The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

what people were telling him and hear the incredible volumes they said about themselves, without noticing, when someone listened to them the way Vasyl’ko did. He could repeat any conversation, even one overheard by chance, almost word for word, and now everyone’s just yakking away over each other’s heads and nobody hears anybody.
    The new crop—they’re totally checked out, blank, like they were born with the earbuds in. Nastya the intern, while her guest is talking, keeps herself entertained by rehearsing the different angles of her supermodel smile, waiting for him to finish until it’s her turn to voice the next question. While Vasyl’ko, a communication genius, who even in a ninety-second vox pop could present any random passerby as a one-in-a-million precious soul, is observingCanadian sparrows through his binoculars somewhere at the end of the world. That e-card he sent sported a bright-yellow-chested creature with a tuxedo-black tail, and Vasyl’ko wrote that it was a new hobby of his: bird-watching. Bird frigging watching.
    And such stories were myriad; they were legion; they were everywhere you looked. People emigrated, disappeared, dropped off the radar; old phone numbers when she called, thinking—he’s the one I’d love to bring in for the new show!—were answered by strange voices.
No, so-and-so had sold the apartment, and didn’t leave a forwarding address
—as if an invisible tornado swept through their ranks, leaving only a few of them who had once been called the first echelon of the Ukrainian journalism, those who still remembered Vadyk Boiko and the first show he wrote and hosted on the only Ukrainian channel that was on the air back then. The whole country watched it, streets on his nights empty like after a flood, and then one winter day in 1992, Vadyk, very happy, bragged to a colleague about a pouch of papers he was about to publicize: “I’ve got ’em Commies right here. I’m gonna drop a bomb on them!” And forty minutes later a bomb exploded in his apartment, where they later found his burned-alive body plastered to the floor. The authorities announced a few theories that all boiled down to the victim having burned all by himself, and without anyone’s help whatsoever; they closed the case, and no one would bring up Vadym Boiko’s name on the air after that, as if he’d never existed.
    Maybe if we had spent the rest of the nineties speaking and shouting about him, if we had kept reminding each other about him, if we’d gathered for an annual wake and aired it live every winter, all for one, in solidarity, on every channel while that was still possible, maybe then it would’ve taken them longer to take care of us? And the thing is, we all went so quietly, without a peep or a fight, and the Gongadze case doesn’t count: by the time Giya’s head (literally) rolled at the close of our wild nineties, the bitter and magnificent age of aspiration and hope, of skyrocketing careers and buried projects, of daily self-congratulatory banquets where we went to graze with a laugh at first—here, give me today’swire; let’s see who’s got a release for dinner tonight—and later more and more selectively—ugh, I won’t go there, those bastards never have booze (The boozeless bastards were the last surviving holdouts of the Helsinki group who were still talking, mostly to themselves, about the lustration problem, but who cared about them anymore?)—by that time, although we still picked and chose our clients and put on superior airs negotiating the price of whitewashing some rotten company’s reputation, we were already tame as guinea pigs—we’d gotten used to beer at Eric’s, and jazz jams at 44, to flying to Antalya and Hurghada on vacation. We had already partaken of designer boutiques and our first discount cards. We were well-fed, well-groomed guinea pigs, with glossy fur—those of us who managed to find our way to the flood of money currents—we had no instinct for danger, and that, perhaps, was the main mark of our generation: bare as bones, armed with nothing but our parents’ blessing of go-ahead-kiddo-and-you’ll-have-the-good-life, we stuck our heads into the trap happily and with an easy heart, even with a sense of our own relevance; we took pride in our glossy furs, in being paid, and being paid well—for being talented and insightful, of course, what else?—and then it was too late. We went along, thinking, in our naïveté, that we were shaping