The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories

The Artist’s Voice

I.

I first met Karl Abbasonov after he had been transferred from the small paralytic ward of a privately owned Episcopal hospital, St. Ann’s, located in upstate New York, to an assisted living apartment back in Texas, the state where he was born, and where he is cared for by a rotating staff of three nurses and occasionally transferred to a sanatorium whenever his health takes a drastic turn for the worse.

His first words to me, after I introduced myself, were, “You are an ill-used clarinet.”

Abbasonov’s voice is rich, deeply timbralled, and surprisingly strong. Abbasonov speaks slowly and often tends to overenunciate, and the letters of each word round out smoothly, as if themselves part of a song or a melody. He does not look at you when he speaks because the muscles in his neck (the semispinalis capitis, the semispinalis cervicis, the multifidi, and the rotatores) cannot move and because his ciliary muscles (those muscles of the eye whose contraction changes the shape of the lens to accommodate objects of varying distances away) also cannot move, and so he does not know what anyone looks like, hasn’t known in almost twenty years, and his best judge of people, how he remembers who is speaking to him or who is in the room with him without ever seeing the person’s face, is through the sound of the person’s voice, and when he or she does not speak, then by the tone of the person’s breath. Abbasonov claims to hear every sound as a note, and cannot abide large crowds of people (the kind one might find in restaurants, at bus stations, cocktail parties, or rock concerts), the din of their speech a cacophony of flats, sharps, discords, and sad melodies of songs he does not wish to remember.

The muscles in his body, all of them, are by now so tightly contracted that his heart beats and his lungs breathe with the aid of a small metallic box, Abbasonov’s Gray Box, created for him by Nicholas Tremmont. Tremmont refuses to take full credit for the design and construction of Abbasonov’s Gray Box. “The original idea was his,” said Tremmont, when I spoke to him at his office, “and he’s the one who approached me about its design, maybe fifteen years ago. He’d sketched out something very minor and vague on the back of a cocktail napkin, and the lines were shaky because, I found out later, he’d just started working on the piece that he’s been working on for twenty, twenty-five years now. I took an interest in the idea of a small box that could not just monitor the heart, lungs, stomach, kidneys, what have you, but also make them function simultaneously, like they do when controlled by the human nervous system. It took over ten years to finish even a prototype, and it’s lucky for him, too, I guess, that I even got that out, and that when we plugged him into it, the whole damn thing started working right, though there were a couple of bugs right at first.”

Like what? I asked him.

“Well, for one thing, we didn’t think of installing a surge protector, and that first night an electrical storm blew in from the southwest, which, though nothing happened, gave us both a big scare. What really scared us, or me, since I never told him exactly what almost happened, is that I’d miswired the heart mechanism at first, and only realized my mistake just before plugging him in; if I hadn’t, I’d have had his heart drawing in blood — all the blood all at once, all of it to his heart — which, most likely, would have caused his heart to burst from the pressure.” The box, still just an early prototype, manages to control all internal muscular functions — the pumping of blood, the circulation of oxygen, the excretion of waste — but is not sophisticated enough to de-contract or relax the musculoskeletal system whose near-permanent contraction relegates Abbasonov to a wheelchair. With this knowledge, it is surprising that Abbasonov is still alive, but even more surprising that he is able to speak, a fact which has, until just recently, confounded every doctor in America and Europe who has treated or tried to treat his affliction.

II.

Isailo Abbasonov moved to Ben Ficklin, Texas, in 1938.

In the late fall of 1936, he and his wife, Fabia, left their home in Albania on a steamer bound for New York City. They spent two years in New York, where Isailo, a skilled accountant, worked as a line cook in a Russian kitchen, and Fabia worked as a housekeeper, washing clothes and dusting bric-a-brac. Then the two moved to the small town of Ben Ficklin, where Isailo’s uncle, Milorad, lived and made decent money constructing crude machinery that was then shipped to Mexico and used to sew rough-hewn blankets and trousers for the campesinos to wear while working in the fields picking cotton.

Less than six weeks after their arrival, Milorad died, bitten by a rattlesnake while demonstrating to Isailo how the thick material of the machine-produced trousers protected workers from burs, thorns, scorpion stings, and snakebites.

Isailo, who knew nothing about metalwork or simple construction, who had in fact been called down to Texas to help his uncle with the accounting side of his growing business, suddenly found himself in charge of an operation that consisted of a house-sized garage littered with greased machinery — cogs, springs, belts, the like — and a small staff of four. His uncle, afraid that his workers, after learning the design of his machine, would steal the design and leave his workshop to start their own businesses, taught each man how to build only one-fourth of the entire apparatus, the four separate parts then pieced together by Milorad himself, in secret. No one, it turned out, knew exactly how to connect the four parts into one whole. After six weeks, the machine parts still not fitted together, Isailo was forced to fire the four men who had worked for his uncle and close the machine shop.

