The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

thing that you share with anyone, period—where do they all go, these observations that no one ever shares with anyone and that just gather dust in the dark corners of people’s brains? It’s hard to believe how much in this life is determined, sometimes, by a single accidental phrase, a single look—a conspiratorial glance, an encouraging expression across the room, just like that—and someone picks it up eagerly, grabs your hand, and drags you into their cabal, lifting the lid on such a teeming subterranean nest of worms thatyou would have preferred not to have seen, never even wanted to know existed.
    And it all starts with the commonest little misunderstanding—you were simply misunderstood. The world is full of crossed signals, and no one really understands anyone anymore. Such scale, such opportunities, such a leap in her career—what is wrong with her? The boss really could not understand, and if he were pretending, then only very little. And what about her project, her unfinished film? He blinked when she asked about that, as if trying to remember: What film? He’d forgotten already, he had erased that file from his memory—some people are lucky like that, they have the serendipitous gift of forgetting everything unnecessary. “The one about the UIA or something?”
    “You know what he said to me, Ma? About my
Lantern
? He said no one needs my heroes. That they are not the heroes in touch with the times.”
    In touch with the times
, how wonderfully apt—it slashed her like a blade. Pyotr Nikolaich, Aleksei Vasil’yich—they’ve bought this time, just as they bought airtime. They thought themselves the major figures, no, the only heroes of life’s written drama; they believed, especially for themselves, and they lived their lives with this belief—until the last control shot to the head. But the boss, the boss! He’s not one of them; he’s not of their breed. He was a talented journalist once; he made that fantastic film in the early nineties, about the little Chernivtsi kids who’d gone bald. (A rocket fuel spill at a nearby army base, wasn’t it? The city should’ve really been evacuated—wait, wait, but the story somehow got hushed down after that, never came up again, and, just a minute, if she recalls correctly, the man who was investigating the cause of the disaster, a local, didn’t he disappear, die quietly under mysterious circumstances?) If she’s not mistaken? It’s hard not to be mistaken, hard to keep it all straight in her memory, when the memory’s long overburdened, the system’s overloaded, and her head has long ago turned into a computer box, cluttered, with snippets of film, with frames of unidentified provenance,shots of who-knows-where and faces with names unstuck from them (this has happened a thousand times: the face—you recognize, the person—no). And she tells herself she’s delivering information to people, but all she actually does is add to the piles of snippets in their heads and so help them
forget
because she doesn’t remember squat herself, except whatever’s blinking right in front of her, on whatever narrow strip is cleared of rubbish to fit in what’s due today.
    Shit, what if she is really in the wrong business?
    “They’re the ones out of touch,” Olga Fedorivna responds, bitterly, and Daryna vaguely registers that she invests these words with something private, invisible, and inaccessible to her. And then her mother adds, though it’s not clear about whom, “Roaches.”
    A rickety bridge is in those words, a narrow plank thrown from one bank to the other. Daryna can sense it but has no time to listen to it; she’s riding her own current—and not only out of the pure momentum of an active life that never really hears those who’d dropped out of the system (Because what could they possibly tell us—the retired, the jobless, the homeless, the bankrupted, the crumpled wrappers swept to the edge of the sidewalk where we click-clack so dashingly along in our brand-new Bally heels that they’ll never be able to afford?) but because she is, quite simply, overrun with indignity, great and intolerable. She’s got a fresh hole gaping inside her, and she’s just begun to mend it. She’s too busy attending to herself, like Uncle Volodya with his arthritis. (The conversation with the boss, retold to her mother in a slightly different edition from the one for Adrian the night before, acquires new contours in her mind in the course of