The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Beaujolais, and about three bottles instead of half.
    From his lisping I more or less gathered the poor slob played the stock market, and played himself clear out of his home, the oldest story in the world. Basically—went after wool and came back shorn. But the horrifying thing was that Sashko wasn’t pretending or bullshitting when he gabbled about it in a casual, could-happen-to-anyone tone, chuckling now and then as if this were something amusing and unimportant—and next stammered enthusiastically with his toothless mouth about his “exshellent proshpects.” Never mind that the only prospect he could’ve been hoping for was a good nursing home: he really could not see himself from outside. Apparently, at some point on the descending slope of his life, he shut his eyes and checked out, refusing to watch the horror of it once and for all, and probably saw a completely different version of himself when he looked in the mirror—the one who used to walk around with his pockets stuffed full of condoms and banged Ilonka-the-Barbie, who eventually married her department head and went with him to the Sorbonne.
    I gave him a twenty on some face-saving pretext, even though he didn’t ask for money, and he was so happy that I thought he’d latch on to me like a tick after that, whine for my telephone number and so on, but he said goodbye quickly with the air of a man late for a business meeting and trotted off through the park. A little later when I drove down Zolotovoritska, I saw him duck into a bar on the corner, saw the tense expression of his back (exactly that: the expression of his back), and that’s when it finally dawned on me where he lit out for in such a rush: the bar had gambling machines.
    It was as if someone had shown me an alternative version of my own life. What could have happened to me if I hadn’t one day, watching for a cigarette stub underfoot, seen myself from outside and been horrified: Holy shit, is it that easy? Snap, and you’re on the trash heap and several generations’ worth of survival experience—of those packed off into camps, stripped of their propertyas kulaks, deported, the heroes of Grandpa’s tales about Karlag, all their long-forgotten skills, “I saw me a stub with a line of red lipstick and broke from the ranks after it”—defrosting in you as they’d been taken out of the freezer?
    I remember the exact spot where it hit me—on Shevchenko Boulevard, not far from the University subway station. Like something shook me out of a coma, and I looked around, stunned, slowly recognizing the place. In moments like this, your mind, for some reason, always fixes the place like a postcard: it’s late fall, slush, drizzle, dim streetlights; street stands line the Botanic Garden’s fence, and the garden’s dark presence looms below, the massed domes of St. Volodymyr cathedral in the brown sky above. It was as if I were seeing it all at once, from above—the gigantic, steep Kyiv slope down which I was being carried like a parachutist; I felt this downward motion in my body as it sometimes happens in dreams—down, into the dark, scraping against the spikes of the fence and the naked branches of the Botanic Garden.
    All young and brilliant, the winner of every academic competition and Strutynsky’s own pet, I was plummeting, going down without any resistance, pulled into the last residual sputtering of a stopped machine, only this time the machine was real. My research lab was in agony; our entire system of research institutes was in agony; all our applied and fundamental physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology, that had spent the previous half-century feeding and clothing themselves off the accumulation of increasingly more perfect means of destruction—and now that only the Russians, of all Soviet heirs, had the privilege of killing anyone—had come to a grinding halt. So our jackals feasted on the scraps from the Russian’s table—falling over each other to pawn off deathly junk on whatever Asian/African fiefs were buying, so they could beat one another to buying live giraffes for their dachas, dialing the fuck out on all our science for decades to come.
    What solar batteries, you moron!—I almost groaned out loud, right there in the street, seeing, as clear as on a graph, the remaining trajectory of my motion: lower and lower, down into thedeep-water murk, with a thin line of tiny bubbles, into despair, the hopeless peddling-piddling of whatever came my way