Moonlight Route in a Tin Box
The city's twilight is always shrouded in the dust of demolition, like a piece of gray cloth repeatedly crumpled. Ayu squats before the rubble of the old train station, her fingertips tracing the fragment of a station sign engraved with "2007," the glass shards embedded in the cement cracks gleaming coldly in the setting sun. Zhong Hua has just kicked half a red brick aside when his shoe bumps into something hard—a rusty brass lock peeks out from the rubble, like the shell of some deep-sea creature.
“This thing is heavier than a bus stop sign.” As he pried open the lid with a crowbar, a salty, fishy smell mixed with the scent of the sea breeze and the musty smell of old paper rushed out. Ayu subconsciously held her breath and watched Zhong Hua lift the cover—the edges of the nautical logbook stacked in the hidden compartment were already brittle, and the route drawn in blue ink meandered on the yellowed pages, with dense latitude and longitude marks next to the dotted line from Qingdao to Sanya.
“Look at the wave patterns,” Zhong Hua said, flipping to a page and tracing the ink-stained crests of the waves with his fingertips. “It’s exactly the same as the seashell you picked up on Weizhou Island.” Ayu leaned closer and indeed saw that the curve of the wave crest perfectly replicated the spiral pattern on the inside of the seashell, down to the tiny serrated notches. She suddenly remembered that afternoon on Weizhou Island, when a seashell, smoothed by the waves, lay in a crevice of the rocks after the tide receded. When the sunlight shone through, the nacreous layer inside the shell shone with the same beige color as the edge of this page.
Zhong Hua used a key to pry open the hidden compartment of the nautical trunk—the brass key he'd found in the old box fit perfectly into the lock. When the bottom compartment clicked open, an anchor-shaped pocket watch rolled out, its chain still entangled with half a piece of dried seaweed. When Ayu picked up the watch, the engraving on the inside of the case made her fingertips tremble—"July 15, 1992," her birthdate.
“4:17.” Zhong Hua paused in his action of opening the watch case. The hands stopped at 4:00 AM, the second hand exactly at the seventeenth mark. Ayu suddenly remembered that night at Namtso Lake. They were wrapped in down jackets and squatted by the lake, watching the Milky Way cascade down like an inverted waterfall of milk. The “crack” sound of the ice freezing on the lake surface rang out at 4:07 AM. The cracks in the ice shimmered silver-blue in the moonlight, just like the cracks on the dial of this pocket watch.
The salty, fishy smell grew stronger, as if an entire ocean was locked inside the box. Ayu flipped to the last page of the logbook and found a blurry pattern drawn in pencil on the back of the paper—at first she thought it was a starfish, but upon closer inspection she realized it was the shoreline of Namtso Lake, and the dot in the center of the lake was exactly where they had set up their camera to photograph star trails years ago. Next to the Qingdao Port marker, there was a gear pattern drawn that was identical to the one on Zhong Hua's grandfather's old clock, and the curve of the gears meshing perfectly matched the glacial fault line at the edge of the Yubeng Village glacial lake.
“Listen.” Zhong Hua suddenly grabbed her wrist. The whistle of a green train drifted from afar, its long, drawn-out note cutting through the metal fence of the demolition site, like a rusty wire cutting through the twilight. Ayu froze—the sound was exactly like the camel bells they had heard in the Gobi Desert near Dunhuang, that dull, drawn-out tremor, as if time itself were swaying. As the whistle and the camel bells of her memory resonated in her ears, she saw the crack in the glass of her pocket watch suddenly light up, and the light seeping from the crack formed the outline of the Weizhou Island volcano.
As dusk completely enveloped the construction site, Ayu noticed a faded boat ticket tucked between the pages of the logbook. The "Qingdao-Shanghai" route on the ticket had been soaked by water, the smudged ink forming the shape of Qinghai Lake, while the tear at the ticket gate perfectly outlined the satellite map of Namtso Lake. Zhong Hua placed his pocket watch next to the fragment of the station sign; the shadow of the four o'clock hand fell on the number "2007," forming the exact angle of the Yubeng Village Waterfall.
“This is all the places we’ve been.” Ayu’s voice trembled slightly. She remembered the coral cavities she saw while diving in Weizhou Island, the shapes of which matched the rust spots on the inside of this nautical logbook; she remembered the cracks in the ice of Namtso Lake, which overlapped with the patterns on the dial of her pocket watch. When Zhong Hua opened the logbook again, the blue ink painting of the waves suddenly oozed water droplets, dripping onto the glass shards of the broken station sign. In the light refracted by the water droplets, the trajectory of the hot air balloon they had photographed in Dunhuang floated.
The brass lock suddenly clicked, as if something was closing deep inside the box. Ayu looked down and saw the hands of her pocket watch tremble slightly. Although still at four o'clock, the second hand had subtly shifted—the angle of that shift was exactly the angle between the sunlight and the surface of Qinghai Lake at sunrise. The salty, fishy smell suddenly mingled with the chill of Namtso Lake at dawn, and the sweet aroma of yak butter tea from Yubeng Village. These three scents intertwined in the twilight, forming a faintly glowing route stretching from the nautical box to the fading sunset in the distance.
The green train in the distance sounded its whistle again, this time with a new rhythm in the resonance of the camel bells—like the muffled thud of an icicle falling into a lake, or the heavy thud of a ship's anchor sinking to the bottom of the sea. Ayu picked up the shards of the station sign, the sharp edges of the glass pricking her palm. She suddenly understood that the glass embedded in the cracks was actually the moonlight of Namtso Lake condensed, and the salty smell in the nautical box was brought by the tides of Qinghai Lake traveling through the tunnel of time.
As the last rays of sunlight brushed past the brass lock on the nautical crate, Ayu noticed a scratch on the inside of the lid—an irregular curve, strikingly similar to the route they had drawn during their pilgrimage around Yubeng Village. Suddenly, Zhong Hua's pocket watch emitted a faint hum, and the light seeping through the cracks in the watch face bathed the fragments of the station sign, the nautical crate, and the scattered rubble on the ground in the orange-red hues of a Qinghai Lake sunrise.
“It’s time to go.” Zhong Hua’s voice echoed, as if it came from a very far place. A Yu nodded, but then she saw the outline of an old train station platform emerging from the ruins behind him. The ticket inspector in the blue cloth shirt was tearing off a 1992 ship ticket, and among the crowd waiting on the platform, there was a little girl with pigtails holding a nautical logbook. The anchor drawn on the cover of the logbook was exactly the same as the pocket watch in Zhong Hua’s hand.
The salty, fishy smell gradually faded, replaced by the smoky aroma of the city night. Ayu put the broken bus stop sign and her pocket watch into her canvas bag. The texture of the canvas suddenly reminded her of the piece of driftwood she'd found on Weizhou Island; the growth rings on it perfectly mirrored the yellowing of the pages in her logbook. As the two turned to leave the rubble heap, neither noticed a drop of water seeping from the brass lock of the nautical box. The droplet shattered into eight pieces upon landing, each reflecting a different starry sky—the sunset over Qinghai Lake, the camel bells of Dunhuang, the icefalls of Yubeng, the Milky Way over Namtso Lake—shimmering briefly in the dust before merging into the city's neon lights.
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