The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

bodyguard—Adrian’s own bunker had just room enough for five.
    ***
    “Geltsia! Lolly, oh...are you here?”
    “Shhh...can you hear it?”
    “What?”
    “The wind...”
    “Listen. I was dreaming about that again.”
    “Me too.”
    “What?”
    “Don’t shout. You cried out in your sleep.”
    “What did I say?”
    “All kinds of very intelligent things, only really loudly. You woke me up. You were talking in your sleep—but in full sentences, like you were reading notes.”
    “And what did I say?”
    “That the set of memories is finite.”
    “Really?”
    “I’ve no idea what it means, but you repeated it several times.”
    “Wow. That’s something...anything else?”
    “I couldn’t memorize everything, Aidy. Something along the lines of everything that happened to us already happened to someone else before. The set of memories in the world is finite. A girl that lets you smell her. Who is that?”
    “Marynka. We played together behind the trashcans, and she let me see her pee. Let me run my finger along her groove, down there.”
    “Little slut.”
    “No, wait...I remember what it felt like to touch her—like silk. But why would she be speaking Polish?”
    “You don’t speak Polish.”
    “It was in my dream. Only it wasn’t my dream; it was his dream. That other man’s. The dead one.”
    “Did the dream have a different girl in it?”
    “The girl may have been different, yes, but the memory was the same. A finite set. Actually, that’s a thought! It’s great that you woke up and heard me—I wouldn’t have remembered this on my own.”
    “It’s my new vocation—a night secretary. I’ll be turning on my dictaphone before we go to bed and keeping track of your dreams.”
    “No, really, Lolly, what if it’s true? What if the set of humankind’s memories is really finite and everything that is happening to us now already happened to someone else before? Then, in principle, this is a set that can be measured—theoretically, at least, you could pack all the memories in the world into a dozen hard drives, you know? It’ll be the only reasonable explanation for all that déjà vu, no?—just a shred of someone else memory getting caught in your mind, like a speck of dirt in your eye...a couple hundred kilobytes, that’s all...”
    “Sweetie, you’ve gotten me all messed up with your kilobytes. Now I can’t remember anything I dreamt myself.”
    “Neither can I—it’s all bits and pieces...but a finite set—that’s a great idea, Lolly! I’ve been thinking about it, just couldn’t find the answer—and it’s right here: if different people’s memories match, not because of the experiences they share, but by the random-numbers principle, like, you know, cards from the same deck, when sometimes you draw four sixes in a row—that’s a different picture.... ”
    “The photograph!”
    “What? Why?”
    “You said picture and I remembered: there was a photograph. In my dream. The same one, of Gela in the woods.”
    “No kidding?”
    “Yes, I’m pretty sure...a picture of a woman taken not long before she died. Vlada, when we shot that interview with her, in the Passage, for a moment had eyes like that—as if no longer hers. And I also, for some reason, remembered Aunt Lyusya, my mom’s sister—you haven’t met her, she died in 2000...”
    “Of what?”
    “Breast cancer. She had this tremendous will to live, believed to her last day that she would get better. Mom was with her, and she said when her heart stopped, she had this baffled expression on her face, like—what, this is it? She looked like that in the coffin, too.... She was a very strong woman, one of those, you know, that hold the family together—way out of Mom’s league in that respect. After the war, during the famine, she went after bread somewhere to your neck of the woods, schlepped a sack of flour all the way back from Zdolbuniv, no one knew where she got it.... That flour fed them through that hungry year—and Mom was so weak with hunger she couldn’t get up. Later, when Mom left to study, Aunt ferried food to her in Kyiv too, every Sunday.... But what made me think of that?”
    “Must be that kind of a night. With the dead in our dreams. Means it’ll rain, no?”
    “That’s not funny.”
    “It’s not supposed to be. Here, be quiet a sec. Can you hear that?”
    “What?”
    “The wind.”
    “No...isn’t that the fridge?”
    “No, be quiet now. You’ll hear it howl. Come to me.