The Man with the Compound Eyes (35 page)

As Atile’i carried Alice through the forest, each of them was giving off a distinctive smell, because of memory. The olfactorily acute forest critters
noticed. The damp, long-settled leaves were silent, but the freshly fallen leaves sounded like brittle bones. Atile’i snapped the bones of the forest floor with every step. It was raining now, the raindrops falling gently, and when Atile’i looked up he thought he could see the end of every thread of rain.

They finally managed to get through the forest to the base of the massive cliff before nightfall. It was like a wall, a giant creature. All the winds in the world had to stop before it, and the forest could only look up in wonder.

Atile’i let Alice down and wiped his sweaty, shining face. Alice pulled out the raincoat stashed in her windbreaker and put on her rain hat, wrapping herself in a small, yellow world. She was calmer than she had expected. So here it is, she thought. Here it was.

Since it was already dark, Alice and Atile’i had to stay another night in the mountains. And because the bear had destroyed the tent, they had to search all over for a place to get out of the rain, finally finding a hollow beneath the cliff. It was not deep, but if you crouched down you could pack a few people in there with you. The ceiling was higher on one side than the other, and at the low end the hollow was apparently connected to another cave, though Alice could not see for sure in the dark. She remembered the people in the alpine association telling her that the cliff never used to exist, that it only appeared after the earthquake due to fault displacement.

The mountain was split asunder, the cliff made manifest. This was the destination on the map. Was this where Dahu had found Thom’s body?

Alice stared at Atile’i from behind. He was making a fire to brew tea. In the flickering light, his shadow on the wall beside her was sometimes as big as Thom, sometimes as small as Toto. She caressed Atile’i’s shadow on the stone wall of the hollow embedded in the base of the cliff, murmuring, “So this is where you’ve been, all this time.” Now, in full possession of her faculties, Alice finally realized that all is shadow. But even a shadow is enough. Even a shadow of a shadow is enough.

Atile’i, having finished making the fire, was sitting quietly watching the rain outside. The rain suddenly became surprisingly heavy, and rainwater started flowing in and down toward the nether reaches of the hollow,
whence it trickled away. It was as if there was a river running through the cave straight toward the heart of the mountain, destination unknown.

“How is the weather at sea today?” asked Atile’i, calmly.

Alice did a double take for a few seconds before replying, in a voice as fine as drizzle, “Very fair.”

The man sits up, but the pain forces him to lie back down. Then he yawns a big yawn, whether due to sorrow or some other emotion he does not know. It is as if the world of men has become too tedious and he would prefer eternal sleep.

After the yawn, the man is pleasantly surprised to discover that the pain has subsided somewhat. The man stops stifling his urge to yawn, and the yawns come fast and furious, like they are lining up, waiting for the man to exhale them. In less than a minute he yawns a grand total of thirteen times.

“Not as painful as you might imagine, is it?”

The man knows most of the bones in his body are broken, that it’s the kind of compound fracture that can never be reset. He has sustained many serious fractures in his life, and knows what it feels like, as if the feeling has been etched in his memory. But this time he does not actually feel any pain.

“Strange, it doesn’t hurt.” The man quickly alerts to what this lack of pain implies. “So, I’m dead?”

“How many yawns?”

“Fifteen.” The man has miscounted. It’s actually been thirteen.

“Then, by the regular definition, you’re dead.”

The man does not understand what “by the regular definition” is supposed to mean. He props himself up, stands up, and walks away from the cliff, looking up anxiously. “But my son is still up there.”

The man with the compound eyes shakes his head, as if perplexed by the man’s inability to understand, and says, “He’s not up there. You can say he’s up there all you want, but in fact he isn’t. You know it well.”

I know it, I know it not, I know it, I know it not, I know it, I know it not, I know it, I know it not … Incensed, he ignores the man with the compound eyes and tries to climb up the cliff by himself, but finds he cannot. He seems to retain a physical existence, but cannot operate his body as he pleases. More precisely, he can’t climb. He seems to be limited to a single plane of movement, as if he’s gone flat. So this is what death is like.

