When Zhong Hua took the cassette tape out of the tape recorder, he noticed a line of small writing in pencil on the inside of the lid, worn almost illegible by time. He took out his phone, turned on the flashlight, and tilted it to shine on the bottom of the box, finally making out the words: "Tides and star trails resonate in unison." The handwriting was faint, yet carried a firm strength, reminding him of the last page of his grandfather's nautical logbook—"The true course is not on the chart, but in the resonance of waves and stars."
The door to the broadcasting room rattled in the wind, stirring up dust. Ayu suddenly pointed to the oscilloscope; the waveform had changed, no longer the altitude curve of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway, but a series of regular pulse waves. Zhong Hua looked at the waveform and suddenly recalled the sound wave pattern formed by the water crashing against the rocks beneath the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village—the frequencies of the two were exactly the same. And now, the sound of the waterfall, the rhythm of camel bells, the lingering rhymes of nursery rhymes, and the pitch of cracking ice were resonating across time and space through this 1976 cassette tape in the mezzanine of the newly built subway station.
As the sun completely sank below the horizon, the construction team's safety officer came to urge them to leave. Zhong Hua carefully placed the cassette tape back into the wooden box, but before closing the lid, A Yu noticed a tiny grain of sand embedded in the corner of the bottom. She picked up the grain with her fingernail and held it up to the light; the grain's sharp edges were identical to the sand structure of the Singing Sand Dunes in Dunhuang. Zhong Hua took the grain and put it in his pocket; it was slightly warm to the touch, as if it had just been dug out of a sun-drenched dune.
As Ayu stepped out of the broadcasting room, the newly built subway station was already lit up. Looking back, the hidden room in the mezzanine resembled a forgotten time capsule. What they had just taken away wasn't just a cassette tape, but a recording of a resonance between nursery rhymes and star trails, captured by magnetic powder. She remembered her grandmother singing nursery rhymes, always saying the moonlight in the alley was as bright as that of Dianshan Lake in their hometown. Now she suddenly understood that some sounds and lights can transcend the dust of time and space, colliding with your memories at some unexpected moment.
Zhong Hua's phone suddenly vibrated; it was a notification from the car dashcam app, saying that new altitude data had been detected. He opened it, but there were no new records on the screen, only an old photo—a picture of the starry sky taken at Namtso Lake, with the Big Dipper hanging above the lake's surface, its star trails perfectly aligning with the texture of the magnetic tape. The photo was dated July 16, 1976, exactly the year on the tape label.
They stood at the entrance of the newly built subway station, watching the passengers come and go. Suddenly, Ayu softly hummed "Rock-a-bye Baby," the tune so gentle, yet Zhong Hua could hear the pauses in the camel bells and the cracks in the ice. He knew that the nursery rhyme on that cassette tape no longer belonged to 1976; it had become an invisible thread, connecting the moonlight in the alleyways, the camel bells in the desert, the icy lakes of the snow-capped mountains, and the altitude of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway, playing a resonant melody of time and memory in their lives.
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