Three Seconds

It’s not something that individual prisoners can decide. You’ve been moved here on your request, in accordance with Paragraph 18. That’s our duty. We are under obligation to do that if you request it. But the hole, solitary confinement, has a completely different set of regulations and conditions. Paragraph 50 is not something you can request, it’s not voluntary, it is a decision that is enforced. By a principal officer in your unit. Or by me.’
    They were walking around out there, and they knew. He wouldn’t survive the week here.
    ‘Enforced?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And how the fuck is that decision made?’
    ‘If you’re a danger to someone else. Or to yourself.’
    With walls that locked you in there was nowhere to hide.
    ‘A danger?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘In what way?’
    ‘Violence. Towards fellow prisoners. Or one of us, one of the staff.’
    __________
    They were waiting for him.
     
    They whispered
stukatj
.
    He moved closer to the governor and looked into a face that crumpled with pain – he had hit him hard.

He sat on the hard concrete floor. He’d heard talk of solitary-confinement cells that were called the hole or the cage, he’d heard tales of people who excelled in violence in the world outside but who had broken after a few days in solitary confinement and were taken to the hospital unit in a foetal position, or those who had quietly hanged themselves with a sheet. A person couldn’t be further removed from life, from what was natural.
     
    He was sitting on the floor as there wasn’t a chair. A heavy metal bed and a cement toilet bowl that was solidly attached to the floor. That was it.
    He had hit the governor in the middle of the face with his fist. The top of the cheek, eye and nose. Oscarsson had fallen from the chair onto the floor, bleeding but conscious. The screws had rushed in, the governor held his hands in front of his face to protect himself against anything else, and Piet Hoffmann had voluntarily stretched his arms and legs for them to carry him out. The four screws each struggled with a part of his body while the prisoners lined the corridor and watched.
    He had survived the attack. He had survived voluntary isolation. He had managed to get here, as much protection as you could get in a closed prison, but he shrank just as he had before,
I am alone, no one knows yet
, he curled up on the hard surface, freezing then sweating then freezing again. He was still lying there when one of the screws opened the square hatch in the door to ask if he wanted his hour out in the fresh air – an hour a day in a cake-slice-shaped cage with blue sky high above the metal mesh – but he shook his head. He didn’t want to leave the cell, didn’t want to expose himself to anyone.
    __________
    Lennart Oscarsson closed the door to the voluntary isolation unit and went slowly down the stairs, one at a time, to the ground floor of Block C. One hand to his cheek, his fingertips touching the swelling. It was tender and particularly swollen along the zygomatic bone, and therewas a taste of blood on his tongue and in his throat. Give it about an hour, then the area around his eye would turn blue. The governor felt physical pain every second from a face that would take a long time to heal, but it meant nothing. It was the other pain, the one from the inside that he felt – all his working life he had lived with men who had no place in real society and he had been proud that he could read difficult people better than anyone, his professional knowledge, the only thing he felt was worth anything any more.
     
    This punch, he hadn’t seen it coming.
    He hadn’t understood the desperation, hadn’t anticipated the force of Hoffmann’s fear.
    The riot squad had carried him down to where the bastard belonged, and he would stay there for a long time in the shittiest of shitty cells. Lennart Oscarsson would file a report that afternoon, and a long sentence would become even longer. It didn’t help. He felt his tender cheek with his fingers. It didn’t change anything, didn’t ease his frustration at having misread a prisoner.
    __________
    The iron bed, the cement toilet. No matter how long he waited, the cell was never going to be more than that. The dirty walls that had once been white, the ceiling that had never been painted, the floor that was so cold. He rang on the bell again, kept his finger on the button long enough to irritate them. One of the screws would break in the end and hurry over to