By this time, Fabia was pregnant. “It was a tough time for my parents, then,” Abbasonov told me. “My dad found another job as a line cook, and my mom had gone back to work cleaning houses, and she did that until about the time I was born, and then went back to it less than a month after, and since they couldn’t afford to pay anyone to take care of me, she took me with her. The thing was, my father could have worked as an accountant, but nobody would hire him in the States, at least not in Texas, until they had some proof, some certification that he wouldn’t run off with their money. He was from Albania, and no one in Texas had heard of Albania, knew what Albania was. Most of them thought, because of his color, because of his features, that he was some mixture of Mexican and black, although nobody thought it strange that he didn’t know how to speak Spanish. But that’s how he found work as a cook, because everyone thought he was mestizo. He was working the morning shift cooking breakfast for field hands, county deputies, and farmers.” A small amount of luck befell Isailo when the restaurant owner’s husband, who managed the restaurant’s finances, was bedridden by a stroke that incapacitated the left side of his body. In order to care for her husband, the owner considered closing the restaurant, but Isailo, unwilling to look for yet another job, offered to work extra hours managing the office for free if she could find someone to run the kitchen and the restaurant floor.

Three years later, Isailo bought the restaurant from the owner, who moved her husband to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in hopes that the heat and the dry air might better suit his physical needs.

“After that, my mother quit cleaning houses, and the three of us spent most of our time there, at the diner. Most of my memories are of time spent in the restaurant, in the kitchen sitting on a worktable, or on the floor behind the counter. It was called the Olympia Diner, after the woman who owned it, and my father never changed the name. He never changed the menu, either, and when he painted the dining room walls or retiled the kitchen floor, he kept the same colors and the same pattern, the same tile, the same everything. One year, the owner — this was after her husband died — came back to visit her family, and she stopped by the restaurant to see what my father had done to it, and when she saw that it was almost exactly the same, she started to cry. She didn’t sob or gush or anything like that, but there were tears in her eyes that sometimes slipped down her cheek and made her face wet. She didn’t know what to say. She ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of pecan pie, and when my father wouldn’t let her pay for either, she just stood up from the counter and left. That was the last we saw of her.”

Just before their son’s eighth birthday, Abbasonov’s parents sold the Olympia, and the three of them moved to Dallas, Texas, where they used the money from the sale of the restaurant and the money that Fabia had saved to buy a house, a piano, and to pay for piano lessons for Karl, who had been begging his parents for music lessons since the age of four.

III.

The 1693 edition of Blancard’s Physical Dictionary contained the first written record or mention of tinnitus aurium, defining it as “a certain Buzzing or tingling in the Ears.” The American Tinnitus Association (founded in 1971) further defines tinnitus as “the perception of ringing, hissing, or other sound in the ears or head when no external sound is present.” According to statistics collected by the ATA, an estimated 50 million Americans suffer from some varying degree of tinnitus, and over 16 million Americans suffer from tinnitus to such a degree that normal, day-to-day living becomes impossible.

The human ear is divided into three main regions: the sound-collecting outer ear, the sound-transmitting middle ear, and the sensory inner ear. The outer ear is separated from the middle ear by the tympanic membrane, and the middle ear is, in turn, separated from the inner ear by membranous fenestrae. The sound-collecting compartment of the outer ear is conical and called the pinna. This cone functions poorly for most people, which is why the elderly may cup their hands to their ears when they want to improve their hearing. The middle ear specializes in transmitting the sound from the outer ear to the oval window opening of the inner ear through the vibration of movable bones called ossicles. The inner ear then conducts this information to the receptor neurons.

The inner ear serves a second function (through the intricate vestibular system), which is to tell the rest of your body where your head is and what it is doing at all times. The vestibular system satisfies this function through two main processes: angular acceleration, necessary for shaking or nodding your head, and linear acceleration, necessary for detecting motion along a line, such as when an elevator drops beneath you.

The auditory and vestibular systems are intimately connected; the receptors for both are located in the temporal bone in the inner ear, in a convoluted chamber called the bony labyrinth. A continuous membrane is suspended within the bony labyrinth, which creates a second chamber within the first, called the membranous labyrinth. The inner ear has two membrane-covered outlets into the middle ear — the oval window and the round window. The inner ear and the middle ear are connected through the oval window by a small bone, the stapes, which vibrates in response to vibrations of the eardrum, and which then sets the fluid of the inner ear, called perilymph, sloshing back and forth, which in turn causes the round window to vibrate in a complementary rhythm. The membranous labyrinth, caught between the oval window and the round window, bounces up and down in all the sloshing.

