The Man with the Compound Eyes Page 5

  So, wearing his backpack over his chest, the man gave Alice and her luggage a ride. Sitting on the rack, Alice rested her hands lightly on the man’s firm waist. Her heart hadn’t slowed a bit. The two of them hung out after they made it back to the camp, talking until dark. The man got a guitar out of his tent and sang songs for her, songs she had grown up listening to. They did not retire to their respective tents until it was too dark to see the windmill generator in the distance.

  As she got to know Thom (a common Danish name, as she later discovered) a bit better, she learned that, after all, the beard was deceptive: she actually was a bit older than him, by three years. But in terms of life experience it was the other way around. He had cycled all over Africa. He had navigated a sailboat across the Atlantic and drifted onto some deserted island after the boat broke down. He had trained in Baji-style kung fu. He had run across the Sahara with an ultramarathon team. And he had participated in an interesting sleep experiment, which revisited the research done at Midnight Cave in Texas in 1972 by revising certain experimental conditions. He had spent six full months thirty meters underground.

  “What’s it like underground?”

  “What’s it like underground? Well, it was actually more like spending time inside a living being.”

  Thom was widely experienced and adventurous. Solving problems and taking up challenges was his idea of fun. These were personal qualities generally lacking in the men from the island Alice had grown up on. It all made her a bit giddy. Especially since Thom had such gentle, sparkling eyes.

  “You’ve done so many things! What’s next?”

  “Mountain climbing. Not in Denmark, though. Denmark is a country without mountains. I’m training in professional rock climbing three days a week in Germany. I’m working here to save up for my climbing gear.”

  Not understanding a word of Danish, Alice could only communicate with him in English. Neither was using his or her mother tongue, so they always seemed a bit hesitant. But the language they were speaking was beside the point. Her mind would always wander when she talked to him, even recalling lines of poetry: “For shade to shade will come too drowsily.” Oh no, Alice thought, this isn’t good.

  Thom was also attracted to this petite, scatterbrained woman who would sometimes launch into Mandarin without warning. He ditched his next plan, to go canoeing up a fjord. Meeting Alice was as exciting and unpredictable as any wilderness adventure, and possibly more dangerous. Thom offered to serve as Alice’s tour guide. He carried his tent, she carried hers, and they went backpacking together, both feeling excitable and frolicsome, like kids. Three weeks later, Alice had made a tour of northern Europe and returned to Copenhagen to catch her flight. Originally Thom was just going to see her off, but at the airport she was pulling her luggage and he was pulling his, and just as she was about to board the plane he made a last-minute decision to go with her to terra incognita Taiwan, just to see what it was like. The flight Alice was taking was already full, so Thom had to take the next flight. Instead of going home, Alice waited all day in the airport in Taipei for his connecting flight to arrive from Bangkok. The moment they found each other at the arrival gate that evening, the question hanging over their hearts was answered, the doubt in their minds dispelled.

  Alice got home to find her mailbox full, and among the mail was a letter informing her that her application for the teaching position had been accepted. So without any second thought Alice immediately started getting ready to move to Haven. She recalled why this was the only university she had applied to. Her romantic tendency had been acting up again: one half of her wanted to live by the ocean, while the other half wanted to rekindle her dream of being a writer. To do so she thought she should choose to live somewhere that seemed far from the crowd but was actually at a suitable distance for people watching. The week before Alice hastened to Haven, Thom had already gotten in touch with an alpine club and gone on an expedition to Great Snow Mountain. After he got back to Taipei and heard Alice talk about Haven this and Haven that, he decided to move there with her and see how it went.

  At first they lived in the faculty housing on campus, but because they weren’t legally married they could only be assigned a cramped single’s residence. Living quarters designed by public agencies in Taiwan are generally uninhabitable. The condensation was so bad in summer that when the air cooled at dusk even the duvet cover would get damp. A flatlander on a hilly island, Thom went climbing everywhere, and started practicing rock climbing with some local friends. Although Thom had started too late in life to become a true mountaineer, his attitude seemed to be: see how high you can go.

