Thyroids, A Love Story(Barry) “Nok. Nok. Nok. Aram noks but nobody seams home.”

Beatrice Monahan, the writing instructor, read from the wrinkled manuscript in a flat monotone then, like a moral indictment, waved the half dozen pages over her head at the disheveled young man sitting three rows back near the water cooler. "The verb, knock, begins with the letter 'k' and seams are stitches used to bind fabric." Her hazel eyes drifted off at an oblique angle, as though addressing the student directly might push the writing instructor beyond her emotional limits.

Dressed in steel-toed work boots and a blue shirt with the Firestone Tire emblem stitched above the left pocket, Abi Petrosyan ran a thumb and index finger over a bearded chin in a repetitive, soothing gesture. A wild outcropping of curly black hair cascaded down over his ears. “Story is goot... yes, no?”

“I appreciate the fact that that English is a second language," The barrel-chested woman observed, "but, perhaps on rare occasion you could consult a dictionary?”

“Computer hab spell check,” he offered. “Is same thing.”

Sage, who sat near the front, wondered if the writing instructor went out of her way to foster the image of a physical grotesque. The frumpy woman stood five foot three and weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. Like some displaced time traveler from the psychedelic sixties, she favored flowery, moo moos and wire-framed granny glasses. Under the best of circumstances, the woman with the orangey hair would never be a fashion plate. Sage wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to discover that Ms. Monahan never shaved her armpits or bothered with feminine deodorants.

At the previous meeting of the writers' group, Abi told a funny story.

Over the winter he traveled back to his homeland to visit relatives. As the Beechcraft King Air twin-prop landed in Baku, the plane badly overshot the runway by several hundred feet, caroming off the asphalt into an open field of barley. The Caspian Sea was visible out the grimy passenger window a short distance to the east. "Was not so good the brakes," the Armenian immigrant noted with a goofy smile that belied his somber tone recounting the ordeal.

As Abi explained it, the region was desperately poverty stricken, the government feudal and corrupt. When a domestic plane experienced mechanical problems or needed routine maintenance, spare parts were often purchased on the black market. They were third rate, the substandard metal either too soft or brittle. It's just the way things were. The provincial country was one of six independent Turkish states with Russia to the north and Iran due south.

Abi desperately wanted to get it all down on paper, to chronicle his bizarre experiences. "I go home for Christmas to visit family, not for to swim in Caspian Sea." He chuckled and rubbed good-naturedly at his hairy chin. Abi was just Abi - a grease monkey, heartbroken over the immutable loss of his spiritual homeland. So he joked in fractured English and, as best he could, jotted down his life story. Nok. Nok.Nok.


*****


Eight students signed up for the creative writing workshop. Two dropped out before the first class. Among the participants, there was Carl, a sixteen year-old high school junior with a twitchy eye. Phyllis, the menopausal housewife, admittedly hadn’t written anything more challenging than a grocery list in years. A chubby girl, Sage Ostrowski, waitressed at Ryan’s Diner. Abi, the Armenian who emigrated from Azerbaijan in central Asia, worked as a mechanic at the tire shop.

The first session, Ms Monahan inquired about the mechanic's name.

“Is short for Abimelki,” he explained. Abi meant father and melik king. The Assyrian variant was Abimelki, a name which was common in biblical times but not so anymore. The Armenian mechanic's short stories contained a veritable junk heap of dangling participles, split infinitives, ill-chosen adjectives and other syntactical abominations. But everyone in the writing group was grammatically challenged. Phyllis, the grocery list lady, favored absurdly prolonged sentences that gobbled up entire paragraphs before a period ever materialized to bring the verbal chaos to a thudding halt. Wearing his anal-compulsive angst like a badge of honor, Carl, the child prodigy, suffered autobiographical diarrhea, and Sage wrote exclusively in short, choppy sentences. Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Abi, whose name meant 'father-king' in a defunct, thoroughly moribund language, was still grappling with the proper spelling of one-syllable words.

“I liked Abi’s story just fine,” Sage blurted.

Beatrice lowered her head and stared at the girl over the top of her bifocals. “How so?”

“Faulty grammar taken aside, he did fine describing the tension between the local Christian villagers and their Moslems neighbors.”

