Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

But the concentration of salt in the sea would not thereby increase, not in the least.

It was right at sunrise that Wayo Wayo was engulfed by the tsunami. Atile’i was facing away from the island, playing on the speaking flute as he rowed into the fragmented Trash Vortex, never looking back. The tune he played was incomprehensibly tender and ineffably anguished. After seeing Atile’I off, Alice swam back to the roof of the Sea House, stood on a broken solar panel, and tried to find Atile’i on the horizon. As the prow and the rain tarp were both made of materials from the vortex, camouflaging the craft and allowing it to proceed by stealth through a sea of trash, Alice looked for quite some time before she spotted him. His silhouette had become small as a gull’s. Soon Alice started to sing, maybe for Atile’i, maybe for herself. It is one of the songs Thom had sung for her toward the sea the evening she first met him. She still remembered him telling her about the Dano — Swedish War of 1808–1809 and the artillery battery at Charlottenlund Fort, a relic of that conflict.

“This shore really saw war. The cannons really fired their balls. Soldiers really died on this beach. And boats really sank in that sea. This here is no ornamental cannon.” He told her he’d lived in a cave over thirty meters underground, piloted a sloop across the Atlantic, and was now preparing for the challenges of rock and mountain climbing. Then they made love. Thom’s penis penetrated deep inside her body, shining like a torch. In that little tent, she looked over his shoulder and saw the world aglow. In a certain instant, gazing into his pale blue eyes, she seemed to see a million worlds.

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?

I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’ ,

I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest ,

Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’ ,

But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’ ,

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 .

“May the sea bless you,” Alice says in a voice much smaller than the point of a pin. The youth has left, has entered the sea. And at this moment the weather on the sea is anything but fair: as rain clouds gather in the distance, Alice can tell that a storm is coming, the likes of which none of the islanders, who have weathered innumerable storms in their time, has ever seen before.

Alice swims back to the shore. The cleanup crew is already there. People run over to offer help when they see her there soaking wet, but Alice just walks in the direction of the hunting hut, keeping her head lowered so they will not be able to get a good look at her face. Now she is walking alone up toward the path through the loveless and pitiless forest. She met Atile’i for the first time along that path; she used to take it with Thom to get water from the stream. She walks and walks, and the moisture on the stalks of grass gradually soaks through her shoes and wets her toes, slowly gets into her eyes. Suddenly Alice feels something furry brush past her leg.

Ohiyo. It’s Ohiyo.

Alice is happy she still has someone to say Ohiyo to. Without Alice noticing, Ohiyo has grown into a beautiful adult cat. Alice has to do something for this little survivor.

The cat raises her amazing little head, opens her eyes, one blue and the other brown, and, responding to Alice’s call, looks right back at her.

Wu Ming-Yi was born in 1971 in Taiwan, where he still lives. A writer, artist, professor, and environmental activist, he has been teaching literature and creative writing at National Dong Hwa University since 2000 and is now a professor in the Department of Chinese. Wu is the author of two books of nature writing, the second of which, The Way of Butterflies , was awarded the China Times Open Book Award in 2003. His debut novel, Routes in the Dream , was named one of the ten best Chinese-language novels of the year by Asian Weekly magazine. The Man with the Compound Eyes is his first book to be translated into English.

About the Translator

Darryl Sterk has translated numerous short stories from Taiwan for The Chinese Pen Quarterly , and now teaches translation in the Graduate Program in Translation and Interpretation at National Taiwan University.