02.21.07
Hello Goodbye
The page cracked with brutal life. The surface of the earth shook as though under the marching feet of a giant, as missiles screamed out of the sky and pounded the cities, dams, and military bases. A cobweb of contrails covered the page. Anti-ballistic missiles would occasionally meet the aggressors up in the paper sky, but most of the time the offense got through. Neither side had any qualms about running up the score. Peace-ships, shaped something like a baseball bat or a barracuda, showered hellfire upon the earth. They nearly filled the page whereon the boy scribbled out the destiny of the world.
At the Mission, they called it the Great Cleansing.
He sat on a pile of bean sacks in the basement of the Mission, as he drew out the mayhem, then laid the prophetic scene aside and slipped off the sacks, down to the floor.
The basement had those small, ceiling-level port windows looking out onto the driveway, and there was a thin, indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor. I don’t recall any furniture, but I remember the large sacks of pinto beans under the windows. The beans were there for emergency purposes, that is, in the case that California got nuked, or whatever means God had at his disposal for cleansing the world. In any case, we’d have been well fed.
Not long after the Mission came to Grangeville, it had some roomers of the sort one might expect to see in those days–a hippie couple, of whom I remember little. What I do remember about them is that they stayed in the basement, that somebody said that one of them died of AIDS or drug abuse or some such modern blight, and that they left us with some music LPs, perhaps as a form of payment; I don’t remember. The core of the collection was a dozen Beatles LPs, that Paul and I would play in the basement on a record player on loan from some foundation or agency for the blind. I’m not sure that I’d been introduced to the Beatles before then, but it wasn’t long until Paul and I had committed those LPs to memory. We’d construct a miniature stage with LEGOs, drop the needle onto an LP, and gawk at the little LEGO characters as though they were about to come to life, and who am I to say: perhaps they did.
Beside the Great One, there were of course lesser kinds of cleansing that would sometimes come from the clouds and turn the Sink into a huge puddle. Our basement, of course, would be one of the deeper spots in that big puddle. The sacks of beans sat under all that water and sprouted en masse. I can still smell the damp, mouldy wall-to-wall carpet that greeted us after the basement drained.
That was the end of the Beatles.
