Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

When he is about halfway down, the boy’s foot slips. In a moment of panic he plummets. Luckily he returns to the wall, but by this point his energy is drained, and he can go no further, neither up nor down. At first his body feels hot, and the sweat keeps dripping down, but soon his motionless body feels the chill of the wind. He shivers.

Stuck there, the boy realizes his hearing is now keener than normal. In addition to the sound of the wind blowing, the leaves falling and insects beating their wings, he seems to hear his father talking to another man at the base of the cliff. He cannot understand most of what they are saying, but when he hears the other man say, “He didn’t die by the regular definition, only he wasn’t alive anymore,” he suddenly feels his body grow light. No, better to say that his original sense of weight disappears.

He cocks his head to one side, as if in contemplation, and decides to climb back up instead of continuing down. He is surprised to find that for some reason when he starts ascending he feels light as a feather, hollow in the middle.

The boy reaches the top of the cliff, walks into the tent, and opens his backpack. Inside is the pocket in which he keeps his insect specimen bottles. He takes them out, walks outside, opens them and dumps out the beetles, one by one. Initially the beetles are terrified. They all play dead, lying motionless on the ground, legs curled up. Then the boy turns the beetles over, one at a time. Several minutes later, a few of them tentatively crawl a short distance, then open their elytra to reveal transparent wings so thin as to be almost invisible. And then they flutter off.

Flap flap, flap flap, flap flap …

The boy stands at the edge of the cliff. The beetles are now mere specks in his beautiful eyes, but their elytra can still be discerned. “Such beautiful insects!” says the boy in a singsong voice. Just then, a huge beetle with charming green and yellow mottling on its elytra stops on a rock in front of him. “A long-armed scarab! A male long-armed scarab!” calls the elated boy.

“Look at that long pair of arms! See how large its elytra are!”

But from that moment on, he feels everything start to get “blurry,” not “blurry” in the regular, visual sense but a kind of blurriness that people could never imagine. It is as if he is transforming into a leaf, an insect, a birdcall, a drop of water, a pinch of lichen, or even a rock.

Flap flap, flap flap, flap flap …

It is as if there’s never been such a boy who climbed that massive cliff in that incredible scene, which is now, once again, received into one of the ommatidia, far smaller than pinpoints, of the man with the compound eyes, along with the panorama of all scenery. No scene now remains, except in memory.

Dahu kept calling but couldn’t reach Alice at the cell he’d given her. So the morning he woke up in the Forest Church, he decided to drive up the coast to the Sea House, to make sure Alice was all right. Reaching the shore, he saw that the volunteer cleanup team had started the day’s work. Maybe it was a false impression, but the Sea House seemed to be sinking even further into the sea. He saw a man and woman, like a mother and son, facing the Sea House and pointing at things. Dahu went over and asked and they turned out to be the writer Kee’s widow and son.

“My mother just wanted to come by and see the old lot, and to check whether Professor Shih is all right,” the son said.

“She’s moved already, for her own safety,” Dahu said.

The writer’s widow seemed filled with regret as she said, “We used to plant vegetables here, looking out to sea. Who would have thought it would end up underwater?”

Dahu resolved to take a trip to the hunting hut, even though it might make Alice angry. When he got there, he was even more convinced that there was someone else living at the hut besides Alice, because there was a tent outside the hut, and a fixed-frame awning had been added on to the hut itself. He also discovered a kind of food cellar, and there were books and drawings scattered around the room. He could tell right away that some of the drawings, wild, and incredibly imaginative, were not from Alice’s hand. So that was why he could never get through to her: Alice had not even taken her cell along. The cell was off and it was being used as a paperweight for those drawings instead. Dahu was going to take the phone with him, but on second thought decided to just set the phone with the solar cell up, turn on the transmitter, and leave Alice a note. This way, Dahu could still get in touch with Alice after she got back. And once she picked up the phone, he would also be able to track her no matter where she went.

But Dahu was still determined to form a rescue team to go into the mountains to find her. He did not know whether Alice really needed rescuing, but he tried to plan for the worst. That’s what his wilderness experience had taught him to do.

Right then, Atile’i was carrying Alice back down the mountain. Alice saw Dahu from far off and had Atile’i let her down so that they would not be seen. They hid until Dahu left; only then did Atile’i carry the debilitated Alice to the hut. The first thing Alice did was to turn on the phone and give Dahu a call.

“You’re back! I was at the hut just now but I didn’t see you. I was about to form a search party,” Dahu said, greatly relieved.

“I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong. No need to form any party.”

“Is there someone there with you? Where’ve you been these past few days?”

“Uh …” Alice wasn’t going to tell him, at least not yet. “I’ll explain it to you some other time.”

After hanging up, Alice looked everywhere for Ohiyo before finally finding her in the straw basket Atile’i had woven, her forepaws covering her eyes and her body curled up into a perfect ball, as if nothing had disturbed her rest.

For whatever reason, when she was looking at Ohiyo fast asleep, Alice suddenly got the urge to write, and she did not want to waste a minute. She sat back down in her Writing Pavilion underneath the awning, got out the notebook, and continued writing the novel she’d never been able to finish.

Atile’i could not help saying, “You’re sick. Why not … rest?”

“I want to do some writing.”

“What about?”

“Something that apparently happened, but maybe never actually did,” Alice said.

Sara took up residence in the tribal village of Sazasa starting the evening she stayed in the Bunun house in the Forest Church. She got up early every day and went to different sections of seashore to observe, take notes and write up her new research proposal. Detlef served as her chauffeur and occasionally went up into the hills to hunt or down into the fields to plant millet or sorghum with some of the villagers. The two of them were getting more and more acquainted with, but at the same time depressed about, the condition the coastline was in. Every day, Sara persisted in measuring the sea temperature at several specific sites. She’d discovered that the average temperature was 1.6 °C higher than the previous record.

“This means that a continuous increase in rainfall is likely,” Sara said to Detlef.

“And the water pollution?”

“Awful. I guess only a few invertebrates will survive, and just barely. Dissolved oxygen levels are also down, and the plastic items exposed to the sun will keep releasing toxins into the sea, like a witch poisoning the water night and day. Look, the sea’s all discolored.”

Detlef looked and the sea was indeed a blotchy patchwork of red and brown. “The shallows are covered in algae.”

Detlef and Sara had fallen in love with the island. But now the happy-go-lucky people living in this relatively poor part of the island had lost even the right to go out to sea.