After losing his partner, Mo Alavi faces a group bent on eliminating homosexuality in Terry
Pinaud’s “Chaos: Where Do You Go When You Run From Yourself?”

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Terry Pinaud warns that “Chaos: Where Do You Go When You Run From Yourself?” (ISBN 1475072791) is not for the faint of heart. A story of love and hate, readers follow Mohammed “Mo” Alavi, a transplanted Iranian research doctor in America, not long after he loses his partner Aden Birch, who was in Iraq fighting in Operation Desert Storm. Against his better judgment, Mo has accepted a position at Cook County General in Chicago. The organization is headed up by Dr. Steven Wong, a nationally renowned virologist who has a secret agenda to eliminate homosexuality.

A war widow, an immigrant and now a doctor working for a man who thinks his sexuality is an abomination, Mo begins to lose his mind. The collusion of tragic events has pushed him to the brink of insanity. He can no longer differentiate dreams and memories from his physical reality. There are times when Mo can’t figure out if he is in a bar in Chicago or if he’s somehow in Louisville where he met Aden. The lines even begin to blur when it comes to his character. Is he a healer or a killer?.

In despair, Mo turns to Jack Finch, a Chicago police detective. But everyone’s help comes with a price and agenda of its own, and his relationship with Jack is no different. Jack has a back story that Mo must confront, if he is to survive his own terrifying ordeal. As Dr. Wong’s organization heats up its campaign to terrorize those it deems unworthy, the novel builds to a blistering conclusion.

“Chaos” is a brave and daring novel that doesn’t shy away from controversy, with its frank dialogue and explicit sex scenes. Powerful, blunt and convincing, the novel’s dark events illustrate the raw reality of people consumed by their fears and passions.

“Chaos: Where Do You Go When You Run From Yourself?” is available for sale online at Amazon.com
and other channels.

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Orchard Grove, Maine: Poor, coastal fishing town, close to Boston. Nine months of the year, the town languishes and hides, but come summer, the natives are restless. The town attracts New York and Boston high society to the exclusive and luscious Pointe-Morel Estates on its outskirts. Money pours in, opportunities present themselves, hopes run high, and love and lust run cheap. But this summer is different because Hope, the town’s favorite daughter, is missing. It’s up to the smart but volatile newcomer detective to find her. Is there a connection between Hope’s disappearance and the tourists? Can it be that simple, that trite? Detective Aziz and his colleagues have very little to go on, very little other than the barely sensible words and actions of Johnny Netter, a teenager with a developmental disorder. Sad Johnny, sad because Hope isn’t there to play catch with him. He is anxious and agitated. He shrieks and he claps and stomps, but is there something else in his emoting, is there a connection? Is there more than just missing a friend behind the emoting and the humming? Will Aziz discover the secrets? And if so, what else might he learn about sympathy, compassion, fear, guilt, about our prejudices reflected in our actions and inactions-in short, all that is in the makeup of all of us?

* Paperback: 268 pages
* Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing, LLC (February 4, 2009)
* Language: English

Buy it at Amazon.com

Dr. Zhivago Was a Doctor Too
by Khashayar Tonekaboni

I was watching Dr. Zhivago, David Lean’s 1966 Academy Award winning movie based on Pasternak’s masterpiece, a story about a doctor and a poet during the Russian Revolution. Interestingly, I had been asked to write an article about the duality of professions. More accurately and case-specific, the assignment was on contrasting a life of teaching, healing, and making a living, and a life dedicated to fulfilling a passion.

I must confess I don’t know much about Pasternak’s personal life, but I cannot ignore the parallel between Yuri Zhivago and myself—a boastful statement, but for the fact that, for all intents and purposes, Zhivago is fictitious. He became a famous poet even before he was a doctor. He helped many by his craft and medical know-how, one by one. He reached countless hearts, ears, and eyes through his art.
Seeing patients is an uplifting thing. It has served to bring me out of my shell, into which I have been prone to crawling since childhood. But the most important contrast I can delineate between the two halves of my life is 1) immediate feedback and 2) being recognized as an expert.