“You can’t go up, not anymore,” the man with the compound eyes confirms, his reply impassive, unwavering, unhesitating.

He knows the man is right, he cannot go up, so he sighs a sigh so heavy and so cold that it seems to cover the plants around him with a film of frost. But he is still worried about his son. He is so anxious he gets up to try over and over again.

The man with the compound eyes does not stop him, only waits until he tires himself out and sits down dejectedly on the ground. In despair he looks at the man with the compound eyes, as if to use every last ounce of strength to appeal for assistance, but all he sees is the man’s compound eyes, which seem to change from moment to moment in hallucinatory permutations and combinations. And the scene in each of the tiny ommatidia that compose every compound eye is completely different with each passing instant. Watching carefully, the man’s mind is helplessly mesmerized by the instantaneous images playing in each ommatidium: could be an erupting undersea volcano, might be a falcon’s-eye view of a landscape, perhaps just a leaf about to fall. Each seems to be playing a kind of documentary.

The man points at the ground and says, “Sit down and have a chat, all right? If you’re not in any hurry.”

“What’s the hurry, if I’m dead?” The man sits down resignedly.

“So, how much do you know about memory?”

The man is a bit taken aback by the pop question. “It’s just what you remember, isn’t it?”

“Sort of. I’ll give you a crash course. Generally speaking, human memory can be divided into declarative memory and nondeclarative memory. Declarative memory can be reported, for instance in speech or in writing. And nondeclarative memory is, roughly, what you call the subconscious mind. It’s the memories a person might not even know he has. This is not to say that it can’t be reported, just that usually it is not reported, because you don’t even know about it. Do you follow?”

The man nods, but he does not know why he has to sit here, listening to this stuff.

“Well, these two kinds of memory can be subdivided into three basic types: episodic, semantic and procedural. Remember your son still couldn’t speak until the age of three? Then one day, when he was looking at an insect specimen, he blurted out a complete sentence, didn’t he?”

The man nods again, but is baffled: how can this man possibly know such personal minutiae? At this, he realizes he is not too certain about the timing. When exactly did the event take place? Was Toto three or four? He couldn’t have been older than five.

“This is an event, an episode in your life, and you can report it, so it’s a declarative, episodic memory. Here’s another example: you remember your wife’s and son’s birthdays, don’t you?”

“Of course I remember.”

“Well, that’s semantic memory or factual memory. Even if you forgot something like this you could still look it up, right? It’s on their ID cards, and even if you misremember, there’s still a ‘mismemory,’ right? Basically, if there’s not been any mistake, their birthdays are recorded the same everywhere, because they’re facts. And people have a way of confirming the facts. In the world people have constructed for themselves you can usually look up a fact like that. You still with me?” The man nods.

“But episodic memory is different. The details you remember about any event must be different from the details your wife remembers. Right? For instance, for when you and your wife met for the first time, what
exactly did you say to her in the forest? Each of you remembers different details, that’s for sure. You almost ended up getting into a fight over it on many different occasions, didn’t you? You were both remembering different parts of the same episode.”

The man lowers his head and thinks about it. “I get it. What about procedural memory?”

“You’ve climbed this rock wall many times before, haven’t you? If I asked you to look up at the cliff could you more or less make out the routes you traveled?”

I suppose I could, the man thinks, but he isn’t too sure. The man revisits the climbs in his mind. The second time a seasoned rock climber takes a certain route some details from the first time will come back to him.

As if continuing the man’s line of thought, the man with the compound eyes says, “Right. Certain details will occur to you the moment your fingers touch the stone, details you normally couldn’t remember no matter how hard you tried. Sometimes it might even cross your mind that there’s a cleft in a certain rock as you climb. Am I right?”

He looks at the man with the compound eyes in amazement.

