Excerpt: The Sound of Neon

At first, all she felt was the current of air caressing her cheek.

Narita Airport exhaled around her, a thousand bodies moving in practiced choreography, air vents sighing above, the warm clicks of luggage wheels dragging on polished tile.

Margot, however, could not see any of it.

The vision had blurred weeks ago, then dimmed, then snuffed out completely. Plaquenil toxicity, the doctor had said. Rare. Unfortunate. The doctors buzzed around her, speaking in clinical tones as if this could be slotted neatly into a case study, as if her world had not been rewritten in smudged black ink.

Yes, she should have canceled the trip. Everyone told her to. Through the tears, her sister begged, her mother cried…but the ticket was bought, the passport begged to be stamped, the dream half-formed in the space between waking and sleep.

Margot had to go, and she’d do it blind.

Now she stood in the arrivals terminal, cane folded uselessly in her bag. The darkness pressed close, but inside it hid a new sharpness.

The breeze hummed; she could hear everything. The clipped syllables of Japanese business travelers, their phones pressed to their ears with words layered on top of one another like music. A child’s impatient squeak as their mother scolded them softly. The sticky whisper of a bottle cap twisting off plastic.

The smells arrived next. Not just the heavy stench of jet fuel that clung to her clothes, but notes she had never registered before, like the sterile tang of sanitizer rising from a janitor’s cart, the sugar-charred perfume of melon bread from a bakery kiosk, the sharp spike of someone’s menthol cigarette wafting from their jacket as they passed.

Her pulse raced, and she almost reached up to rub her eyes out of habit, then stopped. Sight was gone, but something else had been waiting in its place, crouched in the shadows, ready.

A man brushed past her. She flinched at first, then inhaled. Leather wallet. Ink. A faint metallic tang of keys heated in a palm. Somehow she knew he was tall without touching him; the sound of his stride was slower, more weighted, carefully calibrated to longer legs.

Margot whispered to herself: I can do this.

It should have been terrifying, standing in the middle of an international airport alone, unable to see the gates, the security officers, the signs. Yet the darkness slowly became crowded with detail. The place was alive around her; she was inside its lungs.

A voice over the loudspeaker called a final boarding. The words cut through the crowd like an arrow, and she could feel which direction they came from, almost see the air vibrate.

Eagerly, her hand clenched the strap of her bag. She needed to get to the train station, that much she knew. The hotel was in Shinjuku, and thankfully, she had memorized the transfer instructions before she lost her sight. Scribbles on paper meant nothing now; she’d have to trust her intuition in a way she never had.

Margot listened instead; she let the noise become a map.

Luggage wheels hummed east to west. Children’s sneakers slapped toward the south exits. A man coughed repeatedly, and the sound moved farther away, dragging her forward in his wake. Following the hacking, her body weaving through humans she couldn’t see but could predict… their perfumes, their deodorants, the cloying starch of a hotel-pressed shirt.

The floor changed texture under her shoes, from smooth tile to ribbed plastic, followed by an escalator. Margot didn’t hesitate; she stepped on.

The rush of air rose in her ears, and she knew she was descending because she could hear the hum of trains vibrating through the foundation below. Her throat tightened. She had only been in Japan for twenty minutes, and she was already inside the bloodstream of Tokyo.

At the bottom, the station opened wide. She froze for a second, overwhelmed. The noise was immense: hundreds of conversations, announcements, the metallic chatter of vending machines, the shriek of trains braking on the tracks.

It should have crushed her, but instead it unfolded like someone turning a kaleidoscope, breaking chaos into patterns. She could pick out the different shoe soles; the hollow thud of boots, the scratch of cheap sneakers, the impatient staccato of high heels.

Margot knew, actually knew, that the woman to her left had a suitcase full of oranges because she could smell them bleeding through the plastic lining of the case. The man behind her had been drinking whiskey on the plane, the woody residue clinging to his breath. The ticket agent three kiosks down was chewing cinnamon gum to cover up the cigarette he’d snuck earlier.

The fear was still there, sharp and urgent…but threaded through it was tingling exhilaration.

She tilted her head and caught a vibration in the floor; there was a train arriving, and she knew exactly which track. Following the sound without hesitation, her body dodged streams of people like she was led by a wire. As her shoulder grazed someone’s briefcase, she knew he was male, late thirties, ate pork katsu an hour ago, and was still chewing the ghost of fried oil in his teeth.

The thought was grotesque and thrilling.

Margot reached the platform, and the air shifted. Amidst the hot metallic breath of brakes, doors hissing, she stepped inside.

The carriage was crowded, and she could feel sweat, perfume, and the scents of pets all pressed together. Inhaling, she knew the woman mashed against her on the left had roses on her blouse, freshly dry-cleaned two days ago. The man on her right was scrolling a phone, the faint static buzz of screen-light bouncing against his thumb.

Margot was not imagining; she knew. The smells weren’t guesses, the sounds weren’t tricks; she could interpret them as clearly as sight.

The corners of her lips curved into a smile no one could see.

The train lurched and she swayed with it, steady. Outside, the black city whipped past, neon humming somewhere just beyond her darkness….she couldn’t see it, but she could hear its song vibrating in the concrete, taste the faint ozone of its lights in the air.

Tokyo wasn’t a void; it was an orchestra, and she was the only one who could hear every note.

For the first time since the blindness took her, she wasn’t afraid.

She was electric.