  “This place is really humid, not like Scandinavia.”

  “Tell me about it. It’s a tropical island. Hey, don’t you need to worry about money?”

  “That piece I sent back to Denmark has been published in a travel magazine. For now I’m all right. Do you really think I would’ve come all the way here just to sponge off you?” Thom winked his right eye. Alice had discovered that he did this when he was not being completely honest with her, so she did not ask to have a look at the magazine or inquire further into his financial situation or family background.

  Wasn’t it great? You don’t have to know a person’s family to be able to live with him, Alice thought, as Thom enthused about his newfound passion for rock climbing: “Up on a cliff, you can only see part of the sky. You feel your paltry strength through your feet and you thrust your fingers into the clefts in the rock, but you can’t share anything you see or smell with anyone. You ever had that feeling? You can hear your heart beating, you sense your breathing is getting labored, and if you’re really several thousand meters up on a cliff you know you could die at any time. That’s the feeling.” Thom’s eyes were shining now. “Like you might be one moment away from a vision of God.”

  Alice looked into his eyes, which had always charmed her so, and still did. But somehow the qualities that had attracted Alice to Thom in the first place were now her biggest worry.

  As the days went by, Alice became more and more anxious that this sexy guy might up and leave her at any time. She wanted to let go of him, but a certain expression of his—melancholy, profound yet innocent—was just so appealing. She almost felt that the rot in this humid residence had seeped into her heart. She did not know what to do.

  Alice had spent a long time researching a local writer named Kee and become close friends with his much younger wife. Kee’s second wife fell in love with him during an interview (but that’s a story for another day). She had short hair, spoke slowly and liked to wear sandals. Though not exactly beautiful, she had a certain fresh quality. She was especially fond of the fiction of Paul Auster. Love causes people to make strange judgments, including to try to rise above sex across a thirty-year age gap and the difficulties involved in any marriage. People who thought they were having a platonic affair were shocked when the old fellow divorced his wife to marry her. Friends thought that either Kee would end up leaving behind a young widow and a pile of manuscripts or his second wife would eventually get tired of living in seclusion with the old man and awaken from the literary spell he had cast on her. Nobody guessed that Kee’s young wife would leave the world one step ahead of him.

  Kee’s wife was swept away by a huge wave that appeared out of nowhere one day when they were at the beach for a walk. Reportedly, there had been a fairly powerful deep sea earthquake the previous day, resulting in a localized tidal wave. Kee was in the temporary public washroom put up by the local tourist bureau when the water sloshed in and flooded the place up to knee level. He looked out the window only to see his young wife on the distant strand get tripped up by the sudden wave and taken silently away.

  Because there were no eyewitnesses, the police closed the case after an investigation of nearly two weeks, concluding it was an accident. They never expected that Kee would commit suicide the next day, and in a manner that was at once nothing special and highly unusual. He had sealed the doors and windows a
nd started burning his manuscripts and letters. He succumbed due to inhalation of the smoke and fumes of his own writing.

  Kee’s only son Wenyang was indignant when his father left his mother for a much younger woman. They had a falling-out, and Wenyang took his mother to Taipei to run a sporting goods business. Wenyang and Alice had a discussion after his father’s death, and he decided to sell off the estate.

  “I don’t want anything, not the house, not the land. Professor Shih, all decisions concerning the publication of the collected works are at your discretion. Just as long as the royalties and the proceeds of the sale of the house are transferred to my mother.” He left the writer’s ex-wife’s account with Alice. Actually disposing of Kee’s library would be the easy part. She just had to convince the university to assign an office for it. A real estate agent could sell the house in Haven, and Alice herself had fallen in love with the wooded shoreline lot where Kee occasionally went but on which he had only built a tiny thatched cottage. She transferred all the money in her “faculty rate” bank account to Kee’s ex-wife.

