Chapter One
I’ve learned to dread being recognized by people I don’t know. I used to think it would stop when I grew up, as if losing the baby fat in my cheeks and putting on a few more inches would be enough of a change that people would stop recognizing me through the preteen girl I’d once been. I probably could have helped the process by cutting my hair and wearing colored contact lenses. For that matter, I also could have kept my dark glasses on and pretended I needed my cane more than I did, but at the end of the day, I’m the one who has to live with me and I don’t think I could stand to put on a constant charade like that.
My name is Sanmei Long, and yes, I’m completely blind, although I could probably fool you into thinking otherwise if you didn’t know my secret. Unfortunately, a lot of people already know the trick, which is why I wasn’t entirely surprised when I noticed the boy staring at me and recognized the expression of dawning realization that I’ve come to regard with no small amount of vexation. But that’s getting a little ahead of myself.
It started out like any other workday. I work part-time at a coffeehouse—one with the amusing misnomer of a name: The ‘No-Name Coffeehouse’—near the university three days a week, more to keep myself busy than for the money. My foster father is an architect who designs upscale homes, even mansions, for wealthy clients. While we’re not rich, I probably won’t be nearly as far in debt as other students by the time I finish medical school. All right, so I feel a little guilty about that. I like to feel like I’m earning my keep too, and not just through the quarterly check I get from a certain publishing studio. The fact that I don’t really have to work unless I want to is a privilege I’m very conscious of and try not to take for granted.
Today I was celebrating my seventh month at the coffee shop and feeling pretty good about the microbiology exam that was coming up Friday, the tapping of my cane keeping a pleasant rhythm in time to the sounds of the suburbs as I tread the familiar route to work. It was a sunny August afternoon and I didn’t mind spending it indoors; the customers were usually good company when the weather was nice and I could leave the door open for fresh air. Ours was a science-fiction themed location with posters and figurines from various franchises with which I’m not exceptionally familiar, but I tended to get on well with the ‘geeks’ who frequent the shop and they seemed to have collectively decided that they could put up with a cute Asian girl in their midst, even if she’s usually never even heard of Mobile Suit Gundam or The Vision of Escaflowne or whatever else is trending.
Well. I don’t know about cute, and I’m actually Chinese, not Japanese like the animations they tell me about, but I could handle being their part-time mascot as long as they didn’t make too big a mess at their tables and didn’t get too rowdy on Sci-Fi Movie Saturdays. I like their enthusiasm and I never get over how many women I meet who share it. I always thought science-fiction was more a male interest, but the numbers don’t lie. Especially the phone numbers.
I descended stairs, tapping each an instant before my foot came down. I barely needed the aid to find my footing, but the tapping helped me tell whether there was something on the steps that I might slip on. I’d been making this walk often enough that I knew exactly where I was and turned left to skirt the edge of parking lot and ignore the misleadingly unhelpful sidewalk that would, if I tried to follow it, lead me around to the ramp entrance which I would have to cross to reach the next sidewalk. The No-Name Coffeehouse shared space with a drug store, a book store and an import shop, so there was a good chance I’d have to cross two lanes of traffic and hope they paid me enough mind to let me across. No thanks.
I circled around the lot the long way instead and approached the door, which swung open at the touch of a young woman I recognized from one of the monthly socials. She held the door for me as I tapped my way in, pausing a moment to smile and thank her. She used a nice shampoo, one which didn’t thicken to a cloying chemical scent as I passed next to her. I resisted the urge to linger in her presence and drink it in, but she wound up following me inside anyway, rigidly keeping pace at my right side. I bit back the urge to grin. In this building was a larger concentration of people who knew my secret than almost anywhere else on Earth, but clearly I’d just found one who didn’t. She must not have noticed me behind the counter before. I appreciated the courtesy, but it was completely unnecessary.
