Soundtrack in the Fog
The moment Zhong Hua's fingertips touched the bronze pendulum of the wall clock, the faint, mixed scent suddenly intensified. It wasn't the metallic paint smell typical of new subway stations, nor the lingering dust of old waiting rooms, but something else entirely… He searched deep into his memory, but his nose caught the lingering warmth of his mother's sandalwood soap in the top notes before his thoughts could process it; the middle notes carried the scorching smell of sand cracking in the midday sun in the Gobi Desert of Dunhuang; and the base notes were surprisingly tinged with the salty aroma of butter tea unique to Yubeng Village—it was the smell of steam rising from the wooden bowl handed to him by the Tibetan guide last late autumn, when they were wrapped in their down jackets and squatting under the sacred waterfall.
"Can you smell it?" Ayu's voice came from behind her, trembling slightly. She was standing in front of the dilapidated notice board in the waiting room, with a 1982 nautical timetable visible beneath the peeling posters. The blue ink-painted route blurred in the twilight, like a wet blue ribbon.
Zhong Hua turned around and saw the light moving through the air in a strange way. It wasn't natural light, nor the temporary tungsten-halogen lamps set up by the construction team, but a faint light spilling from the glass of the clock, casting the shadow of the 10:18 hands. Where the light passed, the mixed smell suddenly materialized—it was no longer an intangible molecule, but condensed into a visible mist-like fluid, slowly swirling between the two of them.
“Like…like the mist and clouds in a traditional Chinese ink painting.” Ayu reached out her hand, her fingertips about to touch the mist, but the mist suddenly contracted and then spread out along some mysterious trajectory. The horizontal axis stretched from the east wall to the west wall of the waiting room, and the scale was not in centimeters, but marked with numbers using pale golden dots: 1, 5, 10, 17… The vertical axis rose vertically from the ground, and the highest point of the amplitude hit a crack in the ceiling. Zhong Hua remembered that Old Chen from the construction team had said yesterday that the shape of that crack looked exactly like a satellite image of the Weizhou Island volcano.
“The Yunnan-Tibet Highway…” Zhong Hua’s voice was a little hoarse. He recognized the amplitude curve on the vertical axis—it was an elevation difference map exported from their car’s dashcam. The 4376 meters at Mangkang, the 5130 meters at Dongda Mountain, and the 5013 meters at Mila Pass were all presented as peaks of different heights on the hazy acoustic waveform map. And the “travel days” on the horizontal axis corresponded to every day they spent traveling from Lijiang to Tibet along National Highway 214 last year.
On the 17th day, the peak suddenly burst forth with a strong orange light. Not the cool orange of LEDs, but the warm orange of sunrise over Qinghai Lake at 5:30 in the morning, carrying the dampness of the lake. At the summit, the mist gathered into tiny water droplets, refracting thousands of golden rays—just like when they stood on the shore of Heimahe Lake, watching the first ray of sunlight cleave through the clouds, striking the azure lake surface and shattering into a lake full of leaping gold foil. Ayu subconsciously raised her hand to shield her forehead, and through the orange light filtering through her fingers, she seemed to hear again the sound of the wind, carrying the soft sounds of fish leaping out of the water.
The fog continued to shift, and on the 43rd day, a deep valley of light appeared. Overflowing from this valley wasn't light itself, but an almost transparent white light, strikingly similar to the sudden first snowfall in Yubeng Village. That day, they had just passed the Sacred Waterfall when large snowflakes suddenly pelted down, instantly covering the green meadows, with the distant Kawagebo Peak appearing and disappearing in the snow curtain. Zhong Hua remembered that Ayu had squatted on the ground, reaching out her palm to catch the snow, her eyelashes covered in ice crystals, while the thermos in his backpack was steaming, the condensation on its walls mirroring the fog at the edge of the valley now.
“Sound waves…” Ayu murmured, “This is a sound wave diagram composed of scents.”
Zhong Hua suddenly realized what was happening. He took out his phone and turned on the recording function. The light from the phone screen reflected on the fog map, and the dots representing the number of days of travel and altitude suddenly began to vibrate. He held the phone up to the fog, and the microphone didn't capture the vibration of the air, but rather... the frequency of a smell.
The moment the recording ended, the sound of the recording began to play in the waiting room. It wasn't the electronic sound from a cell phone speaker, but a real sound with spatial reverberation coming from deep within the fog.
"Ding-dong!"
The first sound was that of camel bells. Not the crisp bells sold to tourists in scenic areas, but the dull, grainy tinkling of old copper bells around the necks of camel caravans traveling under the moonlight deep in the Gobi Desert of Dunhuang. Zhong Hua seemed to see that night again, as they followed the guide's caravan across the Singing Sand Dunes. The moonlight cast long shadows on the dunes, each step sinking into the warm sand, and the rhythm of the camel bells perfectly matching the frequency of the camels' strides.
Then came a deafening roar. It was the sound of the Yubeng Icefall cascading down. Not the sound of flowing water, but the thunderous crash of thousands of tons of ice floes colliding with the frozen lake as the glacier broke apart, echoing repeatedly through the valley. The roar in the recording made the air in the waiting room vibrate slightly. Ayu even felt a familiar coolness on the floor tiles beneath her feet, just like when she stood on the shore of the frozen lake, watching the meltwater seep from the cracks in the blue ice, and hearing the heart-stopping "crack" before the icefall collapsed.
Finally, a very soft "thump" was added.
It was very light, like something falling into deep water, or perhaps the sigh of time itself. Zhong Hua and A Yu froze simultaneously—it was the sound of a mailbox closing. Not the plastic lid of a modern mailbox, but the green tin mailbox of 1999, the small iron door of the delivery slot opening with a muffled thud as it was released. A Yu suddenly remembered the 1999 postcard she had found at the used bookstore, the postmark date blurred, the words "Waiting for the rain to stop" written in pencil on the back, while Zhong Hua recalled the signature on his father's medical record before his death, the handwriting revealing the same hesitation.
Three sounds intertwine and overlap in the misty sound wave pattern. The rhythm of camel bells, the roar of icefalls, and the soft tinkling of mailboxes—their frequencies perfectly synchronize at a certain moment. Even more astonishingly, the pendulum of the wall clock strikes precisely at that moment—"tick-tock, tick-tock."
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