Located within this sloshing mess is the organ of Corti, which rests on the part of the membranous labyrinth called the basilar membrane, and it is here, finally, where the transduction of sound into neural signals occurs. Auditory hair cells sit within the organ of Corti — inner hair cells, which are the auditory receptors, and outer hair cells, which help to “fine-tune” the pulses of sound. The sensitive stereocilia (sensory hairs) of the inner hair cells are embedded in a membrane called the tectorial membrane. As the membranous labyrinth bounces up and down, the basilar membrane bounces up and down, and the fine stereocilia are sheared back and forth. When the stereocilia are pulled in the right direction, the hair cell depolarizes and releases a signal. This signal is transmitted to a nerve process lying under the organ of Corti, and is then transmitted back along the auditory nerve to the brainstem, where it is read, finally, as understandable sound — car horns, voices, jet engines, or music.

But why should any of this matter?

Bear with me for just a moment longer.

The outer hair cells of the organ of Corti help to “sharpen the tuning” of the frequencies of sounds we hear. Outer hair cells can change length in response to nerve stimulation. By pushing the basilar membrane up and down, the outer hair cells can amplify or dampen vibrations, making the inner hair cells more responsive or less responsive. The theory, then, is that if the outer hair cells can move the basilar membrane (and it has been proven that they can), then they can, in special cases, also move the oval window, and then, possibly, the eardrum. And in severe cases, by shifting the eardrum, the outer hair cells can make the ear work in reverse so that the ear acts, in essence, not like a receiver, but, rather, a speaker. Even before Abbasonov, there have been many cases in the history of medicine of a patient complaining of persistent whispering in her ear, dismissed as crazy until an obliging doctor finally places his stethoscope to her ear and listens, only to discover that he can hear the whispering, too. It is this phenomenon, of the ear reversing roles, that most doctors use to account for the constant ringing or roaring that plagues sufferers of tinnitus.

What I have just presented here is almost word for word the same anatomical lesson I was given by Dr. Larry Franklin, a tall, emaciated, and young professor at the Washington University School of Medicine, who was, according to most experts, the first doctor to understand and then explain how it is that Karl Abbasonov can not only speak, but speak well, even though every muscle in his body is contorted in such a way that even the simple act of breathing is, for him, performed by a machine. At the end of the lesson I was, to be honest, almost afraid to ask the next logical question:

“So, Dr. Franklin, what does all that mean?”

“What does it mean?” he said. “Well, simply put, it means that Karl Abbasonov communicates, verbally, through his ears.”

IV.

The piano in Karl Abbasonov’s living room is an old, wood-finished Steinway upright. The legs are scratched, and there are spots along the body and on the bench and on the lid where the finish has been rubbed away. “Those come from water damage,” Abbasonov told me. “My mother had a goldfish in a small fishbowl on the top of the piano for a while — which, in hindsight, doesn’t make much sense — and I accidentally broke the bowl against the wall, sometime during my Beethoven phase, a year or so into my piano lessons.” He paused for a moment before concluding: “I was very exuberant about Beethoven.”

His parents had bought the piano from a woman who had wanted to learn but who had quit playing after just three lessons. No one plays the old piano anymore, as most of the hammers have been worn away through Abbasonov’s exuberance, but he has kept it as a memento of his parents, his childhood. On more than one occasion, a music fanatic or a freak show fetishist has offered to buy Abbasonov’s old piano from him, and one woman from Wyoming once offered to buy, for fifteen thousand dollars, his entire collection of piano lesson books, the kind of by-rote scale books used by elementary school children when first learning to play. Abbasonov’s, the ones he showed me, looked untouched.

Abbasonov’s piano and piano books, however, aren’t the only thing collectors and museums have requested. The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia has offered, in the event of Karl’s untimely or unexpected or, even, natural death, to preserve his body in the exact position in which it is left at the time of his passing. And though they have assured him of “star treatment”—his own exhibit complete with a piano and copies (if not the originals) of his musical scores — they haven’t offered him any financial compensation.

“I haven’t told them one way or the other yet. Partly I like to string them along, but mostly I just don’t think about it. Really, in the end, all of that will be left up to either Dr. Franklin or Dr. Johnson. Though I’m pretty sure one of them will keep the piano and at least some of my old music books and all of my own music. But who knows what they’ll do with me.”

