Annual rings and camel bells on the coin
When the notice for the demolition of the last batch of public telephone booths in the city was posted, the rainy season was making the sky swell. Ayu passed by the gray cast iron booth on the street corner and saw the "Shanghai Made 1998" stamp exposed under the peeling paint. The notch in the number 8 looked exactly like the dent in the copper thimble her mother used to mend clothes. She squatted down, and her fingertips had just touched the cold iron when the seventh telephone booth collapsed with the roar of the crane. The sound of rusty iron scraping against the ground suddenly pierced her eardrums—the "creak-clang" rhythm was exactly the same as the sound of camel bells clattering that she had heard in the Gobi Desert of Dunhuang that year.
"What are you looking at?" Zhong Hua's voice came from behind. The soy milk in the convenience store plastic bag was still steaming. The water stains from the hem of his raincoat spread across the ground in the shape of the shoreline of Namtso Lake. When Ayu turned around, raindrops dripping from his hair were hitting puddles and breaking into seven shimmering spots, much like the arrangement of red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and purple on Tibetan prayer flags.
As dusk fell after the construction crew finished work, the warning tape was faintly visible in the rain and mist. Ayu trudged through the mud and squeezed into the fence. A ginkgo leaf was caught among the peeling plastic pieces of the dial, its veins marked with the words "Wait for the rain to stop" in pencil. Just as her fingertips touched the tip of the leaf, a coin rolled out from between the numbers "7" and landed on her mud-splattered canvas shoes. The 1998 one-yuan coin gleamed faintly in the rain, and the wheat ear pattern on the national emblem on the coin made Zhong Hua suddenly squat down—an aerial photograph of his hometown's wheat fields was zoomed in on his phone, the curves of the golden wheat waves perfectly matching the coin's pattern, even the angle of the drooping wheat ears looked as if measured with a compass.
"The number of serrations is 12." Ayu's fingernail traced the edge of the coin, the speed at which raindrops rolled down the grooves reminding her of the icicles falling from the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village. That year, she squatted by the frozen lake counting the ripples; the 12 ripples just reached the soles of her boots. Zhong Hua suddenly stopped when he counted the twelfth serration—the combination of those uneven marks clearly resembled their hand-drawn map of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway: the wavy line of Qinghai Lake was embedded in the third serration, the star trail of Namtso Lake was on the seventh, and the crater of Weizhou Island was carved at the end of the twelfth serration.
The receiver gleamed coldly in the rain. When Zhong Hua picked it up, the cord suddenly taut like a bowstring. The trajectory of the water droplets sliding down the spiral pattern coincided with the tide curve drawn in pen in his grandfather's 1983 nautical logbook—the shape of the ink stains recording seawater temperature on a certain page of that yellowed logbook was exactly the same as the national emblem on this coin. As the busy tone seeped out from the electrical static, Ayu pressed the coin to her ear. In the intervals of "beep, beep," two rhythms overlapped: the intermittent sound of sand passing through camel bells, and the creaking sound of her mother humming "Rock-a-bye Baby" in a bamboo chair in the alley. She suddenly remembered the silver lock her mother clutched before her death; the metallic crystalline structure of the intertwined branches on the lock face, as shown under X-ray, was exactly the same as the wheat ear pattern on this coin.
"Listen." The moment Zhong Hua pressed down on the back of her hand, the busy signal frequency in the receiver changed. As the seventh beep sounded, the rain intensified suddenly, and the pounding sound of the tin roof perfectly overlapped with the soundtrack of a downpour from the 1995 cassette tape. Ayu stared at the last stroke of the character "圆" (yuan, meaning round) on the coin; its curve resembled the peony petals her mother had embroidered on the edge of the tablecloth—last year, while tidying up old things, she had found the same pattern in her mother's unfinished embroidery hoop, the stitches stopping at the tips of the petals, much like a certain wear line on the edge of this coin.
