Hafay always felt her best cleaning up the Seventh Sisid first thing in the morning. The aromatic melange of seawater outside and sea-grass mats and wooden chairs inside was reminiscent of the smell of cookies, and this rather childish odor allowed Hafay to forget her cares for a while.
On the first Sunday in July, Hafay saw a couple of new faces in the Seventh Sisid. A man and a woman came in right when Hafay opened, sat at the Lighthouse table, set up a camera, and didn’t move the whole morning. The man wore a cameraman’s vest that was literally covered in pockets and a huge backpack; he was big and strong, and had dark skin, a buzz cut, and single-fold eyelids. He looked like the kind of guy who likes working out and pays attention to detail. The woman was skinny, and with heavy eye makeup that made her face seem a bit unreal. And she was wearing silver high heels, in a place like this! She seemed made for TV. Well, I guess, Hafay admitted grudgingly, she is beautiful, but just barely.
The woman had turned on her tablet right after sitting down and had been staring at the screen ever since, like she wanted to avoid looking at her partner. He had set up a telescope and a professional video camera, with a sticker deliberately covering the brand name. Hafay only needed one look to know they were definitely not there for the bird-watching. A few friends of hers who often went bird-watching had mentioned that, what with upstream factories diverting water into their weirs and discharging waste into the river, over the past few years the fish population at the estuary had collapsed and the birding had even gone to hell at the river mouth. Besides, looking out from the Lighthouse today there weren’t any birds at all, only a gray expanse.
“Here on holidays?”
“No, we’re here on business. Our job today is watching the sea,” the man said.
“Well, I’ve been here watching the sea for many years now, and it’s really not a simple thing. Please take your time,” Hafay joked. Maybe they were here to do a story on Alice’s house. The past couple of years really quite a few of these media people had made the trip. She turned on the stereo and put in a CD from a long time ago. It was the aboriginal singer Panai’s song “Maybe Someday.” Panai was really popular with young people at the time, and one time Hafay heard Panai sing live at the seashore. It was so intense. To Hafay it seemed that though Panai was trying to be laid-back when she sang this song, there was this heavy vibe, as if maybe someday would never come.
Maybe someday, you too will want to leave this bustling town behind.
Maybe someday, you too will want to see that childhood place you keep in mind,
“a place like Heaven,” Mama would say … maybe someday.
The man ordered the daily special. Hafay called today’s special Three Hearts, because she made it out of screwpine hearts, silvergrass hearts and shellflower hearts. She had gathered the vegetables the day before. For the main course you could choose wild boar shank or steamed fish. The man came over to the cashier and presented his name card. As she expected, he was a videojournalist for some TV channel, and the woman was an on-location correspondent.
“You can call me Han.”
“My name’s Lily,” said the woman with the heavy eye makeup, long false lashes and turquoise eyes.
“What are you reporting on? We do not want the attention.”
“Hey, don’t get us wrong, ma’am. This is a great restaurant, and it’d be perfect for a feature. But we’re not working on a fine dining piece right at this time. We’re mainly here because we heard that this is where the trash island might hit.”
“The what island?”
“It’s been all over the news. It’s not really an island. I should call it the Trash Vortex. Ah, you don’t seem to have a TV here.”
“Nope.” Television was one of the many things Hafay disliked, and she did not subscribe to a newspaper, either.
Lily batted her false eyelashes and started to explain: “Some thirty years ago, scientists discovered ocean currents had been carrying people’s garbage into a huge floating trash dump. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? It’s just so fascinating: this heap of trash is floating this way, and the whole world is watching. You’ve got to help us, ma’am.”
“What do you want me to do?” Hafay couldn’t understand what was so fascinating about it.
“Let us shoot from here. You’ve got a great view. And when the time comes we’d like to interview you and get you to share your thoughts.”
“Sorry, I don’t do TV.” Hafay waved her hand dismissively. “Will there be other reporters showing up?” she asked anxiously.
By the afternoon, all the local inns and B&Bs were full of reporters. There were even quite a few foreign correspondents. Every so often helicopters and paragliders would fly by. Journalists of all shapes, sizes and colors covered the beach; some were even setting up tents. But except for Han and Lily, Hafay refused to serve any of them. She wished Han and Lily would leave, too, if possible, but she wouldn’t kick them out. She’d only turn away new customers. Han and Lily were thrilled when they heard about the house rule. “This way we’ll get exclusive footage. These days, no matter what the story, everyone interviews the same people and even gets the same camera angles. It really kills us when we can’t get anything unique.”
