Then, I would turn on some music, usually Schoenberg, which played while I lay out a range of the crayons. This part was very important; I had noticed early on that most of these patients, suffering from a very specific combination of psychological catatonia’s in which I had come to specialize, responded very sensitively to ritual. Slowly, like a tortoise, they would pop their heads out, their hands grip the crayon I placed there, and they would begin to draw.

While drawing, their personality would change. I cant really describe it, words frequently fail to communicate such an abstract quantity as a ‘personality change’, but I will try. Once the element of time was removed, it was as if they began to merge into a single class, a unit separated only by space. The drawings, the ways in which they all drew similar themes in similar ways, their expressions, movements, and formal characteristics, all combined into an uncanny resemblance of something which could almost be grasped, but hung out just outside of vision. After they finished the drawings, they would go into small convulsions, as if the journey back to catatonia was a violent compression of time and distance.

Returning home late as usual from my office, I locked the new drawings in the large metal box I kept under my bed. After a small dinner, spent gazing out the window at the gray midtown buildings which composed the sky of the city, I would be drawn to open the box and once again gaze at the range of drawings, trying to detect the common thread, trying to place together the pieces of a logical puzzle from the scattered fractions of irrational impulse. I had no end of troubled, exhausted nights, staring, moving two drawings together then apart again, combining and recombining them into their specialized combinatorics, using only the laws of psychological inquiry and sustained hypothesis as my guide. Eventually, I would collapse into bed, falling into a troubled sleep of dreams and confusion.

It must have been the dreams that led me to find the order. True, at first I thought I was a little overboard; I could laugh at myself. But it was laughter tinged with desperation; since my first publication in a prestigious psychology journal, the rest of the world had dropped away, taking my childhood with it. I recognized the symptomatic tunnel vision of career specialization, but the tunnel had suggested a journey, something at the end of it which had a stronger gravity than the desire to see around me.

It started with two specific drawings. Jeff, a middle age man, no known occupation, who hadn't spoken in years, had done the first one. A half oval, with intricate designs comprising its interior, lay bisected by the page. Outside the oval, dark, childlike scrawls swarmed, while inside, light pink smooth shapes lay as if protected inside the half egg. The other drawing was by Jane Doe #4, an unknown woman in her seventies. This drawing showed a typical childish composition... a crude house with curly smoke coming from the chimney, green grass, and a tree. Inside the house a bulbous dark shape lurked behind a crude curtain, almost as if it was a smudge upon the drawing sheet. But above the door to the house she had drawn a full oval, similar in design to that of Jeff’s drawing. With the aid of a magnifying glass, I was able to examine the oval's detail, and it was astounding. I still am unable to understand how a crayon could physically create a microcosm of such intricacy, but I am much closer to accepting it now. I have no choice.

The oval's similarity drew me immediately to John Doe #7, whom I had taken to calling ‘Ted’. Ted did drawings of only one object, over and over, in different scales, colors, and a varying technical ability; a tall candle supported by a distorted candle holder of ornate decoration, an extended circle with a point through the middle.

A couple of weeks after I had lain out all the drawing with circles in them on my bed, my patients began to refuse all crayons except red and black, and only rarely, green. Their images very definitely began to degenerate, become more childlike and rough. I made the mistake of asking some colleagues of mine about this, but they would attribute it to nothing more than an environmental factor, if not pure coincidence. I do not know if it was they who began to shun my persistent nagging questions, or if I grew more and more hostile to their dismissals, which seemed to me highly unprofessional. Whichever it was, I grew hesitant, I extended publishing deadlines, missed meetings and forwent the writing of grant proposals. I survived off of my private practice only, scraping by, digging into my savings more and more.

