Twenty-four hours until the new year. One thousand, four hundred and forty minutes. This would be his fourteenth calendar year behind bars.
Before Stig Ahlin began to work out again, there had been a six-month period during which he could hardly get out of bed. That, in combination with the cheap, energy-rich, taste-deficient food they served, had caused him to gain weight. He managed to put on forty pounds before he started running and reversing the trend and regaining control over his body.
But there had been something refreshing about letting his body swell. The fat transformed him, turning him into someone else. A tired blob of lard whose body ached in places it never had before. And it was oddly freeing. The man he became was able to get through the baffling days; the man he had recently been would never have survived.
During his fat months, he devoted every spare minute to watching TV, meaningless TV, entertainment TV. No news, no live debates, no documentaries. Preferably nothing that was even in Swedish. Only empty images.
One day, an American legal drama series was on. In one scene, the prosecutor was trying to convince the members of the jury that the defendant was guilty of intentional homicide rather than manslaughter. The defendant had stabbed the victim, and the prosecutor directed the jury to count.
“Count silently to yourself, count to twenty-four, and with each second that passes, imagine carefully how you must pull the knife from the woman’s body and take aim again: one stab, two stabs, three stabs, four stabs, five, six, seven, eight. Think quietly to yourself all the way up to twenty-four stabs of the knife, and then go out and decide how this ongoing, drawn-out, senselessly repetitive lethal violence should be categorized.”
This would never happen in a Swedish courtroom. Not even in Stig’s own trial would the prosecutor have dared to say such a thing. It was theatrics, pure and simple.
Stig watched the entire show. When the arguments were over, the TV jury handed back their sentence: life in prison, no parole. Life in prison.
As the credits rolled, Stig stood up. The next day he began to work out. And then Stig began to count.
He counted the days that had passed since he was arrested. He counted the days that had passed since he was jailed. The nine months that had passed before the appeals court sentenced him to prison for homicide. The two weeks it had taken before he was moved from the jail to Kumla Prison. And the four months he’d had to wait before arriving at the facility that had become his home. He counted every day. Every morning when Stig woke up, he measured the time that had passed.
Because whether you believed time was linear, dynamic, or even circular, it could be sorted. Into days, hours, weeks, and years. Stig found a certain comfort in that. That time was the same for everyone, even if it might be experienced in different ways. Now. Four thousand, eight hundred and sixty-seven days. When Stig went to jail, Ida was not yet five. Now she would soon be eighteen, legally an adult. But when he thought of the day he had been arrested, it felt like yesterday.
Time flies, even when you’re not having fun. In reality, it was only the individual days that dragged on for an unbearable eternity. Those were the ones he’d been robbed of. One at a time. And he kept counting.
One, two, three, Stig thought as he ran. Four, five, six…