The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

conversation with a lunatic, when you don’t dare call the nurses because you know the head doctor is mad himself—and as she fought through the quicksand of shaken reality, half-hints, and half-lies into which she sank deeper the more she tried to clear them up, she thought, with sickening horror, that this was exactly how they once talked to her father before handing him off to their mad nurses. And the fact that times had since changed (Did they really?), that it was spring of ’87 outside the window and anti-communist protests whirled across the city, did not mean anything in this distorted world; and even if it did, then only inasmuch as it supplied this other side of the looking glass with new material for new schizophrenic distortions.
    All of it wore her down so much that when the captain finally concluded his soliloquy (because he’d talked almost nonstop the entire time) and suggested she write some monthly reports for him, she, instead of telling him to eff off right there and then, agreedto “think about it”—compelled either by the student habit of not turning things in until the last possible moment (to win time to prepare, time to dress her refusal into an impeccably worded formula, although that was something they most certainly wouldn’t give a damn about!) or by the instinctive impulse to step away from the scene of an accident first, like when you break a heel walking, and only then catch your breath and assess the situation.
    That it was a mistake, she realized right away, by how obviously and instantly happy it made the captain—but the gravity of it took time to fully manifest itself, specifically the three days that would pass before their second, and final, interview. She realized she never got out, never stepped away from that terrible office—quite the opposite: it was as if she’d chosen to take on its burden, hefted it onto her own shoulders, the silly little caryatid, and schlepped it around the whole three days, more or less delirious—having the conversation with the mad nurses inside her head the whole time.
And what if...no, like this...and I’ll say to him...and he’ll...
(and the shortness of breath the whole time).
    Later she would recognize this infestation of mind in dissidents’ memoirs: people lived like that for years, wired, as if into an electric grid, trying to untangle something that by definition could not be untangled—drawn into a chess match with a schizoid. But at the time it felt like she was the only one left in the world. Her husband, Sergiy, couldn’t tell her anything helpful except recalling that his mother had also been approached by the KGB with something like this once, but who hadn’t been approached? Millions of people went through the same trials, and yet no collective experience emerged from it, and every rookie had to start from scratch as though he (or she) were the only one in the world—a metaphysical state, almost, like in love or in death when no other person’s experience is of any use to you, and no book has words for what is happening to you, the One and Only, with the sole difference that this whole thing was sealed under the massive lid of solid, shamed silence—this was not an experience people liked to share.
    Sergiy was left outside, behind the looking glass, and his inept efforts to cheer her up resembled the unnaturally lively gesticulations of people seeing someone off on a train, before it departs: those outside wave, come close to the windows, tap on the glass, make faces—and those inside are already thinking about which of their suitcases has their slippers and toothbrush in it. When the train pulls out, both sides breathe a sigh of relief.
    In a few more years, she and Sergiy pulled away from their shared platform never to return, but it was during those three days that she got on the train: the experience she lived through in isolation only added to her loneliness and put more distance between her and those she had considered to be her closest people—and about this the books also said nothing.
    She’s always told both herself and her friends that she learned not to trust collective experience then, none whatsoever, because it was all slop and bullshit meant to befuddle the working class, and the only thing one could rely on was individual people’s stories. She used her example with the captain so often—in smoking rooms at work, at populous parties (appreciating, with a secret satisfaction, the instantly