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
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
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