“Thank you; I know my way around from here,” I assured her, smiling up at her perhaps a few seconds longer than necessary. I’m terrible at flirting. I mean, I can’t do it to save my life, but put me around a pretty person and see if I don’t try. Fortunately, she spared me the embarrassment by gracefully excusing herself and returning to her table by the door, where she must have seen me coming. It was no problem and I said so, but I remained tickled as I fielded my way past tables to the tiny room that served as our employee lounge, bidding friendly hellos to the few people not so engrossed in their drinks, sandwiches or laptops that they couldn’t greet me as I passed by.
The lounge was cramped, not much bigger than a walk-in closet, but I only needed to squeeze in far enough to fetch one of the aprons hanging behind the door. Still, I nearly managed to bump into my coworker as she jumped up from the computer desk crammed in the far wall. Her lithe form somehow managed to flit around me in a complete circle despite the close quarters before settling in front of me with an excited chirp that seemed entirely out of proportion for a workday. It put to mind a cat weaving around my legs and I had to stifle a sudden urge to pat her on the head. It helped that she was five inches taller than me.
“Good afternoon Sanmei! Need me to clock you in?” Sae asked in a breathless rush. I got the feeling I’d interrupted something that wasn’t work-related and tried to give her a stern look to show my disapproval, but the urge to grin was irresistible this time.
“If you would be so kind,” I acknowledged with a nod, hovering in the doorway as I tied the apron, then set about putting my hair in a simple braid. We have a screen reader, but Sae could do it for me much quicker than I could unassisted. It’s one of the few places I don’t mind asking for help. “Were you making an order?”
If Sae was even slightly embarrassed to be caught negligent in her duties, she gave me absolutely no indication of it. “Oh, no, I was falling down the wiki hole. It started with Vanessa-Mae and was on shoe fetishism when you walked in. I never realized how many uses there are for a good pair of stilettos.” She paused. “I was keeping an eye on the door!”
“If you think that’s the only reason I’m aghast, I’m not even sure how to go about explaining it to you,” I replied tersely, feeling my cheeks burn. I took a minute to finish braiding my hair to let them cool, knowing there wasn’t much point in scolding Sae. I didn’t know much about her outside the time we spent together at work, but I knew two things for sure. The first was that she was completely shameless; secondly, she was also technically my boss. While she didn’t own the coffeehouse, she was looking after it for the person who did. I’d never even met the person who made sure my paycheck got deposited into my account every other week, although there was theoretically an e-mail address I could use to get in touch with them if the need arose. This didn’t seem like an occasion to utilize that privilege, but…
Finally I just sighed. “At least make sure and do whatever it is that keeps people from seeing what you’ve been looking at,” I said, smirking resignedly. “Imagine if I went to clock out and the reader started narrating whatever page you left it on.”
Sae made a rude noise. “Pfft, the BDSM munch is tonight. They’ve heard lots worse.”
I gave up.
Usually only one of us was present in the shop at a time, and today was no exception. Before long I was behind the counter by myself and Sae was gone for the day. It looked like today was going to be a slow afternoon, which wasn’t unusual during the summer, but that wasn’t why I was allowed to be there by myself. Sae was the one who’d hired me and she had already known my secret at the time. I was treated the same as the other employees. There was a time when I was nervous about this, but seven months later, it hardly bothered me at all anymore. Taking a long, deliberate breath, I folded my cane into sections, collapsing it into a bundle and laying it aside on a part of the counter I wouldn’t need. Then I picked up a carton of lentil soup and went to work preparing a fresh batch for the afternoon customers. Another day in paradise, except I actually do enjoy myself.
I’ve have never had the benefit of eyesight of any kind. I was born completely blind and grew up utterly reliant on my other four senses. The common narrative for such stories is that my senses adapted to compensate for my lack of vision, and that’s not untrue. In the process of being diagnosed, the doctors ran fMRI and EEG scans on my brain and determined stimulation to any of my senses triggers much more activity in my brain than most people’s, and further testing did prove that I am incredibly sensitive to even tiny amounts of stimuli. There’s a lot that could be—and has been—written about how well my senses work, but that’s not really the secret.
