The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

that had been implanted in him against his will, like viral DNA. If you spend years carrying around something you cannot live with, it might just become easier to crash upon the water than to stop diving.
    In the time I spent with the crumbly book, I experienced a rush of fierce, bone-piercing bliss, as if soaring on a glider: I could be proud of him. Not as my father—he had been gone too long for that—but as a person I could admire had I met him now. It seemed forever since I’d actually met anyone like that (Did they really all die out?), and the unfulfilled need to be around them—not even to be close; I’d be happy to admire my heroes quietly, from the crowd, if only there’d been someone to admire—pulled on my insides, like hunger, like vitamin deficiency or sexual dissatisfaction, and the discovery splashed my face like life-giving water: How could this be, I muttered half-consciously? How could this happen? I put down the book and stumbled around the room, blindly, as if feeling for something I had lost there, then fell back onto the chair and stared, just as blindly, at the same page, while my thoughts looped on themselves, tangled into knots, refusing to register the real shock: How could it be that I really know nothing about him? And won’t ever know—won’t ever find any other evidence of his life as he lived it? He didn’t write private letters, didn’t keep a journal, didn’t leave a single impression of his internal self in any material substance I could find, pick up, turn over—nothing, except a random remark in the margin of a random book.
    this!!!
    ***
    Since then I have more faith in misplaced trifles than in rehearsed stories, which always feel like something gutted, stuffed, and roasted before being served for me to gobble up. I believe in remembered mannerisms and scribbles in books, accidental scowlscaught by a friend’s camera, and strange tooth marks on cigarette holders. I am the detective Columbo of the new century—and please don’t laugh at me! I know that these excavated remains of vanished civilizations, the many, many civilizations that had once existed under people’s names, do not lie. If we have any hope of understanding anything about another’s life, this
this!!!
is it. We’ve heard all the other stories before, thank you very much, and we’re sick of them.
    I can no more pass up these scattered shiny beads than a raccoon can ignore a broken mirror. And I mean literally: I pick them up and drag them to my lair. I have a whole collection of them already: my own disordered notes in various notebooks, on random scraps of paper, on festival booklets and concert programs, on the backs of press releases, on any other printed matter, and lengths of film from the cutting-room floor, twisted and kept, for reasons unknown, in an old computer box—all in utter disarray. Why, you could very well ask, am I holding on to this poorly scanned drawing by a little girl from Pripyat who died of leukemia and whose strangely unbrokenhearted parents were convinced she’d been destined to artistic fame? It’s hard to tell whether this really was the case: all children’s drawings are interesting, and, in this one, a brown hippo stands on the shore of a blue lake, rounded toward the horizon. The picture didn’t make it into the Chernobyl show (I remember I wanted to keep the program austere, somber, inexorable, no sentiments, no snivels), and the girl’s mother was upset with me: I had taken away her role of the tragically lost young genius’s parent, and what could I give her in return—a dead child? Still, even if there hadn’t been the upset mother and my guilt, I wouldn’t have it in me to kill the picture—so I’m keeping it, as if hoping to find, one day, the proper place for it.
    Essentially, none of my shows ever grew out of the themes that I so thoughtfully pitched to my producers and colleagues. They were all conceived out of just such small details, some hook that caught my attention and teased with the promise of inaccessible secrets, like a distant glowing window seen at night from a passingtrain: Who lives there? What are they doing? Why is the light on so late? As a rule, such things did not make the final cut, either remaining somewhere beyond the scope of the lens, or making a brief appearance in the background, so inconspicuous that I alone could find them, like a signature hidden in the corner of the picture. Or, to be completely honest, like a note