The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (10 page)

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.”