The Eyewitnesses

You’d think with two million eyewitnesses, it would be impossible to be interviewed twice. Maybe a bad joke on the fifth time. I don’t know exactly what it is, but at this point, it’s not funny anymore. This’ll be twelve. That actress— what was her name?- she’s got to look better on camera than I do, even if it scrambled her marbles, made her start making God movies and whatever the hell.

You’ll have to forgive me. Sarah tells me that’s how some people coped, thinking it was God or their own special flavor of divinity. Some people couldn’t and they’re not with us anymore.

You know, and this will sound crazy, but I struggle to remember where I was. When I saw it. I’ve done everything: drugs, hypnosis, tantric therapy, NDE. Everything. For awhile I was so ashamed. Was I outside, grabbing the mail? Was I at the sink? It’s funny, now. How hard I clung to that little bit of lost memory.

It was a mountain.

Now that we have pretty much everybody’s story— are most of us still alive? Got to be, right?— I think that’s roughly what it looked like to everyone. Not everybody in the same place saw it, of course, even if they all saw it the same.

Two astronauts saw it, a Frenchman and a woman from Reformed Congo, but only one child in all of India saw it. Five in Montana, a resident, two transients, and a lost Japanese businessman heading for a last minute emergency business meeting in Denver. A thousand in Columbia, all women. A nonsense scattershot across the world.

But they all saw the mountain. It’s been a long time, but I still crumble into a mess when I read our words, look at the untold amount of sketches, paintings. Every impression from two million minds that, without fail, is a mirror of mine.

Before I used to say it was beautiful. But I always knew that was a lie. Not because it wasn’t, oh god, no; it was, but beauty is a child’s word in its shadow, its finger paint. Kilimanjaro and Fuji are bad imitations. It was so, so beautiful. Huge, and black, like all the summer nights of my childhood made into stone. Long, gradual slopes. An invitation. The base was covered with clouds, perfect white clouds, but I felt like the bottom was grassland. Groves of trees with shade to lay in.

A mountain where there shouldn’t have been, pure and huge and impossible. A mountain that felt like home.

I ached at seeing it. I crumbled. My ashes, my soul, went away with it. It was maybe four, five seconds. I’ve heard a minute, but I think James Merrick was having a stroke when he had his witnessing.

I don’t have any good pontificating. Most of us, I think are like that, God-crazed movie stars be damned.

Are we special? What does it mean? Will we go there when we die?

Who the fuck knows?