"Unfortunately, editors wading through a slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts at the Yale Review are looking for something a bit more polished." The instructor’s rebuttal was accompanied by a glacial smile. Retreating to the safe haven of the oak desk at the front of the room, she teacher set the class to work on an impromptu, flash fiction assignment.

Abi, who was unfamiliar with the Yale Review, grinned proudly and continued to stroke his lush beard. Nothing fazed the middle-aged man. His people had been massacred by the Turks, routed from their ancestral homeland and dispersed to an unsympathetic Diaspora. What more could a mean-spirited Beatrice Monahan do to deepen the hurt?

“Screw the Yale Review!” As if on cue, everyone in the class ceased writing and shifted their attention to the rear of the class, where Carl was seated with his head down and legs splayed out at a perverse angle beneath the desk. “Dickens wrote in run-on sentences. Nobody gave him grief for the endless wordiness.”

“Excuse me?” Beatrice compressed her lips together in a tight, bloodless line and eyed the youth with mild annoyance. “What was that?”

Carl waved a slender wrist fitfully in the air, carving the space into manageable chunks. When he spoke again, there was a shrill, neurasthenic intensity to his tone that was offsetting, almost unnerving. “Jane Austen was addicted to double negatives. William Faulkner frequently started sentences with conjunctions.” The boy’s eyes flitted about the room as though searching for moral support.

“Your point?” The instructor could sense her iron-fisted control over the class ebbing away.

“Maybe Abi’s grammatical gaffes aren’t so terrible.”

“It’s true that not all grammar violations are created equally.” Beatrice Monahan was clearly on the defensive, “but then, some blunders indicate a blatant disregard for what’s commonly accepted. These are the result of laziness, cluelessness, or lousy editing, and they’re not okay.”

Carl shook his head violently and began karate chopping the air with renewed vigor. “Cummings refused to capitalize,… H. L. Mencken wrote incomplete sentences. Arthur Conan Doyle favored the passive tense.”

Beatrice waited a good ten seconds before addressing the agitated student. “Are you done?”

Whatever elicited the verbal eruption had run its treacherous course. Carl retreated into his insular, ever-so-private universe. “Just trying to make a point,” he added meekly.

* * * * *

An hour later toward the end of the class, Beatrice asked, “As writers, who would you want to emulate?”

The minute hand on the clock over the chalkboard was edging up on nine p.m.. Everyone was tired, their creative juices played out. Carl announced that Raymond Carver was the best contemporary American writer.

“He’s dead,” Beatrice interjected, “which makes him less than contemporary.”

“Yes,…” Carl blushed and his eyelid twittered an impromptu ballet, “but he’s still quite popular.”

Phyllis was a diehard Alice Monroe addict, having slogged through most everything the Canadian writer had written. Sage was partial to Hemingway and J.D. Salinger.

Beatrice smiled frigidly. “And who do you read, Mr. Petrosyan?” The reptilian expression deepened, grew more intractable. “Of all the great literary figures, who’s your favorite?”

“Greatest writer is Saroyan… William Saroyan!”

“Saroyan,” Beatrice repeated. Abi’s response caught her off guard but only momentarily. “Some people have accused him of excessive sentimentality.”

Sage cringed. Why couldn’t she just let Abi alone? Give the foreigner his space?

“What have you read by Saroyan?” she pressed.

“I dunno.” Abi’s eyes fogged over. After an uncomfortable pause he mumbled, “The Human Comedy.”

“Anything else?”

“My Name is Aram.”

Beatrice Monahan drummed her pudgy fingers on the Formica desktop. Her mannish jaw screwed to one side, deep in thought. “And what did you learn from Saroyan?”

“I dunno,” he returned dully. “Was Armenian like me.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t answer my question. You mentioned a specific author so you must remember some plot, narrative… denouement.” Drawing the last word out with a decidedly French accent, she was clearly baiting the mechanic with the Goodyear Tire logo emblazoned on his chest. “Last chance to redeem yourself,” Beatrice chirped,” and offer your classmates some personal insight into the writer’s weltanschauung.”

Abi cracked his knuckles noisily then rubbed his somber face with calloused, grease stained hands. “Saroyan… is greatest writer whole universe!”

