The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

(I’d already sold two of Grandpa’s cigarette cases and eaten through the get). Everything inside me rebelled, every little cell squealed, “No!” And my entire fucking unique cognitive apparatus that had been hitched to the thermionic generator hammered feverishly, revving out of inertia, and dragged me in the opposite direction—up, clinging to every alternative I hadn’t bothered to consider before. I called my cigarette-case guys that same night.
    I didn’t slam any doors as Lolly did. I, when you think about it, didn’t quit anything abruptly, the smartass that I am—like all Galicians, Igor would say (he’s one of those who’d binged on the Brothers Gadiukin band in their day and came to believe, once and forever, that Galicians constitute a special breed of people). Officially, I can always go back; officially I’m still a PhD candidate in the Semiconductors Department. Weekend scientist, that’s me. People think you can do that. That it’s like an office manager’s job: you come in, turn on your computer, work however long, shut it all down, and walk away—free as a bird. Some clients, when they learn I’m a scientist, and a techie to boot, look at me with new respect: that’s an extra layer of cool. Shit that’s cool. In moments like that, I feel like a male prostitute who’s killed his patron and is now peddling her things. No one except me knows that I had to bury a part of myself—forever; that’s it, lights out, it’s all gone. That I live with my own corpse. As do all my peers, actually, only for some of them it’s worse. For most of them, to be precise.
    I took Sashko Krasnokutsky, who lunged at me out of the darkness and then fell back into it, to be a fortuitous—that’s how selfish I am!—sign from Providence. A visual aid illustrating what it was that horrified me that day on Shevchenko Boulevard—and that I did well getting horrified. Sashko’s arc led down, mine—exponentially, up: E to the
n
th degree. That’s how it seemed to me then.
    For a while, it even soothed the constantly stinging pain of dull dissatisfaction with myself. I recognized this pain in others, too, especially from the way people drank, the way they celebrated acontract, the way they worked so hard to prove to themselves that “life is good” that they ended up face down in their salads. Hell no, I told myself: two cognacs or three glasses of dry wine, and not a drop more. Plus the swimming pool, plus the gym. I was always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the time—a big cheese, like that heron among the birds. The only thing I missed—my dreams: I didn’t remember them anymore. Nothing to do with alcohol—just, a part of me went cold like an unused room in a house.
    And unused rooms, as is only to be expected, are where ghosts move in.
    “Adrian Ambrozich, yu hev a meetin et haf past faiv.”
    Yulichka emerges at the door, barely covered below the navel by her new maxi-belt. Where’d she get the idea that she’s got legs fit to be peeled to the root like that?
    Out, you moron!—I barely keep from barking, but the pure love of truth keeps my mouth shut: my secretary is no moron. Instead, I do something I’d never in a million years expect from myself: I get up, go right up to her (her perfume’s rather nice), bend down, and run my hand over the entire length of her satiny-black-hosed, calvary-bowed thighs—she could press them together and you’d still fit your head between her knees—bottom up, all the way, to her crack, to her very pubic bone sheathed in her micro-skirt, and squeeze it so hard that my brave Yulichka hisses. Hisses but doesn’t give in, what a trooper, take one for the team. That’s what I thought—a G-string. And it doesn’t cut in?
    “Thank you, Yulichka,” I say, leaning her away from me like a tin soldier, but not letting go of her nether regions. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you—would you mind buying yourself a suit? An English one, you know, a traditional cut, a bit conservative—just the thing for the antiques business. Remember that old man who’d promised us a cuckoo clock? Where’d he disappear to—did you, by chance, scare him off with your,
mmm
, glamorous outfit?”
    “I’ll call him back,” Yulichka mutters as if hypnotized, throat caught, voice softened.
    “That’d be great,” I say just as nicely, and let her go. The whole interaction holds about as much eroticism as if I’d held on to a doorknob for a while, but it