The Seventh Wave, Episode 37

Episode 37

Anna is lying in the dark, alone, trying to discover how to arrange her body in such a way that it will let her sleep. On her back is impossible. On her left side with her right knee pulled up, or on her right side with the left knee bent, both seem good at first but her body tires of them before very long. On her stomach is best but even then her mind won’t stop. The mind is the problem. She can feel the stress, the clenching, all over her body, in the muscles of her neck and shoulders, in her aching lower back, but it all comes from her mind which she has never been able to switch off at bedtime. Her thoughts race like sprinters, rushing forth as if to break records, then falling spent and gasping to the floor. But there are always new sprinters to take the place of the fallen ones. Zoom! Zoom! How can she sleep when there’s this track meet taking place in her head?

Here, unbidden, is Dostoevsky materializing by her bed in the dark wearing the cheap frock-coat which seems to have been borrowed from the Wizard of Oz. “The whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia,” he recites. “Everyone was to perish, except for certain, very few, chosen ones.” She sits up straight in bed. “What are you saying?” she says. ”Who says that?”

“Not I,” he replies, “but a poor creature of my invention. The pawnbroker’s killer. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov.”