The Man with the Compound Eyes Read Free Page B

dodge. Sometimes Alice wished she still felt lust; as anyone who has once been young will know, desire is the best antidepressant in the world, dulling the force of memory and keeping a person in the present. But the Thom who appeared in her dreams no longer offered her desire. Holding a climbing ax in his right hand, he would hack away at his left hand as it morphed into a mountain wall. He never said a single word. Each time she tried to grasp the meaning of a dream, she would call the police to see if there was any news. “I’m sorry, Professor Shih. If we hear anything, you’ll be the first to know.” The police had gone from wholehearted to halfhearted, as if taking her calls had become a matter of routine. Once in a while there was even a hint of disgust in the voice on the other end of the line. “It’s that woman again. She’s just not gonna leave us alone,” Alice imagined the policeman saying to his partners after hanging up the phone.
    This April it had been constantly raining and unseasonably warm. There were supine beetles everywhere under the campus streetlights at night. Now there was a scarab inside the car. Alice rolled down the windows, but it could not find a way out. It just kept smacking against the windshield, its blue forewings faintly glowing.
    These past few months, Alice discovered how dependent on Toto she had become. It was only for his sake that she had bothered to eat breakfast and keep a regular bedtime and learn how to cook. Alice had also learned to be more careful, since her safety was her child’s safety. Anytime he went out, she had to worry that some goddamn drunk driver might smash his warm young face into the sidewalk, or that his classmates might bully him, or even his teachers, as people who spend a lot of time around children can sometimes be shockingly cruel. Alice remembered the girl with the dirty uniform she and her classmates used to gang up on. They taunted her day in, day out. They would splatter her dirty clothes to make them even dirtier, as if to show how clean their own clothes were by comparison.
    Alice passed a bridge over a floodplain to the left. The bridge had been washed out a few years before. The new bridge had been built higher up in the hills, almost three kilometers further inland. A burst of honking forced Alice’s attention back onto the road.
    A few minutes later, the car rounded a stretch of coastline, formerly the most famous in Haven. Years before, a developer had gone in, shoveled away part of the mountain, filled it in, firmed it up and built an amusement park. And then, with the full backing of that mayor who was knee deep in corruption charges, the developer kept right on digging away at the mountain wall on the other side of the site. But a major earthquake over nine years ago had caused the foundations of most of the facilities to shift, rendering the rides inoperable. The company filed for bankruptcy to avoid having to pay compensation. What with the rising sea level and the encroaching shoreline, the uncleared cable-car pylons and Ferris wheel looked stranded now. To one side, on a boulder that must originally have been part of the mountain, sat an angler, his boat roped to a pylon. Alice kept driving along the New Coastal Highway, until finally her own distinctive abode came into view in the distance, as sunlight sprayed down on the land through a light rain. Despite the drizzle this was the best weather in weeks.
    Her house was by the sea. But since when had the sea gotten that close?
    Alice opened the door, which now served no meaningful purpose, and looked around at the last of her possessions: the sofa, the mural Thom and she had collaborated on, the Michele De Lucchi chandelier, and the dried-up house plants. She and Thom had selected everything together. The hollow in the pillow, the facecloth in the bathroom and the storybooks on the shelf all bore the marks of Toto’s presence. Making a final inspection, Alice realized she had not