Green Ivy Route
The day Ayu chiseled a drainage hole into the old shoebox, Zhong Hua was wrapping anti-slip tape around a rusty clothes rack on the balcony. The shoebox was filled with soil dug from the flower bed downstairs, mixed with half a crushed eggshell—when she squatted on the tiles crushing the shell, the fragments splattered on the glass sliding door, and when the sunlight shone on it, it looked just like the meteor shower she had seen at Qinghai Lake last year, with meteors like pebbles streaking into the lake's surface.
"Will it survive?" Zhong Hua handed over the shears, the blade still stained with tree sap from pruning a few days ago, congealed into small amber spots. Ayu didn't take them; instead, she pushed the shoebox further under the security bars. The lid wasn't fully closed, revealing a section of pothos stem she'd taken from the company meeting room, its wilted leaves still stained with coffee. "Sister Wang said these things are easy to care for," she said, scraping off a brown spot from the leaf tip with her fingernail, "just like us."
The security grille is an old style from ten years ago, with crooked floral decorations welded between the diamond-shaped iron grates. Zhong Hua always felt it looked like a stranded fish skeleton. The year they moved in, Ayu had placed a pot of succulents on the windowsill, but it was scorched by the afternoon sun before summer. Now, all that's left is a glazed ceramic pot with cracks, and a pebble picked up from Qinghai Lake is still stuck to the bottom.
The pothos sprouted new shoots at an astonishing speed. One morning during the rainy season, Zhong Hua was awakened by birdsong outside his window. Half-asleep, he noticed water droplets clinging to the iron bars of the security grille, trickling down the diamond-shaped grid and pooling into small puddles at the edge of a shoebox. Rubbing his eyes, he leaned closer and discovered that the topmost vines had already wrapped around a second layer of mesh, the pale yellow tendrils hooked onto rusty weld points, remarkably similar to the copper bell hooks dangling from the necks of yaks he had seen in Daocheng Yading.
"It's time to put on the support." Ayu came out of the kitchen carrying a glass jar of soy milk, water droplets condensing on it and dripping down the label. When Zhong Hua took the cup, his fingertip brushed against the curled corner of the label—it was coffee beans they bought in Xishuangbanna last year. The elephant image on the label was blurred by water, but the curve of its trunk was exactly the same as the male elephant they had photographed in the Wild Elephant Valley.
The support frame was made from steel pipes salvaged from an old clothes rack. When Zhong Hua cut it while wearing gloves, sparks flew onto the cement floor, burning small black spots. Ayu squatted nearby, wrapping gardening tape. The green of the tape reminded her of the morning mist in the fir forest of Yubeng Village. That day, they got lost, and the guide whistled ahead to clear the way. Pine needles fell into her backpack and stuck to the wrapper of an energy bar.
"Hey, look at this." Zhong Hua suddenly stopped what he was doing. He was straightening the vines, and when his fingertips touched the back of the leaf, he felt the uneven texture. He held the leaf up against the light, and through the gaps in the veins, he could see fine lines drawn with a pencil—wavy lines that stretched from the tip of the leaf to the petiole, with three overlapping circles at the crest of the waves, a simple map of Bird Island in Qinghai Lake; the wavy lines suddenly tightened in the middle, outlining a sharply defined mountain shape, and below the snow line, the two characters "Daocheng" were written crookedly, with bits of pencil lead seeping into the strokes, much like the road signs that had been hastily blown by the wind at the mountain pass.
Ayu's fingernails dug into the tape. She remembered it was in a hostel in Dunhuang. Zhong Hua was lying on the bed drawing a route map. She leaned over to look, and the pen tip slipped on the map, turning the sand dunes of Crescent Lake into crooked palm leaves. "Palm leaves in Xishuangbanna..." she murmured, turning to another leaf. Sure enough, there was a serrated outline on the back. In the thickest part of the leaf, the pencil marks were worn white, revealing the leaf veins underneath, which overlapped perfectly with the veins of the palm leaf they had photographed at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Botanical Garden.
"When was this drawn?" Zhong Hua's fingers brushed over the two characters "Dunhuang," the pencil marks on the back of the leaf raised, much like the sand ridges of Mingsha Mountain at dusk. Ayu didn't speak, but got up to rummage through the shoebox—the old newspapers at the bottom had been pierced by roots. In the corner of the "Travel" section, she found half a crumpled note with Zhong Hua's handwriting on it: "Qinghai Lake → Daocheng → Dunhuang → Xishuangbanna." The arrow ran out of ink when it reached "Xishuangbanna," leaving a bare pen tip, much like the male elephant they saw in Wild Elephant Valley, missing its tusks.
On the evening the scaffolding was erected, the afternoon sun cast the shadows of the security grilles into the house. Ayu was chopping chili peppers in the kitchen when Zhonghua suddenly called her, his voice trembling strangely. As she ran outside, she saw the last rays of sunlight filtering through the leaves of the pothos vines, casting flickering shadows on the opposite white wall. At first, they were just scattered patches of light, swaying gently in the breeze, until a heart-shaped leaf turned at a certain angle, and all the patches of light suddenly merged—the shadows of the veins formed a silver arc, stretching from the corner to the ceiling, exactly the shape of the Milky Way that had stretched across Namtso Lake that night.
"Look..." Ayu's voice caught in her throat. In the shadows on the wall, the undulating lines of Qinghai Lake were still gently rising and falling, the outline of the snow-capped mountains of Daocheng was gilded by the setting sun, and in the shadows of the sand dunes of Dunhuang, one could vaguely see the crooked camel that Zhong Hua had drawn. And at the heart of the Milky Way, where the brightest spot of light was, was the location of their tent at Namtso Lake. That night, Zhong Hua had used a flashlight to draw a star map on the tent fabric, and the beam of light shining through the gaps in the fabric, casting a spot of light on the back of her hand, was exactly the same as the spot of light on the wall now.
Zhong Hua reached out to touch the shadow, but the moment his fingertips touched the wall, the light shattered into countless points of light. Ayu saw one point land on an old scar on his wrist—a scar he'd gotten in Yubeng Village when he slipped into a crevasse while trying to retrieve her dropped trekking pole. Another point rested on the hollow of her collarbone, where a mole shaped remarkably like a satellite map of Weizhou Island.
"Do you remember?" Zhong Hua's voice was soft. "That night at Namtso, you said the Milky Way looked like a frozen river." His fingertips traced the shadows on the wall, from the wavy lines of "Qinghai Lake" to the snow-capped peaks of "Daocheng," finally stopping at the center of the "Milky Way." "At that time, I thought that when we get old, we'll fill our balcony with pothos plants, letting the leaves connect all these places."
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