boy thinks.

The man still hasn’t returned the following day. His shoes are gone, and so is some equipment. The boy puts on his raincoat and looks in vain for signs around the camp. The sullen rain clouds in the distance envelop the entire mountain in gloom, and the smells of rain and grass mingle. The rain will fall harder.

The boy thinks he should probably turn on the transmitter. But on the second day of the trip the man has asked him to turn it off, saying they couldn’t be tracked because they were going to make a secret trip to the big cliff. Now that he’s gone, the only way people will come rescue Dad or me is if I turn on the transmitter, thought the boy. But then he thought, Dad can free dive to a depth of two hundred meters and single-hand a sailboat across the Atlantic, and nothing could happen to a dad like that. If Dad comes back I’ll get in big trouble.

This thought calms him down. He retreats back into the forward vestibule of the tent and starts fixing a meal. None too skilfully, he lights the camp stove, gets the food out of the backpack and chooses oatmeal. Less than twenty minutes later, he has everything ready. There is still four days’ worth of food, and he can just drink rainwater when the water they’ve brought runs out, and he also knows where the water purification tablets are. No problem. The only thing he has to face is silence. Exactly, just silence. All by himself. The hardest part is being alone. Everything will be all right just as long as he doesn’t get scared.

He spends the next day waiting, and by dusk the rain is falling harder and harder. Visibility is now almost nil. He feels colder and colder, because lots of things are soaked. He thinks about turning on the transmitter again, then reflects, If Dad still hasn’t come back tomorrow I can turn on the transmitter then. What difference will half a day make? That evening the boy lies in the tent listening to his heartbeat, but actually his mind is far away. He is dreaming again, each new dream a sequel to the last.

The boy turns his head to look, and it turns out one of the sambar deer is behind him now, sniffing at him. He turns all the way around and finds himself facing the wet nose of the biggest deer. He retreats a few steps, and the deer turns and runs off, its tail flashing like a firefly. Running after it, the boy discovers he is running along a cliff, and the deer has turned into a goat. The goat runs into a forest that looks a lot like the one they went through on the way up to the cliff. At the end of the forest the goat stops and stands its ground. He now sees there is a mob of deer there, and also a tribe of goats. The boy cannot tell which deer and what goat he was just chasing.

The trees, deer and goats are all looking at the boy.

After a while the boy realizes there is a man standing behind the deer and the goats, lightly stroking one of the ears of one of the goats. The ear is pointy and furry, like it’s heard many secrets.

“Where’s my dad?” the boy asks.

That man motions with his chin. The boy looks. He discovers the mountains are now far away, and he is standing at the edge of that huge cliff, one step away from oblivion. The great waves of the green sea below billow out before him boundlessly.

The first thing Sara thought of when she smelled that reeking beach was Professor Stewart’s breath. He’d taught her English Colonial History; it was a smell of visceral decay. Never before had she seen such an exhausted, defenseless, vulnerable sea. Sara could not think of a better word for it than “exhausted.”

In fact, she’d had the same feeling riding along in the car down the new highway, which had only been opened a few years before. Studying the map, she discovered that the old road had gone along the coast with the Pacific Ocean on one side and the mountains on the other, while the new road went straight through the most beautiful mountains on the island. They passed through quite a few tunnels that made Detlef marvel, What a technical achievement!

Detlef made a point of taking it slow. Jung-hsiang had lent them this Mitsubishi SUV, which gave them mobility. Once in a while, when the road curved back along the coast, the Pacific flashed in the distance, but it was not the deep blue sea they had looked forward to. With the trash floating on the water, the angle of the light reflecting off the surface kept changing, even causing a few resplendent rainbows to form. But when they got a chance to take a closer look they saw the seawater was a heavy, leaden color, not a true blue. And every once in a while, they could see the railway and the train. At dinner the night before, Jung-hsiang had mentioned that along many sections the track foundation had been scoured away, and that the authorities were looking into backing away toward the mountains again. In some places they would just have to dig. Jung-hsiang wanted Detlef’s professional opinion on whether they could get through this range, and had asked him to attend to the terrain along the way.