The face-to-face experience cannot always be duplicated between the writer and her/his reader. As a doctor, a caregiver, and service provider, it is impossible not to have some feedback almost immediately, be it body language, tone, or a look. Even more importantly, a patient sitting in the chair is there because s/he readily admits that the doctor knows more about certain aspects of her/his health. Otherwise why go?

Such is not the case when a reader picks up a book to read. The reader, or more generally, the consumer, may know far more about the subject matter than the writer/provider. As an example, I cringe when I see any type of medical equipment used in a movie or on the television to examine eyes, but then, that is not why I’m watching the film or the program.
On the other hand and speaking specifically, as different as clinical teaching and patient care can be from writing, I have found they have important commonalities as well, among them, creativity and discipline.
I sometimes feel like a storyteller when I am lecturing to 80 young, eager students—eager until the subject matter becomes so dry that 80 pairs of eyes glaze over, at which point, I tend to become more like a stand-up comedian, grasping at anything to regain the focus of my audience.

Attempting to regain the focus of an audience through repetition or simplification of delivery is what I have to do when I write. Finding creative ways to convey the relationship between intra- and extra-ocular muscles to my students or patients is not unlike trying to describe to a reader how my character feels when he suddenly wakes up in a dark room, alone and with no memory of his past.
In spite of the commonality, there still remains the obvious and practical difference: I have been trained to perform one, while the other is a passion I feel compelled to pursue. Having lived the life of a clinician and a teacher, I flatter myself to think that I have helped a few patients see better, even saved a few from serious maladies; and in the process, hopefully, I have given my students the tools to become better, to the point of reversing roles so that I can learn from them. Mission accomplished.
Pursuing the passion and the dream—to reach countless hearts and eyes and ears—on the other hand, remains just a far-fetched promise. I digress to ask just whose promise?

The ‘mission’ vs. ‘the passion’ has an interesting history in my case. My father, a medical doctor, was against my wasting time on reading novels, which I engaged in incessantly. We didn’t have television during my first ten years, you see. We were advanced that way! So, I read a great deal, a habit that stayed with me through high school and beyond to a lesser degree.
I remember during the summer between my tenth and eleventh grades, I was reading Oliver Twist, the unabridged version (in Persian,
of course.) My father scoffed that I should at least read something serious, like War and Peace. I think he was under the impression that Dickens had written Oliver for kids—having seen Lionel Bart’s musical adaptation of the novel. So, the following summer, I boasted to him that I was reading Tolstoy. “You should be studying your twelfth grade math,” he said heavily.
When I cornered him once to explain why he was against my reading stories, he said he was afraid that I would be influenced too much by fantasy. That would make reality harder to live with. In a way, and more often than not, he was right.
When I came to the U.S., watching movies substituted reading to some degree. Movies take less time and effort. And when you’re going to school, struggling with the subject matter and a foreign language, you don’t have the time to “waste” on fantasy.
Time passed and I got a respectable degree—a doctorate—which would have been impossible without my parents’ enormous sacrifices. And I landed a career at Indiana University School of Optometry. With that came self-confidence, prestige, a comfortable material life, and more.

However the appetite lingers. The dream gnaws. I had stopped writing completely until, as it often happens, the heart ached and forced me back toward the pen. I found writing was a solace, more than a childhood dream. To boot, the old appetite persisted while the heartbreak was forgotten.
Twenty years have passed since I got my Visiting Lecturer position at IU. I am established, respected, in charge. I find perhaps now is the time to vent the passion, to obey the whim so that, just maybe, I can impact minds and hearts just sitting at my laptop. No tools, no drops, no prescriptions, just imagination poured onto monitor and onto paper.

