The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

the new television landscape—we measured our ratings, thought up new shows, and, like children, felt unbelievably cool when we said “in Ukrainian here for the first time”—and what we really did was dance on blood, and that unavenged, unreprised blood ate at us from inside, insidious as lead-laced water.
    “What came of us, oh, what came of us?” squealed Irochka Bilozir on every channel—another burnt-out star of the nineties, relegated soon after to the faceless infantry ranks of synthetic Russian pop; her helpless squealing, as it later turned out, was the true chorus of that era, only no one heard it when they should have been listening: Something wrong was really “coming” of us, but so inconspicuously, day by day, drop by drop, how could anyone notice?
    People were changing—they didn’t just drop off the radar, out of the country, out of the profession, lost to the margins, to the Internet, to small-town newspapers that no one ever reads, to radio frequencies barely buzzing along on foreign grants and dying almost before you could find them on the dial—even those who stayed on the radar were no longer the same. Something broke in them, their internal resistance disappeared: where you could, not so long ago, a mere two, three, five years ago, find a solid, good shoulder to lean on, things suddenly slipped and lost shape—softly, viscously, with eyes shifting and hiding in the hangover swell of the eyelids. “For free, Daryna, only your mom kisses you; let’s make a deal: you show me what you’ve got and I’ll show you mine”—and the especially principled editors put five-fold markup on the especially libelous dirt on their own pals and would not budge a cent, all in the name of their sacred friendship. “Don’t take it personally, bro,” they’d say afterward to the victim, “how’d it be if we ran an interview with you?”—and the victims agreed.
    The multiplying personnel gaps were then filled, like a karst cave with water, with the watery-green teenagers, who had absolutely no clue, wanted to know even less, and were only too eager to take on the most blatantly partisan political product. Oil barons enthroned their mistresses in the so-called Lifestyle Interest sector, morality and culture included, and the hordes of serf souls delivered the shows for their silicone-lipped, porn-shells turnkey, so all the ladies had to do was roll in and read prepared text at the camera. And the same guys who once, in the early nineties, broke their backs to raise, like proverbial barns, the most resonant media projects (which later sank, quietly, noiselessly, into the pile of rubbish, and smashed crippled shadows crawled out from under the ruins for a long time afterward, limping to reception buffets where they could eat for two days in advance), the guys who in 1990 lugged bundles of the first independent Ukrainian newspapers from Lithuanian printers and took the police clubs to the kidneys for their efforts—these same guys, saddled withpremature beer bellies and bald spots, went to earn their living as whipping boys for parliamentarians—as press secretaries to various political roughnecks who were liable to bid them fetch their mineral water in thunderously unprintable language right in front of the press corps. And the whipping boys quickly learned to affect permanent holy-fool grins that were supposed to evince their complete philosophical invincibility against the whole vanity of vanities of this world, full-contact Buddhism as Antosha used to say, listening askance, like whores to an inappropriately chatty client, whenever Goshchynska got on her soapbox about her heroes—as if calculating, in their minds, what kind of money was paid for the box, and how much of it they could hope to snatch for themselves.
    At some point all professional topics just expired, suddenly and at once; people stopped talking seriously about what they did, because no one did anything seriously anymore except make money. At some point—What did it look like? When did it come?—very suddenly, they all stopped caring, as if the once-released virus of the latent disease that had been eating away at them from inside finally did its job, and the only thing left to do was to record the rigor mortis. And not even rigor but a viscous, boggy mass that sucked you in everywhere you turned, and the sense at yet another dinner that the people mobbing the tables with their plates and glasses, slurping in unison,