Coming To Understand Jonathan’s Drawings
Jonathan Margolis and his revelations
When the nurse came into my room to check my vitals at ten o’clock, she found me sitting rigidly on the end of my bed with my legs folded beneath me and there were two small streams of tears running down each of my cheeks. On my lap was a drawing. Sometimes the pain was so unbearable that all I could do was to begin to rock back and forth, and the tears began to stream from my eyes with even greater intensity.
She could immediately see that I was upset but she didn’t know how to approach me, and I knew that she didn’t want to cause me further agitation. She stood anxiously and watched me rocking for over five minutes and then left me to see if she could find Dr. Atkinson, whom she had seen earlier on the floor. She walked down the corridor nervously but when she couldn’t find the doctor, she decided to return to the room to see if there was anything she could do to comfort me.
She went to the closet and found a blanket which she placed around my shoulders. I was still rocking back and forth with streams of tears on each cheek. I had also begun to mumble. When she looked down at the drawing, she could see it was of a mangled car which had obviously been in a horrible wreck.
“Is this why you’re upset, Jonathan?” she asked me.
When she lifted the drawing from my lap a moment, I grew even more agitated and when she immediately returned it, I seemed to calm down a little. She too began to cry and tried to embrace me, but I couldn’t stand it when I was so disturbed.
“I wish I could help you,” she told him. “I don’t know what to do.”
At that moment Dr. Atkinson entered the room and seeing me rocking immediately approached my bed.
“I don’t think any of us really know,” Dr Atkinson acknowledged.
When Dr. Atkinson looked down at the drawing, she recognized it immediately as her mother’s car, the car in which her mother had died, and she too began to cry.
“What is your name?” she asked the nurse.
“Rebecca,” the nurse replied.
“My name is also Rebecca,” Dr. Atkinson answered, “and this is the car in which my mother died.”
When the two women embraced, I stopped rocking, and the fit began to subside.
“I haven’t thought about this in over two years,” Dr. Rebecca released the nurse. “Thank you.” She regained herself. “I’m sorry to get so emotional like that.”
“I had my own moment a little while ago when I looked at this drawing.” The nurse went over to the wall and pointed to one of the street scene drawings.
“A man saved my mother from being hit by a bus, right in front of my eyes. She pointed to an image on the drawing of a little girl. And here I am and here is the man. This is just moments before it happened. How could he see this? How is this even possible?”
“I don’t know,” Rebecca Atkinson answered. “I don’t know. Jonathan seems to be able to see things!”
Everyone who encountered my drawings had glimpsed through a small window into my abilities. They saw in my drawings images from their lives.
What they could not have possibly imagined was that whenever I encountered a person, I would experience a window into their thoughts and memories and like a dream, my journey through their memories would lead me in many directions simultaneously, often in circles and many times moving both backward and forward in time. I could sense that I was only at the beginning of my abilities and struggled to bring order to the chaos in my mind.
Dr. Carmichael took his first respite in a very busy day at three o’ clock in the afternoon. He decided to stop a few minutes from the plethora of his daily responsibilities to finally take a closer look at some of my drawings in the box. He was a little reluctant to put his hand inside a second time, given what he had learned from the first drawing of him and his mother. He was coming to understand the revelatory impact of many of my drawings and he was terrified of what other profound secrets would be revealed, especially considering there were a hundred of them waiting within the box’s rigid walls. He was particularly concerned that he might find another drawing about himself which would bring even more unsettling revelations about both his past and future. He felt uneasy and his stomach was a little unsettled. He hesitated a moment as he reached into the box to get the second drawing. In a moment a memory was triggered of when he was a boy of eight years old, barely a year after his mother had died and when his father took him for the first time to dive into the deep water of a pool. He took this first plunge with profound misgivings and yet somehow sitting before this cardboard box, he felt even more profound anxiety as he reached in to remove another drawing. He was afraid of an even more potent asphyxiation, which led to a complete deconstruction of his mind.
The first drawing he removed was a portrait of Thomas McIlhenry, a face he found strangely familiar even though he could not immediately recognize it. He had no way of knowing that this man was related to his mother, nor could he remember that they had met in Wisconsin many years before when they were boys, nor could he have known what role Thomas played in bringing his mother’s notebook from Wisconsin to New York. All these spokes holding the wheel of their common connections firmly in place were invisible to him, though he was coming to know the spindle to which they were all tied and around which they all were spinning.
The second drawing he removed was of a girl of about fifteen on a bicycle near a building with a sign that read Minneapolis Athletic Center. The picture looked older than the others and the lines seemed less certain. It was different from the others in execution, less precise and seemingly from a younger hand, but there was also a strange familiarity in the image. Though Dr. Carmichael knew he had never been to Minnesota, he struggled to remember what about it seemed familiar.
