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.”