Dust Within a Thought

By C. Anthony Delano

In the Novel, Dust Within A Thought... Dr. Kat Sheroki is in her early thirties and recently divorced. By all measures, she is an effective psychiatrist, yet maintains a cool and comfortable distance from others including her patients. An intelligent, organized and tidy person, she treats life with cold indifference desiring to control people and thus gain better control over herself. She is fascinated by and feels an immediate connection to a new client, Calvin Szymanski.
Calvin Szymanski, in his late thirties, suffers with a long history of mental illness and lives his life in constant delusion. Solitary and kindhearted, he desires a complete escape from reality for him to try to control his life. He also feels an instant connection to Dr. Sheroki.
After their initial appointment, both Kat and Calvin have differing issues. Calvin experiences a panic attack on his way home nearly hitting a child on a bike. Arriving home, he escalates to a violent episode but eventually calms down. He craves peace and solitude and visits a patch of vineyard woods once owned by his family. Though seemingly placated, he experiences a psychotic episode resulting in an accident that ands him in the emergency room and an eventual stay in a psychotic ward.
After her initial meeting with Calvin, Kat relaxes at her home with a drink and reflects on her life. Her cat knocks over a vase resulting in a pile of glass and water. While attending to the issue, she cuts her hands on the glass causing her to hit her head into a coffee table. The blood causes her to become emotional and somewhat delusional. Believing the internal stress of her life is the cause she struggles to stay intact both physically and emotionally.
During the following days, Kat begins to spiral as she obsesses over Calvin and acquires new struggles beyond her control. Her ability to remain stable is brief.
Both begin to question reality ... their reality ... and that of each other. As they share each other’s experiences and develop their own perspectives, we find Kat and Calvin might not exist, at least not outside the imagination and the pages written by the author of the story. The ending connects both Kat and Calvin directly to the writer of this novel, his personality, characteristics, and experiences in a surprising conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C. Anthony Delano
• Release date: Jul 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463793404

C. Anthony Delano

C. Anthony Delano lives in West Michigan, where he enjoys hiking, reading, writing, painting, and dreams of sailing Lake Michigan.His stories often push the question of reality... does it truly exist? And the dark angle that question inherits, while attempting to remain compassionate towards the characters and settings he creates.Book reviews of my work, good or bad, are appreciated.

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Dust Within A Thought

A Novel

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By C. Anthony Delano

Acknowledgements

For my grandmother

Donna M. Posthumus

©Craig Anthony Delano 2019

All Rights Reserved.

"To the as-yet unborn,

to all innocent wisps of

undifferentiated nothingness:

Watch out for life."

-KURT VONNEGUT

From the novel, Deadeye Dick

From the Writer

I am aware my story may appeal to a specialized audience, and those with a penchant for knowledge, but I believe it will truly help those souls dealing with mental challenges … by themselves or that of a loved one.

Although this story is fiction, it is influenced by my own personal experiences. Having lived with mental illness and experiencing that of a loved with mental health issues, it encouraged and influenced me to share this story.

This story is not clinically driven, but emotionally driven. The reader will notice the structure and format of this story is a bit different from other books. This will illustrate how mental illness can often disrupt and consume people’s lives without a care for structure and cause chaos.

Dust Within a Thought is a heartfelt account detailing the downward spiral and ultimate deconstruction of two distinct personalities … a psychiatrist and patient. The intense story explores roads many do not realize exist but will also be all too familiar to countless individuals and their families working through the often treacherous and emotional road of psychological disorders.

It is a labor of love and I hope you both enjoy the story and find it enlightening.

C. Anthony Delano

CHAPTER ONE

Dr. Kat Sheroki stood in her office, her hands on her hips as she leaned back and forth side-to-side gazing from her second story suite window. Her deep, hazel eyes were a perfect complement to her light brown hair, and softly painted freckles on a pale complexion. Her short, petite and gracefully slender figure seemed a contradiction by a professional sense of superiority and detachment some may have described as ice-cold and demanded sharp respect.

Lifting her coffee mug to her lips, she would have benefitted from a refill, but had not the time or enthusiasm to take a trip to the break room. Instead, she slowly swirled the remnants around, and peered numbly into it to discern the coffee stains. It looked as if an alternate world had been turned upside down and inside out, and its land dwelled above a muddy ocean … a concept to which many of her patients could relate. She set the mug down turning her attention to the window overlooking parking lot.

