“I lead and you belay, all right? Watch where I climb. I’ll keep my movements small, and choose rocks you’re able to reach. Got it?”
The boy nods and asks, “Will the long-armed scarab be able to climb up, too?”
Surprised by the question the boy had sprung upon him, the man thinks it over and says, “Of course.”
While the boy waits below, the man ascends slowly, finding the route in the pattern of the rock. He uses rock wedges to make anchors, clips a quickdraw onto each anchor, and hangs the lead rope into the quickdraw as a belay, all the while looking down to check up on the boy, who is craning his neck, trying to trace the route the man is taking. Then the boy starts climbing. Faintly feeling the boy’s weight on the rope, the man has a wonderful sense of well-being.
“No problem, you can do it,” the man says quietly, as if he’s afraid to startle the cliff itself. The boy sometimes looks up at the vertical path shining above him, and at other times he looks at the cliff face all around him. He finds himself in an alien realm. He is on the verge of tears, though not because he is afraid. No, this seems like a completely new kind of crying the boy has never experienced before.
They finally make it to the top as dusk approaches. The man and the boy yawp euphorically into the valley. Though the boy doesn’t usually speak, his call is loud and clear. Looking down from here, they can see the forest canopy, a green sea gently swaying. The sound reaches the top of the trees and startles a few birds, which dart up and dive back down into the sea.
They excitedly get the stove ready to brew tea and cook a vacuum-pack meal. Their secret trip is now half done. Actually, the point of the trip is not to climb the mountain. For the man, it is purely so that his ten-year-old son can experience the cliff. It’s also a chance for a father and son, who’ve been drifting apart, to renew their relationship.
After the picnic, the man explains the signs in the stars, adding, “You can see a million times more stars up here than you can down on the plains. Maybe you’re thinking, But aren’t the stars there, no matter what? Sure they are, it’s just a question of visibility. Visibility means how far you can see. You remember when we went to a wetland one time to see migratory birds? The sky was foggy, because there were fine particles floating in the air. I remember your mother saying that gazing at the stars these days is like wearing a pair of fogged-up glasses.”
Only the man speaks. The boy never replies, as if he simply does not exist. The man has regretted his decision to come to the island, but now he’s past the point of no return. He once dreamed about being an explorer. In his younger days, he cycled around Africa, piloted a sailboat across the Atlantic, ran an ultramarathon across the Sahara, and even took part in an interesting sleep experiment, spending fully half a year thirty meters underground. He followed his wife — his girlfriend at the time — here to Taiwan. At first everything was great: she accepted his sudden disappearances, which lasted from two weeks to a month. But after she became pregnant everything changed. The man remembers a time when he was totally willing to stay for the sake of the child, to build a home to raise his son in. And he had built it. Things were perfect then: the child was on the way, they were living in a unique house, and his wife was tender and affectionate again. Then he discovered that he still felt a longing to leave home.
Occasionally, when the man felt so physically restless he couldn’t stand it anymore, he would leave the house and go climbing or leave the island on some adventure with his friends. His wife would say it was okay but would give him the silent treatment when he returned, like he was a stranger. Later on he would just come and go without saying anything. Sometimes he didn’t know whether to stay or go. Maybe that’s why he turned to the consolations of sex. With his outstanding appearance, he has had no trouble finding Taiwanese girls willing to go to bed with him. A couple of times he even slept with his wife’s students. Though he regretted it after, sex has come to dominate his life, brutally and overpoweringly, a bit like a disgusting piece of gum sticking to the bottom of his shoe.
“But I feel like the stars I see up here are as real as the ones I saw as a boy. When I’m climbing it’s like I’m a kid again. Maybe that’s part of why I enjoy it so much.” The man kept talking and talking, more like he was talking to himself than to the boy. He sighed and said, “Sometimes things haven’t gone away, it’s just that we just can’t see them.”
The night sky clouds over and the man takes a flashlight and goes looking with the boy for beetles in the grove by the edge of the cliff. They have not brought much equipment, so he improvises an insect lure by propping up another flashlight on the ground and shining it onto a white T-shirt. It isn’t that effective, attracting only a few moths, but one of them is an erebus, a kind of butterfly with huge eye spots on its wings. The boy turns on the new electronic field guide he has brought along with him to show the man. The two of them are completely content.
“Tomorrow we’ll go down the cliff and spend the night in the forest. I’ve asked some insect experts, and we should be able to find long-armed scarabs in the forest. Haven’t you already found quite a few stag beetles? We can spend the day there, then hike down. I’ll take you down another side of the mountain, a shortcut through the valley. It’s fantastic, an awesome route. The forecast said there’d only be four days of sunny weather. Then it’s supposed to start raining, and rain isn’t good. We’ve got to get home before it rains.”
The boy nods. The fact that he seldom speaks makes him appear older than his actual age. The boy picks up the flashlight and goes to look around the camp. First he chooses trees with the light, then focuses on a few of them and searches up and down. He finds five or six different kinds of stag beetles. He knows which species of stag beetle likes what kind of tree. He catches one of each and goes back to the tent, to make a detailed record of the species, the size and the time and place of discovery in his notebook. He immediately puts them in insect jars.
He goes to sleep shortly after he gets back into the tent. He dreams he is walking alone down a fern-lined forest path, toward a faint light way up ahead. He keeps going until he comes to a stream. There is a mob of Formosan sambar deer crossing the stream, their legs so delicate that even the moonlight would weigh them down. Yet they leap so nimbly they seem to play the stream like a piano. He chases them but the deer disappear, as if they’ve turned into a school of fish. On the other side of the stream, the boy faces a wood, but then he feels something behind him. He smells something moist, something very, very near.
Having gotten this far in the dream, the boy starts to wake up. He opens his eyes and discovers it’s raining, and that the man isn’t by his side. He guesses the man has gone out to do something. He waits with his eyes wide open. The rain patters on the flysheet, and droplets condense on the inside wall of the tent, indicating that it is much colder outside than in.
Two fewer days of sunny weather, the boy thinks.
The man still hasn’t returned the following day. His shoes are gone, and so is some equipment. The boy puts on his raincoat and looks in vain for signs around the camp. The sullen rain clouds in the distance envelop the entire mountain in gloom, and the smells of rain and grass mingle. The rain will fall harder.
The boy thinks he should probably turn on the transmitter. But on the second day of the trip the man has asked him to turn it off, saying they couldn’t be tracked because they were going to make a secret trip to the big cliff. Now that he’s gone, the only way people will come rescue Dad or me is if I turn on the transmitter, thought the boy. But then he thought, Dad can free dive to a depth of two hundred meters and single-hand a sailboat across the Atlantic, and nothing could happen to a dad like that. If Dad comes back I’ll get in big trouble.