He tans into burning while the opening fanfare to "Peaches en Regalia" flows over him, the bugle call for a hippie army that marched at the peak of the American parabola, that moment when physics held its breath to allow levitation, a small reward before the descent. The hippies knew it then, Maggot Boy Johnson thinks; they couldn't build it into words but they could feel it; a floating in the stomach as history shifted direction. They stopped, hey, what's that sound, and knew that the spiny skyscrapers reflected in the river, the chasms of concrete, the wide streets and sidewalks, the power lines cutting into the hills and mountains above missile silos, the highways drawing lines across the blank plains under enormous skies, the pupil of God's eye, would be the ruins that their grandchildren wandered among, the reminders that once there was always water in the faucet, there was electricity all the time, and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it.

His voice, what he said, remains, and it is here, all of those voices are here, in what I am telling you. If in the beginning there was the word, then perhaps, with humility at the smallness of our powers, in words a small part of us can return.

There are no words for so much loss, not right after it happens.

These cords that God makes, Reverend Bauxite thought, we stand holding one end while they run taut into the darkness.

Do you see? The story I have to tell is so small, of the people who stayed when everyone else fled.