FICTION

Seeing The World Through Childlike Eyes

Transformational seeing

My Father, Peter Margolis, had risen early the next morning after Paula Hightower had come to see me. He couldn’t sleep after he had awakened at three o’clock from a dream where he was flying on an aeroplane. For a man who fixed aeroplanes, he had rarely flown in one, only five times in the last 15 years and all work-related. Though he never would have admitted it, my father was afraid of flying. Perhaps because he knew all the things that could go wrong. He walked into the kitchen and noticed that the drawing which I had left on the table the night before was still in the same place. He hadn’t touched it at all. He had a special surprise waiting for me in the living room. Two brand new bicycles, both painted sky blue stood side by side with each other, balanced by their kickstands at nearly perfect equidistance from each other. Dangling from their handlebars were two matching helmets, also of blue, perfectly matching the sky blue of the bicycles. My father did not know what my reaction might be if anything, but he wanted so much to see his boy smile. My father remembered how happy he had been on his bicycle as a boy. His father Arnold had bought him a navy blue Halford ten-speed from a shop in Davenham England. It had been shipped straight from England on a ship called The Christian, arriving on the docks of Boston at sixteen thirty-five military time according to the shipping tag, which was still on the handlebars when his father gave him the bicycle, just like the bicycles in our living room. Once they were also unloaded at Boston Harbour, they were shipped by truck to our house in west White Plains. My father was the only boy in the neighbourhood who owned a Halford bicycle and he had ridden it through his seventeenth birthday. Seven years and 12 days of continuous use until finally, it was no longer rideable. He hadn’t been on a bicycle since.

My father stared a moment at both bicycles, also Halfords and then went upstairs to check on me. On this day I had an appointment with Dr Carmichael in the city and he was planning on taking me to a nearby park to ride bicycles. My father wasn’t even sure whether he could still ride a bicycle.

When he went upstairs at eight o’clock, I had already dressed and was sitting on my bed with my legs crossed and my backpack, across my shoulders. He stared at me a moment, realizing how much I looked like my mother Elizabeth, especially the first time he had seen her when she was also sitting with her legs crossed and a backpack on her shoulders. In the inexplicable way that memories can be instantaneously evoked, he found himself in a moment of anamnesis standing in front of her at the park in Yonkers where they had met. In their first moment of encounter, she had smiled awkwardly at him, with her bright red bicycle lying on the ground beside her. He remembered this as though a moment ago and he thought what a pity it was that she could not see this moment when he was giving a bicycle to Jonathan.

“No school today,” My father told me. “You and I are going to see Dr Carmichael. I have some breakfast downstairs and then we can go to the car.”

He didn’t expect me to respond to him. I handed him something that surprised him, the locket, which held my mother’s photograph, which I had kept with me since I was 4 years old. My mother looked no more than 21 years old. It was the locket I had shown Frank Glen at the hospital.

“I haven’t seen this in a very long time,” he told me. “Thank you, Jonathan.”

He took a deep gut-wrenching breath and then handed the locket back to me.

“Look at my drawing, Daddy,” I spoke slowly.

“I have some things to do, downstairs. I’ll be up to get you in a few minutes.”

My father was obviously moved by what had happened. As he descended the stairs to the first floor, he was overcome a moment and stopped midway to regain control of himself. My father was not a man who easily showed emotions. He felt grief and regret and expectation simultaneously.

When he reached the kitchen, as he finished preparing my breakfast, he reluctantly lifted the drawing from the table and flipped it over. What he saw surprised him. On the page I had drawn one large circle with three smaller circles nested inside, touching one another. Carefully drawn inside of the circles were different images. In the top circle, was an image of my mother with her bicycle in the park. In the bottom circles, there were images of Ian and Nancy on their bicycles, and in the final circle were the two bicycles my father had put in the living room. At the bottom of the page was written the word “OMEGA.”

I could see that he didn’t know what to do with the drawing. He held it a moment in his left hand and sighed. He finally left the drawing face up in the same place on the table he had found it. Then he went back upstairs with a plate of pancakes with one scrambled egg for me, carried in his left hand. This was a recipe that my mother had made for me many times.

After he entered the bedroom, he set the plate down in the centre of the small table and pushed the chair to a closed position.

“I am sorry, I forgot the orange juice,” he chided himself. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

I approached the table and adjusted the chair and then grabbed the plate and moved it until it was centred on the table. My father went downstairs again to the kitchen and poured me a glass of orange juice. It was a ritual he had performed 100 or more times in the weeks since I had come home. He didn’t know why he had fallen into these patterns of behaviour, or why he had grown accustomed to other patterns over the years. If he had paid closer attention, he might have noticed the hundreds of clues that surrounded him. More than anything else, I wanted him to become more aware so that I might finally be able to communicate more freely with my father. I could see one day that I would speak more easily, that I could communicate the panoply of perceptions that pulsed through my awareness.

