The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (9 page)

“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.”