Then Lily, who was still holding the tablet so she could stay online with the news studio in Taipei and the helicopter flying overhead, said, “The news copter has flown out on the open ocean and surveyed the edge of the vortex, but the tidal currents near the shore have been so strong lately; they’ve been pushing the trash offshore. So we really don’t know when it’s going to hit. The experts we consulted with predicted that once the low pressure system forming over Luzon starts moving north the airflows will cause the edge of the vortex to fragment. Part of it might spread to Japan, and another part may get sent here.”
“Go up in the helicopter and you’ll get the shots you want,” Hafay said.
“Sure, we’ve got aerial footage already, but the wind’s been too strong the past few days. And it costs a lot to fuel the news copter, so we can’t run it all the time. What we really want to capture is the moment when the vortex hits the shore, and then get local reactions to the incident,” Han said. “Oh yeah, is there a boat in the area we could charter?”
“Maybe Ah Lung can take you out. I’ll give you his number.” Ah Lung was a local fellow who made wood sculptures and fished at the shore.
Hafay took in the familiar stretch of sea, but try as she might she couldn’t understand what Lily and Han were talking about. It was like when she couldn’t understand an arithmetic problem as a girl. All those things we tossed out assuming the tide would take them away and the ocean would digest them were now floating slowly back?
“Is there anyone living in that house over there?” Lily pointed at the only house in the line of sight of the Lighthouse. Hafay didn’t have to look to know that they meant Alice’s place.
“Sure is.”
Alice was getting used to things she just couldn’t understand coming in with the tide.
Finding Ohiyo was like opening a door and letting in a ray of light. Every morning, she would wake up to the sound of Ohiyo’s meowing, and after pouring her food she’d sit at her writing desk by the Sea Window and zone out, or scribble whatever came to mind, without any particular aim. She wrote in a notebook rather than use a computer. She was not writing so much as performing a kind of ritual to the ocean, as if praying to it and beseeching it. Ohiyo’s appearance seemed to have given her faith that if serendipity had brought Ohiyo to her, then maybe it had delivered Toto to something else, maybe something that had ended up taking him in. This possibility dispelled her suicidal thoughts, at least for now.
At first, she was thinking of letting someone more suitable adopt Ohiyo, or taking her to the animal shelter. But every time she put her in the pet carrier she had bought from the vet she couldn’t help letting her out and stroking her head as she licked her hands with her flickering tongue. Ohiyo, seeming to understand that this person who was petting her needed her, would sit shamelessly on Alice’s lap while she was writing or, even more brazenly, right on top of her notebook, and there was no way she was moving. The little lass knew Alice could not bear to push her away. All Alice could do was try to keep writing, or stare blankly out to sea. The sea was not the same color as when she was a girl. It was a bit darker and grayer now, rarely glowing with its own light. It was like some despairing middle-aged woman one occasionally runs into on the street, who’s been married awhile and has now started to put on weight.
Sometimes Alice would think and think or write and write and end up falling asleep at her desk. At some point Ohiyo would always give herself a shake and spring out the window. Alice would worry she was gone for good, but she discovered Ohiyo had figured out the stunt of hopping from stool to stool to reach the shore. She’d also learned to swim. Watching through the backdoor window, Alice saw Ohiyo squeeze headlong into a thicket of grass. She didn’t know whether it was a coincidence, but the most solitude she could stand before getting suicidal was two or three hours, and just when Alice’s thoughts tended in that direction Ohiyo would make a nimble entrance. Her meowing was just the thing to ward off Alice’s thoughts of leaving the world, as if someone had deliberately bolted the invisible gate that led toward the land of death.
For the longest time after entering the academy Alice used a computer to increase her productivity. When speech recognition became popular later on Alice followed suit. So it felt kind of awkward when she went back to writing by hand, and there were lots of characters she’d forgotten how to write. Editing was even more of a problem, because now she couldn’t just click undo. Sometimes she’d be on the last line and make a mistake and have to crumple up the page and start over. But Alice liked this feeling: the characters had to settle in her mind a bit longer before they could take shape on the paper, stroke by stroke, like stalks of grass rustling out of the ground until she cut them down with the mower and waited for them to grow again. No matter how hard she tried, Alice could not remember why she used to like writing fiction when she was younger. Maybe the feeling was gone never to return, like all the migratory birds that had stopped visiting the island. Observing herself slowly turning into a word machine these past few years, Alice had become extremely short-tempered, and took it out on the scholarly articles she was asked to review. You draw a salary for producing this kind of garbage? The nerve! she always thought. Eventually, Alice got a reputation in the academic world for being unfathomably harsh. “Don’t send her articles,” people would whisper. Soon she was isolated, the way a vicious fish might be put in a Plexiglas separation chamber in an aquarium.
