Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

“So I can only join you if I go and drown myself now?”

“Don’t ever do that. Anyone from Wayo Wayo who commits suicide will turn into a jellyfish. Jellyfish can’t recognize one another. You don’t really want to become a jellyfish, do you?”

Atile’i had no wish to become a jellyfish. But now the spirits of the second sons were out of ideas. They waited with Atile’i for dawn. Actually, to the spirits, dawn no longer had any meaning, it was merely the time when, at the first light of day, they would dive into the water and turn into sperm whales. At night, after regaining their ghostly forms, they would wander on the sea, singing, zoning out, waiting for the arrival of the next second son. The sperm whales into which the spirits transformed during the day were pretty much the same as actual sperm whales. The only difference was that the sperm whale avatars wept.

Atile’i could only wait until the island silently crossed the borderline and left the spirits of the second sons behind at a speed that was hard to grasp and which neither wind nor rain, tide nor dream, could change. When thrice the moon and the sun had traded places, the spirits of the second sons could barely make out the edge of the island when they emerged above the surface. “Atile’i! Atile’i!” they shouted, but their shouts changed into flying fish, leaping over the water and plopping into the waves.

“Now it’s just me.” It took Atile’i two alternations of sun and moon to face the fact that he would have to bestir himself to survive. He tried catching fish, collecting rainwater, and weaving warm clothes out of various things he found here and there on the island. But though he was an expert fisherman, Atile’i was no good at weaving. When he draped himself with the garments he’d pieced together, he looked like a gaudy bird.

Several days after picking up a kind of flexible club, Atile’i had the bright idea of grinding one end into a point and attaching something else he’d found, which was also elastic. In doing so, he had made himself a spear gun. He used the same method to make himself a gawana . Made out of different materials, it was more resilient and springy than the ones on Wayo Wayo. There was also a kind of ball that was harder than the pit of a fruit but bouncy, which could be hurled out beyond a gawana ’s striking distance at birds in flight. Atile’i learned the hurling stance for the ball from a book he had found. There were colorful pictures in the book, and finely printed “words.” (Though people on Wayo Wayo did not have writing, the Sea Sage and Earth Sage still had many “books.”) Inside the book he found a picture of a man with the same brown skin as himself. Atile’i thought his stance was perfect, and the man’s hurling hand was aglow.

Evening was the best time to catch waterfowl and sea turtles with his custom gawana . At first he could only stun the turtles, yank out their heads and suck blood from their necks. Then one day he found a shiny knife on the other side of the island. It was the sharpest knife he had ever seen. (They only had stone knives on Wayo Wayo). With it, he could dine on turtle meat, which was like sea cucumber but firmer. Sometimes a turtle would keep flapping its flippers after he had sliced its abdomen open, as if it was still underwater.

But later Atile’i saw there were actually lots of dead sea turtles around the island. When he butchered them, he often found indigestible objects in their stomachs. “Did the sea turtles die from eating a piece of the island?” Atile’i wondered. Except for the water he collected, he had better avoid ingesting anything on the island.

When Atile’i started diving more often, he realized that “the island under the island” was even more immense than the island itself. It was almost like an underwater maze, “so big as to be another kind of sea.” Atile’i could not think of a better way to describe it. To him, anything big could be compared to the sea. The subaquatic flotsam was a tangled mess, but a large wave could disturb its ad hoc order. Given that the island was translucent and in a constant state of change, it was no wonder Atile’i tended to get a bit lost at first when he went diving. He tried to move anything that might come in handy up onto the island. In no time he had quite the collection. Some things were useful, others just interesting. Atile’i gathered things that were weird or captivating. It was the same on Wayo Wayo, where everyone collected shells to decorate the dawn-facing side of the house. At first Atile’i hung these fancy things on his own “decorative wall,” but as the sun rose from a different direction every day there was no way to keep it facing the sun. The island seemed to be turning.

A while later, Atile’i started to collect thin little boxes with pictures on them. The briny seawater had not yet rotted away some of the pictures, and you could see naked female bodies in them. The girls gazed at him so tenderly, exposing their pale white breasts the likes of which Atile’i had never seen before. It went without saying that Rasula was a match for any of them. She half resembled them, but the rest of her was of the island. Anyway, by this point the sight of any nude female body seemed sufficient to cause Atile’i’s penis to swell and incline him to kawalulu , which he did, thinking of Rasula. He often thought maybe this was a kind of love.

Atile’i also collected “books.” He had seen “books” at the Earth Sage’s place, but they were few and far between, and had to be kept in transparent bags to keep them from getting ripped or rotten. The Earth Sage’s “books” were allegedly left behind by the white man. The Earth Sage said the white man called the marks in the books “writing.” The islanders did not have writing, nor did they think that the world had to be remembered in written form. They thought that life was a kind of resonance between story and song, and that was good enough for them.

Atile’i considered anything with writing to be a book, no matter what symbols it contained, illustrated or not, a single page or a thick stack. The symbols varied from book to book, but there seemed to be a hidden pattern. Perhaps because he had no way of knowing who established the pattern or what its provenance was, Atile’i felt a strange reverence for those marks. There were a few things on the island Atile’i had no trouble understanding, like tree trunks, fish carcasses and stones, but most things came from a world outside of his experience and beyond his knowledge. The marks in the books were the most amazing thing he’d seen, though, because they clearly came in different varieties. Why had the white man, or some other kind of islander, created something that seemed so utterly useless ? As he stared at those marks, his body felt hot. He noticed a slight trembling.

“May the sea bless you, for Kabang has His reason,” he murmured, and stacked the books in a certain place, but the stack got heavier and heavier, and some of the books ended up sinking back down into the sea.

At first Atile’i depended on the novelty of his collections to sustain his deteriorating psyche, but anyone who has dwelt long in solitude must be aware that the gap between moments can seem like a yawning chasm that no one can cross by mind alone. Atile’i now tried to fill it with remembrance. Having suffered great physical torment at sea, he relied on his aversion to jellyfish to keep from killing himself. The only thing keeping him pathetically alive, was memory. He recollected his last night on Wayo Wayo to relieve himself of desire, the words of his father and the elders to understand the sea, and the island songs to know the ways of love.

Atile’i had almost forgotten in which direction Wayo Wayo lay.