the ledger

in crime and punishment, raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker
and then spends four hundred pages
unable to be around people.

not caught. not hunted. that’s not the engine of the book.
he just can’t sit in a room.
his mother arrives and he can’t look at her.
his friend is kind to him and he becomes cruel.

dostoevsky’s actual claim, the one under the whole novel,
is that you do not get away with things
because there is no away.
you have to keep living in the same body afterwards.
you have to keep going to dinner.