Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?

And what did you hear, my darling young one?

I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’ ,

I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world ,

I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’ ,

I heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’ ,

I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’ ,

I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter ,

I heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley ,

And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard ,

And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall .

Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?

Who did you meet, my darling young one?

I met a young child beside a dead pony ,

I met a white man who walked a black dog ,

I met a young woman whose body was burning ,

I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow ,

I met one man who was wounded in love ,

I met another man who was wounded with hatred ,

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard ,

It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall .

Just then the Wayo Wayo islanders were waking up. They had the impression that last night’s wind had been particularly strong. As a matter of fact, the night wind on Wayo Wayo was always strong, but what the islanders did not know was that every night for the past several hundred years, Wayo Wayo had been losing a hand’s worth of surface area and moving north one ten-thousandth of the length of a sand worm. And that this morning, a silent flotilla was monitoring some remote area of the great ocean and lining up like a firing squad. Each crewman stood at his post, gazing toward the horizon. Before long a beam of light leapt up into the sky, flew level for several thousand kilometers, then dove. Just getting up, the Wayo Wayoans thought a massive shooting star had crashed into the sea.

The beam of light plunged beneath the waves and kept boring its way down into an abyssal trench. Never seen before by man, the trench was home to bizarre creatures who could have come from outer space. Suddenly, every creature in the entire ocean heard a deafening sound, like no sound that had ever been heard before, as if some mighty being were departing. A great gash opened up deep in the trench, and a shock wave was transmitted toward the two ends, raising a tsunami of unprecedented power. Of iron will, that wave pushed another piece of the Trash Vortex toward Wayo Wayo. In three minutes and thirty-two seconds, it would, like a gargantuan carpenter’s plane, peel away everything on the island, the living and the nonliving, into the sea.

On the island, only the Sea Sage and Earth Sage anticipated the event. The day before they had appealed to Kabang without receiving any reply.

“Why does Kabang not respond?” the Sea Sage and Earth Sage were deliberating.

“I don’t think he ever will.”

“Shall we warn the islanders?”

“Would it make any difference?”

The two of them fell silent for a while. The Sea Sage murmured, “I really want to know Kabang’s reason. I just wish I knew why.” The wrinkles on his face were so deep that his features seemed to be caving in.

“As you know, Kabang needs no reason for anything, even if His will is for Wayo Wayo to quietly abide in some small corner of the world,” said the Sea Sage.

“Even if His will is for Wayo Wayo to quietly abide in some small corner of the world,” said the Earth Sage. In unison, they repeated, “Even if His will is for Wayo Wayo to quietly abide in some small corner of the world.”

At the approach of the great garbage tsunami, the two Sages were sitting at either end of the island, one of them facing the sea, the other facing away, both watching everything happen with their eyes wide open. The Sea Sage’s eyes began to bleed from overexertion, while the Earth Sage grasped the ground until the joints of his fingers shattered. When the wave smacked into the island, their bodies were instantly ripped apart, and even though they were both firm of will, they couldn’t help howling in agony. Everything on the island — the houses, the shell walls, the talawaka , the beautiful eyes, the woeful calluses, the salt-heavy hair, and all the stories about the sea — was consigned to oblivion in a heartbeat.

At the same time, as if they’d all hearkened unto an epiphany, the sperm whale avatars of the second sons of Wayo Wayo silently assembled into a cetacean rank and file of head to fluke and fin to fin and started cleaving the waves, hastening toward a certain end. Day and night they swam, with no time to change into spirits after dark, with no time at all to rest. The pod passed through the Tropic of Capricorn, through the eyes of three newly formed typhoons, through cold seas and warm, heading straight for land.

One morning a week later, a pod of several hundred sperm whales would be discovered beached on the shores of Valparaíso, Chile, with grim eyes, cracked skin and crushed ribs — ribs crushed by their own weight. Tears would track the cheeks of creatures that did not normally shed tears. Villagers would try at high tide to push some of the whales back into the sea, but the whales, obstinate and resolute, would swim right back on shore.

Cetaceanologists from around the world would rush to Chile in the shortest possible time, because this pod of sperm whales would be entirely male, quite an odd occurrence. Even more surprisingly, one of the whales would be a giant of almost twenty meters in length, a one-of-a-kind in this day and age. As experts would indicate, precocious puberty induced by overfishing had sharply reduced sperm whale body size. Based on recent records, they’d assumed there were no more such truly massive sperm whales left anywhere in the world.

Till the end of their days, the experts who would gather on the Chilean beach would tell one story over and over again: the experience of watching a host of giant creatures die. Blood would trickle out of the mouths of the huge whales, noxious air would spray in huge quantities out of their left nostrils — their blowholes, located on top of their snouts — and their tails would flail in agony. As if they wanted to force memory from their brains, they would hammer the sand with their heads, leaving huge pits on the beach and making a heavy, hopeless monotone that would pass clear on through to the other side of Chile’s coastal mountains, giving the farmers working in the fields pain of the chest.

Aside from the pounding, the beached whales would not make any other sound. Reminiscing in later days, the experts would all claim that they had heard the call of the whales when they beached. They would try to imitate the call in Mandarin, English, German, Klon, Galician, Dhivehi. Some language prodigy would even try in the dead languages of Manx and Eyak. But nobody would be able to imitate it accurately … for each would feel a terrible pain in the throat, like choking on a fishbone.

Then Valparaíso would shudder like an injured whale, as whale by whale by whale by whale by whale by whale would breathe its last upon the beach. The ones that would die first would bloat up under the oppressive sun, decompose and suddenly explode one after another. Their innards would go flying through the humid, stuffy air and spray down like rain on the cetaceanologists, the fishermen and the children who would have come to gather whale bones. The smell, a putridness no one would have ever smelled before, would make one and all pass out or crouch down and start vomiting.

And by the time they would recover their wits, the entire pod would have already expired, leaving the experts to tally the dead: in total there would be three hundred and sixty-five whales. A Swiss cetaceanologist in his seventies named Andreas would kneel down and weep, would actually weep himself to death. His mortal cries would touch the hearts of everyone on the beach, and everyone would join in and cry along with him. Their tears would drip onto the beach, soon to be recovered by the rising tide.