The Man with the Compound Eyes (2 page)

Occasionally, the people went hungry, the weather was too rough, or two of the villages would come into conflict; but no matter how he spent his days, everyone was skilled at telling diverse stories of the sea. People told tales at meals, when they met, at rituals, and when making love. They
even told them in their sleep. A complete record had never been made, but many years later anthropologists might know that the islanders had the greatest number of sea sagas of any people on Earth. “Let me tell you a story of the sea” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. They did not ask how old people were, but simply grew tall like trees and stuck out their organs of increase like flowers. Like the obstinate clam they just passed the time. Like a sea turtle each islander died with the curl of a smile at the corner of his mouth. They were all old souls, older than they appeared, and because they spent their lives staring at the sea they all had melancholy miens and tended to get cataracts and go blind in old age. When they were ready to go, old folks would ask the youngsters by the bed, “What’s the weather out at sea like now?” People believed that dying while gazing at the sea was the grace of Kabang. Their lifelong dream was to arrive at the moment of death with an image of the ocean in the ocean of the mind.

When a boy was born, his father would select a tree for him and carve a notch for each resurrection of the moon. When there were a hundred and eighty notches, the boy had to build a
talawaka
of his very own. Years before, the anthropologist S. Percy Smith had described the
talawaka
as a “canoe.” Actually, it was more like a grass boat. The island was too small to have enough trees with trunks thick enough to be made into canoes. Students of anthropological history smile at Smith’s mistake, but nobody would laugh at him, as anyone who saw a
talawaka
would assume it was a dugout canoe. A
talawaka
was made by weaving sticks, rattan stems and three or four different kinds of silver grass together to form a frame and applying three coatings of plant pulp. Peat from the bog was used to plug any remaining cracks, and the craft was waterproofed with sap. A finished
talawaka
really did look like a finely finished canoe made by hollowing out the trunk of a sturdy tree.

The finest and sturdiest
talawaka
on the island was made by a youth named Atile’i. Atile’i’s face had the typical traits of his people: a flat nose, profound eyes, shining skin, a sad, slouching spine and arrow-like limbs.

“Atile’i, don’t sit there, the sea fiends will see you!” hollered a passing elder upon seeing Atile’i sitting by the shore.

Once, like everyone else, Atile’i thought that the whole world was but a single island drifting on the sea like a hollow clamshell in a tub of water.

Having learned the art of
talawaka
construction from his father, Atile’i was praised as the most skilled
talawaka
-maker among the island youth, even more skilled than his elder brother Nale’ida. Though young, Atile’i had the physique of a fish and could catch three ghostheads on a single breath. Every girl on the island pined for Atile’i and hoped that one day he would waylay her, throw her over his shoulder and carry her off into a clump of grass. Three full moons later, she would discreetly inform Atile’i that she was with child. Then she would go home, act normal, and wait for Atile’i to arrive with a whalebone knife and a marriage proposal. Maybe that’s what the most beautiful girl on the island, Rasula, was hoping for, too.

“Atile’i has the fate of a second son. What good is a second son who can dive? Atile’i is destined for the Sea God, not for Wayo Wayo.” Atile’i’s mother often complained in this vein, and people would nod knowingly, understanding that raising an outstanding second son was the most painful thing in the world for any parent. Atile’i’s mother grumbled day and night, her thick lips trembling, as if the more she bemoaned her son’s fate the greater his chance of avoiding it might be.

Unless an eldest son died young, the second son seldom married and went on to become an “old man of the sea.” Upon reaching his one hundred and eightieth full moon, he would be sent out to sea on a mission of no return. He could take no more than ten days’ worth of water and was not allowed to look back. Hence the saying, “Let’s just wait until your second son returns,” which simply meant, “Perish the thought.”

With flashing eyelashes and sparkling skin, covered in crystals of salt, Atile’i looked like the son of the Sea God. Tomorrow he would brave the waves in his
talawaka
. He climbed the highest reef-rock on the island and gazed down at the distant swells, at the white creases in the fabric of the sea. The seabirds flying along the shore reminded him of Rasula, who was as nimble as the shadow of a bird in flight. And like a shore pounded by the waves for many eons, his heart, he felt, was about to break.

According to custom, Atile’i’s admirers laid ambush at dusk. Atile’i had
only to wander past a clump of grass and some young maiden would accost him. Every time he hoped the girl in the grass would be Rasula, but Rasula never appeared. Atile’i made love over and over again to the girls in the grass, for this was the last chance he had to father a child and leave some small part of himself behind on the island. In fact, as a matter of propriety and morality, he could not refuse their propositions: the girls of Wayo Wayo could ambush a second son on the night before he went to sea. Atile’i broke his back making love to the girls in the thickets, taking no pleasure, intent only on nearing Rasula’s place before dawn. He had a feeling he would meet her there. Each girl along the way sensed that once inside her Atile’i was in a rush to leave. Hurt, they all asked, “Atile’i, why don’t you love me?”

“You know that people can’t pit their hearts against the sea.”

Atile’i finally made it with pale fishbelly dawn on the horizon. A pair of hands appeared from inside the grass and lightly drew him in. Shivering like a seabird ducking beside a boulder to dodge a flash of lightning, Atile’i could barely get an erection, not because he was exhausted but because the look in Rasula’s eyes was like a jellyfish’s sting.

“Atile’i, why don’t you love me?”

“Who says I don’t love you? But you know no man can pit his heart against the sea.”

