Then she made the bed.
She did so stepping carefully over and around her husband.
She hoped her screams hadn’t caused him serious harm. His skull had always been soft, delicate. Normally he wore hats, hats she had knit for him out of a fibrous copper material he’d brought home for her after the last time he had gone scavenging. He should have worn one of his hats before he performed the operation. She should have reminded him, but in her excitement, she’d forgotten all about it. All about him.
She finished the bed and then looked at her husband, still on the floor, still breathing, but only barely, and she worried.
In an hour, she thought. If he is not awake in an hour, I will wake him.
She fixed herself a cup of coffee, and moved to the back porch. So much time had passed since either of them had dared step outside that the vines had brambled—perhaps a defense mechanism—across the patio furniture, so that it took her not a few snips with her shears to cut out a space for sitting. She carried the afghan outside with her, just in case. One can never be too careful. A swooping, cawing blackbird. Claps of thunder. Yelling, rambling children. Very real dangers, all of them. But, in truth, she didn’t expect to use the blanket and was, after a moment, quite frustrated at herself for being so cautious, for bringing it along at all. It snagged on the thorns.
After a time, her coffee went cold. The wind picked up and was, no doubt, howling. She could feel the sound of it against her cheek. Rather than cover herself, though, she gave up on the morning and, back inside, sat down to wait for the afternoon.
Her husband looked vulnerable, like a pile of leaves. He still hadn’t woken, but his lips moved slightly when she moved him from the floor to the bed. She tied him there, anchored him to the bedpost. She removed the mask from his face and covered his ears with the pieces of foil left on the nightstand. Too little too late, she thought to herself. She set his head against a pillow and pulled the sheets to his chin. She pinched his nose, hoping he might wake. He had been against the operation from the very beginning, and now she was afraid he might have been right. They had torn through twelve notebooks arguing back and forth about it, until, finally, she had worn him down.
She lightly touched the bruises on his cheekbone, bare patches high on his face, which had not been quite protected by the mask. She mussed his hair, careful not to pull any of it out. He had been against the operation, but he hadn’t offered any other viable solutions. They had already replaced three windows, and this in just the past week. The dog could not be placated and had become so harmfully loud, neither of them could approach him without suffering bruises and cuts. Children from other neighborhoods and looters, with all their shouts and threats, their powerful voices shuddering chips of paint and loose pieces of drywall onto their heads—the world had become wholly unpredictable and loud. She and her husband had to do something.
She looked at her husband, at his bruises, his cuts, his now misshapen nose. It had been such a nice nose. She touched his cheek. She pressed the flat part of her palm against it. She pushed his head gently to the side. She could get a mirror, she thought. She could find her compact in her purse and hold it under his nose, like she had seen someone do once in a movie, although in the movie the man was trying to make sure a person was dead, and she would be trying to make sure a person was alive.
She shook him softly by the shoulder. She wanted him to wake up. She wanted him to wake up and to make her believe everything was going to be okay. She pressed her hands into his stomach, leaned into him, not too much, just enough to make him open his mouth, to force air out of him, to elicit even the smallest breathy rasp of his voice. But even if he had made a sound (and maybe he did), she wouldn’t have been able to hear it. And then the reality of this—she couldn’t hear anything at all—slowly became real to her.
My, I’m jumpy, she said.
She said this thinking she should at least be able to hear her own voice inside her own head.
Anxious, she said.
Anxious, she said again.
Anxious, she said. And again. Louder. And louder. Straining her throat. Yelling, screaming.
She closed her eyes and cupped her hands over her ears as if she were in a concert hall and yelled as loud as she possibly could. Tried to imagine what her voice, so loud, might sound like.
Nothing.
She opened her eyes then, and, seeing what was left now of her husband’s face, she let out a small gasp and then covered her mouth, afraid even the softest sound might ruin him beyond repair.
Housework, her mother always said. Tidy up your house, tidy up your soul.
So she moved into the bathroom. Scrubbing the grout, tearing mildewed strips from the shower curtain, polishing the marble countertops—these actions calmed her. But.
She rather missed the dog now. She wouldn’t quite admit it, but she rather missed the noise.
She wouldn’t mind, she decided, even if one of the children or a looter came to stand outside and shout at the walls.
Then, after a moment, she realized that they just might be outside that very moment and that, unless she looked, she would never know.
So she looked. And sure enough, eight boys stood in a semicircle in the front yard. Their shouts, amplified (or so she imagined) by hollowed-out plastic drinking cups, warmed the air around her house. Standing on the porch, she removed her sweater.
They must be very young, she thought. Their voices haven’t changed, or else they are hoarse from hours of shouting, weeks of shouting. The damage their voices caused was negligible.
Still, the grass at their feet browned, and the plants closest to them wilted under the weight of their breath. It was obvious they were trying their best. But in the end, their wasted efforts only depressed her further.
Dressed in her space suit, she walked protected through the neighborhood for the first time in months. She waved at her neighbors’ houses. She smiled at the sunshine. Twice, she stopped her walk to bend down to the earth and unroot the small blades of grass pushing through cracks in the sidewalk.
If looters whistled at her, she took no notice. One or two children ran up to her, throwing their voices at her, and then ran away, unsettled, frightened when nothing happened, when she showed neither sign of fear or anger.
The suit wasn’t meant for space, she knew, but space suit had become a loving term between her and her husband. Put on your space suit and we can sit outside, he’d say. Let’s put on our suits so we can make love.
There were no real space suits, just as there was no real space.
But before, even wearing the suit, even wearing two suits, she wouldn’t have dared walk outside for such a prolonged time. No matter how protected her body, no amount of fabric or material could protect her ears. The small predatory birds, in order to survive, had learned the construction of angles and reflection, refraction of sound that could pierce even the most secure ear-covers. Furthermore, the rustle of leaves, the crack of twigs, the rushing sound of a strong wind—any of these could be harmful, or fatal, even.
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 s
he 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 whe
n 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.
Miniature Wife : And Other Stories (9781101602041) Page 5