“What about the local townspeople and villagers?”
“Many of them are Pangcah. The word means ‘people,’ and it’s what the Amis aboriginal people around here prefer to call themselves. Most of the Pangcah in Haven are involved in the recovery work. I’m afraid that this is it for this stretch of coast and for the fishing ground too. Part of the sea culture of the Pangcah people has been ruined. To Han Chinese people, all the pollution means is that there’s no more money to make from the sea, but for the Pangcah it’s different: the sea is their ancestor, and so many of their traditional stories are about the sea. Without ancestors, what’s the point of being ‘Pangcah’?”
“Are you Pangcah yourself?”
“No, I’m Bunun,” Dahu said. “The word bunun means that we are the true ‘people.’ ”
Sara completely understood. Every people in the world, in the beginning, felt that they were the only “true people.”
For dinner they went to Dahu’s house. There they met a girl and a woman. The girl, Umav — what a charming name! — was Dahu’s daughter. But he only introduced the woman by name without indicating whether she was his wife. Sara felt that she seemed not to be. The relationship between Hafay and Dahu seemed like what was between her and Detlef, just not exactly. It was like an article without an explicit thesis. She was told that the dinner was made mainly with the wild vegetables that the Pangcah people often ate. But there wasn’t any seafood. Umav and Hafay could not speak English, so Dahu did most of the talking.
“There’s seafood in almost everything we eat, but there isn’t any seafood for now. You know how it is.”
“No worries. It’s a wonderful, lavish feast! And when you think about it, who knows if there’ll ever be seafood again? Maybe now’s the time to go veg,” Detlef said, laughing, and the others groaned and laughed along with him.
This island has already started to redeem itself, Sara thought.
25. The Mountain Path
Alice woke up in the night and hiked down the mountain with her flashlight. It was still drizzling. This was the eighteenth straight day of rain on the east coast. Apparently, some sections of road and railway in Tai-tung had been swamped by the sea, and some coastal villages in Ping-tung, the ones that suffered the most subsidence, had been evacuated.
The path wasn’t that easy to make out, but Alice was moving right along. She was growing less afraid of the mountain as she became more familiar with every little path she could take to get down, and with the rate of growth of every plant, every clump of grass along the way. So this was what a mountain was like, the same as a person: the more you know, the less you fear. But even so, you still never know what it’s thinking. And just like you never know what a person is going to do next, you never know what a mountain is going to do next, Alice thought.
Alice had mixed feelings when she reached the coast and stood at the shore, once so familiar but now so strange. Since this stretch of coastline was relatively populous, the preliminary cleanup had been finished, finally. But seawater does not stay in one place; the trash island was spread out over an expanse of sea larger than Taiwan itself, so that when the second wave washed in it crammed trash into every discernible gap. The Sea House was now about fifty meters from the high water line, when the water reached all the way up to the edge of the road and surrounded the house with debris. Now the tide would begin to ebb. Alice took off her T-shirt and put it in a waterproof bag, then put on her swimsuit and waded down the slope of the road, which hadn’t subsided, at least not yet.
At first, the water only reached her calves, but soon it was too deep to stand and she stepped into nothing. Her body tensed up for a moment in the frigid water, then relaxed.
In the darkness the seawater was inky black. She’d never seen it this way before. The lights from the streetlamps danced on the waves like flashing threads weaving themselves into something people did not yet understand. Alice put on a diving mask, strapped on a mini Aqua-Lung and plunged. In the glare of her headlamp she saw myriad plastic objects floating in various poses, like the unknown organisms of an alien world.
Alice saw that the sea was two thirds of the way up the second floor when she swam near the Sea House. All the windows were broken, and a huge chunk of one wall had collapsed, along with most of the main wing. She could now see the situation inside the house from underwater. She “dove” in through an opening, found her room by memory and opened the door. It was a bit heavy due to the water pressure, but fortunately there was a hole at the base and she could still push it open. She swam down the hallway, finding Toto’s door ajar. His room was full of trash swept in by the tide, and his things had been washed out into the hallway or were hidden among the debris. She looked up and there it was, the mountain map Toto and Thom had drawn on the ceiling, same as always. But now Alice saw another route she hadn’t known about until now.
All this time, Alice had been trying to get Dahu to tell her where he’d found Thom’s body, but Dahu refused. Perhaps he had some sort of understanding with the police, because they wouldn’t say much, either, only the name of the mountain. They were evasive, claiming that the only person who knew the precise location was the one who discovered the body.
“It wasn’t us who carried him down,” said a fat cop who was handling the case.
When Thom and Toto first went missing Alice desperately wanted the rescue team to take her up. That was how she found out which route Thom had registered. But obviously Dahu had found the body along a different route, and though the two mountains were connected, Thom still didn’t have the permit to climb that other mountain. So why did he die there?
Then, one day, when Alice was sitting in the hut writing, she suddenly remembered the ceiling in Toto’s room.
Now she was looking up at the map on that very ceiling. At first she was a bit lost, but having studied a lot of maps lately she quickly found the route. As she had suspected, Thom, maybe together with Toto, had conspired an alternate route without her knowing. They didn’t follow the route they’d registered at the backcountry office, the route along which the rescue team had naively searched. Actually, they took the route on the ceiling. Alice kept looking at the map, until she seemed to see a gate, a path, the sky, rocks, the source of a tiny spring, and rain.
Seawater. A mountain path.
The seawater was thick like sleep, and when Alice stepped out of it onto the shore she felt like a lonely whale that had snuck on shore. Her heart was broken like glass and sealed like a dead clam.
The next evening, Alice used a 3D projector to shine a map of the earth onto a piece of white paper stuck on the outside wall of the hunting hut. She told Atile’i, “This is called a ‘map.’ The place we live, Taiwan, or any place, can be drawn on a map like this, and you can use a map to tell other people how to get somewhere. So when you’re somewhere unfamiliar you can still find the way.” Alice saw confusion in Atile’i’s eyes and added, “If you know how to read a map.”
Alice used a laser pointer to indicate the position of Taiwan on the map and said, “This’s the island we’re on now. Can you point to the island where you come from? Wayo Wayo?” Atile’i smiled sadly.
“No, the earth, here.” Atile’i pointed at the ground, grasped a clump of dirt, and said, “Not, there.”