“People’s minds are continually weaving the threads of memory together without anyone being aware of it. Sometimes not even you know what you might remember. Even if you climbed this rock wall a hundred times you probably wouldn’t bother remembering the position of every rock and foothold, but your body would remember as a matter of course. If someone moved a certain rock, your fingers and toes would tell you the next time you climbed.”

The man looks in the man’s eyes and seems to see a familiar scene in one of the fine ommatidia. Though overall, the man’s head is no bigger than an average person’s head, nor are his eyes bigger than an average person’s eyes, there were at least tens of thousands of ommatidia in each of his compound eyes, each so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye. But if so, the man wonders, how can he be sure of what he is seeing?

“When it comes to memory, people are no different from any other animal. I’m not kidding. You probably won’t believe it, but actually even a sea hare has memory. Eric Richard Kandel, a scientist famous for his
research on memory, started out experimenting with sea hares. Fortunately, he survived the Kristallnacht, the first systematic Nazi attack on the Jews, or he wouldn’t have had the chance to study memory. In a certain sense, maybe it was because Kandel had a profound understanding of what it’s like to have something etched in memory that he was driven to try to understand it.”

The man with the compound eyes said, “Animals like sea hares may not have much episodic or semantic memory, but animals with developed brains have episodic, semantic and procedural memory, just like people. Migratory birds remember the seacoast, whales remember the boat that harpooned them, and seal pups that manage to avoid annihilation will remember the murderous coat-clad, club-carrying creature that chased them. I kid you not, they’ll never forget. But only human beings have invented a tool to record memory.”

The man with the compound eyes reaches down and takes out a pencil he has stuck in a pocket on his pant leg. The pen is broken in two, but there is no doubt it can still write.

“Writing.”

As he says this there are two dull rolls of distant thunder. Dark clouds are shrouding the sky. A change in the weather.

“There was thunder just now: this is a fact. And it’s a fact that we’re talking. But if there’s no one to record what just happened in writing, the evidence of its occurrence will only be found in the episodic, semantic and procedural memory of two people, you and me. But if you represented these memories in writing, you would discover that the mind adds massive amounts of material anytime it weaves an episodic memory. In this way, the world reconstructed in writing approximates even more closely what you call ‘the realm of nature.’ It’s an organism.”

The man with the compound eyes reaches into a rotten log on the ground nearby and, as if performing a magic trick, pulls out a pale, rough thing like the larva of some beetle.

“But the world that people perceive is too partial, too narrow. Sometimes, you consciously, all too consciously, only remember what you want to. Many apparently authentic episodic memories are partly fabricated. Sometimes
things that have never happened anywhere in the world can be vividly ‘represented’ in the mind, again by virtue of the imagination. Many people have diseased brains, and some of them even mistake one thing for another, like the man who took his wife for a hat.”

The man with the compound eyes gazes off into the distance. How strange that even though compound eyes do not focus like human eyes, he can still tell where the man is looking. “Similarly, as I was just saying, it’s not just humans who have the ability to remember. And of course it’s not only Homo sapiens who have the ability to make things up. But only you people can turn the contents of their minds into writing, that’s for sure. This larva I’m holding will never be able to recount the memory it will have of being a pupa in a cocoon.”

The man discovers that at some point the larva in the man’s hand has pupated, covering itself in a brown cocoon.

“So what you mean to say is that …” The man cannot finish his sentence. He falls into a stupor, maybe a state that people who have just died all experience.

“Your wife’s writing kept your son alive,” said the man with the compound eyes, looking the man straight in the eyes. “You remember that summer? That snake? That afternoon? You lost the life you’d born and raised. It was your wife who kept the diary, did all the things only your son would have done, bought the things he would have needed when he reached a certain age and read the field guides she imagined he would have found interesting. She went out into the wilderness and collected specimens, then rendered possession of them unto your son. And in order to protect her, or rather in order to protect her ‘brain,’ the people around her went along with her memories, at least with the memories she was willing to acknowledge. And for this reason, at the opposite extremes of life and death, your wife and your son have enjoyed a kind of symbiotic coexistence.”