My father stood silently and watched me eat the pancakes and egg, with precision, cutting the pancakes with my fork into symmetrical strips about I haven’t wide, and then I cut the egg in a similar fashion. My father seemed distracted. After I finished my egg and orange juice, he took the plate and glass from the table and brought them downstairs. For the first time, I followed him and stood at the top of the staircase waiting for his return. I stared at the two bicycles standing side-by-side in the living room. I could already see myself and my father riding side-by-side in the park, my father struggling to keep balance. We would move in tandem past the children playing, past the swimming pool, beneath the trees as though attached together by an invisible wire, With each moment strung together like pearls, small spheres of meaning and impressions, where time itself was more than just a ticking clock, like a grand symphony of possibilities, where every tendril reached out to make a connection, to find the nexus of stability, where it might turn its leaves to the pulsing waves of sunlight, absorbing its energies into its green leaves. In this vine of duration, satiated with sensation, I sat serenely, with my senses more acute and my nous even more precise. I experienced my life as a sea of light and sound, listening to the soulful rhythms of the spheres. It was both fire and water simultaneously, a flowing river of fire, dancing before my mind’s eye, both beautiful and awesome and beyond words.

My father came back from the kitchen to the front landing on the stairs and looked up at me, his son standing there watching him.

“We need to go to the car now. It’s a long drive to the city,” he told me earnestly.

“I missed you, Daddy,” I told him. It had been very difficult for me in the four long years that I felt alone at the Spellman School.

“I missed you too,” he responded.

I began to walk slowly down the steps toward my father. I could remember my father holding my hand as I walked down the steps when I was four. There were 12 steps from the second floor to the first, 12 windows on the first floor and 12 speeds on the bicycles, which stood in the 12-foot square living room. Like Liam, I found comfort in the number 12.

My father opened the front door of the house and led me to the car parked in our driveway. He put the two bicycles on a car rack on the back. Just beneath the surface of things, where most could not see them, where the patterns of numbers, which held together with the tapestry of the universe, dancing and singing as though the multitude of the choirs of heaven, a symphony first conceived as numbers in the mind of God.

I followed behind two paces as my father led me to the car. He opened the door on the passenger side of the sedan and I climbed inside. Taking my backpack off my shoulder, I laid it on the floor near my feet. My father walked around the front of the car and opened the door on the driver's side. He was about to climb inside when he stopped a moment as though he was remembering something and he reached inside and opened the trunk.

“I almost forgot,” he told me through the open door. “I have something for you.”

He walked to the rear of the car and reached into the trunk and removed a canvas bag with a 10 by 12-inch package wrapped in brown paper. From inside the bag, he removed the package and brought it to the passenger side of the car completing a full circle. Then he handed the package to me. After taking the canvas bag with his left hand, he walked again around the front of the car, opened his door and climbed inside. He started the engine and began to back the car from the driveway.

“It’s a sort of belated birthday present, I’m sorry about the wrapping, I was never very good at wrapping presents.”

He watched a moment as I held the package firmly on my lap with both hands.

“I hope you like it,” he told me as he put the car in drive and began our journey to the city. He drove west in White Plains toward the Sprain Parkway, towards the Cross County Parkway. As we passed the two small lakes, I turned my head to stare at the dozen geese that were floating on the western side.

My father turned on the radio and began to change the stations, looking for something that I might like. With then regular top 40 stations, I showed no interest. Only when he found a classical station, did I turn my head and look at my father. My father remembered that my mother had often played classical music for me when she was alive.

For the next 30 minutes, both of us listened to a Prokofiev Symphony and while it played, I seemed calmer. After leaving the Parkway for I87 South, I seemed more restless, as the large trucks began to pass us as they travelled down the centre lane. As we passed the county line into the Bronx, I began to rip open the package to investigate its contents.

My father had purchased me an expensive drawing set with 100 colour pencils and professional paper.

“There are 100 colours,” he told me. “That way you can more precisely capture these images.”

To his surprise, I responded to him, “there are a lot more colours than 100. Thank you, Daddy.”

“Thank you, Jonathan.”

“This world is beautiful, Daddy.”

“I know it is,” he responded.