His parents and his first piano teachers faced a similar problem — What should we do with Karl? — once he began taking piano lessons. He started with a forty-five minute lesson once every week, on Wednesday nights. Western music comprises twelve diatonic major scales and twelve diatonic minor scales. Of the minor scales, there are three different variants — melodic, harmonic, and natural. The natural minor scale is, note for note, the same scale as a major scale, except that it begins with a different starting tone and results in a different interval pattern. These forty-eight scales are the standard for Western tonality, formed and used extensively between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In the six days between his first lesson and his second lesson, Abbasonov had mastered the complete range of diatonic scales, all forty-eight of them, this after being taught only the very first, C major. His piano teacher, after she heard him run flawlessly over each, was speechless. His parents increased his lessons to two a week. After a month, though, he had to find a new piano teacher, one more advanced and who might be able to keep up with him. Three months after that, Abbasonov moved away from piano teachers altogether and moved into the Southern Methodist University’s conservatory program, where he took daily lessons from professors of musicology, music theory, and advanced piano, and where he first took up the violin.

“I was in heaven. I felt so completely submerged in music. There I was, an eight-year-old kid who didn’t have to go to school but for a half day, who could spend his days around instruments and around music. Sheets and sheets of music. I’ve always been a fair sight reader, and so I used to play through whatever I got my hands on. It frustrated my teachers no end, because I would jump from new piece to new piece, and it took all of their energy to get me to focus enough on one piece to really polish my performance. But after a while, they just let me go, figuring that I was only eight and that I would settle down with age. I didn’t care what was placed in front of me, I would play through it, and maybe play through it again if it had been particularly difficult, like a Rachmaninoff or a Liszt, both of whom had larger than average hands and much larger hands than mine, and so I had to improvise while playing their music to get the full range of sound that they could produce. Life was perfect, and sometimes I like to think that, if I hadn’t been introduced to music composition, life would have stayed that way, but I’m sure, after a while, I’d have stumbled into composition on my own, and then it would have happened anyway.”

The “it” happened just before he reached his tenth birthday, when one of his professors gave him a small book of blank score sheets “for those melodies, he told me, running through my head that might be mine and that might be lost if they’re not written down. At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about, had become so caught up in Bartók and Mozart and Schubert to even think about my own notes, but then, once the notion was pointed out to me, the notes just followed. That’s when I had my first seizure. A short one, to be sure, since the melody I thought out was short and simple, very much a nine-year-old melody, so it was less of a seizure, more of a stiffening, and not throughout my whole body, but in my shoulders. Back then, it always started at the base of my neck and in my shoulders.”

Abbasonov never thought much about his stiff joints and minor seizures. It was, in fact, his parents who noticed their son shuffling through the house in a slightly hunched and stiff-hipped manner. When they asked him about it, he shrugged them off, told them he was busy, that he was in the middle of thinking through a song, that he had almost finished it, and that he needed to start writing it out. When he came back out of his bedroom, the piece finished, he would be fine and fluid again, and he would claim that he didn’t know anything about the way he was walking, and, no, he didn’t remember being in pain.

“The next time, though — long before we figured out that it was in any way connected to music — I had started work on a scherzo, playful and fun, but longer and more complicated than anything else I’d tried to compose, and then it was unignorable, unavoidable. I couldn’t get out of bed, and after a while, I couldn’t move even my eyelids. My parents had no idea what was wrong with me. The doctor, when he came to the house, couldn’t figure it out, either, other than to say that I’d had some sort of fit or seizure. They hooked me up to an IV so that I could get food and water, had a nurse come to the house to stay with me, because no one knew what this was, much less how long this was going to last. I’d been working on the piece for about two weeks, and I wasn’t bedridden until the last three or four days. It was a longer score, but not that long, really. And so, I wasn’t even scrunched up, nothing like the way I am now. I was just flat on my back, stiff as a board, stuck in bed, while I ran through the music in my head.

“I knew, part of me knew, that what was going on was caused by the music in my head, but I didn’t want to think about it that way. Instead, I thought that the music was what was helping me through these strange seizures, thought that I was occupying myself by thinking about the music and nothing else but the music, and that if I could make it through this melody in my head, see it all the way through, picture exactly how it should sound, then I would pull myself, or the music would pull me, through this seizure, and the next seizure, and the next.”

Soon, however, the seizures began to attack Abbasonov with alarming frequency.

Karl Abbasonov is one of five known sufferers of the musculoskeletal and neuropsychological disease locomotor ataxia agitans libertætis. In this affliction, a kernel of an idea infects the brain, like the spore of a fungus might infect the brain of an ant. In Abbasonov’s case, this spore comes in the form of an original piece of music — and as the kernel grows, neurotoxins develop that in turn affect either norepinephrine or acetylcholine (the doctors aren’t sure which in these cases), causing these neurotransmitters to send incorrect impulses across incorrect synapses. This causes a slow and simultaneous arthritis, contraction, or paralysis to occur, so that the body, in effect, involuntarily contorts. Visually, if one were to video record and then watch it at a higher speed, the progression of this disease, from the time the kernel enters the brain through to the final contortions of the body, resembles the wilting of a flower or a weed under a hot sun.

