Prism Gap

The clock in the waiting room was stuck at 10:18, a drop of water clinging to the rusted copper chain of the pendulum. Ayu stared at the drop for a long time, until it suddenly detached from the pendulum and hovered in mid-air. A faint hum filled the air, like the strings of some musical instrument being plucked. Just as Zhong Hua was about to say something, the drop burst open with a "pop" into seven colorful rays of light.

I. Orange-Red: Salt Grains and Morning Light of Qinghai Lake

The outermost beam of light burned a vibrant orange-red, like a shattered sunset. Ayu saw that what surged within the light wasn't clouds, but the waves of Qinghai Lake—that July, they had crouched on the rocks of Heima River, wrapped in their windbreakers, and she had reached out to catch the first rays of sunrise, but what slipped through her fingers were actually grains of salt from the lake shore. In the beam of light, the salt grains were drifting upwards against the flow of time, gathering into the woolen hat she had worn then, the frozen beads on the brim refracting tiny rainbows.

"Look over there." Zhong Hua's voice came from within the light, carrying the morning breeze of 2016. Ayu looked in the direction he pointed. Deep within the orange-red pillar of light, a girl in a blue dress was chasing a kite. The kite string wasn't tied to a windmill, but to a peony handkerchief embroidered by her mother. The tassels on the handkerchief swept across the lake's surface, startling a school of fish that leaped out of the water, forming the star trails they later photographed at Chaka Salt Lake. She wanted to call out to the girl, but found her voice mingled with the sound of the waves in the light, becoming the soft scratching of a pen across the veins of a peony leaf on the letter her mother had sent years ago.

As Zhong Hua's fingertips passed through the orange-red beam of light, they created ripples made of salt grains. A warm sensation suddenly seeped from the edge of the beam, and A Yu looked down to see a thin layer of frost on the back of her hand—it was the dew from Qinghai Lake at dawn, slowly disappearing at the same rate it used to be.

II. Indigo: Echoes and Cracks of the Yubeng Icefall

The second beam of light was the color of a glacier, an indigo blue with half a collapsed icefall frozen within it. In the late autumn of 2018, they were at the Yubeng Sacred Waterfall. Ayu looked up at the falling icicles when Zhong Hua suddenly pulled her back half a step. The icicles crashed into the spot where they had just been standing, and among the shattered ice fragments was a crystal with a frozen pine needle, now suspended in the center of the indigo beam of light, like a magnified sapphire.

A cracking sound came from deep within the beam of light—the metallic clang of a glacier moving. Ayu saw herself crouching on the moraine, tracing the cracks in the ice with her trekking pole. Suddenly, the cracks came alive, meandering into the vine-like patterns her mother had embroidered on the tablecloth. When Zhong Hua reached out to touch the light prism, the indigo light suddenly fluctuated. In the slow-motion replay of the cascading icefall, the edges of each ice crystal reflected the window frames of the Tibetan-style guesthouse they had stayed in—the "Om Mani Padme Hum" mantra pasted on the window paper swirling in rhythm with the fluttering prayer flags.

“The cracks here are just like the chipped enamel basin at home,” Ayu heard herself say in the light. That year, she helped Grandma Wang clean the enamel basin at her wonton stall. The chipped corner on the rim reminded Zhong Hua of the pebbles on Qinghai Lake. And now, the direction of the icefall cracks was extending along the arc of the basin's rim, eventually gathering into a hexagonal ice crystal at the top of the pillar of light, exactly the same shape as the snowflakes they had picked up in Changbai Mountain.

III. Snow-white: Star trails and prayer wheels at Namtso Lake

The brightest pillar of white light was in the center, as bright as a shattered Milky Way. Ayu squinted and saw that what was rotating in the light was not star trails, but prayer wheels in front of the Potala Palace. On a night in 2020, wrapped in down jackets, they sat on Tashi Peninsula. Zhong Hua fixed his camera on a tripod, and in the long exposure with the shutter open, the starry sky of Namtso was drawing a circle, while in the pillar of light, this circle was being broken down into countless points of light, each point of light being a Sanskrit character worn on a prayer wheel.

“Look at the Big Dipper.” Zhong Hua pointed to the sky from within the light. A Yu followed his finger and saw that at the core of the white pillar of light, the seven stars were rotating at their actual speed, and the arc of their orbits was exactly the pattern of the copper lock on her grandmother’s dowry chest. As she tried to count the number of points of light, the white light suddenly contracted, revealing a prayer wheel hidden deep inside—the carvings on the surface of the prayer wheel were the shoreline of Namtso Lake, and the skin texture of the hand turning the prayer wheel was exactly the same as the pen pressure of the signature on Zhong Hua’s grandfather’s nautical logbook.

The moment Zhong Hua's fingertips touched the white light, all the points of light suddenly surged toward him. A Yu saw a projection of star trails appear on the back of his hand, extending from his wrist to his fingertips, exactly the distance of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway from Lijiang to Lhasa.

IV. Light Belt: The Mileage and Heartbeat of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway

The seven beams of light suddenly disintegrated, and all the light spots aligned into a line as if attracted by a magnet. Ayu heard the sound of railway tracks vibrating, not the metallic clang of the newly built subway station in front of her, but the sound of the old green train she had taken in Dali in 2017. The line of light spots extended along the floor of the waiting room, each step corresponding to a milestone on the Yunnan-Tibet Railway: the 17th kilometer was the orange light of sunrise over Qinghai Lake, the 43rd kilometer was the indigo blue of the Yubeng Icefall, and at the 199th kilometer, the starry sky over Namtso Lake was drawing a circle in the white light.

“This is our mileage.” Zhong Hua squatted down, his fingertips tracing the spot of light at kilometer 217—where colorful specks floated like glass marbles, red ones representing the fiery clouds over Qinghai Lake, and green ones representing the fir trees of Yubeng. The band of light continued to extend, passing through the glass curtain wall of the waiting room. Ayu saw the spots of light outlining the altitude curve of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway in the air outside, each peak corresponding to a hostel they had stayed at: a hostel in Litang, a Tibetan-style inn in Bomi, and a guesthouse on Barkhor Street in Lhasa.

At the end of the band of light was a wall of liquid glass. Behind the wall stood a girl with pigtails, wearing a floral dress from 1999, clutching a postcard in her hand. Ayu recognized it as the one that had fallen out of an old mailbox that had been demolished during urban renewal. The wave pattern drawn on the back was now rising and falling with the girl's breath. And in the instant the girl turned around, Ayu saw the reflection of her own windbreaker zipper—the worn teeth of the zipper pull perfectly aligned with the postmark perforations on the edge of the postcard.

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