Toner Star Chart and Time Texture
1. Rusty keys from the secondhand market
On a rainy weekend, Zhong Hua was drawn into the secondhand market at the end of the alley by the smell of mold on the old furniture. Sunlight filtering through the tin roof, like crumpled coins, rolled past piles of old typewriters, broken clocks, and sewing machines covered with oilcloth. He crouched down to fiddle with a 1958 "Flying Fish" brand typewriter; the peeling blue paint revealed a dark bronze color, like an old anchor soaked in seawater.
"This machine is ink-intensive, and the ribbon needs to be replaced." The stall owner was an old man wearing a melon-shaped hat, with grease stuck under his fingernails. "But the force that the hammer produces is something that modern electronic gadgets can't match."
Zhong Hua pressed the "Q" key, and the hammer bounced up, kicking up a wisp of dust that traced an arc in the beam of light. He remembered Ayu saying that her grandmother's dowry chest had a copper lock with the same feel—a stubborn sense of ritual when opening and closing. As he pulled out the wrapped ribbon, half a sheet of yellowed carbon paper fell off in a rustling sound, its edges roughened by the perforations.
The letters on the toner paper had long since blurred into a light gray mist, with only the outlines of a few "O"s and "T"s still barely discernible. Zhong Hua held up the paper to the sunlight and suddenly held his breath—those scattered letter marks, in the light and shadow, somehow formed the shape of the constellation Orion: Betelgeuse was a hazy "E", Rigel was transformed into a tilted "L", and the three belt stars in the middle were composed of three blurry "I"s, the spacing of which was exactly the same as the star orbit distances he had measured with a star chart app at Namtso last year.
"Boss, I'll take this machine." Zhong Hua's fingertips brushed against the toner paper, leaving a light gray fingerprint. "Is the paper stuck in the ribbon also worth the money?"
The old man squinted at the paper, then waved his hand: "Here you go. The other day, the scrap collector dragged it from the old newspaper office warehouse. I guess it's some editor's discarded manuscript."
On his way home, Zhong Hua wrapped the typewriter inside his raincoat, but held the toner paper in his palm. Rainwater dampened the edges of the paper, and the toner that spread spread across his hand, leaving a faint star pattern, like a birthmark that suddenly appeared.
II. Overlap of weave and key marks
When Ayu opened the door, Zhong Hua was kneeling on the living room floor disassembling the typewriter. The gears inside the machine were covered in decades of grease. He wiped them with a cotton swab dipped in alcohol and suddenly noticed that the keys "J", "K", and "L" were particularly worn—the metal surface was worn with crescent-shaped indentations, and the edges were as smooth as pebbles washed by river water.
“This wear and tear…” Ayu leaned closer, her fingers unconsciously rubbing the cuff of the sweater. “When my mother knitted sweaters, the joints of her right middle and ring fingers were used to tuck the needles like this.” She remembered her mother sitting on the rattan chair on the balcony, the bamboo needles flying between her fingers, and the second joint of her middle finger always had a callus that matched the curve of the typewriter key in an amazing way.
Zhong Hua was stunned. He had seen a half-knitted blue scarf in A Yu's mother's belongings box, the stitches uneven, suddenly tightening at certain lines—now, thinking back, the rhythm was exactly like the pausing of a typewriter when it jammed. He laid the toner paper under the lamp and examined the blank areas closely with a magnifying glass: the toner hadn't fallen off randomly, but formed honeycomb-like holes, just like the pore structure they had seen in the volcanic rocks of Weizhou Island—the cavities left by the gas escaping during magma eruptions, their size and distribution perfectly matching the blank areas on the paper.
“Look here.” Ayu’s fingertip pointed to the upper left corner of the paper. “Doesn’t this blank area look like the crater of Nanwan on Weizhou Island?” She remembered last year at the volcanic geological park, when the tour guide pointed to the rock wall and said, “These pores were formed when the magma cooled 12,000 years ago.” And now, the blank space on the toner paper was replicating those geological rings in the same proportion.
The rain outside the window had stopped. The setting sun shone through the green ivy on the balcony, and the shadows of the leaves swayed on the toner paper. Zhong Hua suddenly noticed that as the sunlight penetrated the ribbon, the shadows cast by the toner particles were moving on the table—not an illusion caused by the wind, but they were actually gliding slowly, at the same speed as the water flow they had seen under the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village: 3.2 meters per second, the inherent rhythm of glacial meltwater cutting through the ravines of the rock face.
"That's impossible." Ayu's voice trembled. She reached out to block the shadow, but her fingertips passed right through the gray patch of light. "How can the shadow move on its own?"
Zhong Hua remained silent. He recalled the night at Namtso Lake, where the star trails seemed to rotate at a speed imperceptible to the naked eye; the tour guide had said it was evidence of the Earth's rotation. Yet now, this 1958 typewriter ribbon was recreating the speed of water flowing thousands of miles away, like a precision instrument sealed by time.
III. Unmailed Mail in the Newspaper Office Warehouse
To find out the origin of the toner paper, Zhong Hua made a trip to the city archives. The microfilm of the old newspapers scrolled on the reader, the 1958 pages filled with news about steelmaking and yield per mu, until he turned to the September supplement and suddenly saw a missing person notice: "Looking for members of the 'Orion' Poetry Society. If you see this, please come to the editorial office on the third floor of the newspaper office immediately." The date at the bottom of the notice was the month the typewriter was produced.
He followed the file number to the newspaper's warehouse registration from that year, and indeed, a batch of "discarded printed materials" was transported to the scrap yard in November 1958—among them "one Flying Fish typewriter, along with several poems." Zhong Hua photocopied the missing person notice and, on his way home, turned into the old printing factory on the corner. The retired old worker stared at the photocopy for a long time, then suddenly slapped his thigh: "'Orion' Poetry Society! The leader was a girl with glasses, surnamed Chen, who always drew stars on the manuscript paper back then."
"Has she ever used this kind of typewriter?" Zhong Hua asked, showing a photo of the typewriter.
“That’s right!” The old worker pointed to the indentation on the “J” key. “Editor Chen has rheumatism in her right finger joints. She always used these keys to apply pressure when typing, and over time, the indentation was worn down.” He paused, his gaze suddenly becoming distant. “Later, the poetry society disbanded. I heard that she went to teach on Weizhou Island. Before she left, she left a box of manuscripts in the warehouse, saying she would come back to retrieve them when Orion rose again.”
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