The first known case of locomotor ataxia agitans libertætis was described in late 1942 by Dr. Phillip Koepkind. His patient was one Adam Shy, a minor artist whose paintings were acrylic abstracts, angular and uncomfortable to look at, done in browns, blacks, and reds, each one a tightly concentrated patch of colors and lines roughly the size of a quarter, sometimes as large as a silver dollar, painted onto unusually oversized canvases. Dr. Koepkind found that hypnotism and subliminal suggestion partially cured Adam Shy, whose artistic endeavors paralyzed the left side of his body from the neck down, and his entire body from the waist down. “In the course of a month,” wrote Koepkind in 1944, “not once did Shy suffer from what had, before treatment, become almost hourly paralytic attacks. It seems, however, that the suppression, through hypnotic suggestion, of Shy’s artistic urges must be maintained through monthly sessions, otherwise the urge to produce slowly resurfaces and the paralytic attacks return.”

Although Abbasonov has been through over ten hypnotic sessions with six different hypnotherapists, psychologists, and musico-therapists, he still has not lost the urge, the need to compose.

V.

Of the two doctors most invested in the case of Karl Abbasonov, Dr. Johnson and Dr. Franklin, Franklin has known him, or of him, the longest.

Dr. Larry Franklin knew of Karl Abbasonov long before the two ever met. Dr. Franklin’s mother, June, a recently retired piano teacher and the current conductor of the church choir in Larry Franklin’s hometown, considers Karl Abbasonov one of the greatest American composers of the twentieth century — June and Karl were friends during high school.

“Once,” she told me, “he wrote me a song during algebra class. Took him about five seconds, scribbling it on the back of one of our pop quizzes. I’ve still got it here, somewhere, in the attic or in a box, I’m sure. I remember, though, on the quiz he’d gotten a D. And on the back, he’d written me this short little trill of a song, like a birdcall, in the key of D.” Puckering her lips, she whistled for me a thrilling conversation of notes that sounded, truly, like a birdcall. “Of course, I didn’t read music back then. Didn’t know what he’d given me, and when I asked him about it, he just smiled and said I’d have to figure it out for myself. Really, that’s why I started taking piano lessons. I took the little scrap of music to the school’s music teacher to ask her what it was, and she played it for me on the piano. I liked the sound of it fine, but just listening to it, I didn’t feel satisfied. I wanted to know how to connect what he’d written on the page to what the music teacher had played on the piano, so I asked her to teach me the notes so that I could play them, too. After she did, well, I just fell into the trap, and I’m still playing piano to this day.”

Abbasonov left school before June could play for him what she’d learned. “He just stopped coming to classes. He’d been sick for a while, on and off, always in the nurse’s office, and then his parents sent him down to Houston for some special surgery or something, and after that, he just stopped coming to school altogether.

“I went off to college, received my degree from North Texas State, music pedagogy, and that’s where I met Richard, and the two of us were married just after we graduated, and then we moved to Oregon. We settled down, and then Larry came along. By then, I was teaching students out of the house. My life had settled and I was happy, but I never really stopped thinking about Karl. Every once in a while, I would walk through record stores looking for Glenn Gould, or Horowitz, but also, in the back of my mind, hoping that I’d see Karl’s name on a compilation tape or on a record, the composer of some Hollywood score, anything, but I never found a recording of his music. Not in Oregon, anyway. I once flew out to New York for a music conference, and while there, I found this small, eclectic classical records store, and I stumbled across one recording of him, but it was him playing Bach fugues, and to be honest, it wasn’t all that good. I don’t know if I even still have it.”

Abbasonov recorded that album in October of 1969 on a small label that no longer exists. The year is important to Abbasonov. That year, in February or March, he began composing his most ambitious score to date. Before then, he had been writing pieces for string quartets or short symphonies or complex piano pieces. They were light and playful and, God willing, short. He hadn’t produced anything, anyway, that had taken more than a few weeks, or at most a month, to compose in his head, for he is unable to begin writing the piece out until it has been finished inside of his head, and the longer it remains there, the more complex the piece is, the more his body works against itself. At the time of his Bach recording, however, he had been working on the same piece of music for over six months.

