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.