She noticed smudges on the window glass and dirt and dust in the corners, which irritated and twisted up her nerves … she tried to ignore it. Perfecting everything had been a constant headache and took a great deal of mental time and energy. Recognizing her issue, she attempted to think of things she could be doing instead … if only she could ignore the smudges and refocus. Unable to think of anything better or more important, she strutted to her bookshelf, retrieved cleaning supplies and cleaned off the window and sill corners. Though she felt relieved, it was less than she anticipated. The tediousness of her habits seemed unnecessary after the attention had been given.

Mid-afternoon often provided a mood of restrained containment compared with the swiftness of activity earlier in the day. Sunny and slightly breezy, seagulls were congregating and scavenging around the lot. Kat had been amused by the communication skills of birds. Instinctively, they rationalize their place of existence and distinguish their individual breeds. They live peacefully among their own collaborative environment … unlike humans. And unlike humans, birds don’t require a psychiatrist. As a result, Kat felt blessed many human beings leaned towards the psychosomatic.

One man in the parking lot caught her attention as he hesitantly stepped from a rusty old hatchback. He seemed peculiar as he glanced suspiciously at his surroundings, seemingly with mistrust and perhaps a touch of resentment. He obviously wanted to be elsewhere … as did Kat.

Kat sometimes wished she possessed a keener imagination, allowing her to escape leisurely into her mind and enjoy, rather than instinctively over-evaluate. Though a consideration it frightened her having no experience in that kind of mental escape. She wondered, How and when do people know when to return from their deep imaginations? She felt uncertain she would know how to return once caught up in deep imagination, and she knew certain clients never figured out how to return themselves.

She decided her best escape route, however unsatisfying it had been, was to continue to stare listlessly through the window. It seemed a safe option. But the man she observed in the parking lot seemed to severely struggle with reality, and if he were not able to find an escape he would soon break. Her intuition told her his choice escape would be settling within his own mind … and she felt somewhat envious.

The man appeared to be in his late twenties, a few years younger than Kat, and his boyish mannerism seemed to clash with his apparent age. He looked a little too thin, possibly causing him to appear a bit taller. He seemed youthfully careless and unsure of what to do and how to do it, appearing to struggle if shutting his own car door would be right or wrong. He made several attempts before shutting it completely. It seemed each time he tried, he shut it as softly as possible in an apparent attempt at not being heard … careful not to draw attention. It would have made no difference. Kat shook her head thinking, the only people roaming around were the mentally ill and a few professionals, like livestock being examined by potential buyers. She cringed at her thought of entertaining such a morbid idea. Though these came to her much too often.

The man’s hair, nearly black, looked somewhat long and unkempt, and he wore a vintage-style black slim fitting tee shirt with dark colored jeans. Ordinary clothes, but he wore them well with an unusual charm Kat could not put her finger on. He walked cautiously towards the building with his head down, and his arms pressed against his body, causing him to seem quite frail.

Something about this man piqued her curiosity, but as he disappeared under her window she realized he wasn’t much different from any other of her clients … sad and tormented for some unknown reason. She felt, all living in a secluded and self-absorbed world but being as much a part of it as anybody else, and the responsibility of every community, could be a scary thought.

She let out a deep sigh. She often asked herself why she had chosen psychiatry, but simply, a curiosity grew into ambition, which made her determined to be the best. She wasn’t. But she looked good on paper. She thought paper is what matters most … paper is ultimately where people are judged despite actions being more accurate. She looked at her filing cabinet where she kept all her client files … her depression visited her again.

She returned to her desk; an antique oak teacher’s desk, painted mat black, nudged and dented, chipped but enticing, which she had dragged out from her mom’s basement years before. A black wooden executive chair on rollers accompanied the desk, a remanufactured copy of a classic.

She browsed through the file for her next client, a new client by the name of Calvin Vincent Szymanski. Thirty-seven-year old Calvin had a long history of psychiatric treatment and a violent criminal record. He had recently been released from an extensive hospital stay. He had two daughters from different relationships; Mayla, age seventeen, and Veronica, age eleven, with whom he had no contact. He had never married.

Kat sat down and stared … out into a void below the surface of a daydream but failing to capture a dream … she came back and pulled opened her left-hand drawer. She removed a framed picture of her and Eric, taken during a vacation at Yellow Stone two summers into their three-and-a-half-year marriage. She often wondered why she kept it. Perhaps it had been a token, an unused and expired token, into the life, the person, and the daughter her mother desired Kat to be. The kind of life her mother considered to be the natural way of things and Kat had persistently denied since her divorce.

