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Someone else said it was the exact color of the cardboard they used to reinforce his shirts
when they came from the Chinese hand laundry.
And one thing more.
Every neon sign in Times Square had a new color added to its spectrum. It seemed to reside
somewhere between silver and orange, bled off into the ultraviolet and the infrared at one and the
same time, had tinges of vermilion at the top and jade at the bottom, and resembled no other color
ever seen by human eyes. The color sounded like a Louisville Slugger connecting solidly with a
hardball in that special certain way that produces a line drive high into the right center bleachers. It
smelled like a forest of silver pines just after the rain, with scents of camomile, juniper, melissa and
mountain gentian thrown in. It felt like the flesh of a three-week-old baby’s instep. It tasted like
lithograph ink, but there are people who like the taste of lithograph ink.
Someone said it was the exact color of caring.
On another plane of existence, where things were vastly different from those in the world that had
given Roger Charna his neon chest spiral, observations were made and the new color was seen.
“There it is,” they said.
“Yep, there it is,” they said.
“Took them long enough,” they said.
“Well, now that they’re ready we can go and show them how to do it,” they said.
“They’re going to like this,” they said.
“A lot,” they said.
And they set out immediately, and it took no time at all to get there, and when they arrived they
changed everything and everyone enjoyed it a lot.
And everyone said the angels were the exact color of charna, which wasn’t a bad name for it at all.
