22 October
22 October 2026, nine o'clock. It is half an hour after the shepherds got all the sheep into the pen. My favourite joke comes when we are going to the gym, being locked in, or there is some other purpose that has the trainee officers running around like headless chickens, trying to get every prisoner to follow a particular queuing system.
‘BAAAAAAAA BAAAAAA come on, cows!’ Everyone laughs, and the officers turn red as tomatoes. Some cannot maintain that impersonal, numbing ‘professionalism’; they do not yet have the experience to keep a straight face. They burst out laughing before it is replaced by embarrassment a second later. Those who have not yet had their humanity and compassion worn down so far that they can just stand and watch without saying anything look around as if everyone had not just noticed. But they have tipped over the boundary the psyche automatically has, separating silent acceptance from taking part in organised sexual assaults in pursuit of a little resin from a plant variety that has become big business, or the biggest business among so much in the authorities' assortment, in every country, in the eternal struggle designed to get bigger and bigger.
Profit, profit, profit. Harder crime as a result of harder persecution. Greater risk for those who profit from it. More violence among those who cannot be trusted. There would not have been body parts stacked like an art exhibition at intersections in Mexico if there were no life sentences for those taking part in the industry being hunted. If they had said, ‘Fine, demand will always exist, so it is better for everyone if it is regulated like Vinmonopolet, with age limits and quality products,’ then an extremely violent global spiral of violence stops overnight.
Another train of thought that spun out of control. Because I am stressed. The ADHD medication is fighting the urge to express myself, and my body is no longer calm. This has to come out. It has to come out now. There is so much. All of it has to be included.
The alarm goes off, and I hear shouting from C3 in the middle, facing the cultural building and the front of Bergen Prison, and C1, which shares the same view but also looks across at unit B, as C7 and C2 do. I see the student being escorted out by ten officers while he frantically tries to explain himself about the obvious, extreme, unjust situation unfolding.
I only understand it fully when the cell door opens. I walk down the corridor towards the school. Everyone who has usually blocked out yesterday's humiliations now apparently has their positivity barometer topped back up after a trip to dreamland, where the brain has been working flat out to process all the emotions. It is not the same smile. Their eyes are empty. Several sit apathetically, staring down at the floor and waiting to be escorted to school or work.
‘They sent the student to Vest,’ someone says. They sent the student to Vest. The student who is a role model for so many, who sits at school all day studying advanced mathematics and has an exam coming up soon. No more school for him. Isolation 23 hours a day. One of the sharpest young minds is, after being put through it by the child welfare services and getting all the sexual assaults from the correctional service like pearls on a string since before turning 18, sent and pushed in the direction so many others this happens to end up in: the vulnerable side of the state's biggest chain of profit, wrapped up as a moral cause.
‘Why???’ I say. ‘What happened?’
One of them, his gaze fixed beyond the prison and into the emptiness, says it. I had not noticed, because all day yesterday I was stuck like a fly on the state's flypaper and writing new chapters in the saga of sexual assaults and Subutex.
It had happened the day before yesterday. The student was sitting studying in his cell, as usual when the school was closed for the day. The other prisoner had heard that the student had criticised him for going around mouthing off at everyone to get an excuse to assert himself. Then he had walked from C4, where he lives, right down at the other end, past C3, past the new ‘digital right’ room, past the roof terrace, past the school corridor, past the laundry room and in to the left, where the main officers' station's two-way mirror at 45 degrees towards us and the last roof terrace meet.
Let me see: Past the officers' lookout post and past 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 cameras in total, then into the student's cell. Those who were there say that the student calmly asked him several times to get out of his room, that he did not want trouble, and asked him to leave him alone. But the other prisoner had not let up. He had turned to leave and then quickly, to create the element of surprise his cowardice needed, smacked the student, who for a second had thought the other prisoner could be talked down and had lowered his guard.
But the student is not someone to mess with. It is not Oboy and Grandiosa they raised him on in the primeval forest where he took his first steps. He responds with 1-2-3, so well placed that Conor McGregor would have said ‘take a coffee break, [name redacted]’, and then the others on the residential unit had separated them.
The other prisoner had met a superior force in one of the apparently most peaceful of the most peaceful prisoners, licked the asphalt and had to offer his paw. They agreed that if any awkward questions came up, the other prisoner would say he fell in the shower, that he walked into the door, so the student could go back and concentrate on his studies, while the other prisoner had to go down to the doctor to get his nose straightened and a plaster put over his pride.
Then yesterday evening, after outdoor exercise, when the shepherds had forgotten the goat sitting writing a new chapter in the saga, who did not notice this either, an alert, responsible trainee officer had seen a cut in the student's eyebrow and reported it to central control. So yesterday, when the flock had gathered in each of their little personal bathrooms, living rooms, offices, bedrooms — open plan, paradise measuring 4 × 5 metres — the student had been taken last. New officers had crawled out of every nook and cranny like rats in the sewers when half a baguette finds its way down an open manhole, and taken the student with them to Vest. And the other prisoner got to sleep undisturbed on C4.
I flared up. I felt it inside me: that fucking chief witch, that goddamn fucking witch. Again with her pen on the trigger of her Browning M2, loaded with .50 divide et impera ink bullets. Another chance to create anger, frustration, hopelessness and hatred, with the hope there in her dark corner that the projectiles tear into as much harmony and balance as it is possible to establish on a prison unit, produce anger and frustration in all the student's friends and create new situations without the context of their cause.
More sexual assaults disguised as the holy eternal jihad in pursuit of men sitting on Facebook. More progress burned down. More children with ruined childhoods. More case processing. More money for the gold stripes.
The strategy is the same as always: Manufacture a situation that creates despair, remove the cause, reap the fruits and feed the cannon with the next intervention. The eternal hamster wheel.
So the signal is: Even though the witch's disciples can see on camera that the other prisoner passes the surveillance of seven cameras over fifty metres and enters another prisoner's cell, it is the prisoner attacked in his own bedroom who is sent to Vest and has his entire education effectively torpedoed, while the one who got up, walked, came and started it gets to go free.
So, to avoid ending up on Vest and having your life flushed down the toilet, you have to take the treatment people like the other prisoner hand out left, right and centre. Do not defend yourself. Do not say anything. Let it happen and hope he has had enough. Just as you have learned from the rape cell at the far end of the corridor on Vest.
Tore, what are you letting those above you do to your unit? I sincerely hope that this one time you can intervene and listen, and restore the balance again before the powerlessness and hopelessness turn into anger in everyone on the unit over the next few hours. They are already at the limit of how much injustice they can bear to live with when you read this today.
I will stop here, print out this sheet and have it forwarded to Kagge before putting it in Tore's pigeonhole. I cross my fingers that his conscience gets the better of him today, that the student is back at his school desk after lunch, and that I get to keep taking my frustration out on paper and keep telling my story to Kagge every day. As much as I can manage on one meal a day, because I do not have time for anything else if my equation is going to add up: the number of words that have to come out + nourishment = another day to write.
Every day, for as long as the prison keeps me locked up here on overtime, now that they know, or should have been told, that chance meant I ran into Marita, just as Gørbitz had not counted on in the plan.
A former legal officer for the stormtroopers had, after distinguishing himself and excelling in Fortress Vader, met his conscience in the mirror and decided to become a real jedi. He became a founder and partner of the biggest law firm defending the raw material for the state's meat grinder on the planet Mustafar, aka the City West of the Law. He visited here on Wednesday and is working on an extremely well-documented, strong criminal complaint — a strong case, as he said himself — against the fabricated basis on which the senior adviser builds the master record to keep me away from my girl and everything I have worked for.