The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

a sick man who might be contagious, and I decide not to make fun of her “from me.” “It’s non of mai biseness of course, and I don’t really anderstend wat I hev to do with zis at all.... I didn’t recognaiz ze voice, but it waz completely clear.” She belligerently thrusts her Cherokee chin at me. “Forgive me, Adrian.”
    Has she lost it? She’s lost it, hasn’t she? What is this nonsense?
    “Forgive me, Adrian,” Yulichka repeats, as if to an idiot. “And somethin about a chaild, laik she’s expectin a chaild, but I didn’t remembe, got scared, can’t ripeat exactli.... ”
    “You’re sure you’re not imagining it?” I say automatically, because I know she’s not imagining it. And I can see she’s not pulling a prank on me—and I can tell she knows she’s got me, although she doesn’t know which part of what she said did it. Her eyes flash with triumphant vindictive satisfaction: this is her moment of power over me, only she doesn’t know how to take advantage of it, and how to make this moment last longer—women never know how to do that, the bed is the only form of power they know, and if a woman doesn’t turn you on, she’ll always be nowhere with all the other advantages she has over you because she won’t know how to use them—and thank God for that.
    What if she’s shooting up in the bathroom on the sly? Or doing acid?—and then, as an ideal secretary, she hallucinates more or less professionally on the phone? Only why would her auditory hallucinations be in unison with my own thoughts—why would we be on the same brain wave, completely in sync, as if we were connected as closely as I’ve only let a single woman becomeconnected to me in my entire life? At first, the thought singed me, a blazing shot of horror through my brain, that it was Lolly asking my forgiveness, saying goodbye to me forever because she was expecting a child from another man (The one she’d flown to Holland with, to eat lobsters on the beach?)—a theory just insane enough to be instantly discarded. No, this was something else, something even crazier.
    Yulichka broke into my thoughts as though she’d been summoned by them, as the universe’s direct response to the claims and complaints rumbling in my head like so much intestinal gas, and I believe that she really heard something and got scared because she did not know she was tuned into my brain waves, only I can’t make heads or tails of any of this either, and do not find this tuning in particularly enjoyable—the same as if Yulichka had penetrated my dreams: such things are only pleasant with someone close, and this Mariupol Amazon is no one to me, nothing, a secretary, no more. Well, that’s what you get with a perfect secretary, is the sarcastic retort that pops up in my mind: she can even take calls from the other world!
    The other world? Why—the other world? Or is that Adrian who was being asked to forgive precisely the “chaild,” the one Granny Lina expected in exile? And it was Granny’s voice that materialized in Yulichka’s phone, summoned by my remembering? But how exactly could it materialize—and with dogs, machine guns, and explosions to boot? I’d forgotten my radio technology, crap. I’ll have to dig around in the literature. I wonder if sound can, say, in a highly resistant medium, get stuck in time? But, for how long—half a century? Total bull. Or maybe I’m one of those, what are they called, somnambulists, and Yulichka and I are under some kind of collective hypnosis? Like in those Moscow sessions that were all over the zombie-tube in the late eighties: stadiums full of people, a gorilla-like psychotherapist in the middle of the field, and a string of hypnotized folks before him, flailing their arms and shaking their heads like a team of demented soccer players—no wonder a country like that croaked soon after. Calmdown, Adrianambrozich, calm down now; don’t let yourself get rattled over nothing.
    Easy to say, calm down: I feel like I’ve been caught in an invisible fishing net and it’s dragging me somewhere where my feet don’t reach bottom. In such cases, the only sensible way to proceed is to let go and quit jerking around, because aside from wasting your energy, the jerking does you no good. This presence in my life of some invisible outside force that keeps making itself known, like in
those dreams
, does not demand
understanding
; and that’s the thing Lolly cannot seem to recognize, my diligent