Turning Up 'American Idol'

I had to toss the hearing aids. For a while, I tried to communicate orally without them, but it was just too frustrating. Even one-on-one conversations were as difficult as those old high school parties. So then: silence. Sign language. And, after the initial adjustment difficulties -- learning a new way to communicate, switching to work in the deaf community -- the beauty of waking up to a world where every person, every creature, touched one with the same gentleness. Silence has a bad rap: We view it as an absence, a lack. But when you really step into it, you see that it's no such thing. Details you barely noticed before expand to take the place of noise. The coolness of a doorknob, the smell after a spring rainstorm, the insanity lurking in the eyes of certain height-challenged movie stars -- all become astonishingly apparent. And in quiet is a peaceful remove. While sound puts you at the center of your own swirling cosmos, sight lets you observe things from a distance.

Into this silence came season three of "American Idol." I understood immediately why some of my deaf and non-oral friends watched it, even though they could barely make out the words. Aside from the drama and the visual spectacle -- the stunned tears when a favorite was sent home early, for example -- "Idol" was like an introductory class in music appreciation, spelled out in scrolling captions. Simon was the key: I was fascinated by his descriptions of what I was missing. If you stuck a robot in Paula's seat that prattled variations of, "I truly love you, though you really sook," very few people would notice the change. Ditto a bear in glasses in Randy's seat, trained to say, "Dawg, song choice. Song choice, dawg." (Bless those at Closed Captioning Central; they actually spell out d-a-w-g -- I don't think Webster's has gone that far yet.) But Simon seemed to really listen to the songs, and his descriptions painted verbal pictures that I wanted to understand, sort of like a blind man who asks a trusted friend to describe a photograph. (Although honestly I don't know if that really happens; it's something I once saw Agent Smith from the Matrix ask Russell Crowe to do in an Australian weepie.)

It was an interesting experience, but something obvious was missing, both onscreen and off. I had grown up in the hearing world, and though I had never been completely at home there, I still thought it a rich and interesting place. I missed music, and conversation and laughter. I missed my brown-eyed girl and her la-la's.

So last spring, when the doctor said he could bring it all back, I mulled everything over for six months and then decided to go for it. A cochlear implant, a 3-centimeter electrode coil, would be embedded in my right ear, and a transmitter with a removable external piece -- actually, a small processor the size of a bottle cap -- would be placed in the back of my skull. Signals from the processor would pulse the implant, which would stimulate the hearing nerve in lieu of sound itself. The auditory world would come straight through a computer. The end result: hearing.

"How much?" I asked the doc.

"If all goes well, more than you ever had before," he said.

"Enough to talk on the phone?"

"Yes," he said.

"Enough to hear 'American Idol'?"

The doctor shook his head, and his face split into a long laugh I couldn't hear. He had played quarterback at Princeton before becoming a neurosurgeon. As a day job, he brought people back to life. "Excuse me?" he said.

"Don't laugh," I said. "This is important to me."

"I WASN'T EXPECTING MUCH FROM YOU," Chicken Little said to Simon. It was the first week of this year's "American Idol" finals. Kevin Covais, aka Chicken Little, was so nicknamed because he was a dead ringer for the big-headed character in a recent Disney movie, the one that ran around screeching that the sky was falling. He was staring down The Godfather, Simon Cowell. The packed auditorium was going wild at the audacity of it. Critiquing Covais's performance of Stevie Wonder's "Part-Time Lover," Simon had all but stuffed the dorky Beantowner in a gym locker. "Absolutely appalling," had been the verdict.