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.”
The man feels something flashing in front of his eyes, fleetingly. Someone puts out the light of his life. Someone has extinguished something.
“In fact, since then your son has only existed in her writing and daily activities, and you have been an accessory. You two have been the bearers of a traumatic memory, and its authors.”
The man sighs. Clearly, something leaves his body at that moment. “So my son’s later existence is meaningless?”
“Not exactly. At least for a certain period of time, by a kind of tacit understanding, he lived between you and your wife, didn’t he? He lived, like a chain. He didn’t die by the regular definition, only he wasn’t alive anymore. No other creature can share experience like this. Only human beings can, through writing, experience something separately together.”
The man with the compound eyes looks into the man’s glimmering eyes as they start to dim: this is a sign that he has reached fourteen and a half yawns.
“But at the end of the day memory and imagination have to be archived separately, just as waves must always leave the beach. Because otherwise, people couldn’t go on living,” the man said. “This is the price humanity must pay for being the only species with the ability to record memory in writing.”
The man discovers that the chrysalis in the man’s hand has begun to writhe, as if being trapped inside the cocoon is quite painful and it wants to end the pain.
“In all honesty, I don’t envy you the possession of this power over memory, nor do I admire you. Because humans are usually completely unconcerned with the memories of other creatures. Human existence involves the wilful destruction of the existential memories of other creatures and of your own memories as well. No life can survive without other lives, without the ecological memories other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which they live. People don’t realize they need to rely on the memories of other organisms to survive. You think that flowers bloom in colorful profusion just to please your eyes. That a wild boar exists just to provide meat for your table. That a fish takes the bait just for your sake. That only you can mourn. That a stone falling into a gorge is of no significance. That a sambar deer, its head bent low to sip at a creek, is not a revelation … When in fact the finest movement of any organism represents a change in an ecosystem.” The man with the compound eyes takes a deep sigh and says: “But if you were any different you wouldn’t be human.”
“And who are you, then?” The man uses the remaining fraction of his final breath to spit this question out, and it is as if a chorus of a million voices asks it.
“Who am I? Who am I indeed?” The cocoon in the man’s hand is throbbing violently now, like an emerging galaxy in the agony of formation. His eyes are flashing, almost as if they contain flecks of quartz. But if you looked carefully, you would see that they are not really flashing, that some of the ommatidia are wet with tears, tears so exceedingly fine they are harder to perceive than the point of a pin.
Pointing at his own eyes, the man with the compound eyes says, “The only reason for my existence is that I can merely observe, not intervene.”
Part XI
30. The Man with the Compound Eyes IV
The boy resolves to climb down the cliff.
He attaches the safety rope and slowly starts climbing down. Because he is light, the boy does not feel the weight of his body at first, but soon he feels his strength deplete. He’s never imagined his body is this heavy. He looks up, and all he can see is an endless stone wall. He has to wipe the sweat on his brow away with his arm, so it doesn’t sting his beautiful brown eyes, which from a certain angle look a bit blue.
When he is about halfway down, the boy’s foot slips. In a moment of panic he plummets. Luckily he returns to the wall, but by this point his energy is drained, and he can go no further, neither up nor down. At first his body feels hot, and the sweat keeps dripping down, but soon his motionless body feels the chill of the wind. He shivers.
Stuck there, the boy realizes his hearing is now keener than normal. In addition to the sound of the wind blowing, the leaves falling and insects beating their wings, he seems to hear his father talking to another man at the base of the cliff. He cannot understand most of what they are saying, but when he hears the other man say, “He didn’t die by the regular definition, only he wasn’t alive anymore,” he suddenly feels his body grow light. No, better to say that his original sense of weight disappears.
He cocks his head to one side, as if in contemplation, and decides to climb back up instead of continuing down. He is surprised to find that for some reason when he starts ascending he feels light as a feather, hollow in the middle.
The boy reaches the top of the cliff, walks into the tent, and opens his backpack. Inside is the pocket in which he keeps his insect specimen bottles. He takes them out, walks outside, opens them and dumps out the beetles, one by one. Initially the beetles are terrified. They all play dead, lying motionless on the ground, legs curled up. Then the boy turns the beetles over, one at a time. Several minutes later, a few of them tentatively crawl a short distance, then open their elytra to reveal transparent wings so thin as to be almost invisible. And then they flutter off.
Flap flap, flap flap, flap flap …
The boy stands at the edge of the cliff. The beetles are now mere specks in his beautiful eyes, but their elytra can still be discerned. “Such beautiful insects!” says the boy in a singsong voice. Just then, a huge beetle with charming green and yellow mottling on its elytra stops on a rock in front of him. “A long-armed scarab! A male long-armed scarab!” calls the elated boy.
“Look at that long pair of arms! See how large its elytra are!”
But from that moment on, he feels everything start to get “blurry,” not “blurry” in the regular, visual sense but a kind of blurriness that people could never imagine. It is as if he is transforming into a leaf, an insect, a birdcall, a drop of water, a pinch of lichen, or even a rock.
Flap flap, flap flap, flap flap …
It is as if there’s never been such a boy who climbed that massive cliff in that incredible scene, which is now, once again, received into one of the ommatidia, far smaller than pinpoints, of the man with the compound eyes, along with the panorama of all scenery. No scene now remains, except in memory.
31. End of the Road