The Man with the Compound Eyes Read Free

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. Whodid 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 dresshim 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.
    “It’s all Thom’s fault!” She was frantic.
    “Don’t worry. If