The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (8 page)

How the children and the looters had survived these past few months, she never managed to discover.

The wind swept tattered pieces of soundproofing and insulation past her and down the street. She looked at the other houses surrounding hers, which seemed as cracked and chipped and crumbling as her own. At one point, a small bird fell from the sky to land just feet away from her, knocked unconscious, she assumed, only then to be jawed by an emaciated cat, which must have screeched and hissed the bird out of the sky. She had hoped getting out of the house would have done her some good, calmed her down, made her feel somehow less guilty, but being a witness to all of this had only exhausted and saddened her. She was glad her husband couldn’t have come with her.

She had decided to turn around and walk home then, to go back to him, to tend to him as best she could, when something struck her in the small of her back. She turned around, startled, expecting to see someone with a bullhorn or some other voice amplifier, something strong that could punch through her suit. Instead she saw a huddle of boys with rocks and sticks, made timid by the unfamiliar speed of thrown objects. They stood silent at her. Then, one of the boys lifted his hand and threw, his rock glancing her shoulder, then another boy, and then the rush of them, like a dam bursting open, each of them picking up new stones or collecting those already thrown, flooding over her, each with his mouth closed.

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: