insomnia; a midnight fresco
by Bobby Caldwell
In the middle of the night, the third shift CO stuffs tomorrow through the bars of my cell.
A single sheet of paper.
I almost remember hearing it brush against the bars last night. But that was hours ago, when I was still successfully engaged in the act of sleep. My current version of "sleep" consists of a never-ending attempt to find a position novel enough to buy a few more minutes of sweet, sweet, oblivion. Deep down I know it's too late—that there is no such position—and that the morning will soon steal the horizon.
Bastard.
Still, I refuse to open my eyes.
If only my petulance could somehow fortify my ears.
Cell doors as heavy as wrecking balls crank open and slam closed with a rhythm beyond the ability of any single individual involved. The battle cries of early-morning dominoes—games waged over tiny stainless steel tables whose seats have been welded in place to prevent theft, or murder, or anything close to a comfortable sitting position—join the sonic fray. Faceless combatants bark spasms, Pentecostal tongues, to commemorate cut books and trump cards in a contest of spades that will go on in perpetuity. This ante meridiem symphony, the soundtrack to my insomnia, climbs handrails and stairs up the galleries of 9-block and into my cell like time-lapse footage of rust.
I try to will the members of the orchestra dead with my mind.
It never works.
With all the enthusiasm of a drunk lifting his head from a toilet I finally pull myself to a sitting position. A single sheet of typing paper lies facedown on the floor. A callout. A few hours ago the paper was tomorrow. Now it's today. I hardly ever get callouts anymore. It means I have somewhere to be. A series of neurons, tucked somewhere in the folds of my grey matter, fire in just the right order to inspire something between anxiety and annoyance.
I scrape the omen off the floor. It sounds like sandpaper. I need to sweep. I turn it over to have a look at the next twenty-four hours of my life.
CALLOUT / ASSIGNMENT - DESCRIPTION: Creative Writing/Drama/Choir.
REPORTING STATION: Chapel
DEPARTMENT: Recreation
ARRIVE: 19:00 DEPART: 20:30
Military time.
I hate math.
7pm.
Creative writing.
This time the neurons dance out the program for anticipation.
This morning's meditation will not unfold without pestering thoughts of the unknown tugging at my sleeve.
Back to the breath.
Ignore the distractions.
Stay in the moment.
It almost never works.
The rest of the day passes with the typical monotony of life behind bars—only now I have this looming workshop to get ready for.
I do my best to temper my expectations.
This will be my first creative writing class. The closest I've come is a book called Elements of Style by Strunk & White. The librarian at the last joint bought it for me—at least I assume it was her. She was lovely. We'd talk literature. She'd read my stuff and help me with edits. Whenever I'd badger her about some technical writing rule she'd suggest I order this book.
I never did.
Eventually she left. Prison gossip said she'd transferred to a prison closer to home. A few days after she fled, in search of different shades of green, two books came in the mail. One was Victor Frankel's A Man's Search For Meaning. She said it reminded her of my writing. The other was Elements of Style. There was no name on the package.
Everything else I know about writing I learned from reading and instinct.
Keroc showed me adventure.
Palahniuk: rebellion.
Vonnegut: irreverent humor.
Bukowski: grit.
Huxley: range.
Salinger: angst.
They showed me style, let me know what was possible if you arranged words in just the right order. Alchemists.
I wondered what wisdom this little callout could impart.
Even with twenty-four hours notice I almost didn't make it. On my way out the door, The C.O. in my unit—the one who's supposed to sign our callouts before we can leave—looks at my itinerary and asks, "Where you going with that?" He uses his pen to point at the JPay tablet strung around my neck. "Can't take that."
My first protest is confusion. My second is, "Why?"
"You don't need that," he says. "It has nothing to do with writing...or singing."
Brilliant.
Before I can mention that the ONLY meaningful capabilities of the little electronic device around my neck are, ironically, the exact two things he claims it has nothing to do with, he slides the callout under the glass partition, unsigned. I've been down long enough to know that any objection based on logic or reason would only succeed in eating up time that I don't really have. So I say nothing.
Three flights up. Three down. Pass signed.
I make it out the door just in time.
Tablet tucked in my back pocket.
I'd never been to the chapel—to any prison chapel actually—but I knew exactly where it was. In the center of the compound sits a small rebellious A-framed building headed in it's own direction. It's almost as if all the buildings were headed the same way when the chapel suddenly realized it had lost its keys, turned around to find them, and was suddenly frozen in place.
The chapel's only act of conformity—or insecurity really—is the razor sharp spire rising from the head of its ridge. The mock phallus nearly doubles the height of the independent little building.
I watch an inmate slip through a door in the back of the chapel. I rush to catch up. Inside are two cramped offices that look to have been tacked on long after the church's original construction. A rather congenial CO asks for our passes. He delivers his signature line, "Take your hats off." He uses the callouts, curled in his grip, to point to a door.
I'm not wearing a hat.
The inmate ahead of me slides the beanie from his head and into his coat pocket in one fluid motion.
One foot in Kansas, one foot in Oz. I follow him into the chapel.
Years behind bars can lead you to believe that every room, in every building on the planet, is a painfully lit concrete box. I'd completely forgotten that churches—especially old churches—have a welcoming to them that you'd never see in prison.
