The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

betray none of your fear—I saw you. I knew you to be that girl from that first moment, as soon as I’d spotted you among the backstage chaos of the TV studio that looks like a factory floor and a fossil dig at once—among turned-off cameras, dead like pterodactyls, and the twisted cables underfoot that slithered out of nowhere like pythons in the jungle—where, on the brightly lit stage familiar from your broadcasts, you, just done, were unpinning your microphone and talking to your crew, and all of yousteamed with a kind of hot, feverish charge—as if you’d all just tumbled out of a nightclub and didn’t know what to do with the rest of your artificially pumped-up high.
    Back then I didn’t know yet that this was the condition required for creating any virtual reality, and the one on the screen above all: to be real, it demands from its creators a constant energy feed, new logs for the fire, new kilocalories of living exhilaration—same as with a lie that has to be refreshed, fed all the time, even if it only means keeping it at the front of your mind with a constant mental effort because left to its own devices it would instantly deflate like any parasitic form of life, like mistletoe when the tree it sucked dry finally falls.
    You belonged to the army of those who feed it—with their own blood, the gleam of their eyes and the freshness of their skin, and with time I learned to detect in you and your crew this short-lived, drug-like, camera-induced high; I watched you all come down from it outside the lens’s reach—some faster, others slower, and still others, after several years on TV, turned lethargic and limp, like they’d been unplugged, and came to life only on camera; under the lights, they’d flip their tail a few times, like a fish thrown back into water, and then go back into suspended animation.
    Back then I knew none of this, and the only thing that stunned me, blinded me, was your sharply lit shape, like an Egyptian figurine in tight black jeans. Before, I had no idea how blatantly the screen can lie: how close-ups make everyone’s faces look equally wide, when in real life you are so fragile and fine—delicate, as Granny Lina liked to say, the highest compliment she could pay a woman. And you seemed to me then not the queen of that other-side kingdom but the opposite—the girl sacrifice, a lamb with your eyes and lips blackened à la Monica Bellucci, like a child who’d painted herself with her mother’s makeup. When I came closer, the crown of your head came exactly up to my lips, and it was like someone gave me a push in that instant, saying into my ear,
Here, Adrian, is a woman made to your measure
.
    I should protect you now, but I don’t know how. That’s the thing, my girl. More important—don’t know if that’s what you really want. In all your childhood photos that I have seen—from the little Lolly with a big bow perched above her comically Socratic forehead, to the teenager with mouse-tail braids, who is, everywhere, shying away from the camera like a small animal wanting to hide (as if you could sense, even back then, that the camera lies)—your little hands are squeezed into fists. As if you did all your growing up like that—in the constant state of red alert. My little warrior. These fists of yours—thumbs tucked under the folded fingers—are all I see these days: you’ve squeezed yourself into a fist, just like that, folded yourself in, and locked me out. Some work is being done in there, inside you, and I am not privy to it.
    Can anyone ever understand a woman completely? And do women even understand themselves?
    It’s not like you’ve deliberately pushed me away from your problems—no, you told me about what happened in great detail, and you listened very intently, without your usual “contortions,” when I tried to demystify for you how business works in our godforsaken country where government itself is merely a kind of business, and television is also business, and your entire journalistic guild serves, as even I can see from the sidelines, as a mere tip of the iceberg, one of the many means the real players have of laundering their dough—a plug, in a word. A gag. You didn’t like that word; you bit your lip, winced with a pained expression, and recoiled too abruptly in the next instant, when I, stirred by tenderness, reached out to stroke your cheek. You were already closed before me, tense and cocked like a gun, and this short wordless