So, the difference, and not the commonality, becomes the defining notion in a life such as mine and Zhivago’s.
Just like him, who, fictitious or not, lived during a very real and significant period of human history, struggling with the death of the person in favor of the community, the demise of the private life in favor of totalitarianism, but on a far smaller scale, I struggle with the mission vs. the dream; balancing practicality and the appetite—silly me—for immortality. Is that the promise? Oh, what a wonder to be remembered like Hugo, Dickens, Lee, Dumas, Tolstoy… In the movie, thousands came to Zhivago’s funeral. They were not his patients. They were his readers. Is that the fascination, to have touched lives without really having touched—in my case—eyes?
Perhaps the fascination immortality holds does have a hand in a writer’s desire to write, a painter to paint, and on so on. However, I wonder how many would continue, never expecting the result of their labor to ever be published, hang in a museum or be heard in an auditorium.

For me, spending a few hours with the characters I create, the words that I put down, the world I craft is an unadulterated joy, a joy that is interrupted and intruded upon by the need for practicality. Although I freely admit that, if not for the day-to-day necessities and concern for the future, I’d probably be holed up somewhere surrounded by my imaginary world, as my father had predicted. Still, there resides this need, which is as sacred and as real as everything I do during the 40 to even 80-hour workweeks. And it demands to be fulfilled.
But I suppose that’s what weekends are for.

Khashayar Tonekaboni graduated with a B.A. degree in biological sciences from Indiana University in 1981, continued in the field at California State University, and finally was admitted in and obtained a doctorate in optometry from Southern College of Optometry in Memphis in 1987. He is also a writer of fiction under the pen name of Terry Pinaud. He is currently a clinical assistant professor at Indiana University School of Optometry and holds the directorship position at the Atwater Eye Care Center.

Project: Enhance suggestibility of the subject.

Method: Medical extension of coma and amnesia induction.

Purpose: Eradicate homosexual behavior

Subject: Omar Kebalah, an Egyptian teenager from an affluent family, who travels to Evanston to prepare for his future. He is afraid. Coming to the United States is his father’s idea—Dr. Mohammad Kebalah. Omar hides behind nationalism and political idealism, but there is a secret he’s been keeping. Chris Levinson, the host family’s son, helps him unlock the secret. Seventeen, rich, handsome, and invincible, they go on a road trip in Chris’ brand new car. They never reach their destination. Chris and another boy are killed. Omar goes into a coma. And the story has only just begun.

Excerpt

Finch was taking a calculated risk. He had seen something in Ann’s eyes the night he spoke to her in front of the grocery store. She was startled, of course, but there was something else, something that wanted to peer through her desire to control, beyond her elitist and defiant tone. There were tiny sparks of the woman underneath the prominent scientist that wanted to push through, held back only by determination. He had seen the same fear in Ann’s eyes as she was almost fleeing Wong’s office. Finch had also been in touch with Melanie, Ann’s gossipy assistant, who had been very helpful. The death of Ann’s patients had attracted the detective’s already piqued interest. Perhaps this would help the detective break through the icy exterior and get at what was underneath.

“Well, detective, don’t just stand there.”

“Dr. Dole,” Finch said with a start. “I’m sorry, but I just wanted to…”

Ann walked close quickly. “Don’t tell me you just happened to be in the neighborhood or because you want to help me take out the trash.”

“No, doctor, I am here to speak to you.”

Ann set down the trash bag. “Listen, detective,” she said through her teeth, “I don’t know what you’ve been up to or what you think I’m up to. Frankly, I don’t care. All I want is to be left alone. This is bordering on harassment.”

“Doctor,” Finch said calmly, “I believe couple of your patients have a bigger complaint; that is, they would if they could.”

“What the hell are you trying to say?”

Finch did not answer immediately. He was searching. Was he seeing the fear, perhaps even remorse, beyond the growl? “Doctor,” he said, measuring his words, “I’m only trying to understand why your patients die. That’s not too unreasonable, is it?”

“This book was unlike anything I could’ve imagined! The characters were so well developed that you felt as if you knew each of them personally. I couldn’t put it down, and finished it in two days. I became so involved in the story that I even dreamt about it when I finished it. I definitley recommend this book!” – Reader Reviews for The Parallel Triangle