The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

(nibbled) model. Or, perhaps, not the model, but the work? No, it wasn’t the model, or the work either. For her, I was something else in that incarnation, a bizarre impersonation of female strength, which she no longer felt in herself. And I remember well the strange alarm that stirred in me when she was aiming at us like that, with both hands, at face level, as if it were a gun muzzle and not a camera lens.
    Those pictures remain in her digital archive—Vadym hasn’t destroyed that yet. That’s what he says, at least. I don’t know if I would like to see them now. “Doesn’t matter,” Vlada said, when we looked at the pictures together—“no photograph can ever give you what you get when you look at the thing in flesh, and color photography especially is all smoke and mirrors, bull andopium for the people.” And she was right: The pictures were very impressive but something crept into them that wasn’t there in the mirror—theatricality. We looked like a pair of masqueraders, and my witchy mask no longer mesmerized as powerfully—some magic had gone out of it. This is why, Vlada professed contemplatively, painting can never be replaced, not ever, not with anything. “That’s okay. I’ll use this. I’ll do something with these. I just don’t know what yet...”
    And I did not tell her that she’d already done something—to me, only I also didn’t know yet what it was. Washing my face in the bathroom later—with dull regret, as if an unfulfilled promise had breathed so near and passed me by, only brushing me with that one touch on the lips, and then slipping between my fingers (only living beauty can evoke such an aching sense of loss—never the one on canvas)—I felt my knees buckle under me. Just like that, literally, as if the tendons suddenly turned to mush and lost their grip—and up till then I thought “straw legs” was just a figure of speech. Had there been a male artist in Vlada’s stead, everything between us would’ve discharged into clarity by means of immediate sex, and that sex probably would’ve been divine. One of those few times, count them on your fingers, that you remember for the rest of your life—with a complete release from the body such as one experiences in the midst of religious ecstasy, when, as I seem to remember Papa Hemingway wrote, the ground swam, although that was nonsense, too, because there’s no ground left in sex like that, neither ground nor sky, neither up nor down, and love has nothing to do with it. Although I did have one time like that with Aidy, but then I’ve also had one with Artem—that time in the archive, when I first saw the photo of Dovganivna with her comrades and it came over me right on the spot, and that’s when it all started, my life changed.
    But Vlada was not a man, and the two of us could not rely on such simple resolutions, programmed into us by Mother Nature herself. Something else, then, was between us, something more unsettling, something akin to the link between a new mother andthe fruit of her womb—she gave birth to something in me that night. She set something free, like a large dark bird.
    And this remained our secret, one for the two of us—we never talked about it again, didn’t have a chance. Until the day there was no longer anyone to talk to.
    How could I have given her the strength I myself did not know was in me?
    ***
    “B-beg pardon, I didn’t hear you—what was t-that?”
    Baldy asked me a question or something. And I tuned him out. Coz I’m drunk. Drink-dong-drunk...I hear bells ringing somewhere, a tinny-tiny little sound. No kidding, I’m drunk, good and drunk, who’d have thunk. Somewhere there was a stage at which I should’ve stopped and lingered, and I didn’t notice how I rolled straight through it. Overdid it. And butter won’t help no mo’.
    Baldy was asking whether I am bored. Oh, sure, he needs an audience; he wanted to preen before me, too. And I just tuned him out; how uncivil—did not hear a thing,
nada
, of what they were talking about.
    “I’m n-never bored.”
    “Oh, then you are a very special woman. One of a kind—your health!”
    But I am bored looking at you, mister. Do you have any idea how boring you are to look at? You’re all so boring, like someone’d just pulled you out of a washer. That’s exactly what you’re like: soggy and wrung out. And you probably imagine yourself all clean and squeaky, right?
    “It’s time we got going,” Aidy says. The big