Traffic was heavy as we reached the Triboro bridge. I had taken a sheet of paper from the box and two colour pencils, red and yellow and I began to sketch beside my father. It took nearly 35 minutes for us to cross the bridge and he watched me feverishly sketching beside him, though I could see he could not recognise what I was drawing. Once we crossed the bridge into Manhattan, he took the Harlem River Drive South and then turned right unto 125th Street to drive crosstown to St. Nicholas Avenue, then he turned to go uptown to the hospital. I could see our journey as though a map laid before my eyes. By that time, the radio station had finished playing Prokofiev and was then playing Beethoven’s Pathetique. My father remembered my mother playing this piece on the small console piano in our living room. Of all the many things he missed about my mother, her music was one of the hardest to live without. When we arrived at the front of the hospital, the clock on his dashboard read exactly 11:12. To his surprise, there was an empty parking space though it was waiting for us to arrive. My father pulled into the space right in front of the doors of the children’s Hospital. Above the double doors was the image of a rainbow, with a small Noah’s ark beneath it, with two giraffe heads sticking out from the top of the ark. Between the images were the words, “We are all one family.”

My father climbed out of the car and came to the passenger side and let me out. I was holding the drawing in my left hand as my father led me into the building through the doors with the rainbow. He stopped to let a young woman with three small children out of the building. There were two girls and a young boy between the ages of five and nine years old. My father could see she was struggling to keep them together.

I turned to him and spoke, “Daddy, please help her put them in the car.”

“You’re sure?” he asked me. I nodded my head. Then he left me for a few moments. He helped her put all the children in her car outside and came back into the building. Then together we both walked toward the elevators to go upstairs to the fifth floor. As we left the lobby and began to walk down the corridor for the elevators, he looked down for the first time to get a closer look at my drawing. It was a precise drawing of a bee hovering near a bright yellow flower. When we reached the elevators, my father pressed the button for the fifth floor. What I couldn’t tell him was that with that small act of kindness, he had saved one of her children from being injured.

“Is this drawing for someone?” he asked me.

I didn’t answer.

The time it took for the elevator to rise the five floors seemed longer than he remembered from his prior trip to Dr Carmichael’s office. He even looked at his watch for the first time that morning and the watch read 11:35 as the doors finally opened. He was beginning to notice these recurring patterns of numbers as though they cycled through his life like spinning gyroscopes, keeping balance in his often chaotic life. The first things he noticed were the rainbows of various sizes scattered across the walls of the main corridor. He didn’t remember these from his prior visit. As he and I began to walk down the corridor, with me holding the drawing of the bee beside me, we could hear the sound of piano music coming from a playroom at the end of the corridor. This was the same playroom where Dr Carmichael had first brought me when he was summoned to the emergency room to calm me. That day now seemed an aeon away.

My father approached a small receptionist desk, Where Melissa Glen was sitting. He was surprised to see her quietly working.

“Ms Glen,” he greeted her. “You are working at the hospital now?”

She lifted her head and smiled when she saw us.

“I work with Dr Carmichael now.“ She paused. “Please take a seat. He is with another patient now. It should be a few minutes and I will take you both inside.“ She turned her head toward me. “How are you, Jonathan? I’ve been so busy. I’ve wanted to come and see you.”

I didn’t respond. I just bowed my head a moment and closed my eyes.

“How is your brother?” my father asked her.

“My brother is occupied,” she hesitated a moment. “They’re sending him all over the country chasing ghosts.” There was an undercurrent of disappointment in her voice.

“How is mister McShane?” he asked.

“Liam is fine. He still works at the Insurance company.”

“Would you like something to drink, Jonathan? I have juices?” she asked me.

Again I didn’t respond.

“He’s taken a liking to strawberry juice,” my father told her. “It’s difficult to find.”

“I have grape juice, apple juice and orange juice.”

“He likes orange juice.”

“Who doesn’t like orange juice?“ She acknowledged as she reached under the small desk and handed my father a form.

“If you would just fill this form out, I will get Jonathan some orange juice.”

She left her station a moment later to retrieve a cup of orange juice. While she was gone for a few minutes, my father sat quietly beside me and I had laid the bee drawing on my lap. He seemed nervous.

“Is this drawing for Dr Carmichael?” he asked me.

“It is not for Dr Carmichael,” I responded.

“Is it for someone here at the hospital?”

I didn’t respond. There was a young girl about seven or eight who was obviously suffering from cancer, walking with her mother down the corridor beside us. As the young girl passed, I handed her the drawing. Her mother seemed annoyed at first, but when she saw that her daughter was obviously moved, she thanked me.

“I love bees, Mommy,” the girl told her mother.

“I know, Honey.”