A few days before, Alice had gone to a new bookstore in town to get the right notebook. The prevalence of computers did not seem to have decreased the number of notebooks on the market. Lots of people still enjoyed having a booklet close at hand, jotting things in it when they felt like it. The store had a large selection. Alice took a liking to a notebook with a blue cover without any lettering. But the “paper” inside felt really neat to the touch. The clerk explained, “It’s made in Germany. It’s really cool. You can also buy a vial of this correction fluid. It’s an organic plant-extract, and you use it wherever you want to erase and rewrite. It erases just like that, no sweat. The paper is made out of hemp fiber but has the texture of traditional paper.”
“Amazing, fake paper that’s just like the real thing.”
“No, no, miss, this is real paper.”
Well, the clerk was right. Maybe she’d fallen into a kind of intellectual trap. She’d started with a preconceived notion of paper and regarded anything that seemed “like paper” as fake paper or a replacement for paper. She felt that the whole world seemed to be of the same composition as this paper, but she could not say how, at least not until she got home and another thought occurred to her. About a dozen years before, people had started promoting “green living” or “slow living,” and so forth, but this was just the latest fad. The people of this island basically pursued whatever was popular, not because it was significant but because it was “the latest.” Saying “this is the latest” to Taiwanese people was like casting a spell on them, or like playing the melody of a magic flute that made whosoever heard it follow along. And this paper seemed to provide temporary repose to all such newfangled notions. But it was not a digital repose. It was writing out one stroke at a time the characters that appeared really necessary, worth preserving for all eternity.
“Yes, I guess it is, in that sense.”
Alice bought a stack of notebooks in one go. Sitting by the Sea Window, she would write poems in the shape of a mouse’s tail, in imitation of Alice in Wonderland. Sometimes she’d draw Ohiyo fast asleep, or copy out Toto’s insect notes: highland red-belly swallowtail butterfly (Mount Li), Chinese hairstreak (Mount Ninety-Two in Nantou County), jewel beetle (Plum Mountain in Chiayi County), midnight luster stag beetle (Mystery Lake), moon-gazer stag beetle (Lala Mountain) … Alice discovered that insects sometimes had very charming names. They got more and more familiar until she pretty much had them all memorized. Now it was like her mind contained a forest, a mountain.
Today Alice would try writing fiction again. For a while, she thought she could keep writing stories on this paper. She would finish one, erase it and write another, over and over again. One day a reader might think he was reading a single story when he was actually reading countless stories. But right at this moment, all she had in her mind was an opening:
Nobody has ever seen the forest she now beholds, like a forest in a novel that has grown into a real wood.
That was as far as she had gotten. Didn’t matter, though, because in any case she was no longer writing with a particular end in mind. Besides, maybe a single sentence could be considered a complete story. She put down her pen and poked her head out the window, wanting to enjoy the nice weather, only to discover a bunch of people setting up tents on the beach all the way from her house to the Seventh Sisid, some even pointing cameras right at her place. She couldn’t believe her eyes. When the cameras noticed the lady of the house sticking her head out, it was like they’d found a new quarry: all of them turned toward her as if they were synchronized.
Alice was momentarily dazzled, by the hue of the sun and the glare off the water. The light turned into a kind of strange vibration. It confined her, confused her. Her chest was ready to burst; something inside her yearned to escape. Then, in the midst of a mind glitch, she suddenly dove out the window, like a dolphin.
These days wherever Dahu went, he would think of the scene that day in the mountains: a gorge shrouded in a milky mist, a young man appearing out of nowhere like rain.
Could someone really “go back” to the mountains? Dahu was watching Umav, who was unclipping her hair to check whether her bangs were even with rapt, undivided attention.
They were eating at the Old Shandong Noodle House. A regular patron, Dahu ordered the usual: a plate of noodles and a bowl of meatball soup. And Umav had beef dumpling soup. Though Umav had Bunun features, her skin was extremely fair. Aboriginal kids like Umav had been born and raised in the city. The TV they watched and the kids they met mixed fashions and lifestyle trends from Taiwan, the United States, Japan, Korea and a few other countries; they learned their fashion sense and way of life from the internet. Dahu wondered whether Umav’s generation was a new breed of Bunun. Umav reclipped her hair and started jamming away at the air keyboard on the edge of the table. Dahu waited for a pause in her performance before asking: “What’s the tune?”