* * * * *

“Want to grab a coffee?” Sage was waiting outside the community college center when Abi emerged.

“Would be nice,” Abi watched as the other students filtered out into the parking lot. A Honey Dew just up the street stayed open until eleven. At the donut shop they ordered hot drinks. "Something to eat with that?" the waitress asked. Sage shook her head.

When they were seated, Abi sipped his coffee and glanced out the front window. The last of the dusky, late summer light had bled out of the sky wrapping the town in wooly darkness. From his wallet he withdrew a tattered picture postcard folded in quarters. “Is mine country. Murovdag… is the highest mountain range in the Lesser Caucasus.”

He handed her the picture, which showed a rugged, hilly country with grassy valleys and snowcapped mountains in the far distance. A stone structure constructed in a combination of Byzantine or Roman styles – she couldn’t be sure – stood in the foreground. A dozen arched columns rose thirty feet in the air creating an outdoor portico. “Is beautiful…no?”

“Yes, quite lovely.”

She returned the card, which he refolded with infinite care like a family heirloom.

“Key, kitten, kite, kilo, kiss, kick, kangaroo is begin with k,”, Abi sputtered bitterly, remembering Beatrice Monahan’s snide indignities. Is no ‘k’ sound with knock.”

Sage suddenly felt a surge of homicidal rage toward the florid, red-haired teacher with her effete predilections.

“Silent letter,” Abi repeated wearily. “Is stupid… make no sense.”

“For what it’s worth, Beatrice hasn’t had a nice thing to say about anyone’s writing.”

The previous week the instructor trashed one of Sage’s stories, insisting the main characters were unsympathetically drawn - little more than one-dimensional stick figures and talking heads. The expository prose was tedious, dialogue stiff. “I thought your story rather touching,” Sage noted. “What Beatrice said earlier was a cheap shot.”

“I spell,” Abi observed glumly, “like second grader.”

“Getting published in the Yale Review isn't the point.” Sage shook her head emphatically. “Never was.” “Maybe you’re lonely... homesick, so you write about a mountain village ten thousand mile away in the Lesser Caucasus and, in pouring your heart out, come to terms with the loss.”

A mother with two freckle-faced children entered the doughnut shop. They bought an assortment of donuts and disappeared back out into the street. “How’s your thyroid condition?”

The odd question caught Abi totally off guard. In response to his baffled expression, Sage added, “When I got to class, you were shaking one of those distinctive, butterfly-shaped pills from a plastic prescription container into your palm.” She blew on the coffee before raising the Styrofoam cup to her lips. “I took Synthroid for six month. Gave me the goddamn heebie-jeebies... almost had a nervous breakdown.”

“You don’t take medicine now?”

“Not that crap!” Sage shook her head violently then leaned closer over the table and continued in a confidential tone. "We belong to an exclusive club… more like a carnival freak show," the girl added almost as an afterthought.

"What is?"

"People with thyroid conditions… we're always looking for something better, comparing notes."

"You have a funny way of putting things."

A black man with dreadlocks and a guitar case slung over his shoulder entered the donut shop. He ordered a coffee with a glazed donut and headed back out into the evening stillness. "Brain fog… ever get it?"

Abi nibbled at his jelly donut. "Some days is worse," he confided.

Brain fog. You couldn't think straight or remember the simplest detail. It was like being diagnosed with presenile dementia forty years too soon. How did you explain such nuttiness to 'normal' people? Brain fog - what a stupid expression!

"Some days," he noted, "I can hardly think straight, I'm so screwed up." He cleared his throat. “Cold… always cold. Even in summer, sleep with wool cover.”

"What about the heebie-jeebies?" Abi’s face went blank. Sage raised a hand, palm down over the table and the fingers fluttered listlessly. "The jitters, shakes, the creeps…”

“Yeah.” The middle-aged man smiled sheepishly. “I go work Goodyear Tire, but brain go somewhere else.”

Sage nodded sympathetically. “Some days are worse than others." The endocrinologist initially started Sage on a regimen of seventy-five micrograms levothyroxine. The first week she was bushwhacked by panic attacks in the lobby of the Brandenberg Public Library; a few days later while climbing a short flight of stairs, she felt an erratic flurry of palpitations mimicking angina, then broke out in a cold sweat.

