Qinghai Lake in the Rusty Turnstile

The dome of the old waiting room resembled an inverted iron pot, trapping the cicadas' chirping and the demolition crew's drills in June. Ayu squatted in front of the ticket gate, the rusty smell reminding her of the scent she'd caught as a child sneaking through her grandmother's camphor wood chest—a smell steeped in time, carrying a stale yet subtly sweet aroma. This dark green iron behemoth was half-buried in concrete, rust creeping up from the edges like an abstract painting smeared with cheap ink.

“Look at this paint,” she said, scratching the edge of the turnstile with her fingernail, as peeling rust flakes off onto her rubber shoes. “It looks like there’s color underneath.”

Zhong Hua handed him the entrenching tool, its tip flashing in the morning light. He'd just loosened the cement chunks in the brickwork when beads of sweat trickled down his neck and into his collar. "It's an old thing from 1987; it's lucky if some red paint is still left," he said, kicking away a piece of concrete with reinforcing steel. The piece rolled across the ground, startling a woodlice hiding in the shadow of the turnstile.

Ayu didn't reply. Her fingernails were filled with rust, but her gaze stopped at a certain peeling arc. She had scraped an irregular gap in the rust layer, and the red paint at the edge of the gap seemed to come alive, outlining a shape she knew so well she could draw every bay of the lake—satellite images of Bird Island on Qinghai Lake had been stored on her phone for three years, and now, in an absurd way, they were emerging from the red paint of 1987.

“Zhong Hua,” her voice trembled slightly, her fingertips pressing against the red paint, “look at this shape…”

As the man approached, the wind he created caused the spiderwebs atop the turnstile to sway. He stared at the peeling rust, his Adam's apple bobbing. Dust accumulated in the recesses of Bird Island's outline, the dust particles floating in the light, much like the swarms of flying mosquitoes they had seen at Qinghai Lake that May—the sound of thousands of birds flapping their wings across the water still lingers in Ayu's phone recordings.

“And here,” Ayu touched the rust, the texture reminding her of the bamboo needles her mother used to knit. “Look at this pile of rust, doesn’t it look a lot like…”

“The twisted stitch,” Zhong Hua finished for her. He remembered last winter, his mother-in-law sitting on the wicker chair on the balcony knitting a scarf, the bamboo needles flying across the knitting needles, the patterns she created perfectly mirroring the curves of the rust piled up on this turnstile. When sunlight filtered through the yarn, those diamond-shaped holes were filled with dappled afternoon light, and now, thinking about it, they strangely overlapped with the morning light filtering through the cracks in the rust before him.

The demolition team's walkie-talkie crackled in the distance, the static mingling with shouts of "We'll call it a day after we finish this side!" Ayu looked up at the hole in the dome; the blue sky resembled a torn piece of cloth, with bits of brick dust falling in a flurry. She continued scraping away the rust, blood seeping from under her fingernails, but at the southernmost point of Bird Island's outline, she scraped out a smooth surface the size of a coin—something seemed to be hidden beneath the red paint, gleaming faintly with a metallic sheen in the light.

“Try this.” Zhong Hua pulled a coin from his wallet. It was one they had picked up at Qinghai Lake in 2008; the chrysanthemum pattern on the back was blurred by the lake water, but the edge still had a chipped corner like a bird's beak. When he inserted the coin into the coin slot of the turnstile, the metallic scraping sound was particularly jarring in the empty waiting room, like someone scraping glass with their fingernail.

"Click".

The turnstile barrier suddenly moved. It didn't open completely, just bounced slightly, and the sound made Ayu clench her fists tightly. The rhythm was all too familiar—it was the same sound of camels chewing hay outside their tent in the Gobi Desert of Dunhuang that night, with a brief pause between each chew, much like the chirping of an old-fashioned clock. She remembered falling asleep counting the camels' chewing sounds, and when she counted to the seventh, Zhong Hua added a piece of red willow wood to the fire; the sound of the sparks flying was somewhat similar to this "click."

Even more astonishing were the oxidation spots on the barrier. Those originally grayish rust spots, in the instant the gate moved slightly, seemed to spread out like water rippled by a stone thrown in. Ayu watched as the brown edges of the spots gradually lightened, revealing a color between blue and green—the color of Milk Lake in Daocheng Yading, the lake color they had only seen after two days of hiking, sculpted by glacial meltwater. The spots spread very slowly, much like the water of Milk Lake, meandering through the granite gullies, each centimeter taking an entire morning to move.

“This is impossible…” Zhong Hua’s voice was hoarse with disbelief. He reached out to touch the spots on the baffle, but the rust layer his fingertips touched was dry, without any trace of moisture. But the color change was so real, the blue-green lines extending along the metal texture of the baffle, growing like living things, and finally gathering into a small puddle-like reflection in the center of the baffle.

Ayu suddenly remembered her mother's knitting needles. One winter, when she had a fever, her mother sat by the bed knitting a scarf, the sound of the bamboo needles clinking together coinciding with the rhythm of the IV drip. Now, thinking back, the curves of those braided stitches, the outline of Bird Island on Qinghai Lake, and the water ripples on the turnstile barrier all seemed to follow some hidden, elusive pattern. She knelt down and wiped away the rust near the coin slot with her sleeve, discovering that the wear marks on the edge of the slot formed a shape she knew all too well—the ribbed stitches of the collar of her mother's first sweater.

Outside the hole in the dome, the cicadas' chirping suddenly rose in pitch. The demolition crew's footsteps grew closer, and the sound of electric drills exploded on the adjacent platform, making the cobwebs on the turnstiles tremble. Ayu looked at the blue-green spots of light on the barrier and suddenly remembered the sound of bubbles bursting in the ice layer when sunlight pierced through the glacier at Milk Beach—that extremely faint "pop" sound, and now, the faint sound of gears turning inside the turnstiles, overlapped in her ears.

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