As dusk settled over the construction site fence, they found half a postcard tucked away in the cement cracks of the foundation. The postmark of July 15, 1998, stunned Zhong Hua—his birthdate. On the back, a crayon drawing of a train's chimney revealed smoke rings that mirrored the trajectory of a hot air balloon ascending from Dunhuang, while the headlights emitted orange-red particles reminiscent of the sunrise over Qinghai Lake. Ayu suddenly remembered an old photograph her father clutched before his death, showing her as a child stuffing coins into a phone booth, the rain streaks on the glass window behind her resembling the fault lines of Weizhou Island's volcanic rock.
"Click." A clear sound came from the receiver, like the click of a saddle buckle when riding a horse in Daocheng. Ayu leaned closer to listen. The sound consisted of three frequencies: the metallic vibration of camel bells, the throaty resonance of a lullaby, and the hollow sound of a coin falling into a metal box. Zhong Hua recorded and analyzed the sound wave, which showed the thermal expansion and contraction curve of Namtso Lake when it froze over—the roar of the icefalls he heard in Yubeng Village and the resonance of the conch shells he picked up on Weizhou Island were all hidden in the metal rings of this coin.
When the rain stopped, the iron boxes in the scrap heap emitted a salty, fishy smell. The 1998 nautical logbook lay open on her lap, the blue ink drawing of the Qingdao-Sanya route revealing patterns in the waves that resembled the seashells she'd found on Weizhou Island. On the last page of the logbook, the pen marks in the date column on the ticket stub perfectly matched the wear direction of the twelfth serration on the coin. Zhong Hua embedded the coin into the groove of the telephone booth ruins. As moonlight pierced through the rusted dial, the wheat ears on the coin's surface projected a dynamic image: waves of wheat in her hometown fields, the sandstorms of the Dunhuang Gobi Desert, and the silhouette of her mother fanning herself with a palm leaf fan—all intertwined, their rotational angular velocity matching the flow rate of the melting glacial lake in Yubeng Village.
Demolition workers later discovered that coins were buried under the base of each phone booth. One 1998 coin, its serrated surface inlaid with silver foil, revealed a complete map of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway under a magnifying glass—the route they had drawn in their notebooks during their trip, down to the contour lines of the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village. Now, this coin is embedded in a glass paperweight in the study, and whenever there is a thunderstorm, the hallucination of a busy signal ringing from the receiver recurs. Zhong Hua analyzed it with a sound wave detector and found that the frequency resonated strangely with the drumbeats of old Shanghai alleyways, the birdsong of Bird Island in Qinghai Lake, and even the vibrations of the meteor trail in Dunhuang when they first met.
Last night, while tidying up her mother's embroidery frame, Ayu suddenly noticed that a certain indentation in the wheat ear pattern of the coin, under the lamplight, reflected the precise angle at which the silver needle glided across the silk—the very arc of her mother's wrist as she embroidered the peony. The rain outside started falling again, its rhythm on the glass resonating across time with the sound of a schoolgirl in her uniform dropping coins into a phone booth during the rainy season of 1998. She picked up the coin from the paperweight, turned it under the light, and saw, amidst the wheat ears of the national emblem on the coin, the sunrise over Qinghai Lake, the camel bells of Dunhuang, the starry sky of Namtso Lake, and the silver strand of hair at her mother's temple as she hummed a song while fanning herself with a palm leaf fan.
When the construction team was cleaning the foundation for the last time, they unearthed a copper box in the deepest crack of the cement. Inside, they found twelve coins, each with a serration corresponding to a province they had traveled through. One coin had a tiny musical score for "Rock-a-bye Baby" engraved on its reverse, the arrangement of the notes perfectly matching the flowing ribbons of a flying apsara in a mural at the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang. Ayu placed this coin beside her mother's urn and suddenly understood: some sounds don't disappear; they are simply forged into the metal rings of time, waiting for a rain to awaken their slumber, allowing the camel bells and lullabies to resonate anew across the city's ruins, echoing across twenty years.
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