“Frankly,” he told me, “I don’t even know how I recorded that session. We laid it down in one take, and I haven’t listened to it but two or three times my whole life, mainly because, even knowing the circumstances, I think it’s awful, but what I do remember is that the end of the session sounds smoother, sounds more controlled than the beginning of the session. I think that by the end I was concentrating so hard on making my fingers play through Bach’s fugues, which are complex and brilliant, that, for a moment, I forgot about my own work.” I asked him how he was able to play at all, for surely after six months of composing his body must have been almost fully paralyzed. “My arms and hands have always been the last part of my body to even begin to stiffen, and I’d never worked on a piece long enough for them to freeze up completely,” he said. “And then — a good friend of mine set up the sessions, and after he saw how I was, he rigged up a studio that made it possible for me to play without sitting up or moving anything but my hands. The studio looked bent out of shape, had been made into some weird contraption of pulleys and rope and levers, and in the middle, hanging from the ceiling, impossibly, was a piano. A Steinway grand, six feet, nine inches. I’ve got pictures somewhere.”

And so he recorded Bach and then June bought it, and, even though she didn’t like the recording, she felt compelled to reconnect with Karl Abbasonov. She called the record label, and they gave her an address. She mailed him a letter. Two weeks later she received, instead of a reply, sheets and sheets of music. “All of them Karl’s, all of them short pieces. Scherzos, mazurkas, piano exercises, compositions for strings, some concertos, some pieces for harpsichord, even small, complete operas. But everything short. Even the two or three symphonies, minutes long. And yet some of them so complex, I still can’t figure them out. Piano pieces that seem meant for two or three pianos, string quartets that feel made for full orchestras. I still haven’t figured out the real complex stuff, but some of the simpler pieces I play over and over again. Some of the exercises — the simplest ones, anyway — I gave to my students. But mostly, I played Karl’s piano pieces for Larry when he was younger.”

VI.

I met Dr. Harold Johnson at a small medical convention held in Austin, Texas, some few weeks after my initial meetings with Dr. Larry Franklin and his mother. Dr. Johnson is currently the resident director at Baylor University Medical Center of Dallas. I mentioned that I was interested in his thoughts on the Karl Abbasonov case and made an appointment with him for breakfast at one of the small taquerias along Congress Avenue. After we ordered, I explained to him Dr. Franklin’s theory about Abbasonov’s ears, and then I asked him for his opinion on the matter.

“Bull. Shit” were the first words out of Dr. Johnson’s mouth.

Dr. Johnson graduated in 1967 from Rice University and then entered Baylor College of Medicine in 1970. After graduation, he moved to Boston, where he completed his residency, and then moved to New York, where he lived for four years and where he practiced neurosurgery at St. Luke’s Hospital. He is a big, bull-necked man with a large voice and large, Texas-sized hands that, when they grab your own hands in a handshake, are surprisingly soft and quick, as well as strong. “Bull. Shit,” he repeated. “That’s exactly what I would’ve told you a year ago, hell, six months ago, if you’d come in here with some damn fool idea about Karl talking out his goddamn ears. ’Cause that’s exactly what I told Lare [Dr. Franklin] when he came in here and explained the whole thing to me. Hell, we can call him up right now and you can ask him yourself. He’ll tell you my exact words. Bull. Shit. But he wouldn’t let go of the idea, and just kept pestering me about it until, finally, he said, ‘Look, Harold, if you don’t believe me, we can just go test the goddamn theory out right now.’ I’ll tell you, that boy makes a powerful and persuasive case.”

Dr. Johnson became interested in Karl Abbasonov while living in Manhattan. In 1989, Abbasonov’s partner, Annie Ashbury, contacted the ten best neurosurgeons living and working in New York City, and Johnson was number ten on her list. The ten of them were invited to Abbasonov’s apartment, where they were served lunch and cocktails. All of the doctors knew one another, but only one of them, Dr. Richard Iovinelli, had ever met Karl Abbasonov or Annie Ashbury, and during lunch and over drinks, the other nine surgeons plied him for details about their mysterious host. It wasn’t until after cocktails that Abbasonov made his appearance.

“The whole time we were there,” Dr. Johnson told me, “eating lunch and having a quiet drink, we’d been listening to music over some speakers. Short, tense, complex music. Never heard anything like it, wasn’t sure who it was, or when it was from. Turned out it was Karl’s stuff, and Annie had put it on for us, but then, before she wheeled Karl into the room, she must’ve turned it off.

“It was quite a shock to see him. It seemed that Karl had worsened since the last time Richard had seen him, so even he was pretty quiet there for a while, just looking at poor old Karl. Supposedly, nobody knows for sure these days, the man stands at about six-two, six-three, and there he was in that wheelchair, taking up the space of a four-year-old, his body all wound in tight, except for his left arm, which for some reason had contracted differently from the rest of him, so that it stuck out of him, like a dead tree trunk sticking up out of the ground.