Eventually, even through the disintegration, I could see images of a more simplistic, unified formalism arise. Like puzzle pieces, I could find lines that continued off of one page and onto another. I stopped paying attention to whose drawings were whose, I did not gather time, dates, environmental data, psychological observations or names on the individual drawings. By ignoring the separation thus, the patterns began to become more clear. One drawing had been ripped in such a way that it seemed to fit exactly the tear of another. Images, lines, shapes fractured and came together only when two or three sheets were joined. I noticed that viewing the drawings by the light of a single candle somehow made the images clearer. The flickering light, suspended in the center of the drawing, created a sense of liveliness and suggestion that pierced the film of separation I felt from the drawing as a mere drawing, and hinted at an organic pattern of indefinable permutations. I moved my bed out into the kitchen and turned the bedroom into a huge mosaic, closing and double-locking the door whenever I was out.

At work, I noticed the people whom I normally met throughout the day looked at me a little strangely. It was true, I hadn't washed my suit or clothes in a while, though I washed infrequently in the kitchen sink. I started to become afraid they were going to bring about a halt to my work, that my days of collecting drawings were perhaps numbered, and this increased my involvement. I would search through hospital records for those who had similar psychological histories to those I had studied, and rush through the paperwork, sometimes filling in lies, making up reasons and references, just to get access under the guise of therapy to more scribbles. I collected them in furtive five minute ‘interviews’ conducted in hospital rooms, beds, wheelchairs. Carrying a sketchpad and wearing a white doctor lab coat, I drove to a local sanitarium and snuck into the exercise yard. Pretending to be a staff member, giving the few patients whose symptoms I recognized crayons and paper, receiving quick sketches, I would rush back home and resume taping and shuffling, sometimes completing a section, sometimes feeling something was missing and rushing out again.

In the mirror, my face had become gaunt, unrecognizable. But by now, two thirds of the floor was finished. I could feel the closeness of a goal. My heart beat in a constant state of hypertension, driven by edgy suspense. The last group of drawings was almost complete.

That was when I received the phone call. My office had been shut down by the state board of regulators. I was under investigation by the American Psychological Association, threatening to revoke my license. But I didn't care. I was so close. By that evening, only a few pieces remained, and I felt so confident in my vision of the whole that I sat down and shakily sketched out the remaining pieces. In a trance, I became only aware of the scraping of the crayon and its mysterious lines upon the rough paper surface. Done, I returned to the bedroom and carefully lay them in.

Shutting the door behind me, I lit the single candle at the center of the room. The huge ornate oval came flickeringly alive. Patterns washed and rippled the surface of the drawings, ripping them apart and reforming them as if alive. I felt a sense of awe in the presence of a huge micro-organism, teeming with life from another scale, a life which existed alongside our own and yet was invisible, dead to the daily life of our vision. Its segments existed in parts, each locked away in their individual prisons, in hospitals and rooms, over the centuries and throughout the world.

As I watched the surface, immobile, unable to move, I saw larger shapes form inside the dancing patterns. Shadows, as if diffracted through a prism, swarmed like clouds across the surface. Though moving, they suggested another form behind the shifting lines and shapes; I felt suddenly cold, though sweat was poring through my skin. A shape, large and dark, moved behind the screen. My vision slowly began to fade, as if a smoky white film had arisen from the dark corners of the room. My mind became hazy, unable to hold any thought under the influence of the movement and fog. Muscles throughout my body became slack and numb. I sunk down to the floor, my mouth agape, trying to breathe in the heavy dank air, each inhalation becoming more difficult to complete. Soon, the dark room was completely subsumed into the white haze over my vision. The dark shapes in the fog multiplied and came towards me, swarming around me, comforting and smothering me. Then I was gone.

When next I opened my eyes, I stared straight into the blinding sun. The blue cold sky around me was crystal clear. I felt the hardness of cement and grass on my bare back, on the nakedness of my thighs. I do not know how I got there, or where the people came from to take me to the bed where I now lay. But every now and then, I am put into a wheelchair and moved to a small room, where a young man, fresh in face and motivation, sets down a piece of paper and crayons in front of me. And I begin to draw.