The Seventh Wave: a sneak peek into Episode 17. (The second act begins.)

Anna today is in a white shirt, black jacket, black skirt, white running shoes, with a black trilby on her head, and working her way through a mountain of pasta. She has not learned not to speak with her mouth full, or she has unlearned that lesson as a form of social defiance. Fragments of spaghetti fall from her lips as she speaks, wagging a fork at him. “If you ring a bell in front of a dog, but after that nothing happens, he doesn’t get a tasty bite to eat, and he doesn’t get punished either, then after a time he will stop responding to the bell. This is called habituation. Diminished response to a stimulus after repeated exposure. Fewer and fewer neurotransmitters are released at the synapses. The dog stops caring about the bell. I’ve been reading up on it.”

“It’s us, the dogs,” she goes on. “We get used to extraordinary things. A thousand people a day can die of a disease, and finally we shrug. People die all the time of every kind of thing. We hear the news, there is no reward, and in our own case, there is no punishment. The synapses stop firing. Our neurotransmitters are no longer being released.”

“We say ‘fuck it,’” he comments. “We are scornful of the second wave, the third, the fourth, the fifth.”

“Exactly,” she says, showing no sign of embarrassment or shame. “Let’s enjoy our lunch.”