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Welcome to Hell
The Floater
By D.P. O’Keefe
"It’s all part of the cosmic unconsciousness." —Miller in Repo Man
"Surreal" is a word too often used by pseudo-intellectuals to describe a bad restaurant experience. Webster defines it as "grotesque; bizarre." If you really want to get into it, it says: "having the quality of surrealism," which is: (1) 20th century literary movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and irrational juxtaposition of subject matter. It also says: "See prison."
Prison is surreal. And in it are, for my own Twilight Zone teleplay, characters that pop up, blurt out a few lines, then disappear back into the sea of confusion here. And somehow, frighteningly, it all has meaning.
One such character is a corrections officer here whom I call "The Floater." He first appeared as an escort to take me from the medical wing to my cellblock. We spent about five minutes together while walking the length of the facility. For the first minute or so, not a word was spoken, and the sound of footfalls echoing off the walls was all that could be heard—until he said, "You should read a lot."
The sound of footfalls quickly absorbed his words until I wasn’t sure if he had said anything at all.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"Poe is good," he said. "Fantasy too, stuff like that."
The footfalls returned again as the only sound until we reached my cellblock. "Thanks," I said, clearing my throat.
"You betcha," he said. The door slammed behind me. I blinked a few times just to make certain I was conscious, then walked back to my cell.
I ran into him a few weeks later, also as an escort, as I was en route to a court appearance. Again, it was just the two of us and it was the same eerie deal with the echoing footfalls between sentences.
"Anything in your pockets?"
"No," I said defensively, nervously patting myself down.
"You should keep your rosary beads in one," he said.
I had a set. At the time it didn’t occur to me to be disturbed that he knew that. But I didn’t think to take them with me—which was stupid. If there was one place on Earth I needed a religious article, it was in the hallowed halls of justice. I carried them to subsequent appearances, though. And I was also reading Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry on a regular basis. It seemed to take me out of where I was.
But who was this guy? And why was he telling me what to read and what to carry? Or was I just suffering from residual LSD? Was I manufacturing him by metabolizing some acid-laced fatty tissue? Whatever it was, I wasn’t sure I liked it. And even in a best-case scenario—even if I was having some sort of spiritual experience—God could have picked a better messenger.
In the times I’d seen him after that, he’d simply nod. Or there were times I’d catch snippets of his conversation. What I heard was either pertinent to something I was going through or, discomfortingly, something I was about to go through.
So for me, surrealism isn’t a literary thing. It’s a literal thing. In here, it’s to be expected—in my own Twilight Zone with my own cast.
D.P. O’Keefe is a humorist incarcerated in a Connecticut maximum security correctional facility.
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