Wu Ming-Yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

If a Wayo Wayoan encountered a rough current or some other hardship while out at sea, he would close his eyes, raise his head and stretch his spine, for it was said that the man of rich experience could “smell” the direction in which Wayo Wayo lay. At first Atile’i could still catch a whiff of the island’s powerful aroma through the stench of the sea and rain, but seven songs later and only the thinnest filament of scent remained. After another seven songs he could only roughly guess that Wayo Wayo was somewhere toward the sunset. Alas, like all Wayo Wayoans, Atile’i knew that the sun sets in a different place every evening, so that was not the exact direction in which Wayo Wayo was to be found.

The past few days, Atile’i had seen all manner of ocean scenery. He had never experienced such weird weather in all his life: one moment it was scorching, the next minute freezing, and the sky could turn from fair to foul before a single fish was hooked. Sometimes night came suddenly, and sometimes darkness would rudely descend on the afternoon. One minute the stars would be shining, and the next moment the sun would rise with a blinding light. One time he saw nine cyclones appear at once above the sea, with thunder chasing the lightning through the clouds. The clouds seemed to grow spidery legs that reached downward to the sea, and as soon as they touched the water up a vortex sprang. A storm followed hot on the heels of the twisters, and Atile’i kept praying to Kabang to just take him away and let that be the end of him. When the sky cleared, Atile’i was surprised to find a long shadow lying like a ribbon on the sea. He swam over to take a closer look. The ribbon was composed of butterflies’ corpses, which had floated here from who knows where. There were so many of them, and they stretched out so far, that he was reminded of his own interminable odyssey. Oh, when would it end?

Atile’i was losing any notion of dusk and dawn or noon and night, and he gave up trying to tell direction by observing the heights of the moon and the morningstar. He let himself go like a fallen leaf, like a dead fish floating on the sea. Hungry, he ate. Tired, he slept. For a while he even thought that Wayo Wayo was just a poignant fantasy, a story he had made up. But Atile’i had to admit he wanted desperately to see his island home again, that any ghost would do. Atile’i would holler at the sea whenever he sighted the shadow of a whale, for he knew that the spirits of the second sons turned into sperm whales by day. Even the north-migrating eagles were sad to hear him this way. It would be so nice if Rasula and her mother Saliya were here, Atile’i thought. In all the island, only their voices had the power to summon Masimaga’o (“a whale with a body like the sea” in the Wayo Wayoan language), whose posture in the water allowed the Sea Sage to divine the future. Wouldn’t you know it, one day a pair of Masimaga’o really did appear after Atile’i had finished singing. They “joined tails” near the island and knocked a hole in the weakest part. When they surfaced their bodies were covered in colorful objects, like idols ready for some religious rite.

Once, Atile’i speared a sailfish swimming by the island and got dragged into the water when it swam off. Just when he was about to let go and give up, the speed of the dive caused him to black out. His head told his hand to let go, but his hand held on tight. By this time the wounded sailfish had swum into the island maze, sometimes rising to the surface, sometimes sinking among the sundry oddities of the island. Atile’i could only pray, “O Kabang, the only one who can dry the sea, even if you have forsaken me, please let my corpse turn into coral and drift homeward for Rasula to find.”

The fish tried and tried but could not find the way out of the underwater island. It had gotten all scraped up, and its head was covered in clutter. Badly wounded now, it was losing strength, giving Atile’i, who was still clutching the spear, the chance to flip the fish over, grab onto a corner of the island and find a pocket of air. He realized an instinctive need to see the light of day again. He only ate a single piece of sailfish before stashing the rest of it there. The next day all of it had vanished. Even the bones were gone.

Alone, not knowing when he would be able to go back to Wayo Wayo, Atile’i thought he would need a place that could withstand the wind and rain. He found a sheet of highly water-resistant blue cloth and draped it over a lattice of flexible yet sturdy rods to make himself a little makeshift shelter. It was soon wrecked by a storm, so Atile’i resolved to build himself a small house. Of course it wouldn’t be able to withstand a real storm. (Nothing in this world could, right?) But at least it would not be quite so flimsy as the shelter. “A weak house makes a weak man,” as the Wayo Wayoan proverb put it. Atile’i used whatever rain would not rot, nor seawater erode, in the construction of his house. It would drift with the ocean currents, maybe someday all the way back to Wayo Wayo. Even if by that time he was dead and gone, his house might still be there, bringing back news of what had befallen him at sea.

Now that he was seriously considering building a house, Atile’i discovered that the island was actually rich in rot-resistant materials. Atile’i used the metal rods from the shelter and whale jaws and ribs for the beams, with the kind of club he had used to make the spear for the columns. Then he secured the frame with a colorful material that would not rip no matter how hard you yanked on it. At first he built a structure with space inside for three people to lie down in, and as the sun and moon kept trading places the house was taking shape. Atile’i also built a storage shed, as well as a place to store water, which he called the sakaloma , meaning “a well on the sea.” Made of things available around the island, the house blended in with its surroundings when you looked at it from a distance, as if purposefully camouflaged. Looking at the house he had built with his own two hands, Atile’i felt himself truly rich.

But Atile’i had also noticed a lot of other dead sea creatures around the island, guessing they must have eaten part of the island just like the turtle. The island sometimes looked like a giant floating cage — a shadowy incantation, a rootless place, the cemetery of all creation. Aside from a few species of seabird that made nests and laid eggs on the island from time to time, nothing else could survive there. Creatures that died from eating bits of the island eventually became part of the island. Atile’i thought he too might end up becoming part of the island. So this is what hell was like, he thought. So this is the land of death.

In the distance Atile’i had seen mighty ships far bigger than a talawaka , and frighteningly noisy iron birds. He remembered the Earth Sage had spoken of “the birds of hell and the ghost ships of the white man.”

Atile’i knew nothing of the worlds inhabited by other men. He heard that when the Wayo Wayo islanders first saw the white man they had said, “Have you come here along a road through the sky?”

A rainbow was a road through the sky. The Earth Sage said, “Only spirits are light enough to cross it.” Atile’i sometimes saw rainbows in the distance, wondering what he would do if he ran into a white man. How should he talk to him? Could a white man take me back to Wayo Wayo? Atile’i remembered another of the Earth Sage’s offhand remarks: “The white man may come and the white man may go, but we will live by the law of Wayo Wayo. We don’t need the white man. The gifts he left us are harmful, ill-gotten gains. There’s just this useless watch, a couple of books, and a few children like Rasula.” The Earth Sage sighed and said, “But there may come a day when the other men who live upon the earth cause Wayo Wayo to vanish. You never know.”