I took orders, dispensing coffee, mocha, chai and tea. I mixed steamers and poured soup and assembled sandwiches, making small talk and chatting with the regulars. Sometimes customers seemed uncertain about my serving them, probably because of my dark glasses, but the ease at which I moved around our little kitchen dispelled concerns. Remember when I said I could fool you into thinking I wasn’t blind? That’s what I was doing to them, never intending to deceive, but simply making no effort to disguise my capabilities. I didn’t have to constantly test water levels or verify my grip on a cup or trace my hands over the counter for guidance before I sat something down. I knew where everything was, how full the milk container before I poured from it, how hot the drip coffee was before I put a lid on the cup and handed it over the counter. I pass very well for a sighted person, but I’m not.
At some point the young woman who’d been so eager to help me approached the counter after I’d finished an iced chai to go for a customer coming in from the heat. I’m not very good at reading people, but I thought she seemed embarrassed. “You really do know your way around here,” she said with a little laugh. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be—“
“It’s fine,” I assured her with as bright a smile as I knew how to perform. After some more awkwardness, she requested an iced mocha to take with her on her way out and paid for it with a five dollar bill, leaving me with the change as a tip. Our fingers brushed as I collected the bill from her, a little jolt of electricity running all the way up my arm and straight to my cheeks, where it apparently burst into flames. Did I mention my sense of touch is extra sensitive too? I don’t know if it’s just me, but there’s something so intimate about touching another person that it actually flusters me a bit when it happens by accident. My turn to be embarrassed, I put the bill in the register, counted out change automatically and put it in the tip jar before making her desired mocha. I probably beamed like a fool the entire time.
The next couple of hours passed uneventfully, as slow as predicted. Between customers, I listened to a reading of my microbiology textbook on my phone to study for Friday’s exam and filled the brewers with fresh grounds, fetched boxes of soft drinks for the refrigerator and signed for a box of flavored syrups which went into the storage room for later. My good mood never had reason to falter. I like helping people and I like cooking and making meals, so it felt more like hosting for my friends and their friends, hardly a bad way to pass the time.
It was nearing 6:00 PM according to my smartwatch when a woman and young boy came in, walking with the hesitant, mildly overwhelmed air of people unused to the ‘geek’ theme. I’m used to fielding questions about the various spaceships and action figures decorating the counters and the posters of movies and television when ‘mundanes’—like myself—come in and I waited expectantly, projecting as much welcoming friendliness as I could. I wasn’t disappointed. Concluding that I must be the resident expect since I was at the counter, the boy bombarded me with questions and declarations that everything was ‘awesome’ and ‘super super cool.’ While I’m not and probably won’t ever be a major fan of science-fiction, I’ve picked up enough from the regular patrons that I could answer a few basic questions—‘What’s this? Who’s that? Is he a bad guy? What does this do?’ Oh yes, I had this!—and I was happily planting seeds of future fandom while his mother hung back, presumably reading the menu.
“What’s that?” the boy asked, pointing at a replica of a vision-enhancing visor worn by a character I suspect I’d like if I had the mind to watch television. I smiled and took off my glasses, putting the visor over my head to demonstrate their usage. Needless to say, the plastic lattice failed to let me see into the electromagnetic spectrum, but the vastly simplified explanation delighted him, so that was a win for me. Walking back over to the counter with the visor still over my eyes, I gently prompted his mother to see if she was ready to order.
“Do you have any questions about the menu?” I inquired, and was surprised when she jumped as if I’d spooked her.
“Oh, n-no, sorry, I think I’m ready,” she replied hesitantly in a small voice, and then repeated, “I’m sorry,” hunching her shoulders as if expecting me to yell back at her.
I wish I was more perceptive than I am, but I just don’t always get people. Her reaction to the question was all out of sorts, and I definitely picked up on the undertone, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I dropped out of my good mood immediately, confused and alarmed. What had I done to upset her? Did she feel guilty for interrupting while I showed off for her son, and if so, why, when I was just doing my job? It made no sense for her to be sorry for anything, and somehow this twisted around in my head and made me out to be the villain. All I knew was that she was reacting negatively, and I assumed it had to be my fault. Before you ask, no, I don’t have the best self-esteem.