They cuddled for a long while. Eyes closed, Atile’i felt like he was hanging in thin air, gazing down upon the open ocean. He gradually became aroused, tried to force himself to forget that soon he would go to sea, wanting only to feel the warmth inside Rasula’s body. At dawn, the villagers would all go down to the shore to see Atile’i off. Except for the Sea Sage and the Earth Sage, nobody would have noticed that all through the night departed spirits of second sons had been coming home. They all wanted to ride with the youth whose skin sparkled like the son of the Sea as he piloted the
talawaka
he had fashioned himself, carrying a “speaking flute,” a final gift from Rasula, as he rowed away to the fate he shared with them, each one, the fate of every Wayo Wayoan second son.

Alice Shih got up early one morning and decided to kill herself.

Actually, she had mostly made all the necessary preparations. Or perhaps one should say now nothing stood in her way: there wasn’t anything she wanted to leave anybody, and she did not have much of an estate. She was simply someone who wanted to die.

But Alice was an obstinate person. She cared about all the people she cared about. There weren’t many left, her son Toto and the students who had entrusted her with their hopes and dreams. Once Alice had known what she would need. Now nothing was clear.

Alice had tendered her resignation, returned her faculty ID. She could finally let out a big sigh of relief: now the torment of this life would end and she could try her luck in the next. Alice had gone to grad school to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. She had sailed into this faculty position after getting her Ph.D. With her delicate appearance and sensitive disposition she seemed in Taiwan’s conservative society typecast for the role of the writer. A lot of people envied her; after all, for a literary person, this was the smoothest road one could possibly take. Only Alice knew the truth: that becoming a good writer was no longer the issue, that she simply had no time to write. Stifled by administrative duties, she had not had a breath of fresh, literary air these past few years. Oftentimes it was already sunrise before she was ready to leave the office.

She decided to give away all the books and things in her office to her students. Trying not to get all emotional, she treated each of the students she had mentored to a meal as a way of saying goodbye. Sitting in the dreadful campus cafeteria, she observed the different expressions in their eyes.

“So young,” she thought.

These kids imagined they were on the way to some mysterious destination, but there wasn’t really anything where they were going, just an empty space like a basement, a place that was heaped with junk. She tried to keep a glimmer of sympathy in her eyes, to let her students think that she was still listening and interested in what they had to say. But Alice was just a shell through which air was blowing, all words like stones being tossed into an empty house that didn’t even have windows. The only thoughts that flickered through her mind were memories of Toto and possible ways of ending her life.

On second thought, that seemed a bit unnecessary. The sea was right on her doorstep, wasn’t it?

Alice had not bid farewell to practically any of her colleagues. She was afraid she might reveal the knots of revulsion toward the world that life had tied in her soul. Driving through town, Alice felt things looked about the same as when she first came here over ten years before, but she was struck by the sense that this was no longer the land of gorges and villages that had drawn her here. Halfway down the east coast, separated from the overdeveloped west by the Central Mountain Range, Haven had once seemed a refuge. But now the huge leaves, the clouds that would gather all of a sudden, the corrugated iron roofs, the dry creek beds she would see along the road every couple of miles, and the vulgar billboards—all the things she had at first found so endearing—were gradually withering, growing unreal, losing their hold on her. She remembered her first year in Haven: then the bush and the vegetation came quite close to the road, as if neither the terrain nor the wild animals feared the sight of man. Now the new highway had pushed nature far away.

Originally, Alice reflected, this place had belonged to the aborigines. Then it belonged to the Japanese, the Han people, and the tourists. Who
did it belong to now? Maybe to those city folks who bought homesteads, elected that slimeball of a mayor, and got the new highway approved. After the highway went through, the seashore and the hills were soon covered with exotic edifices, not one of them authentic, pretty much as if a global village theme park had been built there as a joke. There were fallow fields and empty houses everywhere, and the fat cats who owned these eyesores usually only appeared on holidays. Folks in the local cultural scene liked to gush about how Haven was the true “pure land,” among other cheap clichés of native identity, while Alice often felt that except for some houses belonging to the aboriginal people or buildings from the Japanese era, now maintained as tourist attractions, the artificial environment had been intended to spite the natural landscape.

Which reminded her of this one conference coffee break when her colleague Professor Wang started spouting off about how sticky the soil in Haven was, how “stuck-on-Haven” he felt, and not for the first time. What a disingenuous comment! Alice couldn’t help telling him, right to his face, “Don’t you mean stuck-in-Haven? There’s fake farmhouses and fake B&Bs all over the place; even the trees in the yards of these places are fake. Don’t you think? These houses! Ug. What’s so great about it if all it does is cause phonies like that to stick around?”

Professor Wang was at a loss for words. For a moment he forgot to wear the mantle of the senior faculty member. With his drooping eyelids, gray hair and greasy appearance, he looked more like a businessman than like an academic. Honestly, there were times when Alice could not tell the difference. Professor Wang eventually managed, “If you say so, then what should it really be like?”

What was it really like? Alice ruminated on the drive home.

It was April. Everywhere was a sluggish, damp smell in the air, like the smell of sex. Alice was driving south. To the right was the Central Mountain Range, a national icon. Occasionally—no, more like every day—Alice recalled the way Toto had looked standing up on the car seat, gazing at the mountains with his head sticking up through the sunroof. He wore a camouflage hat, like a little soldier. Sometimes her memory would dress
him in a windbreaker, sometimes not. Sometimes he would be waving, but not always. She imagined that Toto must have left the foot-sized indentation in the car seat that day. That was the last impression she had of her husband and son.

Dahu was the first person she called for help after Thom and Toto went missing. Dahu was Thom’s climbing buddy. A member of the local rescue team, he knew these hills like the back of his hand.