My father seemed perplexed, with so many questions coming into his awareness after every odd thing that happened along our journey. We both watched them as they walked toward the elevators.

“You drew that for the little girl?” He asked me. “ You somehow knew she was here?”

“It’s going to be a very special day,” I proclaimed.

Melissa returned with 2 cups of orange juice, which she handed to my father and me.

“It’s good to see you both. This has become like my dream job.”

I smiled because I could see every moment of her life stretched out like a motion picture film from a canister. There was a stillness beneath the moving pictures that only I and those others like me could see. My father was beginning to understand the depth and breadth of my abilities. But I sensed he was troubled to learn more.

“Do you know what’s going to happen to that girl?” my father asked me.

“Yes,” I answered.

He was surprised that I was responding to him.

“She will be okay,” I spoke slowly.

Both of us sat quietly sipping orange juice for almost 15 minutes while Melissa worked at her desk. My father continued to fill out the form. My father took out his wallet and handed her his insurance card.

“It’s Axiom,” she acknowledged. “Your health carrier is Axiom. What a small world. That’s where I used to work. I wonder if I handled any of your medical claims.”

Her intercom buzzed and she picked up her phone.

“Yes, Doctor, they’re right here. I’ll send them in.” She hung up the phone. “Dr Carmichael is ready for you both.”

She handed my father his insurance card. My father took the two paper cups and then handed them back to her.

“Thank you,” he told her and then stood up. He gently touched my right elbow and I stood up. Then my father began to walk towards Dr Carmichael’s office, with me following two paces behind him. When we entered the office through the open doors, Dr Carmichael was sitting at his desk typing into a notebook computer keyboard.

“I have to put a note in the file and then I will be with you both.”

I could see my father watching him feverishly typing. After about five minutes, Dr Carmichael finished and then folded down the notebook screen.

“Welcome,” he greeted. “Let me examine Jonathan a few minutes and then we can talk.”

There was something strangely familiar about the examination, as Dr Carmichael began to check my reflexes, look into my eyes and ears with a small flashlight, remove the stethoscope from the drawer and begin to listen to my lungs and heart. Finally, he began to move my arms and legs to check their range of motion. While he performed all these procedures, I sat silently with my eyes closed.

“Alright, Jonathan, I’m finished. You can get off the examining table.”

I did not move immediately. Five minutes passed then suddenly, like a statue, I came to life, jumped off the table onto the floor, landing like a gymnast after a difficult routine.

“Are you okay, Jonathan?” my father asked me. I didn’t answer him. I could hear my own heartbeat like a drum.

“Thank you, Dr Carmichael,” I stoically answered.

“Thank you, Jonathan,” Dr Carmichael acknowledged.

The doctor returned to his desk to continue their conversation.

“How has he been doing?” He asked my father.

“He’s been doing great. We have our routines. He is drawing his pictures. People show up unexpectedly to see him. I sense there is a pattern to everything, but I have no idea what it is. I feel like I am living in a dream.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t want you to know, for your protection,” Dr Carmichael told him.

“For my protection from what?” He hesitated. “He goes to school, he comes home. No one has bothered us.”

“You said when I came to see you that you thought someone had made him this way?” Dr Carmichael reminded him. “Aren’t you concerned that those people are going to come and see how is doing?”

“I said a lot of things. That doesn’t mean I believe any of it,” my father responded.

“I would like to bring him in again for some tests.” Dr Carmichael proposed.

“You mean in the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so. He’s had enough probing and tickling. He needs a chance to lead a normal life.”

“I want him to lead a normal life. Jonathan is an extraordinary young man.”

I did not respond to what they were saying. I did not want to come back to the hospital again. I liked being back with my father.

“I haven’t forgotten that you sanctioned that reporter to take him to Pennsylvania,” my father countered him.

“Okay, will drop the subject of the testing for the time being. I think we are both on the same page. We want what is best for Jonathan.” Dr Carmichael paused. “As for Pennsylvania, I’m sorry. I had no idea what would happen. But something good did come from that. Jonathan is no longer speaking backwards.”

“Why was he speaking backwards in the first place?” My father asked.

“I have no answer for that question or how it was is even possible. But I witnessed it with my own eyes.” He paused. “How much is he speaking now?”

“Just a few sentences. Sometimes he goes days without a word. I wish he could speak more.”

“We all wish that! But it’s part of this gift that he has been given.”

“I don’t know that it is such a gift, given some of the pictures,” my father told him.

“What is the drawing now? I would like to come and see some of the drawings.”

“I can’t describe them all. I don’t know what any of them mean and it appears Jonathan can’t tell me.”

