The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi Page A

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 and 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 accountwith 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