Platform markings and pendulum resonance
As the excavator's iron arm slammed into the concrete wall for the third time, Zhong Hua was squatting outside the warning line tying his shoelaces. His shoe sole scraped against a piece of bluish-gray brick, half a seashell embedded in the crack, its spiral pattern strikingly similar to the one they had found on Weizhou Island. A Yu's gasp came from the bottom of the construction pit. He looked up and saw his girlfriend half-submerged in the newly exposed arch structure, her windbreaker cuffs covered in the rusty dust characteristic of the 1980s.
"Zhong Hua! Come down and see!"
The concrete debris at the bottom of the pit formed a slope. As Zhong Hua slid down the steel bars, his knee hit a protruding brick edge—the texture was unusually smooth, like the edge of a deliberately polished platform. Ayu was squatting in front of the wall clock. The light from her phone's flashlight swept across the clock face, revealing a missing corner of the Roman numeral "X," exposing the even older black paint underneath. The hour and minute hands crossed at an acute angle, stopping at 10:17.
"The second hand is stuck at 7, like a broken eyelash." Ayu's fingertip hovered over the glass surface. "Look at this pendulum."
The four characters "Made in Shanghai" on the cast iron pendulum gleamed with a bluish hue in the light. When Zhong Hua leaned closer, the first thing he smelled was a mixture of scents: rust, old wood, and a sandalwood fragrance similar to that in his grandmother's camphor wood chest. When he saw the beginning of the engraving, his heart skipped a beat—the curve was strikingly similar to the copper lock pattern on A Yu's grandmother's dowry chest. Last year, when he helped move the chest, he had seen a 1948 ship ticket at the bottom, the perforations still bearing traces of crayon gold.
"I was born at 10:17." His voice was broken by the construction noise overhead, and he subconsciously reached out to touch the pendulum. The moment his fingertips touched the cold cast iron, a "click" suddenly echoed throughout the old waiting room. It wasn't the dull thud of gears meshing, but the rhythmic swaying of a copper bell on a camel's neck, carried by the wind and sand.
"Dunhuang!" Ayu blurted out. That year, they spent the night at Mingsha Mountain and were awakened by a camel caravan at three in the morning. The sound of bells mingled with the rustling of sand sliding down the dunes, and now, in the enclosed concrete space, the echoes carried the unique emptiness and coolness of the Gobi night.
Zhong Hua took a deep breath and forcefully flicked the hands. The rusted gears emitted a dry, grinding sound, but the "click-clack" frequency was exactly the same as the resonance of camel bells in his memory, even the pauses in breathing precisely replicated the intervals of a camel's stride. He could even recall how the sound of the bells was drawn out by the wind while he was lying in his sleeping bag, and how it suddenly became crisp in the leeward part of the sand dune.
The unexpected event occurred the instant the hands crossed 10:18.
Ayu was taking a picture of the clock when she caught a glimpse of the reflection on the clock face. She instinctively adjusted the zipper of her windbreaker, only to see her reflection fading—the dark gray windproof fabric turning white, the metallic sheen of the zipper pull turning plastic, the Velcro straps on her shoulders disappearing, replaced by two thick, clumsy braids tied with faded pink ribbons. Startled, she took a half-step back, her heel hitting the platform tiles behind her, while the background of her reflection changed from reinforced concrete scaffolding to a misty, blue ice surface.
"The frozen lake in Yubeng Village..." she murmured to herself, her fingers tracing the cracks in the ice on the glass. It was a scene she had witnessed during her hike last year, where sunlight pierced through a 30-meter-thick layer of ice, refracting bubbles into solidified stars, and now the ice patterns reflected in the glass were slowly flowing at the same rate as the melting lake water had been.
"Ayu! Look at the paving stones!" Zhong Hua's voice trembled almost imperceptibly. He squatted in front of the third bluestone slab; the cracks looked like silver veins in the phone's light. Ayu looked in the direction he pointed, and the crisscrossing cracks suddenly took on meaning—the deep grooves running northwest formed the handle of the Big Dipper, the narrow cracks on the southeast outlined the constellation Ursa Minor, and the main crack connecting the two poles, its winding arc mirroring the Milky Way's path under the starry sky of Namtso Lake. The mica flakes embedded in the cracks shimmered with the vibrations, each reflection resembling the moment a star fell onto the lake's surface at an altitude of over 5,000 meters.
"The brick seams here..." Zhong Hua measured the north-south lines with his fingertips, "from this depression to that ridge, it's exactly the proportion of the altitude difference along the Yunnan-Tibet Highway from Lijiang to Lhasa." His fingernail scratched across a badly worn brick surface, the shape of the depression perfectly matching the glacial scratch mark left by Ayu's backpack when they rested under the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village. At that time, she was lying on the ice taking pictures, and the backpack strap got caught in a crevice, leaving an imprint that now seemed to reappear.
Suddenly, the vibration of the last subway train came from underground. The entire old waiting room began to sway slightly, and fine water droplets seeped from the cracks in the platform floor tiles. Ayu watched as the water droplets gathered on the ground, not forming puddles, but arranging spots of light on the brick surface with the frequency of the vibration—the dipper of the Big Dipper converged to form the outline of Qinghai Lake, the tail of Ursa Minor extended to form the crater of Weizhou Island, and among the patterns of the Milky Way, each spot of light flickered in rhythm with Zhong Hua's heartbeat.
"1999." Ayu suddenly squatted down, her fingertips touching a piece of paper stuck in the crack of the brick. It was the corner of a postcard, the faded ink printing "No. 7 Moon Street," the postmark date blurred, but the blue threads embedded in the paper fibers were the same imported yarn her mother used to knit scarves. Zhong Hua took the paper and held it up to the light, suddenly discovering that the translucent patterns on the paper overlapped with the star trail photos they had taken at Namtso Lake—the strokes of the unfinished sentence "Waiting for the train to arrive" on the postcard passed precisely through the position of Vega.
The vibrations grew stronger, and water droplets from the cracks in the floor tiles suddenly floated to the surface. Ayu saw her reflection still on the clock face, the girl with pigtails reaching for the floating droplets. Meanwhile, in reality, her phone vibrated in her jacket pocket. It was a WeChat message from her mother, attached with an old photo: a platform in 1999, the girl with pigtails standing before the clock, clutching a postcard whose wave pattern perfectly matched the half-piece of paper she was touching. Behind the girl, on the platform, was the back of a man in overalls, half a train timetable peeking out of his pocket, its worn edges identical to those of Zhong Hua's grandfather's nautical logbook.
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