Throughout her life, her mother, grandparents, friends, and acquaintances, often accused Kat, of being stubborn, and she had even overheard her stubbornness mentioned by colleagues and subordinates on occasion. She appeared renowned for this and thought of the accusation as strength. It caused her to feel more individual than what others were by taking her own route. Her stubbornness seemed a virtue, a means to tread her own path, in her own way, despite what others thought. She felt going against what other people considered the best way to do things not only separated her from them but set herself above them.

She needed to consider herself above others, where she could observe, contemplate, and keep a safe distance. She felt when people make themselves equal to others, they limit their vision, their senses dull, and they end up in some sort of trouble, involved in situations where they do not belong … other people’s business, and their lives become more and more complicated and they become trapped. Many people seemed to her to embrace this kind of lifestyle, the excitement of drama, but Kat wanted nothing to do with it.

This had been a reason why she had poor relationships with people. Even with Eric, she thought him below her, her subordinate, and in a way, she treated him as such. He had been there to serve her when she wanted him around, but most of the time she acted if he hadn’t even been there, more correctly, as if she hadn’t been around.

As their marriage progressed, they argued, which she would almost always instigate, although she would never admit to it, but she knew. She would nit-pick everything he did and let every small habit of his irritate her. She judged his character so severely where Eric would often refer to her in a third-person perspective rather than speaking to her directly. He didn’t think anybody could ever loathe him as much as Kat.

She had loved Eric, as much as she could love anybody, but he rightfully blamed her for being too distant and not letting him in. She didn’t let anybody in. But his condemnation for her coldness became irrelevant. This would be the last time she let herself hurt emotionally, she assured herself, and the last time she became emotionally involved.

The incident had been painful and complicated, and the betrayal dug deep under her skin. She vowed to never again let anybody tear her apart again, as she felt it better not to trust than to feel any kind of pain. This had been a view she coveted long before meeting Eric, but she had liked Eric enough to let him in only a little, but even a little left her completely vulnerable, and for that she blamed herself.

She returned the photo and softly closed the drawer. Maybe someday it won’t be there anymore, she thought with a heavy sigh.

She heard a tap at the door, as it slowly opened. Her young nurse, Jessica, appeared and Kat thought her much too chipper and playful for a psychiatric nurse. With Kat’s approval Jessica led Calvin Szymanski into her office.

Kat felt surprise when the young man she had observed in the parking lot drudgingly sauntered into her office, his head hanging down and his eyes vaguely looking toward the floor, avoiding any eye contact. He seemed as unsteady and as uncomfortable as an eleven-month-old baby learning how to walk, understanding but hesitant to learn the limits of a newfound skill.

Calvin appeared older than Kat first thought watching him from her window. He had strong, somewhat deep lines underneath his eyes and around his mouth, and his skin was dull and slightly blemished. But his gestures and characteristics were of somebody much younger … perhaps somebody whom had been sheltered for too long.

Kat understood isolation, for she had isolated herself for much of her life, whether it had been a means to be physically away from others, or by removing herself mentally. Her isolation had always been important to her. She liked herself, and felt she been her own best and most trusted friend. Everyday she yearned to return home if only to isolate herself. But, her isolation was never truly an escape … she never let things bother her … whether keeping things neat and organized, or simply her negative point of view. It all wore her down and caused her to age steadily.

* * *

Kat asked him to sit down and he obliged, relieved at being given direction. Seconds after he sat, it appeared as if he felt he sat in the wrong chair and he looked back and forth between the vacant seat next to him and the floor in front of him. Kat noted his indecisiveness, which appeared to cause him much stress and anxiety. He reached his right arm to his left side and touched the armrest, touched the armrest with his left hand, and again with his right, and pulled his right arm back over to his right side … this seemed to reassure him. It reminded Kat of when she had been a young child and superstitious. Every time she would pass through a corridor she would tap one side of it four times and counted, one, two, three, bonus. The fourth time had always been noted as the bonus, although she was unsure why. And she did not remember why she had had this obsessive habit. Perhaps she thought it had been for luck, or to dissuade bad fortune. Nevertheless, this habit eventually ceased.

Jessica handed Kat her assessment report, left the room, and closed the door behind her. Kat casually skimmed the report as she sat down at her desk.

Calvin lifted his eyes slightly and studied her office to hide his awkwardness, but he wasn’t convincing. Kat could guess he wasn’t interested in the medical journals he carelessly shuffled through on the table beside him. He constantly moved his vacant stare from a cheap ceramic vase on the bookshelf and back to the medical Journals. He didn’t appear to be handsome, but strangely appealing. His eyes were dark, distant and painful … tormented eyes, like those of a recovering alcoholic, but not bludgeoned and red.

