The Sound of Neon
Another vignette, this time inspired by JD Laclede's neon-splattered art. If you haven't read "Ask the Werewolves" you really should
To hear humans talk about it, there's nothing like the colors of neon. Red, purple, orange, yellow, green, blue--every damn color of the rainbow in a tube blazing out a light that can be seen on the darkest, rainiest, foggiest nights the city can offer. They'll write poems about the colors of neon. They'll paint them in classical styles, emulating Monet or Van Gogh, and hang it in museums with million dollar insurance policies. They'll follow that alluring signal out through the cold, the rain, the stink of the streets because the yellow spelled out "Buy donuts" and like zombies they'll march to buy those donuts, even if they weren't hungry.
But if you ask me, humans got it all wrong.
Take it from a were-bat. There's nothing in the world, nothing at all, like the sound of neon.
There's deep woodwind neon, blaring out a contrabassoon note that never stops until you cut the power. There's high reedy neon, like a soothing whistle in the air. There's big brass neon and violin neon and shakuhachi neon and biwa neon. There's neon that I can't name because humans have yet to invent the instrument that really approximates it. (Well, they have, but they just call it a neon light like a bunch of philistines.)
The colors of neon might shine bright, but they don't impact the world around them. They're pinpricks that might get reflected once or twice in a puddle or a window, and their color might cast onto nearby surfaces, but only if there isn't too much other light. That's why humans like neon at night but not during the day. It's how you can maximize the color's effect.
But the sound is a whole other beast. Have you ever hung five stories in the air and just listened to it? You're human, so I guess not, but just imagine it, if you can. You're five stories up, hanging from a balcony. It's a cool night. The wind is still. There's a bit of rain, and rain is like it always is: cacophonous, erratic. Big drops. Little drops. Hitting the pavement. Hitting the puddles. Hitting each other. People walk with unsteady footfalls and cars will stop and start, engines revving and breaks squealing. Horns blare like the nuisances they are. It's all a mess.
Except for one thing. The neon light, four stories beneath you. It's a constant hum in a chaotic world. Loud and clear.
You can't get much echolocation from random noises. You can't feel the shapes of the buildings from a splash of water or a person's panting breath. But you can sense it all from the steady buzz of neon. Five stories up, and I can pick out the fly that landed on a wall on the other side of the street. I can read the grooves in the concrete below me like a needle reads a record. I can see every architectural detail some designer slaved away on and humans walk past without a second thought: up here on the fifth story, they set the windows at angle to the street, balconies offset the other way in an almost endless geometric pattern that stretches up and down and left and right. And in each facet of the building I hear the neon.
All those flat surfaces reflect the sound so well. I can pick out every bend in the neon's tubing. I see the same ghostly afterimages of the message everywhere I turn my ears: "Buy donuts," it says. It says it so sweetly that I forsake my ears for stubby human ones and join the rest of the zombies going for a midnight bite. Just like them, I'm not hungry, and I know I'll be back five stories up in a moment, mouth full of powdered sugar, ears tuned to the sound of neon.