So instead of asking what I should have—what’s wrong, are you all right?—I went into damage control mode. I took off the visor, emoting professional contrition, and waited as she corralled her son and got him to pick something off the menu. I think that was when he started to figure out who I was, looking up at the menu on the wall behind me while I waited, still squirming internally and wondering if I should apologize or whether I’d done enough harm already. Maybe if the boy hadn’t recognized me just then, I might have finally tipped in favor of asking whether there was something else amiss.
It was my eyes, I’m sure of it. Maybe he’d been harboring suspicions until then, but it wasn’t until he was looking just past my head, now bereft of both glasses and visor, that suddenly he got that expression, the one that makes my stomach sink and my shoulders slump, and instead of picking out a sandwich, he asked, “Hey, um, have you ever been on TV?” and suddenly I had a fresh distraction to keep me from acting on my inner turmoil.
Oh, bother, I thought with resignation, but I wasn’t about to be rude to a child, so what I said was, “Yes I was. If you’re curious, you pick out what you want and then I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” He seemed to think this was an acceptable compromise, because in less than 15 seconds, he’d selected a plain turkey sandwich and his mother eventually put in a request for two toasted ham and cheese sandwiches and a 16 ounce drip coffee. Having put my foot in it, I wasn’t at all surprised when the boy started in immediately, his first question being ‘are you a superhero?’
Okay, that was pretty cute and not the usual sort of question I got asked. “Yes I am!” I declared, just because I could. A superhero who was using a toaster oven to toast ham and cheese sandwiches.
The show was called Mutants Like Me. The show’s premise was to explore the lives of medical marvels, including living and historical persons and more than a few who were probably nothing more than folklore. There were three seasons, each 18 episodes long, and I appeared in episode 14 for all of about five minutes. It wasn’t a very good show to say the least. They displayed a few still shots of me while the narrator proclaimed ominously how I had ‘powers of perception beyond belief,’ interspersed between excerpts of a ten minute interview I had with the local news shortly after my diagnosis. I was nine years old at the time and didn’t explain my condition very well, and their editing made it sound more like I had psychic powers. Dad got about $250 for the episode and used it to buy me an eBook reader with a screen reader. It was a hack job that I was embarrassed to have participated in, but that could have been the end of it and it would have faded from memory soon enough.
But toward the end of its run, two of the show’s writers approached the producers and pitched an idea. They were tired of the carnival showmanship nature of the series and wanted to try a different approach, one which ‘paid homage to the miraculous among us.’ Rather than half an hour of sensationalism, they wanted to try hour-long episodes each showcasing a single person at a time. Backed by the marketing department’s viewer retention data and a binder of letters, e-mails, and a petition with 8000 signatures, they secured a tentative agreement with the producers that something had to change, and soon, so why not give them a shot. They were quite persuasive, not only securing the role of Creative Lead for the new season, but also the funding to better compensate the—exclusively living—people who would be appearing on the show.
After several months of focus groups and online surveys, the newly established leads put together a list of candidates to invite back to the show. The premise of a little girl who could see-without-seeing proved irresistible to test audiences, so they reached out to my father, who in turn discussed it with me. I was eleven years old by this time and starting to get really serious about finishing school as quickly as possible—I was already a sophomore in high school—and remembered my last appearance on the show all too well, but when they promised ongoing compensation in the form of royalties for the use of my story… well, you have to understand what was going through my mind at the time. We’d just had to move out of the only home I’d been in more than a year since I was abandoned and I was scared that someone was going to start pressuring Dad to put me back in the foster system. When they mentioned money, my only thought was that I’d do anything to help him keep me.