Dr. Balcewicz’s response was to increase dosage.

"Why are you giving me more medicine, if I don’t feel good?"

Dr. Balcewicz, a pear-shaped man with a florid complexion and bristly, salt-and-pepper moustache, grinned affably. "Your TSH levels are still much too high. The temporary unpleasantness will subside over time. Trust me."

What good was trust when a patient found herself in worse shape than before she sought medical intervention? At their next meeting Sage complained, "If you don't take me off this dog shit, I’m gonna go nuts."

“You aren’t giving the pills enough time to work properly.”

“What about desiccated animal hormone?” Sage learned about the old-school therapy on the internet.

"Wrong percentage of T3 versus T4," the older man in the clinical white jacket replied authoritatively. "What works for pigs and bovines is ineffective for humans… chemistry is all wrong."

"But I read where tons of people swear by the stuff."

"Mostly crackpots and older people," the doctor said, "who took the stuff a century ago, before there was a sensible alternative." Leaning forward, he patted her lightly on the shoulder. "Look, you're a reasonable kid. You want the best that modern medicine has to offer, not some outmoded, nineteenth century snake oil."

Actually, Sage did want outmoded, nineteenth century gobbledygook. Outdated poppycock, twaddle, quackery - what the hell did Sage care as long as it made her feel half-human again?

Dr. Balcewicz stared at the morose young woman seated on the opposite side of the desk. His pokerfaced expression never wavered. The impasse was broken only when the doctor reluctantly reached for his prescription pad and began scratching out a new order. "Levoxyl is a safe alternative to the generics." He pushed the script across the desk. "Let's see how you make out on this new medication." Before Sage could collect her addled thoughts, the endocrinologist was already racing out the door toward an adjacent examining room.

Abi finished his donut and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. "What you take now?"

"A desiccated supplement made from pig thyroids.

“Doctor gipt you?”

She shook her head. “Most traditional MD's won't prescribe organics. They claim it’s voodoo medicine, so I gave doctor Balcewicz the bum’s rush and switched to a naturopath." Reaching into her purse Sage located a pen, scribbled some numbers on a clean napkin and handed it to him. "There's my telephone. Like I said, it’s an exclusive club and us thyroid freaks got to stick together.”

* * * * *

Prickly ash bark, sarsaparilla, oat seed, shizandra berry, ashwaganda and maca root.... Before leaving the community college parking lot, Sage fished about in the glove compartment of her Toyota. “Here try this.” She handed Abi a smallish, opaque bottle.

“What is?”

“An adrenal support herbal formula. I got a spare bottle at home. Just follow the directions.”

From a backpack Abi withdrew an inch-thick paperback with a lemony yellow cover. “Is goot, no?”

Sage glanced at the title. English Grammar for Dummies. “Yes, I’m sure it will help.”

“There, their, they’re… is difficult language, but I learn.”

“It’s hard enough,” Sage confirmed, “for people who were born in America.”

Abi retrieved the book and buried it back in the canvass bag. “Yesterday I went to library…read Chekhov, second best writer whole world.”

“What did you learn from the Russian?”

“Only write ordinary life.”

“What else?”

“Don’t waste words.”

*****
Later that night, Abi dribbled ten drops of the rust-colored herbal solution into a tumbler of water and tossed down the bitter solution. Sage was seeing a naturopath. Maybe he would make an appointment with the holistic practitioner to discuss a non-pharmaceutical alternative. An hour after taking the herbal remedy, the Armenian already felt better, although he realized, full well, that the euphoric sense of well being was probably more wishful thinking. Still later that night as he lay under the covers, Abi felt warm. He removed a blanket - just one as a precautionary gesture. The heebie-jeebies weren't completely gone, but manageable. And his spirits lifted ever-so-slightly. Maybe when the hormonal brain fog dissipated and an implacable universe of silent ‘k’s had been laid to rest, Abi Petrosyan, whose plane almost ended up at the bottom of the Caspian Sea and name meant father-king in an ancient tongue, would write the next contemporary American masterpiece.

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