Kat began and asked him questions about his illness, medications, and lifestyle. He answered by shaking and nodding his head, slowly and forcefully, and when Kat asked him to answer by responding yes or no, he became anxious. His hands began to quiver, but he complied, answering in soft tones.

His left leg bounced in erratic movements as he shuffled in his chair. He scratched his forehead above his right eyebrow in growing annoyance with the questions. Kat decided he had nearly reached his limit and stopped the questions. She told him she understood this to be uncomfortable for him and he could take a moment for a breather. He stared at her, and she understood by the tortured and despairing look on his face meant she couldn’t possibly understand. He turned his attention to the Newton’s Cradle, which rested on the end of her desk, a gift from Eric. She opted to tap an end, and Calvin seemed to ease a little as he watched each ball bearing gently bounce back and forth.

The movement of the cradle seemed to calm him. As he fell into a trance, his dark eyes appeared distant. It looked as if they fell back a hundred miles away, appearing he had left but his body remained. Kat, curious to know where his mind had gone, but became somewhat alarmed by his demeanor and dared not ask. She felt that should she try should would not be able to wake him but she wasn’t going to try.

Then after a few moments, he suddenly, as if possessed, got to his feet and went to a small stand between Kat’s two office windows where an old CD player and CD’s rested. He gave a pleading look, and she understood he was asking if he could look at the CD’s … she nodded consent. He pulled out a jewel case and studied it. She asked what kind of music he preferred, and he held out a copy of Horowitz: The Last Romantic; an album she had never listened to, nor had she recalled where she obtained it

Surprised by his request, she allowed him to play the CD. Though barely audible, he began to speak with a voice moving with mellifluous charm and he spoke enthusiastically about his love and knowledge of classical music and art; smooth and agile were his words ranging in soft tones like a lullaby. But he still could not look her in the eyes.

Kat got used to clients changing personalities on a dime, but this transmutation by Calvin was unexpected. Even though it initially appeared his personality changed, it rather seemed more about his comfort increasing … in a way it led to immediate progress and growth. Like a child taking his first steps, it seemed to incite change and growth into an adult in a matter of seconds. It amused her as much as it had puzzled her. His performance seemed magnificent and put a smile upon her face. But at the same time, his unexpected personality caused her to feel a little uncomfortable, because she did not like surprises, and he seemed to have experienced a personality change, rather than merely stepping out of his comfort zone. Surprises interrupted her agenda and her assumptions, both she relied upon to feel in control of herself and her situations. But she already felt that she could keep in control of her sessions with Calvin while he remained her client, because she felt she could correctly assume it wouldn’t be difficult to not down his confidence when she needed to, and he retract to the meek person whom first strolled across the parking lot.

Kat referred to people’s actions as a performance. And this one by Calvin was alluring. He became charismatic and charming, amused and passionate, and perfectly eccentric, waving his hands around in gestures as if directing an orchestra.

People are complex. So much dwells within a human body, the mind, and she felt consoled in the moment when she could experience different perspectives and personalities people would rarely offer and let it appear before her. It stood as a sign of trust, and now, Kat saw herself already getting somewhere with Calvin Szymanski.

Kat felt she lived a complete contradiction. She did not trust anyone, but she desired people to trust her. She strived for people’s trust because it benefited her. Maybe this was a reason she didn’t want to trust people … she did not want them to benefit from her lest she become susceptible and helpless. She was determined, this would never happen again. But even though she made herself that commitment, and intended to follow through with it, she lived her lived with an emptiness that only connecting with a person could fill. She understood this, but she would never give in, she thought, never let another Eric get the best of her, ever again. She made this promise to herself everyday since she and Eric split up.

Still, she had been put off guard by his change and felt herself blush. She hoped he hadn’t noticed and gets the wrong idea, as many men did. But he remained indifferent, moved only by the soft tones flowing from the small speakers.

Calvin acted as if she weren’t in the room, even though he acknowledged her by looking and speaking to her. She felt he had been treating her like a prop in a show, which she did not particularly like, but decided to let him continue, as uncomfortable as it made her feel.

She had not been certain what this change or newfound comfort meant, or if it were to continue. Had this been the true Calvin? If he had showed his true self, or the person he desired to be, could he find the consistency to maintain. She hoped this Calvin to be the true Calvin Szymanski. She knew people could look horrible on paper, but be wonderful in life, and vice versa … like her. As a psychiatrist she had to keep a professional distance and careful not to trust people too much. For Kat this wasn’t difficult.

But, if Calvin could find his consistency and stick by it, she believed he