By this point some of the mysteries surrounding my condition had been solved, even if the conclusions were just as mystifying. The show covered the chain of events with careful detail. I had woken up one morning shortly after my ninth birthday in agony, every sound, touch, scent and taste completely unbearable. Dad rushed me to the emergency room and they ran tests, but couldn’t find anything wrong with me at first, so they kept me for a few days. Every day, the pain got less and less, but we had no idea what was causing it in the first place.
Then Dad noticed that my eyes had changed color. They used to be an ordinary brown, but somehow they had turned a pale golden yellow over the past couple of days. The doctor certainly thought this was odd and checked my eyes with a light, only to discover that my pupils weren’t dilating or contracting. That led to an eye exam, then to the doctor frantically pulling up my fMRI results for clues, where he discovered that my optic nerve was severely underdeveloped and couldn’t possibly be functioning properly. Every test confirmed that I should be blind, but obviously I wasn’t, right? Except that the more tests they did, the stranger the results looked, until finally the doctor put his hand over my eyes and asked me how many fingers he was holding up.
I still remember how frightened he was that I could answer. I’d thought he was playing a game.
As near as we were able to figure out over the next few years, I have two things going on: first that I have extremely sharp senses, and second that I have synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition where the brain doesn’t process sensory information properly, so it confuses one sense for another and processes them simultaneously. People with synesthesia might see music or feel a smell, or feel like they’re physically touching something when they look at an object.
I was able to see the sounds, sensations, tastes and scents of the world around me. My sharp senses drew in an immense amount of information, and my synesthesia-addled brain interpreted it as visual, creating a picture I could see and understand. Because my senses were so keen, the picture I got was so accurate that no one, including me, had ever suspected anything was wrong. I grew up with other children in the foster system, playing the games they were playing, learning the things they learned, and no one ever picked up on the fact that I was learning them differently than they were. They thought I’d been slow to pick up reading and writing, but the truth is that I was learning how to read using my juxtaposed senses. My senses of touch, smell, and even taste allowed me to detect the ink or lead on the pages, and eventually it all came together and then I was reading without a problem. No braille, just a brain having learned to do something that should have been impossible.
The first time I appeared on the show, we’d settled on what I was doing, but not how. The second time, with a full hour dedicated to telling the story and the benefit of a few more years of tests and diagnoses, it was a lot clearer. The film crew shot footage of me going about my day, doing chores, going to school, cheerleading and performing ballet, cut it down into enough material to fill an hour long show, and hired an expert to study my case and then provide narration explaining how my condition allowed me to function in a way few other blind people could. I was the girl with golden eyes who could see even though she was blind.
Unfortunately, the show was cancelled immediately after the premier episode featuring me aired on television. The producers waited until they saw the viewership analysis and were happy by how much it had increased, but the cost of doing the show like this outweighed what they could expect from advertising revenue, so they pulled the plug. They rebranded the episode as a stand-alone documentary featuring the ‘most requested medical mystery’ in the show’s history and it featured on video streaming sites for months afterward. Little did I or anyone else realize how popular that one episode would turn out to be, and how many people would see my story and wind up remembering it for years to come.
“That is so cool!” the boy declared before long, thoroughly impressed with what little I had to confirm in order to prove I really was the same Sanmei from television land. Nonetheless, he thrust his hand under his shirt. “Can you see how many fingers I have?”
“Two,” I answered gamely, spreading mayonnaise. People often wanted demonstrations and this was old hat for me. “And now it’s four. Do you want mustard on your sandwich too?”
“Uh-huh. What else can you see? Can you see inside me?”
“Jeffrey, don’t bother her while she’s working,” his mother tried to protest, looking bewildered. I suppose there’s no hiding the fact that I could ‘see’ her expression. I’m still not entirely sure how my brain decodes subtle things like that. It doesn’t seem like something I could hear or smell, much less taste, and I certainly wasn’t touching her face at the time, but my brain obliged me with the image all the same.
