Resonance of gears and stardust
The clock stopped at 3:15, its brass pendulum like a frozen comma, hanging above the yellowed Roman numerals on the clock face. Zhong Hua squatted on the attic floor, dust floating in the slanting sunlight. The old clock, left by his grandfather, exuded a mixture of camphor and machine oil. He unscrewed the screws on the back cover, and rust powder seeping from the metal seams left a dark brown stain on his fingertips—this was the clock his grandfather had placed in the living room when he was born in 1983; now the pendulum had stopped, and cobwebs of unknown age were stuck between the gears.
"We need to ask Master Zhou to take a look." Ayu's voice came from the stairwell. She was carrying a freshly dried bed sheet, and the ends of her hair were still covered with the green of the vines from the balcony. When Zhong Hua looked up, the sunlight was shining through her hair, turning a few strands of hair into a transparent gold. This reminded him of last year on Weizhou Island, when the sunlight pierced through the pores of the volcanic rock and the fine sand suspended in the beams of light.
Old Zhou's watch repair shop was tucked away at the end of an alley, the "Exquisite Craftsmanship" signboard on the wooden door half-painted. A grandfather clock sat on the greasy workbench. Old Zhou used tweezers to pry open the gear train, suddenly letting out a soft "Huh?" Zhong Hua leaned closer and saw a dark silver part stuck between the mainspring gears, with the blurry words "1900 SWISS" engraved on its edge—it wasn't the original movement of the grandfather clock, but rather looked like a part salvaged from an antique pocket watch.
"That's strange, how come the movement is embedded inside?" Old Zhou put on his magnifying glass, and his eyes behind the lens suddenly narrowed. "Look at this pattern—" He used the tip of his tweezers to lightly touch a dent on the edge of the gear. It was an irregular pit, and the walls of the pit were covered with fine, spiderweb-like lines. "Doesn't it look like it was hit by something?"
Ayu bent down to examine it closely. The metallic crystals in the depression were arranged in a radial pattern, like solidified ripples. She suddenly remembered last month on Weizhou Island, when the guide at the volcanic geological park pointed to a dark brown rock and said, "Look at these pores. They were formed by gases escaping during magma eruptions. This largest one looks just like a crater made by a meteor." At that time, she squatted in front of the volcanic rock, her fingertips tracing the rough inner walls of the pores. Now, the depression on this gear was exactly the same as the curvature of the pores on that rock.
"Meteor impact?" Zhong Hua picked up the movement and held it up to the light. The copper-nickel alloy from 1900 gleamed a cold gray in the sunlight, but the recessed areas refracted a faint blue light, like the phosphorescence on the sea surface of Weizhou Island at dusk. When Lao Zhou was cleaning the parts with an ultrasonic cleaner, fine bubbles suddenly appeared on the surface of the water. The sound of the bubbles bursting made A Yu feel inexplicably uneasy—the frequency was too similar to the soft sound of bubbles rising from under the ice when the frozen lake in Yubeng Village thawed.
“This movement needs to be oiled separately.” Old Zhou laid the parts on a velvet cloth, dipped tweezers in special machine oil, and slowly ran them along the gear teeth. Zhong Hua noticed that as the oil seeped into the recesses, a few wisps of very faint white steam rose up, like the frost of the Gobi Desert in Dunhuang at dawn. He suddenly remembered the sound of sand grains sliding down outside his tent three years ago when he spent the night at Mingsha Mountain. At first, it was a fine “rustling” sound, but as the night wind intensified, it turned into a rhythmic hum, like the heartbeat of the earth.
As the movement was reassembled into the clock, Old Zhou tightened the last screw, and the pendulum began to swing back and forth. "Tick-tock—tick-tock—" The sound echoed in the quiet shop, initially slow, gradually becoming rhythmic. Suddenly, Ayu grabbed Zhong Hua's hand; her fingertips were icy cold: "This sound…"
Zhong Hua was also stunned. It wasn't the sound of an ordinary clock ticking; rather, it carried a dull, lingering tone, like grains of sand cascading down from a height, first a soft, individual sound, then a series of resonant notes. He closed his eyes, instantly transported back to that night in Dunhuang: the moonlight bathed the Singing Sand Dunes in silvery-gray light, and he and Ayu lay on sand-resistant mats, listening to the sounds coming from the distant sand ridges—not the howling of the wind, but the resonance created by the sand grains rubbing against each other and rolling down, the frequency stable at 1.2 times per second, like some kind of natural metronome.
“It sounds just like the Singing Sand Dunes.” Ayu’s voice trembled with disbelief as she pointed to the pendulum of the clock. “Look at the amplitude of its swing. Doesn’t it look a lot like the sound wave pattern we recorded with our phones back then?”
Old Zhou put down his magnifying glass, picked up the brass bell on the table, and shook it. The crisp "ding" sound overlapped with the "tick-tock" of the clock, creating a strange harmony. "Strange," he scratched his head, "this mechanism has been stuck in the gears for at least decades, how can it still resonate with natural sounds?"
Zhong Hua picked up the volcanic rock specimen he had brought back from Weizhou Island and placed it next to the clock. The pores on the rock and the gear-like indentation faced each other, casting similar shadows on the table as sunlight passed through them. He suddenly remembered his grandfather's logbook, which contained a ship ticket from 1948. On the edge of the route map on the ticket, there was a blurry star-shaped pattern drawn in pencil. At the time, he thought it was just a casual sketch by the old man, but now it seemed that the five points of that star were exactly the same as the radial lines of the gear-like indentation.
“A Swiss movement from 1900,” Ayu murmured, “that was the year before my grandfather was born.” She opened her phone’s photo album and found a picture of star trails taken at night in Dunhuang—the handle of the Big Dipper points towards the Singing Sand Dunes, and in the lower left corner of the photo, there is the trail of a shooting star, the arc of its tail exactly the same as the concave edge of a gear.
The clock's ticking continued, each "tick" like a knock on the door of memory. Zhong Hua recalled his childhood, how his grandfather would always wind the clock in the evenings, the "click" of the brass key turning, seemingly connected to the sound of sand he heard now. Perhaps this movement hadn't fallen into the clock by chance, but rather intentionally placed there by his grandfather? Had that old man, who had lived through war and sailed across the Pacific, discovered this part bearing the traces of a meteor on a starry night, and sensed its secret resonance with the earth?
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