Structurally, the interior of the chapel is what you'd expect from the outside. No dividing walls. No separate rooms. Just four load-bearing walls and a vaulted ceiling. But, like most things worth knowing, its external simplicity belies a beauty within.
As you step inside the ceiling rises like two massive waves of polished wooden slats. Glistening, as if they'd been dipped in olive oil, the mahogany peaks rush towards each other, climbing, until they finally crash together into a sturdy ridge. Several ceiling fans with nothing much to prove, slowly spin their slick wooden blades over rows of rich mahogany pews below. Everything in here was alive once.
Us included.
Mercifully absent are the screaming fluorescents bulbs whose light dominates, sterilizes every inch of every institution ever built. The chapel lights don't scream, they yawn, radiating a glow you could warm honey with or grow Kentucky Blue grass under. This place is a cozy velvet-lined cigar box. And I am on the verge of converting.
No more than a dozen of us show up for class. Everyone seems to be here for the right reasons—or at least not the wrong ones.
We spend a few minutes marveling in relative silence before our free-world counterparts arrive. Two women from the University of Michigan. There were supposed to be three. One had car trouble. They lead us in silly improv games designed to let us step outside of ourselves, to loosen up and relax. We learn names through movement, string connections with laughter, and convert vulnerability to trust.
The hour and a half class goes by like déja vu. Before I can check the time, or catch my breath, I'm back in my cell halfway through my nightly ritual. I open and close a bag of chips, scan channels, wash my face, squeeze paste on a brush, and select Recently Added Playlist. Juice WRLD.
High hat.
Snare.
Kick.
I watch myself brush my teeth in the faded mirror above my sink. The light from the talking heads on my TV gives my skin a bluish glow. My tattoos are subdued. My brush strokes in rhythm with the music.
Spit.
Rinse.
I close the TV and kill my eyes. Laying here, my heart beats a two-step. Flashes of chapel velvet cut with snippets of dialogue, waves, wood, and the rapid unfolding of that little white piece of paper make a firework's show of my neurons.
Sleep seems naive.
Invasive pinholes of light prevent me from reaching back into oblivion. I tie a shirt around my face to lure the darkness necessary for sleep. Failure. The light isn't coming in through the shirt. It's inside of my head, going out. I undo the makeshift sleeping mask and exhale frenetic energy towards the ceiling.
A fresco yet to be painted.
I can almost feel my cells in motion. All this potential energy, this high frequency biology, has to be more than just the lingering effects from the three cups of coffee I slammed before class.
I feel like water on a slick street with downed power lines.
This is about the chapel.
There wasn't one single thing you could pin down about tonight. No monumental happening. But I felt something different over there, something I haven't felt in a long time. Oh god, was it freedom? Am I that fucked up? Has it been so long that I'd forgotten that freedom was anything more than a word? CHRIST, I felt a twinge of freedom and didn't even know what to call it!
There was an energy in that little cigar box that was set in motion before any of us even showed up. It might've INVOLVED us, but it didn't COME from us. That type of energy isn't made behind prison walls. It can't be cultivated in the presence of steel bars and razor wire. It is uncorrupted by training or job titles, ignorant to the hatred between convict and institution. This specific brand of energy, formed with idealism, hope, a little higher education, and a couple pairs of X chromosomes was the catalyst. Without the infusion of free energy whose trajectory hasn't yet bent or flagged under the influence of time and its inevitable disappointments we would've been nothing more than a handful of convicts in an old church.
Blasphemous.
Instead—even if it was only for a few consecutive moments—we were allowed to be more than just six digit numbers, more than convicts and case numbers, gang members or college students, fuck ups or saints. Tonight, in that little cigar box, we were free to be more than just the documenting files of our past, and less than pie-eyed stories we tell ourselves about the future.
Tonight, under all that glistening wood, we dabbled in freedom.
Or maybe my brain is just overstimulated and reeling from being in the general vicinity of attractive women.
Maybe I'm just telling myself a story because that's what I do.
Maybe there is no profound meaning.
Or maybe the most profound meaning is that I may have never known what freedom felt like in the first place.
The emergency lights in 9-Block never go out. Their yellow halos run into the bars of my cell where they break up and stretch faint shadows across my ceiling. If I ever paint a picture up there I'll incorporate the patterns of light. A distorted chess board maybe.
I did learn one undeniable fact from that little white piece of paper tonight: If, after seven years of incarcerated stasis, you're unexpectedly painted back to life inside of an old prison cigar box by two college coeds, don't expect to get a full night's sleep.
Which, I guess, is a small price to pay to learn what freedom feels like, in the off chance I ever come across it again.
The plan is to erase us. They dig holes, surround them with bricks wrapped in razor wire and expect us to be forgotten. This is my refusal go away. I am a pebble in the shoe of the prison industrial complex. My name is Robert Lee Allen Caldwell MDOC#929141.
Robert Lee Allen Caldwell was born in Detroit but spent most of his youth in Florida. He now lives behind a wall in Michigan where he writes and does a podcast, Notes From The Pen, to spread awareness about the need for prison reform: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notes-from-the-pen/id1518819034