“It’s all right,” I assured her, “we’re just talking about something from TV. I was—“
A thunderous cacophony interrupted me, droning on long enough that I had plenty of time to realize it was a car horn being deployed right outside the building before it finally cut off, the sound blasting through the open door. A chorus of annoyed complaints resounded around the dining room, and the outline of the car momentarily appeared behind my eyes as the sound seemed to physically press against my head and shoulders. The strongest reaction, however, belonged to the woman. She turned pale, the blood rushing from her face so quickly that I could actually feel the chill of her flesh.
“I have to go.” The words tumbled leadenly from her mouth and she grabbed at the only completed items on the table: the coffee and one of the ham and cheese sandwiches. She was in such a hurry that she nearly squeezed the coffee lid off and had to juggle the sandwich box to force the lid back down, nearly spilling it on herself in the process.
“It’ll be ready in just a minute, I promise,” I protested, surprised. I was nearly done with the turkey and the second ham and cheese sandwich was already in the toaster oven. I could ‘see’ the cheese softening and the bread browning—even though the toaster oven was behind me—and was keeping tabs on it to get a perfect toasting. I know I’d spent a little extra time entertaining her son, but it hardly seemed like she’d been delayed an excessive length of time. Whoever was outside was being a jerk.
“I can’t stay,” she said, repeating it several times like a mantra. “I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t.” She put a $20 bill down on the counter, grabbing her protesting son by the hand and dragging him toward the door without waiting for the change. I waved the turkey sandwich at her in an effort to flag her down long enough to at least take that much, but she wouldn’t stop even long enough to grab it. Bewildered and not wanting to make an even bigger scene in front of the other customers, I let her go.
What did I do wrong? I wondered helplessly. Realizing I was still holding the sandwich, I put it down on a plate and busied myself with getting the second ham and cheese out of the toaster oven before it burnt. I had no idea what I would do with the abandoned sandwiches. Maybe I could give them away before they went stale. If it weren’t for the fact that the homeless population typically retreated to what shelter they could find, I’d save them to take with me on the way home. Maybe I’d eat them for my own dinner. It was an easier problem to solve than figuring out if there was something I should have done that I hadn’t. Now that I was thinking about it—or rather, trying not to think about it—it seemed obvious in retrospect that the woman had been deeply afraid of something. Or someone.
As if in response to my response, a commotion sprang up outside. It sounded like voices, but they were too indistinct to make sense of the words. I cast my attention around the room, but no one seemed to be paying attention. It was possible they couldn’t even hear it. Feeling a frown crease my brow with unwelcome tension, I focused on the yelling, apprehension creeping up my spine. I had a bad idea I knew what it was, and I didn’t want to be right.
Luck wasn’t on my side tonight. I could hear two voices, and I recognized one as the woman I’d just been serving. The other was masculine and I didn’t recognize it, but I could tell he was doing most of the yelling, and while I still couldn’t make out what they were saying, I had a strong suspicion I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of it. Someone was getting chewed out, and I still wasn’t sure it wasn’t my fault.
Wait, if they haven’t left yet—
I all but threw the sandwiches into a box and grabbed my cane for good measure. Ordinarily I don’t like leaning on my blindness as an excuse for anything—for obvious reasons—but if I could defuse an argument with it, I’d count that as using my powers for good. It probably would have helped if I’d unfolded it first, but I was in a hurry to get there before they left.
My skin dimpled with goosebumps the moment I stepped outside, and not just because of the late afternoon having cooled more than I’d noticed behind the counter. The car’s doors and windows were closed, but away from the insulation of the walls and the soft din of customer voices, I could hear more of what was transpiring and I didn’t like it. This wasn’t just an argument; it was too one-sided and far too hostile. I stepped closer, hesitant. I was suddenly feeling a great deal more trepidatious about interrupting them. I didn’t have much experience with conflict, and I was starting to hear words that made my heart quail.
And then suddenly I didn’t have a choice.
“That’s it, I am sick of this shit!” the man screamed so loudly that I could ‘see’ him light up distinctly inside the vehicle, ‘see’ his silhouette grab something at his waist, and suddenly there was enough screaming that I had no trouble at all making out what was going on as the man forced a gun at his wife’s head and pulled back the hammer.