  That is how Alice got the chance to read the diary entry Kee had made the day before he committed suicide. In the entry, he described the appearance of the wave: “At first sight it wasn’t just a wave crashing in so much as the sea itself surging up, silently and suddenly. Before I got a good look at it, it had returned whence it came. It did not make any sound. It merely confiscated a few things. That’s all it did.”

  Thom was away in Chamonix on an international winter expedition to Mont Blanc the whole time. He suddenly turned up in the kitchen of their residence one morning several weeks later and started making breakfast.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Bacon omelette with onions?”

  “Sure.” Alice was used to reunions like this. She pretended she didn’t mind, enraged at herself for being so weak. Thom told her about his adventure while they were eating. This time he had almost gone snow blind. (She suspected that he had taken off his snow goggles on purpose to pay homage to Michel-Gabriel Paccard, who became the first man to climb Mont Blanc in 1786. Thom was always replicating the “near-death experiences” of adventurers like Paccard). Alice started to segue toward the topic of home architecture.

  “So when are you going to take me to Chamonix?”

  “Anytime you want.”

  “Are the houses nice?”

  “Only you are fit to live in the houses I saw there.”

  “Do you still remember the Summer House?” She cut to the chase.

  “Sure. A charming little cabin.” He lightly kissed the ketchup away from the edge of her mouth.

  “I want to build a house like that.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ve bought some land.”

  “You’ve bought some land? You mean you’ve bought a piece of land to build a house on?”

  The land was quite close to the ocean, by a coastal copse. The shoreline here was rocky for the most part, with only a thin layer of topsoil. Although it was registered as farmland, you would not be able to grow much. Alice read through Kee’s manuscripts, still no wiser as to why he had bought this property in the first place. Standing at the edge of the lot, Thom started letting his steps guide him toward the sea. Then he tore off his clothes and jumped in naked. It was like he had been separated from a lover for too long and needed to give her a big hug and some sweet loving to celebrate the reunion. Standing mutely in the middle of the lot, Alice watched his curly sandy locks bob up and down in the water, like a keepsake she might lose at any time. He came back up on shore, gave her a big kiss, and said: “Let’s build a house like the Summer House.”

  Thom borrowed a stack of architecture books from the library and started doing research. He almost never went climbing. Alice had total faith in him. Though he was no genius he had drive, and could finish anything he started if he was willing to put his heart into it. But could she really keep a man like this?

  Thom said, “The exterior can be like the Summer House, but the whole concept has to be different. I want to build a house that suits these surroundings.” He rotated the house slightly. The side of Asplund’s Summer House that had faced a Scandinavian fjord now faced the Pacific Ocean, but at a thirty-degree angle in order to deflect the stiff ocean breeze. Also, sunlight reflecting directly off the water might bother people instead of creating the kind of comfortable atmosphere that would make them want to take their time getting out of bed in the morning, and a thirty-degree turn would illuminate every corner of the house, affording ample but not glaring light. Thom raised the ceiling in the attic of the right-hand cabin by a meter so that the window would have a full view of the Pacific.

  Listening to Thom’s explanation, Alice started imagining herself writing at the window. She said she wanted to call it the Sea Window. Thom also explained the rationale for keeping the little cross passages between the cabins in Asplund’s original design: each would be granted a certain semidetached independence while maintaining a friendly rapport. “You’ll live in the right-hand cabin. The one on the left will be mine. I’ve moved it back slightly so I’ll have a view of the sea, too.” That sense of distance appealed to her.

  For the main cabin, Thom put various plants inside and out, so when you looked in from the outside you’d see a charming tropical living room. Rather sneakily, Thom went and stayed in all the B&Bs up and down the coast. With total self-confidence, he reported back to Alice, “I think many people who build houses don’t understand that people ‘live’ in their houses. Particularly in Taiwan, where you have people building places just to serve as B&Bs, because most guests will only ‘stay for a night.’ A house you really live in for ten or twenty years is different. I want to build a home we can live in for a long, long time.” This last declaration made Alice fall madly in love with him all over again.