“ ‘The Happy Blacksmith.’ ”
“Oh, ‘The Happy Blacksmith.’ ”
A few years before, Dahu had followed the latest trend in children’s education and sent Umav for piano lessons. This appeared to be her favorite activity. But Dahu was utterly ignorant. He did not know who had composed “The Happy Blacksmith” or what the notes were. Since he’d never met a blacksmith in his entire life, he wondered why the blacksmith would be happy instead of sad. Come to think of it, the blacksmiths in some of the movies he’d seen all looked pretty glum, at least when they were striking the iron. Anyway, maybe there weren’t any blacksmiths left at all anymore.
On TV, the beautiful anchorwoman was reporting on an incredible news story in a broadcaster’s standard Mandarin. The volume was turned way up, but the speaker seemed to be broken and the sound kept breaking up. All you could make out from the spluttering speaker was words like “trash,” “island,” and “Pacific.” The anchorwoman’s voice was strident and shrill. For some reason TV stations today seemed to favor such loud news anchors.
The Old Shandong Noodle House was a greasy spoon, but Dahu found this kind of restaurant had the tastiest side dishes. The proprietor wasn’t from Shandong at all. He was a local, born and bred in Haven. He changed the name after his son married a girl from Shandong. After she arrived Dahu thought the taste of the dumplings changed, and later he realized it was the skin that had changed, not the filling.
Dahu got the remote control, turned it down a bit, spread out the greasy newspaper on the table and found that the report he’d just seen on TV was front-page news. The headline read, COAST IN CRISIS! TRASH VORTEX ABOUT TO ENGULF TAIWAN.
[staff report] Taiwan is about to be sucked into the Trash Vortex! In 1997, the oceanographer Charles J. Moore was the first to discover that a vast tract of the north Pacific was strewn with plastic trash, forming what can be described as the world’s largest garbage dump. Others have called it the Plastic Continent or the Trash Vortex. The vortex had been kept in place by swirling underwater currents, typically ranging from 500 nautical miles off the coast of California all the way to Japan.
Moore has described how he discovered the vortex one year while en route to the start of the Transpac sailing race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. It was the day before the big race and without realizing he steered his craft into the “North Pacific Gyre.” He thought he had stumbled into some kind of alternate dimension. In the gyre the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it. Moore was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish. His ship plowed through the stuff day after day, taking about a week to reach the other side. At the time Moore believed there was over a hundred million tons of flotsam circulating in the north Pacific, divided into eastern and western garbage patches in orbit around Hawaii. That was in 1997. Now it’s even more massive, totaling at least two hundred million tons.
Mr. Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He launched the Algalita Marine Research Institute. To him, containing the Trash Vortex had the same symbolic significance as humanity’s efforts to combat global warming. And he was willing to lead the fight. Marcus Eriksen, the former research director at Algalita, says that historically the trash entering the North Pacific Gyre has biodegraded. But modern plastics and composites are so durable that intact items thrown away half a century ago can still be found in the Trash Vortex today. A number of charitable foundations have reserved funding for scientists analyzing its composition or searching for a solvent that would “obliterate” the garbage, but the search has proven elusive, because any solvent that can dissolve plastic would release toxic chemicals into the water, potentially hastening ocean death in and around the vortex.
Based on scientific analysis, about a fifth of the trash is from ships and oil rigs, while the rest has been dumped into the ocean by Pacific Rim nations. Because the confetti of plastic rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water’s surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. It can only be seen passing along the hull of a ship. The tiny plastic pellets of which the vortex is composed act like chemical sponges, absorbing hazardous chemicals like hydrocarbons and DDT, which then enter the food chain. People have also discovered lighters, toothbrushes and plastic syringes in the stomachs of the dead seabirds and sea turtles that mistook these things for food. Dr. Eriksen said that what goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It’s that simple.
The Algalita Marine Research Institute went bankrupt after over a decade of operation, but the Trash Vortex is still floating around in the ocean. It has now fragmented into several parts, one of which is headed west across the north Pacific. Taiwan lies right in its path. Several years ago, the Ministry of Environmental Resources and the US government discussed the possibility of skimming or turning the vortex in the event of an emergency, but the job was simply too big, and even if it had been possible to sweep it up, nobody knew where the waste should be buried. At the present juncture, the Kuroshio current is pushing part of the vortex toward Taiwan. The Ministry has put out an evacuation advisory notice for east-coast residents, because nobody knows what harmful substances the nonbiodegradable waste in the vortex might contain.