“They had this crazy idea of some kind of tag-team surgery, where the ten of us would work nonstop in shifting rotations, trying to rewire his whole damn system. If you ask me, certainly not one of Annie’s better ideas, though you can’t blame her for trying. By that time, Karl’d been paralyzed for just over two years, and he’d been working on this piece of music for going on twenty, and it looked like he was only going to get worse, stuck in a wheelchair with that little gray box of his. Frankly, none of us figured that piece of shit to last for more than a week at the most. And she was such a nice woman, and anyone could tell just by looking at her how much she loved him, and she kept baking us cakes and cupcakes and muffins. So it broke our hearts to have to tell her that it wouldn’t work, the ten of us digging around in there at different times, during different stages of the operation — too much possibility of error. And for a while after we told her no, Annie stopped talking to us altogether, all ten of us, and it wasn’t but a few years ago that she called me up out of the blue one day after she found out I’d moved down to Texas. Karl, you know, is from Texas, and this was when they first started thinking of moving him back home. Of course, then, six months later, she passed away. Funny how, with all that attention we were paying to Karl, none of us knew a damn thing about Annie’s condition — heart murmurs, high blood pressure — makes sense that the stress of caring for Karl would catch up to her, but still, it took us all by surprise.”

Dr. Johnson was quiet for a moment, tipping back the last dregs of his coffee. “Nice woman,” he said. “True salt of the earth.”

Then I asked for the check, and despite my objections, Dr. Johnson paid the tab. As we were walking out of the restaurant, I couldn’t get the nagging feeling out of my head that something was missing still.

“But wait,” I said. “You’re telling me that Dr. Franklin’s theory holds up?”

“Holds up? Oh, hell yeah. No mistake. It’s the only theory that makes any sense. I might’ve been skeptical at first, but that little bastard Franklin’s right. Karl’s talking out his goddamn ears. The only thing left to figure out is how the hell it all works — does he talk out of both ears or just one? Is there some kind of internal, neural mechanism that lets him talk one minute and listen the next, kind of like your intercom system, or what? And then, how do those synapses connect? What’s sending what signals and where, that kind of thing. It’s funny how nobody ever really questions it, though, when they’re talking to him. It’s not something you think about right at first. You just talk at him and he talks back and so you know he heard you and you already know that you can hear him so it never really occurs to you to ask yourself how it all happens even though he’s crumpled up like some kind of leather knot. Hell, I’ve known him for going on eighteen years, and it sure as hell wasn’t me that said, Hey, fellas, how the hell you think old Karl talks when he can’t even move his jaw? It was Larry who first wondered about all that.”

VII.

“What’s funny is that even I didn’t think about it.” I’m sitting in Abbasonov’s Texas apartment. “Nobody did. Not even Annie. And then Dr. Franklin came to the house, showed up without warning, flew in from Washington and rented a car and found the house and knocked on the door. That was when we were still living in New York.”

Listening to Abbasonov, I’m trying to make myself hear the words come out of his ears, trying to make myself believe how it all really works, but the illusion of it all is too strong. I feel like a child again, handed a sheet of optical illusions — a candlestick holder or two faces? An ugly old hag or a beautiful young woman? — and, as a kid, once I knew what the second image was, I could always make it come back. But this — is he talking with his mouth, which is impossible, or does he speak through his ears, which is equally (or so I thought) impossible? — this defies my ability to reason. Furthermore, there is no physical movement to make it clear one way or the other. His ears don’t flap around. His Adam’s apple does not move up and down. And yet, somehow, he’s talking. I can’t make the first illusion fade, can’t bring the second one to light, and so I give up trying.

What makes it all the more difficult, makes it worse, even, is the discomfort I feel simply looking at him. He is a painful thing to look at, wrenched into violent knots, cramped into himself, smaller now, even, more tightly constricted than when I first met him only a few weeks before. The question I want to ask him, but don’t have the heart to, or don’t need to because I feel like I already know the answer to it, is this: Is it worth it? This piece of music you’re composing in your head, will it really be so good that it is worth all of this?

“Larry came over,” he continues, “and we were surprised, Annie and I, but it was a pleasant surprise. All he said was that he wanted to run a few tests. I was used to testing by then, and Larry’s always been a nice young man, so I told him that was okay, and then I asked him what he was testing me for, but he wouldn’t tell me, said that he’d tell me just as soon as he was done. Then he opened a bag of cotton balls and told me not to mind him, to keep talking while he was setting things up, so I kept talking to him, mostly small talk, about his flight, about the weather, about why he was stuffing cotton into my ears.”