Dr Carmichael reached into his desk drawer and removed a drawing of what looked like randomly interlaced coloured threads. He held it up above the desktop so that I could see it.

“This is one of the neural cognition tests that I want to run on Jonathan.”

My father stared at the strange drawing.

“What is it?” he asked the doctor.

“It’s from ancient China. It’s a test in pattern recognition.12 distinct colours, only three of the threads are continuous. Can you determine which three threads run throughout the entire pattern?”

“No,” My father answered solemnly. But I knew that he could. He did every day with his aeroplane wiring.

“Neither can I. But I’m certain Jonathan can. He sees patterns that would seem impossible to distinguish.” Dr Carmichael held the drawing up higher.

“Jonathan, which coloured threads go throughout the drawing?”

I didn’t look at the drawing and I did not respond. Dr Carmichael then removed the cassette player from his desk drawer. As he had done many times before, he pressed the play button and the player began to play what seemed like an incoherent sentence backwards. After about three minutes he turned off the player and put it back in the drawer.

“I don’t see how this accomplishes anything,” my father told him. “What was on that player?”

“A sentence played backwards. I want to see if he still hears backwards.”

“This is all a waste of time. I need a way to talk to him,” my father responded.

“That I wish I could give you. But it seems to me if Jonathan wants to talk to you, he will find a way.” He paused. “Unfortunately, I have another patient in a few minutes. This conversation will have to continue some other time.”

As my father stood up to leave, Melissa came into the office carrying a federal express package, that she had just received.

“The oddest thing. This package came addressed to you, Doctor and Peter Margolis.”

“Are the Tofts here yet for their appointment?”

“No, doctor,” Melissa answered. “They called and said they are running about fifteen minutes late.”

“Then we have a little time.”

Jonathan had bowed his head and closed his eyes as Dr Carmichael ripped open the package. The return address was from Phillipsburg Pennsylvania mailed two days before. Melissa turned to leave the room.

“Please stay a moment, Melissa,” Dr Carmichael told her.

“It’s not addressed to me.”

“Please.”

He removed a legal size envelope from inside the stiff cardboard package and it only had the words, “For Peter Margolis and Dr Carmichael,” written on its face. Dr Carmichael removed a letter opener from his desk drawer and carefully opened the envelope. After removing the folded letter in a beautiful seemingly feminine script, he quietly scanned through it for a few moments and then he began to read it aloud.

“ I wish I could explain to you, Daddy, the difficulty I go through to speak a single word and the sea of noise that surrounds me every day of my life. One day I know I will have the strength to speak more, that I will be able to have a real conversation with you about what I live with every day, but for now, I give myself comfort in the knowledge that we are together.”

My father could almost hear my voice as Dr Carmichael read.

“ I know you have questions and very few answers and you wonder if what you are witnessing could be real. It is like a veil has been lifted from your eyes and you see a world you can barely recognise. But I assure you, Daddy, that this world is more extraordinary than you or Dr Carmichael could ever imagine, but it is also more dangerous as well. The world I see is complex and filled with patterns and time seems to dance in front of my eyes. My mind floats like a balloon blown by the winds from moment to moment, thread to thread, And if it were not for the drawings giving anchors to my memories, I would find myself lost in an ocean of chaos in a dance that never ends. I struggle every day to find a way to bring order into the lives of those I have been given the blessing to watch over.” He paused. “There are three threads, which go throughout the entire drawing, Dr Carmichael, yellow, magenta and green. Yellow for the sun which gives its warmth and light, magenta for the hope of transcendence that we all long for and green for the abundance of life which covers our beautiful planet. If I kept you in the dark, I’m sorry. But I know what’s coming and I want to protect you, just as I wish to protect all those I watch over. If you could see what I see, you would easily understand my silence sometimes. I am so happy that we are together again, that I have been given the blessing that we should share this journey together, as with all the people whom God loves and has given me the privilege to watch. Often I am overwhelmed with both the responsibility and the blessing my abilities have given me, so I might become an instrument of mercy and compassion in this world. I wish I could do more now. I above anyone else in the world, clearly see my limitations. Though I sometimes find it difficult to speak, I am always listening. Oiktirmia. P.S. Dr Carmichael, please destroy the letter and the envelope. P.S.S. It was easier for me to speak backwards for reasons I’m sure you would find impossible to believe. But I will one day explain everything.”

The three of them sat stunned by what Dr Carmichael had read. I lifted my head and opened my eyes and turned to my father and slowly spoke, “Can we go ride the bicycles now?”

“Of course,” my father answered. “Anything you want.” My father was visibly crying.