The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

for
Lantern
—and for Vlada, too. Yep, and apparently Vlada’s no longer in touch with the times, and Vadym’s been showing up on TV more often, generally looking like he’s got his act together and is doing pretty well;
why
should we mess with the dead if we’ve got living people lining up, cash in hand?) The Donets’k surgeon, Vlada, Gela Dovganivna, whom she kept postponing, unable to find the key to her story—Lord, how proud she was of her show; how much she loved her heroes, always had butterflies in her stomach when she went to the website to read the viewers’ comments the morning after a new episode had aired. What’s happening to us, how low can we fall, what are we letting them do to us?
    No, she did not burst into tears right there, in the boss’s office; she’d held her face screen-proof—like a cream puff, because fury was boiling inside her, and fury demanded action, immediate action. She interrogated; she went on the offensive; she cornered him; she didn’t know she had such breathless pace in her; she rode it like a witch on a broomstick, and he did not realize that this was merely a doomed man’s attempt to extract from his executioner the law that had sent him to the gallows—no, he looked at her with growing respect, as at a woman who was expertly, professionally raising her price. Good job. (She’s run so many times into this astonishing shortsightedness in otherwise intelligent people that she long stopped marveling at it: it was like a virus, increasingly widespread, that affected not only politicians, businesspeople, and members of her own journalistic tribe, but also artists of whom one commonly expects a more complex spiritual organization. Instead of living, people were scheming, playing out their combinations, and anything that was not partof their scheme was simply blocked in their consciousness, as if they had a blind spot.)
    Boss really valued her, even the tip of his nose was all sweaty with tension she noted gleefully—she wasn’t the only one on whom the conversation was taking its toll! Alright, he sighed, about to slap his last ace, the joker up his sleeve, onto the table in a grand, bighearted sweep—cards down! He might be able to negotiate a bigger sum for her, he said, he’d do his best—if it works, they’ll “take her in” (he said this in Russian, when the talk turned to money, he switched completely into Russian) on the profits from the
Miss New TV
show. Is that so? It’s a very serious project, he warned, nervously twitching his sweaty nose (and
Diogenes’ Lantern
was NOT serious, she dictated mentally to her invisible attorney—the boss’s every word scorched her like a flame), only this must remain strictly between the two of them, okay? (This reminded her of someone else—oh yes, her captain from that office with fake leather doors of 1987 vintage: he also asked with the same sepulchral import for the conversation to remain between them.)
    This was in her own interest, by the way, because he had Yurko pegged to host the
Miss New TV
pageant (Yurko!—she yelped inside—and Yurko will agree?), but only on an official salary—Yurko’s not in on the profits. How about that? They do value her!
    “And what kind of show is that?”
    “The usual kind, just another show, the main thing’s to select and sort the girls who applied, and then they’d be passed on to a different agency.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Well, only a few finalists will appear on the show, you know,” he explained.
    And where would the money come from?, she almost asked like the last idiot—and that’s when it finally dawned on her.
    “Motherfucker,” she said. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
    She thought she was smiling as it sometimes happens to people in shock. Boss’s face hung still before her in close-up, as if someone had hit the pause button (he’d never heard herutter such profanity; the words popped out by themselves, as if they were the last pieces needed to complete the puzzle). And under her gaze, this face, confirming her guess, was collapsing, slipping like a wall in earthquake coverage—from his eyes, where the inquiry (Is something wrong?) was replaced by the flash of realization (She won’t be his accomplice!) to the fright (What has he done?!), a moving shadow, to the deathly bleached wings of his nose, and then to the chin that somehow instantly lost shape and dropped like a clump of wet spackle. In the fraction of a second that she experienced as