The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

idiot!), would smile a Buddha smile and say that her enthusiasm made him insanely horny (and would pull her hand into his pants, so she could see for herself). The same effect was produced in him by the enthusiasm with which she sucked delicious shreds of lobster flesh out of the shell in the little Dutch restaurant: an erection was another hard (doesn’t get much harder) language, tangible like money, into which they translated what they didn’t understand. And she had nothing else to show them as proof of her identity; she worked with them, she lived on the money they paid her, even—and she couldn’t strike this from her résumé either—occasionally slept with them (a woman’s curiosity can lead all kinds of places!). She was inside the system and felt quite at home there. Had she told her boss that after seven years on air she still felt the darkness in the studio of an audience extending to infinity on the other side of the screen—full of people to whom she was accountable, could even feel their breath—this confession, most likely, wouldn’t elicit even an erection from him: he’d just laugh and counsel her to spend more time outdoors. He hadalso become a different biological species—she’d been refusing to see it for too long.
    It occurred to her that he really wanted her to stay with the channel. He wanted her to be the way they saw her; he was willing to fight for that. Not just for the profits, or for the “face of the channel.” This mattered to him: that they become equals, two of a kind, professionals, and he no less (better even—because he’s the one paid more) than she—to erase between them any gap that could not be translated into clear, hard language. The gap irked him.
    And, exactly as with R., only without the screaming (on the contrary, dreadfully slowly and quietly because rage was choking her and made it hard for her to speak, even the room grew darker around her, as if dusk fell suddenly), she said things to him that she hadn’t intended to say and that would’ve probably been better left unsaid, because it’s not wise to be so old-fashioned as to declare war—like Prince Oleg to the Khazars—right in the face of the person you intend to war with (she knew she would do everything imaginable to kill their dastardly show). But, just as with R., telling the truth to the eyes of the person facing her was, in that moment, the only thing she could do to separate, to shield herself from their sticky grasp, like lowering the manhole cover on the cloacae below.
    “Do you realize,” she said to the boss, “that you’re contagious? You’re like the guy with TB who goes around spitting into other people’s soup. Like in vampire movies: you’ve been bitten, and now you must bite everyone else so they become like you. And that sucks, brother. Big time.”
    Amazingly enough, he kept silent. Then muttered in Russian, obviously working over something in his mind, “You’re insane.”
    “Aha,” she said, rising to go, straightening to her full height in front of him on her high heels (he was short, a small man with a Napoleon complex), stepping like a hot-blooded racehorse—unshakeoffable. “That’s right, insane. It runs in the family, don’t you know?”
    ***
    She only tells her mother the triumphant part, in an edited version, without too many details. Olga Fedorivna suddenly chimes in. She remembers that fifteen-year-old film that propelled the boss into big journalism—sure, sure, it was on TV—children in Chernivtsi struck down by a mysterious illness, terrible shots: a hospital room full of little girls and all of them bald as old men. You bet, a picture like that stays with you: science fiction, banshee purgatory. The kids would wake up one morning, get out of bed, and all their hair would stay on the pillow. Soft baby hair, a tiny silky scalp.
    “That was right after Chernobyl, wasn’t it,” says Olga Fedorivna, delighting in her good memory.
    “No, Mom, that was later. And it’s got nothing to do with Chernobyl.”
    A typical merging effect: the greater horror subsumes the smaller one. Chernobyl, Chernivtsi—they even sound similar, both start with Ch, easy to mix them up. Mix them up and then forget. Do they teach this in the Journalism Institute now: How to present information in the manner that makes it easiest to forget? And then paste over the poignant image in people’s minds with something from
Star Wars
—plenty of bald-headed little monsters