The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

toots, like a straight-A student who firmly believes that every problem has a solution and she just needs to find it. No, this force demands only
obedience
, and the best thing you can do, once something like this has claimed your life and is running some sort of a unipolar current through you in an unknown direction, is simply to submit to it and let it carry you like water, ride it like surf....
    When Mom died I was too little to know anything about this, but I still remember, a whole year before her death, being gripped and torn, so I sometimes couldn’t fall asleep at night, by waves of suddenly surging dread that Mom would die. They say it often happens to teens, and there is nothing mystical about it—the usual prepubescent rollercoaster. But the sense, from back then, of doors opened onto the cosmic cold and the draft of a strange will blowing through them—a will stronger than anything I could have imagined then or could imagine now—I kept this feeling. I remembered it like a dog remembers a scent. And so when it comes again, when the doors creak open—I recognize it.
    Only I don’t know how
to obey
.
    (If back then, when I was twelve, I hadn’t let Mom go on that last trek to Goverla, if I’d latched on to her clothes and screamed, “Don’t go!”—would she be alive now? Although, on that actual day I didn’t have any sense of foreboding, no one did—not even Dad.)
    I cannot let go because the fear for Lolly grips me. An irrational, instinctive fear—the dread that I won’t recognize the moment when I need to latch on to clothes—hers this time. The fear ofbeing under fire from all sides, like those wild pigs in the preserve: you don’t know where to aim when they come.
    Or
who
is coming.
    Still, what if the “chaild” is actually me? And it’s Mom who was asking for my forgiveness? (For what?) Lolly, Granny, Mom, Great-Aunt Gela—so many women already hold me in their net, ensnare me with their presence, and now Yulichka wants a piece of that action, too—like they’ve all conspired behind my back, sending each other their secret signals. Women, of course—they have to be more sensitive to any drafts stirred up in the universe; they, with their monthly bleedings, must be well familiar with this anonymous force that takes you over unilaterally leaving you to simply change your pads obediently. Women ought to be wise as snakes; they ought to be the ones showing us the right way to live, so why are they always so damn helpless?
    Calm down, Adrian, keep it down man.
    “Well, that’s quite a story.” I smile at Yulichka with Olympic composure. “I think I read this somewhere, or maybe it was a movie—this guy comes to a new town, checks into a hotel, and just like you, right then, overhears someone else’s conversation on the phone. And in the conversation they’re making plans to kill someone, so the guy then spends the rest of the movie trying to decide if he should go to the police—but he doesn’t know any names, or dates—so he’d just look like an idiot. Alright, sweetie, is that all? No one else called?”
    Yulichka coolly flutters her heavily mascaraed lashes at me. I recognized this same tense mistrust from the guard at the Tax Inspection office the other day—a hick who’s convinced that the whole world is just waiting for a chance to rip him off—when I tried to tell him a joke. The poor sucker didn’t even smile. But the mention of her immediate professional duties produces its usual effect in Yulichka, like a “sic ’em” command to a police dog, and she sets obediently to reporting who else called while I, here in my little alcove that’s loftily referred to as the office, was indulging in my philosophical meditations instead of doing work. (Whichwas, actually, the right idea: when reality starts to leak, there’s no better way to show it who’s boss than to plunge into the piddly, routine stuff, like organizing my acquisitions log—only it looks like our reality is leaking for real this time, despite my attempts to derail it.)
    “End you hev a meetin et hav past faiv,” Yulichka reminds me for the umpteenth time.
    I assure her, with somewhat exaggerated gratitude, that even Julius Caesar couldn’t hold a candle to her. Because while holding five things in your mind at once is pretty impressive for a man—we men are all single-taskers; we can only focus on one thing at a time, but fully and to the end (and if you couldn’t, and split, that’s