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.”
Since that day, Abbasonov’s been able to speak clearly and effortlessly, and not once in our conversations did he stumble or falter. “Not thinking about how it worked became easier after that. And even now, talking to you about it right now, I’m not really thinking about it, not about the process, anyway. Not about any of it, really. No. For the past hour or so, I’ve been trying to move my right arm two inches to the left.”
Henry Richard Niles: A Meritorious Life
NILES, HENRY RICHARD (b. 1940). Poet. Place of birth: Cleveland, Ohio. Born to Polish parents, Henry Richard Niles did not speak his first words until the age of seven. Originally, his parents had assumed that their son was born deaf, but hearing tests disproved this theory, and doctors suggested that the boy’s vocal cords didn’t work properly. The doctors then suggested that his parents teach him to read and write, and that the best way to communicate with their son was by way of pad and pencil. Rather than subject the mute boy to the ridicule and mismanagement that he would surely encounter in any school system, whether public or private, his parents kept him at home to teach him themselves how to speak, how to read, how to write, how to calculate numbers, and the uses of shapes. Niles could understand only the basics of the Arabic numbering system, never quite cognizant of the numbers past seven, and was oddly more adept at Roman numerals. Furthermore, as a child, he was unable to work either his left or right fist around the nub of a pencil comfortably enough to scratch out those words predominant in (and necessary for) communication through the English language—the, and, to want—and although he was able to place vowels correctly in between consonants and was able to place consonants correctly alongside one another, the combinations formed by his hands were both illegible and indecipherable as spoken language.