Annual rings on a rusty scale
As the last rays of sunlight streamed through the glass dome of the old waiting room, Zhong Hua was scraping the rust off the luggage scale with his Swiss Army knife. On the seventh stroke, the number "7.3kg" suddenly peeked out from the dial, like a coin buried by time. Ayu handed him a canvas water bottle; the dull thud of the spout hitting the scale pillar reminded them both of the sound of icicles falling they had heard in Yubeng Village last year.
"The pointer has been stuck here for at least twenty years." Zhong Hua ran his fingertip along the edge of the dial, rust falling onto the muddy marks on his hiking boots. The boots, still covered in sand from Namtso Lake, were now stuck in the cracks in the waiting room's floor tiles—the mica flakes embedded in the cracks shimmered faintly in the twilight, much like the fragments of the Milky Way they had seen in Dunhuang.
As Ayu squatted down, the compass slipped out of her apron pocket. The needle spun wildly in the magnetic field of the rusty iron, finally stopping in the northwest-northwest direction, the winding arc of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway. She suddenly reached out and pressed her hand against the dent on the edge of the scale pan: "This dent... is exactly the same as the copper corner of my mother's dowry chest." She had touched the lotus scroll pattern on the copper corner a thousand times, and now seeing the same wear pattern on the rusty scale was like seeing her mother's fingertips pressing against the back of her hand through the passage of time.
Zhong Hua's razor blade suddenly stopped at the number "19". Dark brown marks seeped from where the rust had peeled away; it wasn't rust, but the color of oxidized pencil lead. He took out his phone and turned on the flashlight. Suddenly, the dust particles in the beam aligned in lines, resembling the migratory bird tracks he'd photographed at Qinghai Lake. When the light focused below the dial, the pencil lettering of 1994 emerged from beneath the rust: "Waiting for Dad to come home."
The pauses in the four characters carried a noticeable tremor, and the final stroke of the character "家" (home) was exceptionally long, with uneven ink density—a unique habit of Zhong Hua's father when writing medical records. Once, he saw his father signing for a critically ill patient in the emergency room; the rhythm of the pen's pauses on the medical record paper was exactly the same as the pressure points of this pencil writing. Now, rust dust fell on the bend of the character "爸" (dad), much like the medicine stains that had spread on his father's medical record before his death.
"1994..." Ayu's fingertips traced the three dots of the character "等" (děng, meaning "wait"), and she suddenly remembered the unmailed letter at the bottom of her mother's trunk. The letter also bore the character "等," and the ink smudges on the back of the paper, like the pencil marks on the scale, carried the slightly trembling tail characteristic of someone waiting. A draft in the waiting room suddenly swirled up a newspaper in the corner, and the 1994 headline, "Qinghai-Tibet Railway Phase I Opens," rustled in the wind. The ink smudges on the corner of the newspaper were identical in shape to the message in a bottle label they had found on Weizhou Island.
Zhong Hua suddenly grabbed A Yu's wrist. Her pulse beat in his palm, the frequency matching the pulse period of Vega he had recorded when stargazing at Namtso last year. "Step onto the scale." His voice carried a metallic coldness, yet it rippled the moment A Yu stepped onto it—the weight of the two of them caused the rusty pointer to tremble violently, not downwards, but swinging back and forth along the edge of the scale.
The weight swung from 0.1kg to 7.8kg, then back to 3.2kg, like a prayer flag fluttering in the wind. Ayu stared at the arc traced by the pointer, suddenly recalling the contour lines she'd seen on the Yunnan-Tibet Highway elevation map—7.8kg corresponded to 5013 meters at Mila Pass, and 3.2kg to 3100 meters at Yubeng Village. When the pointer swung to 5.6kg for the third time, the sound of the weights colliding came through the soles of her shoes: tap...tap tap...tap—this rhythm was perfectly synchronized with the flow of the meltwater from Yubeng Glacier Lake. Last year, they had squatted by the lake and used a stopwatch to measure the interval between the water hitting the rocks; it was exactly 1.2 times per second.
"Look at the back of the scale." Zhong Hua shone his flashlight on the bottom of the scale pan, where the rust had peeled away, revealing layers of engravings. At the top was a graffiti smiley face from 2008, below that was the inscription "Jianjun was here" from 1997, and further down was an anchor pattern from 1983—the way the anchor chain was wound was exactly the same as the Qingdao Port breakwater drawn in his grandfather's logbook. When Ayu's fingernail scratched the back of the pencil writing from 1994, oil suddenly seeped from the metal of the scale, staining the ground with the outline of Qinghai Lake.
The lights in the waiting room suddenly came on. A construction safety officer rushed in with a spotlight. As the beam swept across the luggage scales, Zhong Hua saw the pencil marks on the dial glowing. The ink seeping from the strokes of the four characters, "Waiting for Dad to Come Home," wasn't rust water, but a pale yellow oil—the same color as the ink from the Hero brand fountain pen his father used to use. Ayu suddenly remembered a similar oil stain on the inside of the brass corner of her mother's dowry chest; her mother said it was left by her father when he used his fountain pen.
Suddenly, the safety officer's walkie-talkie crackled with static. Amidst the static, a clear child's voice sang "Rock-a-bye Baby," a song Ayu's grandmother had taught her. Zhong Hua, however, heard his father humming "Farewell" in the emergency room. The two melodies intertwined with the clanging of the weights, creating a wondrous resonance—a resonance frequency that superimposed on the sound waves of camel bells they had heard in Dunhuang, the icefalls of Yubeng, and the starry sky of Namtso, condensing into visible ripples in the air.
As the ripples passed through the scale pan, the pointer suddenly pointed to 0 at 7.3kg. Ayu felt the floor tiles beneath her feet vibrate, and the water droplets seeping from the cracks weren't water, but melting glacier water—the same icy, gritty water she had received at the Yubeng Waterfall last year. Zhong Hua bent down and picked up something that had fallen from the crack in the scale pan: a train button from 1994, the employee number engraved on the back of which was exactly the same as his father's employee number at the railway hospital back then.
"It's time to go." Ayu's voice was wet with tears as she pointed to the fading pencil marks on the scale. The last stroke of the character "家" (home) was turning into a beam of light, at the end of which stood a man in a railway uniform, carrying a canvas bag identical to the one his mother had brought with her as part of her dowry. As the man turned, the worn edges of the bag strap revealed cotton thread, the color matching the piping on Ayu's apron.
As the construction team's bulldozer rolled over the waiting room floor tiles, the pointer on the luggage scale in Zhong Hua's arms suddenly stopped at 14.6 kg—exactly the total weight of their backpacks. The pencil marks of 1994 on the rusty scale had disappeared, but left permanent imprints in the metal, much like the pencil-drawn altitude map of the entire Yunnan-Tibet Highway in their travel log. And in the indentation of the copper corner of the scale, half a ginkgo leaf had somehow become embedded, its veins slowly smudged into the shape of the Chinese character for "home," at the speed of the melting water from Yubeng Glacier Lake.
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