  Given the warm climate in eastern Taiwan, there was no reason to keep the famous fireplaces in the original Asplund design. Thom found the fake fireplaces in many B&Bs in Taiwan silly and pretentious. But under Alice’s guidance he became quite enamored with Taiwan’s once ubiquitous rural “hearth culture,” and added a traditional stove room to the modern kitchen.

  “We’ll really be able to use it. Only a house in which you can make authentic local cuisine is a true home.”

  Thom spent another full year on the electrical system. He compared many different brands of solar panel. He adjusted the angles and covered the tops of the sloping eaves with panels, creating a solar awning for each of the three porches, under which a person could cool off, meditate or take a nap. He also went online, ordered a small desalination machine from a German firm and designed a salt-and-fresh dual-plumbing system. He planted salt-tolerant local plants like the pongam oil tree and the white-bloom mangrove, spacing them out outside the line of sight of the windows. He even calculated the growth rates so the shade of the mature trees would not fall on the solar panels fifty years hence.

  A year and a half later, Thom had finished the graphic design, the 3D mock-up, and the blueprints for the electrical and plumbing systems. Alice had been watching and listening to him put the little house together, her heart faintly trembling the whole time. She had a sense of reckless bliss, a bit like turning on the tap and watching water come pouring out.

  Before construction began, Alice pledged all her assets to secure a big loan from the bank. Building the house allowed her to extricate herself from her stuffy, unimaginative academic life and let her orient herself toward a specific goal. Then the day they started digging the foundation, Alice went to the hospital because she felt nauseous. The doctor recommended that she take a pregnancy test.

  Alice would later say that Toto and the Sea House were the same age, which was basically true. Thom’s attitude toward Toto’s impending arrival was about the same as any father’s. He was thrilled. He added a place for Toto in both the left-hand and right-hand cabins, so both mum and dad would have time alone with him.

  Toto
was conceived before building began, and born before construction was complete. He was three months old when Alice finished planting the garden. She put Toto under the eaves and started planting herbs around the house for butterflies to eat. She had an acquaintance named Ming, a colleague at the university, who had written some literary essays about butterflies. Alice asked him to list species that would be appropriate for a coastal property and teach her how to plant them.

  Thom loosened up the dirt road that had been packed hard by the bulldozer, and planted a windbreak on both sides to create a tree-lined path down to the shore.

  But there was a series of strong typhoons the year the house was finished, and the foundation of the coastal highway, which had already been rebuilt ten meters inland from the old road, started to scour. Not long thereafter a whole stretch of road collapsed unexpectedly, and the Bureau of Public Works had no choice but to retreat another thirty meters and build a new “coastal” highway at a slightly higher elevation, drilling through a few mountainsides to do it. In the aftermath of the Great Flood that struck Taiwan on 8 August 2009, whether or how much of the island would be underwater ten years hence became a hot-button issue. But to many folks, this was still “outside the realm of possibility.” Alice thought that the lives the flood had taken would only give the survivors a fool’s confidence that there was no disaster people could not handle. Some folks shrugged it off by anthropomorphizing the disaster and running off at the mouth about the “cruelty” and “inhumanity” of nature.

  After hearing Alice’s thoughts on the matter, Thom would occasionally promote his own Danish viewpoint, that, “Actually, nature isn’t cruel at all. At least, it isn’t especially cruel to human beings. Nature doesn’t fight back, either, because nothing without conscious intent can ‘fight back.’ Nature is just doing what it should, that’s all. If the sea will rise then let it rise. When the time comes we’ll move house and all will be well. If we don’t move in time the worst that’ll happen is that the sea will serve for our watery tomb, and we will become fish food. Not so bad if you think of it that way, is it?”