Nursery rhymes and star trails on cassette tapes
Dust from the old broadcasting room floated in the three o'clock afternoon sunlight, like undisturbed grains of time. Zhong Hua entered following the sound of the construction team's bulldozers. This secret room, unearthed during the subway station renovation project, was hidden in the platform mezzanine. Fire prevention slogans from 1983 were still pasted on the metal filing cabinets, the ink turning blue from the dampness. Ayu coughed twice behind him, her nose brushing against the peeling white plaster on the wall, but suddenly pointed to the cassette tape rack in the corner—a black vinyl box was slanted into the gap at the bottom, sealed off by cobwebs.
"Look at the label, 1976 Nursery Rhymes." Her fingernail scraped across the box, revealing faded gold lettering. Beneath the curled edges of the tape, the faint marks of another year were visible, like covered tree rings. As Zhong Hua crouched down, his knee crushed a tile on the floor, the cracks radiating outwards, reminding him of the volcanic rock he'd picked up on Weizhou Island last year. The moment the wooden box opened, a smell mixed with rust and magnetic powder wafted out. On the plastic casing of the cassette tape was a blurry "Chen" written in pen, the strokes bearing a striking resemblance to the signature in his grandfather's nautical logbook.
The old tape recorder in the broadcasting room was still connected to a tattered wire. When Zhong Hua tried to connect it to a temporary power source, the indicator light flashed three times before lighting up, like some belated response. Ayu inserted the tape into the slot, and the creaking sound of the reel turning echoed in the empty room. At first, there was only a hissing electrical noise, like the fine sand blowing through the Gobi Desert near Dunhuang. She subconsciously moved closer to the speaker, her hair brushing against the dusty grille, when suddenly she heard a child's voice seep through the noise, humming a tune intermittently.
"Rock-a-bye baby, rock-a-bye to Grandma's bridge..."
The voice was soft, with the distortion characteristic of an old-fashioned microphone, yet it made Ayu abruptly take a half-step back. It was a nursery rhyme her grandmother had taught her in the Shanghai alleyways; the ending of each syllable carried the soft, gentle tone characteristic of Wu dialect, even the soft "hmm" sound during breaths was identical. She remembered her grandmother singing this song in the wicker chair in the courtyard the year before she passed away, the rhythm of the needle and thread sliding across the embroidery perfectly matching the rhyme's beat. Zhong Hua reached out and pressed her trembling wrist; the skin his fingertips touched resembled the surface of Namtso Lake in the early morning, covered with a thin layer of ice.
"Listen to the breath." He pressed his ear to the speaker, and the child's voice paused briefly after the word "bridge," like a ripple of breath. At that instant, the static suddenly grew louder, producing a crisp "ding-ding" sound, the intervals of which were exactly the same as the bells of the camel caravan passing through the camp during their night in Dunhuang. The rhythm of the camel bells was always three short and one long, like Morse code being tapped in the desert, and at that moment, the pauses in the tape were cutting through the melody of the nursery rhyme at the same frequency.
Ayu crouched down, her fingers tracing the tachometer knob on the tape recorder, where the rubber had hardened and cracked. When the children's voices sang "Grandma calls me a good baby," the tape suddenly sputtered, the pitch rising sharply before falling back down, creating a strange pitch shift. This pitch shift reminded Zhong Hua of the "crack" sound he heard last month at Namtso Lake when the lake froze over in the middle of the night—the ice's expansion and contraction due to heat caused a pitch change that was exactly the same. He had recorded that cracking sound on his phone; the spikes on the sound wave graph looked like suddenly erected icicles, and now the pitch shift in the speaker was vibrating the air with the same physical laws.
As the tape reached its end, the child's voice was gradually swallowed by dense electrical noise. Ayu thought it would fall silent like a normal tape, but she saw Zhong Hua suddenly stand up and point to the oscilloscope connected to the tape recorder—an old instrument left behind by the construction team. The waveform on the screen was jumping violently with the noise. At first, it was just a chaotic curve, like a spider web blown about by the wind, until the last loop of the tape tightened, and the waveform suddenly stabilized, forming a continuous undulating arc.
"The Yunnan-Tibet Highway." Zhong Hua's voice was a little hoarse. He pulled his phone out of his backpack and opened the folder on his car's dashcam. The altitude curve that popped up on the screen perfectly matched the waveform on the oscilloscope: the peak corresponded to 5013 meters at the Mila Pass, the trough was the Lancang River Canyon, and even the brief altitude fluctuations when passing through a small town left corresponding bends on the waveform. They had stopped at a teahouse in that town, where the proprietress served butter tea with golden milk skin floating on top. Now, the altitude data for that journey was sealed away as static on a cassette tape from 1976.
Ayu reached out and touched the oscilloscope screen. As her fingertip traced the crest of the waveform, she suddenly heard a slight vibration from the broadcasting room window. She turned to look, and saw the setting sun shining through the glass curtain wall of the newly built subway station, casting diamond-shaped patches of light on the brick wall opposite. The speed at which the light patches moved was exactly the same as the speed at which the shadows of clouds swept across the road as they drove over Dongda Mountain. Zhong Hua had somehow walked to the window, still clutching the cassette tape in his hand. The plastic casing shimmered with amber-colored veins in the light, like solidified resin.
"Look at the texture of this tape." He held the tape up to the light, and the scratches on the magnetic powder coating revealed fine lines in the sunlight. "Doesn't it look like the star trails of Namtso Lake?" Ayu leaned closer to examine it. The random scratches actually formed the shape of the Big Dipper, and the angle of the handle's curve was exactly the same as the star trail photos they had taken at Shengxiang Tianmen. Even more astonishingly, below the Big Dipper, in the blank spaces left by the detached magnetic powder, the outline of the Weizhou Island volcano was faintly outlined, with even the fumaroles on the edge clearly visible.
The tape recorder suddenly clicked, the tone indicating the tape had finished playing. But this time, the noise didn't disappear; instead, it became clearer, as if countless tiny voices were speaking simultaneously. Ayu closed her eyes and heard the mixed sounds: the tinkling of camel bells, the cracking of ice, the electronic sound of the car dashcam, the soft rustling of her grandmother's embroidery needle through fabric, and that child's voice from 1976, softly humming "Rock-a-bye Baby" again in the gaps between all the sounds.
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