This is unbelievable, Dahu thought. He told Umav, “There’s a trash island floating this way.”
“What trash island?”
“It’s made of stuff like this,” said Dahu, yanking at the plastic tablecloth. “We keep throwing this kind of thing in the ocean. Gradually a heap of garbage formed, and when it got big enough it turned into an island.”
“Are my slippers on the island?”
“Possibly.”
“What about your binoculars?”
“Probably.”
“What about Mummy’s headband?”
Dahu didn’t reply. Umav found a headband somewhere when she was very small. He knew it was Millet’s as soon as he saw it. It was a little thing he had forgotten to throw out, maybe on purpose. Umav asked him whether it was Mummy’s, and he shook his head. Umav said it was, and he said it wasn’t. “Yes it is,” she said, and put it away before he had a chance to reply. But it had floated off somewhere in the flood. Dahu thought Umav had forgotten all about it.
At the mention of his binoculars Dahu recalled again what had happened that day.
After taking Alice for a hike along the rescue route, Dahu had a sudden intuition about another route he could try. He went up alone, only to suffer a string of bad luck. What bugged him the most was the loss of his trusty binoculars, which had been with him through thick and thin for over a decade, until they fell into the creek in a moment of carelessness while he was arranging things in his backpack. They were brand-name binoculars he’d bought back in his student days, eating nothing but instant noodles for months in order to save up the money. Because they’d fallen right against the base of the cliff, it appeared he would never retrieve them. In a huff, Dahu decided to call it a day. He took out a betel leaf he had picked at the foot of the mountain and folded up the two ends. Then he used his Swiss army knife, first to poke a hole in each end of the leaf, then to sharpen the end of a strip of bamboo, which he passed through the holes in the leaf to make an improvised platter. He had picked arrow bamboo shoots on the way up. Now he prepared them one by one: you pinched the tip and swiveled the base around to remove a vertical strip down the sheath, then the whole sheath would just come off. He wanted to make a soup.
Just as he was about to build the fire, he seemed to see a human form walking toward the edge of the gorge.
Usually in a situation like this Moon and Stone would give chase, but that evening the two dogs didn’t move a muscle, like they hadn’t noticed anything. Dahu shouted and it was like they’d suddenly realized what was going on. Dahu went after him, but he did not run, afraid that if the fellow was a mountain climber, Dahu might frighten him and cause an accident. Instead, he tried talking to him: “Hey there, what’s up? I’m just up here hunting. Care to join me for a drink? I’ve got some fine tea with me, and there’s wine as well.”
He and his dogs tried to approach the man, but the man kept his distance. Apparently he was of medium build, but he also seemed to be a muscular young man. Dahu was ready to give up, thinking it was just some guy, probably someone in the habit of coming up alone just like him. Why not leave him alone? But when Dahu stopped, he was certain he sensed the man waving at him. Before Dahu had a chance to react, Moon and Stone went after him. Dahu had to follow along.
The chase proceeded in a tacit, single-file arrangement: the man, Stone, Moon, with Dahu pulling up the rear. It carried on for about half an hour before the man ducked under a bush. Dahu, about a dozen meters behind, could barely make out the man’s movements in the faint moonlight. Dahu reached the bush, hesitated for a second, then crouched down and went in. Up ahead, Moon and Stone were barking like crazy, like they’d suddenly seen something. It started raining harder and harder, with the raindrops pattering down on the tree canopy above. Dahu hastily put on his water-resistant jacket.
The space under the bush was too low even for a Bunun. Dahu was crouching so much he had to prop himself up with his hands. He was almost crawling part of the way. Finally he was able to stand up straight, right when a dark cloud hid the moon from view. Dahu groped around in the darkness and found that he had arrived beneath a huge rocky outcrop. Moon and Stone had run off somewhere, so Dahu felt along with his hand to see whether the path ahead was level or not. It turned out not to be: there was a pit right in front of him, as wide as a man’s outstretched arms. To one side was the huge root of a cypress tree, and the tree shade made it even harder to see the pit, which looked deep, even bottomless, in the darkness. Momentarily unable to keep his breathing regular, he got some rain up his nose and coughed so hard his chest hurt. Had that man lured him here to show him this pit?
Dahu called for Moon and Stone and soon they appeared. Dahu decided to go back to camp to get spikes, a rappeling rope and a headlamp: he had to see what was down there.
