The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

circuits upstairs. Malarkey! she’d fire back (that’s when her opinion was still worth something, when it could, she thought, change something); people consume whatever they’re being fed, simply because they don’t have another choice. The same way you go to Big Pocket and buy those plastic-looking apples fit to hang on Christmas trees—they don’t rot, don’t dry up, and they’d still shine a year later—but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t like a living, breathing, fresh-off-the-tree Simirenko, nice and juicy and with a real little worm inside, just that you wouldn’t find any in thesupermarkets, only the tin Granny Smiths—eat all you want—and there you have your rating.
    Their arguments ended—a long time ago. What happened yesterday was just a line drawn under the emptiness, dead air that’s been running for who knows how long, rustling with the blank frames of the played-out film. No more movies for you. She, Daryna Goshchynska, has been discarded as, by the way, many before her. Decommissioned, my dear, decommissioned, your place can always be filled with fresh meat, more agreeable and always willing to please—with a moistly open little maw and ecstatic whimpering when it’s being had through every hole.
    Olga Fedorivna, meanwhile, is busy spinning her own thread of thought—mother and daughter run their parallel courses like two rivers divided by the hilly terrain of incommensurate experience, making inept swerves toward confluence and missing each other time and again.
    “You’ve been sort of edgy for a while, Daryna. I even wondered if maybe things weren’t working with you and Adrian; I’ve been worried about you. I could see you were all nerves.... ”
    Of course, if it’s “all nerves,” then it must be men troubles. Mom’s logic is ironclad. But the funniest thing, Daryna thinks, is that they both guessed wrong. She, for one, has been blaming all her tension of the last year on the film about Dovganivna, like an ostrich with her head in the sand—nose and ears plugged to avoid paying any attention to the stupendous shitstorm that raged around her, muck first pooling around her ankles and then rising to her knees, making it harder and harder to move, never mind breathe: live debates were disappearing from prime time; news people complained about receiving daily thematic instructions from their channels’ owners, prescribing exactly how they were to present each piece of news and about which they were to keep mute as fishes. Original programming sank under the tidal surge of Russian imports, as if life were being replaced by slipshod alien simulacra slapped together on a desktop by a sophomoric nerd—the dusk of reason falling all around. But she thought she hadfound a niche where “it don’t flood,” as Yurko liked to say; they all thought so, everyone who stayed with the channel to the end, stubbornly refusing to notice that it does, in fact, flood. Until, that is, it flooded absolutely everything in sight, and it became clear that there were no more niches—only those who pay and those who deliver the goods. Meaning, that’s how those who were paying saw things, and to them it looked like the natural order of things. The unnatural part was that there appeared to be no one who would object to that view.
    “That’s what they offered me, Mommy, one of those imbecile talk shows.”
    “Instead of your
Lantern!?
”
    “If you can imagine that. A show for young people. The producer said ‘we’re revitalizing the channel’s brand.’ They’re betting on young audiences, and I’d get, as they saw it, a mega bonus: the youth talk show. You know the drill: Just say no to sex without a condom; we met in a karaoke bar, and so on,” she stumbles, swallows the lump that’s come up in her throat (assholes! assholes!) to finish. And then there’s the
Miss New TV
beauty pageant—but no, she’ll leave out that new part of the programming; it’s not fit for Mom’s ears—one shouldn’t tell such things to museum workers of advanced age.
    “What carry-oakie bar?” Olga Fedorivna asks, dejected.
    Once again, Daryna feels her eyes fill with tears. What’s the point of rubbing it in like this—for her mom, or for herself? Of all people to whine to.
    “Doesn’t matter, Mom, that’s just an example. They want me to wear braids. Revitalize my image, you know, make it easier for the target audience to relate. You’ve seen those commercials: generation jeans,