The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

know then that I couldn’t be bent, that I’m capable of standing my ground. Instead, I split.
    I could’ve been a scientist—a real scientist and not just another PhD in physics. But I’ve already missed the age of brilliant ideas—those all happen before thirty. Bohr developed the model of theatom before he was twenty-eight, Einstein published “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” at twenty-six, Bell invented the telephone at twenty-nine. It’s a good age: you’re starting to know what you’re talking about, but you aren’t scared yet because you don’t believe you can lose. A constant upward ascent. I used it up on building my business. My best years, right here—in this office, in these catalogs. In this damn log: two Russian copper coins in good condition, fetch up to twenty-five Euros a piece at Russian auctions, if, of course, one gets lucky. And why shouldn’t I—I’m a lucky motherfucker, ain’t I?
    What I’ve never told Lolly is that as a second-year student I caught the eye of Strutynsky himself, God rest his soul—and that was the same as falling into the hands of a living god. When the old man shuffled into the lecture hall, always in his dust- and chalk-powdered suit, everything froze as if a basilisk had just entered. We, young bucks, had no clue back then that we bored this legend, with his scornfully drooping eyelids, to tears: the distance that separated us could only be measured in light years, if at all. And Strutynsky wasn’t a teacher, and did not know how, or feel inclined, to begin to breach that distance. What he did know how to do—magnificently—was to spot, through those leaden eyelids, like a mythical Viy, those in the massive class before him who had the potential of breaching that distance themselves one day, who could rev their thought to the speed required.
    There were three of us like that, that year—Gotsik, Zahar, and myself—and that’s who he taught, collecting quizzes from the rest of the class and giving them to us to grade. It was in his seminars that I first experienced that dazzling exultation that comes from the energy of a thought set free—and it’s never come back as powerfully since. The brilliance, the clarity when chaos begins to make sense under the quickening assault of your thought and finally—poof!—turns into the slim crystal of a formula—there’s nothing else like it. A complete loss of self and a sense of omnipotence at once—you step out on a break reeling like you’re drunk and feelsweat running down between your shoulder blades. Skydiving’s got nothing on it.
    So I do know how it felt to them—Einstein, Bohr, all those dudes who could. The whole thing is in not letting your assault slacken. In knowing how to keep it up. For years, if need be, that’s the thing. For years.
    Instead, I split.
    It’s been a long time since I dreamt of complete, perfect solutions—and I used to, they came for a while even after I left the lab—as if my unemployed thought, evicted from its home, moved to the basement of my mind and kept stubbornly running her Singer sewing machine there: night after night formulas lit up on my screen (I still remember that cold metallic glow from below!), appeared, as if spelled out by an invisible hand, bloomed like seaweed, like underwater flowers, one time a whole scheme came together in space as if made out of snowflakes, like the fairytale about the Snow Queen; and in my dream I somehow knew that the space was four-dimensional, but didn’t remember the proof itself in the morning, only retained a general impression—of spellbinding, freezing beauty. Or maybe I did remember but didn’t write it down—because what would I’ve done with it? The day then dropped into my mind like a dirty sponge and erased everything it didn’t need without a trace. Fifteen years ago Strutynsky used to say I had a unique cognitive apparatus—I interrupted him with a question in the middle of a lecture and the old bloodsucker’s eyes flashed like laser-beams: “Vatamanyuk,” he said, fixing me with an enamored stare that made me blush, “you have a unique cognitive apparatus.” The glory of that moment lasted me until I graduated. It sputtered for a long time, that apparatus—spinning empty, like an engine without fuel. Fading oscillation, a faint SOS signal, dying, dying...I doubt it could be revved again to cosmic speeds now.
    Gotsik’s now a postdoc somewhere in Minnesota; Zahar’s top management