“Dad, look!” Umav said, pulling Dahu back to reality. She was pointing at the TV. Dahu looked up and hey, wasn’t that at the Seventh Sisid? Dahu could tell immediately: that was the view looking out from the Lighthouse.
The shot started panning across Alice’s house, stopping for a few seconds. Then a head appeared through the window. That was Alice.
Seemingly before she’d had time to react, Alice in the shot jumped out of the window and dropped into the sea. There was barely any splash to be seen on the screen. It was like a perfectly executed dive by a trained dolphin.
Atile’i sang to calculate the time he had been away from Wayo Wayo. According to the Sea Sage, in the olden days the islanders wrote a song for every star, and because the stars were just too many in the sky nobody could truly learn all the island songs. Someone who said he had sung a new song was surely a liar, for the islanders assumed that the song already existed and had suddenly been recollected. All songs on the island of Wayo Wayo were old songs, which is the reason why you sometimes start crying when you hear an unfamiliar island melody.
These days Atile’i had been singing one island song from the moment the sun was born to the moment it passed away. He kept singing until he couldn’t remember how many songs he had sung, nor did he know which songs his parents and people in the village had taught him and which he had improvised. The songs he sang went on and on, like the sea itself. While he was singing, Atile’i often thought that all would be well if Rasula were here: she would harmonize with his melody, and then together they would sing a new song. He didn’t notice at first, but he had started pinching his throat so he could sing Rasula’s part. When the song ended the sound of the sea breeze made him feel like an empty cave, or like a translucent shell some crab had shed and left behind on the beach.
At the same time, Atile’i noticed that his body was changing: his gums often bled and his joints ached, too. He could not swim as smoothly as before. Sometimes he even felt dizzy, like he was back on land. (Never had Atile’i felt dizzy at sea).
Several days later Atile’i discovered a suppurating wound on his left leg, right over the spot where he had drawn the island of Wayo Wayo. He took this to be a bad sign. Lately the weather had been getting warmer, so warm that he could no longer escape the torrid midday heat by hiding out in his “house.” Worse, the whole island emitted a blinding glare and exuded a horrible rotten stench that blended with the raw smell of the ocean. Atile’I kept vomiting, and his body became weaker and weaker. Atile’i also noticed a huge increase in the number of insects on the island, with flies and mosquitos everywhere, and the currents had become erratic, too. Was the island approaching another world?
Atile’i had learned long ago from the Sea Sage that there was another world besides Wayo Wayo, and the past couple of days the idea that he was approaching this other world had been occurring to him. He tried to suppress the thought while anticipating the possibility that he was approaching the place whence the white man came, the place whither the hell bird and the ghost ship hastened. The problem was, did Kabang still rule over this other world? Atile’i didn’t have the slightest idea, and there was nobody he could ask. So when he discovered people visiting the island every so often, no matter how far away they were, he chose to dive and wait it out beneath the island. He had dug lots of “wells” all around the island that went all the way down to the sea, so that he could take cover at a moment’s notice. Yet once in a while Atile’i still imagined himself getting trapped and taken away by another race of man: the idea of this happening had him in its clutches, like a sickness.
Lately the hell bird and the ghost ship had been appearing far too often! He saw them almost every day. Several times while underwater Atile’i had even encountered “men” tightly clad from head to toe in black attire. Atile’i did not know if they’d seen him. He just looked for a place to hide. He was much better at swimming than they were, but because they held glowing things in their hands that darted hither and thither like slithery sea snakes, he suspected they might have caught a glimpse of him. Are they looking for me? That’s impossible, for in all the world, only men of Wayo Wayo know that I exist, right? No, Kabang also knows, and so does the ocean, Atile’i thought.
Today was the peak of Atile’i’s unease. He was burning up, almost too weak to stand. He intuited that he had been spotted by a hell bird with a single wing on its head. The hell bird raised swirling squalls all over, until it actually stopped in the northwest, which Atile’i knew to be one of the island’s firmest spots. It was about a day-and-night’s journey on foot. Although it was quite far from Atile’i’s hideout, he knew he might be discovered very soon. He was not surprised the next day to hear noises coming from that direction. He summoned his last ounce of strength, picked up his spear gun, and uncovered the “land lane” near his house that led all the way down to the sea. He dove right on in.
Right then it started hailing. Great chunks of hail knocked fish leaping out of the water senseless, and in no time the ocean was covered with stunned or lifeless fish. Atile’i was floating in a seething sea of lifeless fish, as if he himself had transformed into an enormous fish.