The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

thermae. And it was there, while the guests were touring the pantheonic bathrooms, to their happy laughter (pierced, time and again, like expensive upholstery with stubbed-out cigarettes, with uncontainable, hissing ahhs of envy), that Antosha, their cameraman whom they’d dubbed Occam’s Razor for his fast adherence to the principle of finding the most basic explanation for every human action and for being almost never wrong(“If your cynicism is what’s called the wisdom of life, Antosha,” she used to say, half-kidding, “then I wish to die stupid.” And he answered with his latent alcoholic’s suggestively loony half-grin, “You should be so lucky, hon!”), grunted, quiet and short, like a spit: “That’s it, the boss hit some big-ass pay dirt; time to jump this rig.” Meaning their channel, which was already sinking fast, turning, like all the others, into a corporation, a front for some uncouth money-laundering enterprises, and their captain, their boss and breadwinner, their producer and co-founder, drenched in sweat, as if he’d come from the shower, darted, like a halfback on a football field, across his cavern of a living room from one VIP to another, desperately ingratiating himself:
Pyotr Nikolaich, have some sushi. You like it, don’t you? Aleksei Vasil’yich, a drop of vodka?
(There weren’t many of them at the party, those men of Vadym’s ilk, with identical occiputs sunk into soft cushions of fat that make their heads resemble pool balls dropped straight onto their shoulders; Daryna knew almost none of them—there weren’t many, but a single type like that is enough to spoil an evening.)
    And at some point, after another one of his bendings-over-backwards, the boss must have caught Daryna looking at him—probably sneering a bit. But no, she must’ve been still sympathetic, because at the time she still thought this was all for the channel’s sake, that the boss was slavering the movers and shakers for their collective sake, for the cause, to keep the channel afloat—ate shit, bless his soul, every day so that Goshchynska could grow flowers on the air. Well, flowers always grow on shit, and television is no different from a beautiful woman: Does anyone blowing her kisses through his car’s window wonder about the inner workings of her guts, about the smack of fecal matter inside her intestines, whose regularity, by the way, is directly responsible for her radiant complexion? Except that here it wasn’t fecal but financial flows that were being pumped and someone did have to insure their regularity.
    That’s what she thought, pinching her delicate little nose, because in that gigantic tele-organism the role she was meant to play, after all, was not that of the colon but rather of the radiantvisage, “the face of the channel.” And under that understanding look of hers, extended to him over the well-fed shoulders and masticating heads, the boss, as if waking up from a dream, suddenly looked triumphantly, conspiratorially, over his smoke-filled cavernous salon, literally smoothed the salon over himself—just like a woman, out of the dressing room, smoothes a new skirt over her thighs—gathered it all in, weighed it, and offered it to her, the whole thing with himself in the middle, with the same feminine inquiring anxiety in his look: What do you think? As if she were the one who held the controlling interest, as if the whole show would instantly lose its meaning without her approval.
    She remembers it seemed really funny to her at the time, and she laughed at him from across the table (she’d had too much to drink), saluting him with her glass in a mute toast: Cheers, sweetheart, here’s to you! And Lord, how he bloomed in return, glowing as if she’d lifted a rock off his shoulders, lightened his burden! And she had no clue that by then the channel’s fate was, must have been, already decided. Antosha, as always, had been right, and the controlling interest was being passed into someone else’s hands entirely—the ones that took her by the throat yesterday, using her boss’s hands to do the work. The same boss who saw her as an accomplice and continued to need her approval: You’re on the right path, comrades! Kiss my ass, asshole.
    It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?, she asks in her head—not of her mother (she doesn’t talk to her mother in her head) but of Adrian, with whom she is also unlikely to share this observation out loud because it’s not the kind of