To clarify, many people are under the false impression that Karl Abbasonov is paralyzed — that his nervous system doesn’t work properly, which is correct, and that he has no sense of touch, which is incorrect. His nervous system is not deadened or numbed, but, instead, overactive, which makes his skin extremely sensitive, which is how he was able to feel the discomfort of all these cotton balls pushed into his ears.

“But he didn’t say anything,” Abbasonov tells me, “and he kept stuffing cotton in my ears until I guess he must have pushed ten small balls of cotton into each ear, and I told him, Look, Larry, I don’t think my ears can hold another piece of cotton, but he was ignoring me, or so I thought, and anyway, he’d stopped talking to me, stopped answering my questions. And I must have been that way, twenty balls of cotton stuffed in my ears, for about ten minutes, maybe longer, until he finally took the cotton out, and it was then that I realized that he hadn’t stopped talking to me but that I hadn’t been able to hear him because of all the cotton. I couldn’t see Annie, but I could tell something was up by the way her breathing had sped up, could tell that she was excited about something. Then Larry said to me, ‘Karl, that’s amazing. How do you do that, and why haven’t you told anybody?’ And Annie was going on about how she never even thought about it, and why didn’t she notice it, and it’s all so obvious that, of course, I couldn’t talk with my mouth. By that time, I was thoroughly confused, which is, I think, the reaction Larry was looking for. He was pretty sure I didn’t know that I didn’t talk normally, and he was right. When he explained it to me, how my voice had been muffled even by the very first piece of cotton and how my voice had disappeared almost completely by the end (he claims he only put four or five pieces in each ear, but that’s a lie), and that neither he nor Annie had heard me tell him to stop stuffing cotton in my ears, I was pretty excited. I mean, that’s a pretty big deal, speaking out of my ears, and when you’re in a condition like mine, any new development or new discovery is a big deal, so this kind of thing was huge. Funny thing is, after that, I couldn’t talk for almost six months.”

“Six months?” I ask him. “What happened?”

“If you play the piano,” he says, “or if you play baseball, you’ll see this kind of thing happen to you, sometimes more often than you’d like.

“Say you’re a baseball player and you’ve been playing baseball since you were young, say, since you were five or six. And, as you grow older, you become a great catcher, a natural, and you’ve got a great arm to second, and then it happens — and I don’t know why this happens, maybe someone says, ‘Hey, you’ve got a great arm,’ or says anything to you about your technique — but you start to think about what you’re doing. Then you miss the throw to second. Well, you tell yourself, it was just once, nothing to worry about, but you worry about it anyway, and you miss the throw again. Now you’re thinking about it more, and you’re starting to really worry. And then you miss the throw to the pitcher. This is something you’ve been doing for almost twenty years now, something you could do with your eyes closed (and, really, that might help), and before, you’d never thought about how you were doing it, you were just doing it. And after a while, the manager tells you to put in more practice hours, and then after that, he benches you because you haven’t been able to throw the ball to the pitcher in last five games. And you can’t figure out what the hell happened to your arm, and you’re thinking about it all the time. In your mind, you’re going over the basics of throwing a baseball, techniques you learned when you were too young to know you were learning anything. The whole time, you never realize that the thinking is the problem, that your brain’s getting in the way of what your body already knows how to do.

“Well, when it came to talking out of my ears, that’s what happened. As soon as I found out, I thought myself out of being able to do it. It was Larry who figured that one out, too. And he came over the same way, without a word of warning, and I was depressed this time, and Annie was always crying because I couldn’t say anything to her, and I could hear her, but after a while, after a few months, she had stopped talking to me because she said it was just too depressing, like she was talking to herself, or like I was dead. Larry came over with this IV bag of clear fluid — it turned out to be nothing but a sugar-water drip — but at the time, he told us it was a new drug that might loosen my muscles up, might help reconnect the nerve bundles the right way, and so he set everything up and after a few minutes, he told me to try to move — my arm or my leg or my head, or even just try to focus my eyes again, so I could see clearly — and I tried and I tried, but I couldn’t get anything to move and it was frustrating, this on top of losing my voice, and Larry kept egging me on, and I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t do it, that it wasn’t working, and that I was worn out from the effort — my whole body was wet from sweat afterward — but I couldn’t tell him anything because I couldn’t get my ears to work, and then, suddenly, I was talking again. ‘Goddamn it, Larry, shut the fuck up. I can’t move a goddamn thing, you goddamn hack.’ That’s what I told him. He’ll never let me forget it, either.”

Since that day, Abbasonov’s been able to speak clearly and effortlessly, and not once in our conversations did he stumble or falter. “Not thinking about how it worked became easier after that. And even now, talking to you about it right now, I’m not really thinking about it, not about the process, anyway. Not about any of it, really. No. For the past hour or so, I’ve been trying to move my right arm two inches to the left.”