Silver Moon and Star Tide Map
As Ayu held the frayed postcard between her fingers, the afternoon sun slanted into the attic dormer window. She had found the postcard last week at a used bookstore in Panjiayuan. The picture was of the faded Qingdao Zhanqiao Pier, with waves rolling in fine white foam, like someone had accidentally spilled lead white paint. She had been drawn to the phrase written in pencil on the back, "Wait for the tide to reach the twelfth step," but as she opened the envelope, she heard a faint "click"—half a yellowed nautical map slid out from the lining, with a silver foil moon tucked into the corner.
"1983." Zhong Hua's finger traced the ink date along the edge of the map; the numbers had turned a rusty color with age. The map lay open on a low pine table. The Bohai Bay, outlined in ink, resembled a curled-up conch shell. The shipping route from Weihaiwei to Yantai was heavily marked with a red pencil, and within the outline of the Shandong Peninsula, someone had drawn a silver foil moon in the sea near Weihai with an extremely fine pen. Ayu lightly scratched the edge of the silver foil with her fingernail and saw fine ripples in the reflection, much like the sunlight filtering through the seawater and casting shadows on the volcanic rocks when she was diving at Weizhou Island last month.
"Look here." Zhong Hua suddenly held the map up to the window, sunlight streaming through the pages and illuminating the ink lines. When Ayu leaned closer, she gasped—the Shandong Peninsula coastline on the map, that arc-shaped outline from Chengshantou to Penglai, perfectly matched the photos of the Weizhou Island volcanic rock fracture zone she had saved on her phone. The dotted lines marking the deep-sea trenches on the map corresponded to the winding cooling lines on the black volcanic rock of Weizhou Island, and even the smallest branch at the very end followed the same direction as the three-centimeter-long crack on the east side of the crater.
"Lighthouse." Zhong Hua's fingertip touched a red dot drawn on the map, "Weihai Lighthouse." The red dot was drawn at the entrance of Weihai Bay, with its latitude and longitude noted in tiny print next to it. Ayu opened her travel notebook, inside which was a record of the night she stargazed at Namtso Lake: at 2:17 AM, Vega was depicted by Zhong Hua as a bright star trail in pen, with the endpoint of the trail circled with a small cross in highlighter. When she brought the notebook close to the map and compared it in the sunlight, she discovered that the cross in highlighter matched the red dot of the Weihai Lighthouse on the map perfectly—as if the starlight from the Namtso Plateau, spanning four thousand kilometers, had landed precisely on this lighthouse in the Bohai Bay.
The silver foil moon swayed gently in the sunlight, its worn edges revealing a pale blue paper base beneath. Ayu suddenly recalled the volcanic rock at the Crocodile Mountain scenic area on Weizhou Island, polished by the waves; the fossilized shells embedded in the rock's fractures had a cross-sectional color identical to the base of this silver foil moon. She reached for the back of the map, but paused when her fingertips touched the paper—seven characters were written in pencil on the back: "Tides and Star Orbits in Harmony." The handwriting was faint, like a child's uneven strokes, but at the pauses of each stroke, the pencil lead was deeply embedded in the paper's texture.
"This handwriting..." Zhong Hua's voice was a little strained. He pulled a waterproof bag from his backpack, inside which was his grandfather's nautical logbook. It was a leather notebook from the 1970s, the gold-embossed words "Oceanic" on the cover now faded to a dark brown. When he opened the first page and placed the pencil writing on the back of the map next to his grandfather's signature on the logbook, Ayu saw the two lines of writing overlap in the sunlight—the last stroke of the character "潮" (tide) had a slight upward flick at the end, a mark left by the habit of using the wrist; the vertical hook of the character "轨" (track) had the same pressure point at the turn, as if it were a mark left by the same pencil in different times and spaces.
The attic was so quiet you could hear the wind rustling through the locust trees downstairs. Ayu picked up the silver foil moon and noticed its curve fit perfectly into the depression of Weihai Bay on the map, like a long-lost puzzle piece. She suddenly remembered the volcanic rocks at Dripstone Screen on Weizhou Island, sculpted into crescent shapes by the waves—locals said it was the moon falling into the sea. And the starry sky over Namtso Lake always seemed to rotate after 3 a.m., and when Vega's light streaked across the lake's surface, the sound of cracking ice and the frequency of the tides seemed to resonate in an indescribable way.
"My grandfather was a transportman in the Bohai Bay in 1983," Zhong Hua said, tracing the shipping routes on the map. "That year, he suddenly resigned, saying he wanted to go west to see the stars." Tucked in his logbook was a yellowed ship ticket, dated September 1983, a third-class ticket from Yantai to Shanghai. Ayu remembered Zhong Hua saying that before his grandfather passed away, he always talked about "the stars and tides in sync," saying that on a certain night at sea, he saw the light of Vega falling into the waves, and the rise and fall of the tides were in sync with the rotation of the star's orbit.
The silvery moon suddenly slipped from Ayu's fingertips, landing on the map at the location of Weihai Bay. Sunlight shone through it, casting a trembling patch of light on the table. Ayu stared at the patch of light, suddenly remembering that night at Namtso Lake, when she and Zhong Hua lay on the rocks by the lake, Vega hanging precisely above the summit of Nyainqêntanglha Mountain. When Zhong Hua was recording star trails with a mobile app, she heard the sound of the distant glacial lake cracking, a sound as regular as the ticking of a second hand. Now, recalling it, the frequency was strikingly similar to the sound of seawater ebb and flow through the volcanic crevices of Weizhou Island.
"Tides are the moon's breath, star trails are the patterns of time," Ayu said softly, her fingertips tracing the pencil lines on the map that read "Tides and star trails resonate in unison." She recalled her mother's embroidery, the veins of the peony petals always matching the veins of a leaf she had seen before; she remembered her father repairing radios, the arrangement of the solder joints mirroring the arc of the ribbons of flying apsaras in the Dunhuang murals. Over the years, they had seen the same peony pattern on the letter paper at Qinghai Lake, and discovered a sunset at the icy lake in Yubeng Village the same color as the concert tickets—as if every encounter was a pre-written footnote.
Zhong Hua suddenly stacked the map and the star trail record of Namtso Lake together, shining his phone flashlight on the back. At the overlap of the two layers of paper, the outline of the Shandong Peninsula and the fracture zone of the volcanic rock of Weizhou Island formed a strange pattern—like a seabird spreading its wings. The red dot of the Weihai Lighthouse fell precisely at the bird's eye, while the star trail of Vega transformed into the bird's beak, pointing to some unknown point beyond the map. The silvery moonlight fell on the "bird's eye," swaying gently with the wind outside the window, like a real star pulsating.
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