The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Flagellum Dei, the scourge of God (where did I just hear this phrase?). They have magnificent teeth, brand new titanium implants, and are insatiable like the iron locusts of the Apocalypse: they have come to eat, and they will eat until they burst—until their titanium teeth grind everything in their path into dust.
    Suddenly I feel so tired, as if all the air had been let out of me. As if he’d sucked me dry, this Vadym—although it is not at all clear how he could’ve managed that. A growing ache buzzes at the back of my head; I try to hold it straight. The black-giraffe Mashenka brings ice cream in silver flutes—his own ice cream, made in house, Vadym continues to brag, from that same wonder chef.
    “Taste it, you won’t regret it. Have you ever had homemade ice cream?”
    Rich, thick-enough-to-cut-with-a-knife ice cream, yellowish like cream, does have an unusual taste—like the taste of country cooking: something filling, dense, unrefined and fragrant, from an era before plastics. One helping of this is enough to keep you full for a day. Obediently, I say this to Vadym. He nods like a professor happy with a student’s answer on an exam.
    “Now this, Daryna,” he suddenly says didactically, “is the reality.”
    “What—the ice cream?”
    “And the ice cream, too.” He is no longer smiling. “All this,” he looks over his cave again, “and many other things. The ice cream, by the way, is all-natural, made with real milk. No chemical dyes, no GMOs. You know what gee-em-Os are?”
    “I’ve seen that abbreviation before...”
    “Genetically modified organisms. The ones that are winning a growing share of the world’s food market and our national market as well. Soy beans, potatoes with scorpion genes...”
    “Good Lord, why scorpion?”
    “So the bugs won’t eat them. And they don’t. But we do, all of Polyssya has been planted over with those potatoes. Western importers are dumping all this shit on us with no restrictions or controls whatsoever; another generation—and we’ll have the same problems with obesity as Americans do today. And in a few more generations on such a diet we might very well start growing tails, or, say, hooves, no one can tell for sure which in advance.”
    “Come on, that’s straight out of Hollywood!”
    “Yes!” Vadym responds, inexplicably encouraged. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You were so full of fire and brimstone when you were talking about reality and how one doesn’t kid around with it, you almost had me. You’re good! You nailed it, as if from the screen. But what is it—this reality? To listen to you, it’s a...a...” he hesitates for an instant, uncertain outside his regular vocabulary, “a fetish. As if reality existed separately, all by itself.”
    “Doesn’t it, though?”
    “For some village grandma—it may very well indeed. But you, of all people, ought to realize that reality is manufactured by people. And you can’t draw the boundary anymore between what you call reality and what’s been manufactured,” he slows down again, looking for words: he is not used to abstractions, “realities that have been manufactured by people.”
    “Simulacra?”
    Damn that silver tongue of mine! This is not a word Vadym knows—and for a few seconds he studies me with the unblinking antipathy of a redneck whose first instinct is to suspect treacheryevery time he runs into something unknown. (This momentary clash—as if he and I had rammed into each other at full tilt—makes me instantly dizzy; the world, shaken, lurches into motion like sloshing water, and a queer sense of someone else’s invisible presence flickers by, a near presence, somewhere by my side, where I don’t dare turn my suddenly aching head.)
    “It’s postmodern theory,” I hear my own voice say, also as if from somewhere beside me. “Media, advertising, the Internet—they are simulacra. Phantom phenomena that do not bear a direct relationship to reality, but together constitute a parallel reality, the so-called hyperreality. A famous theory—Baudrillard wrote about it. He was French.”
    “See!” hearing that he, by himself, came to the same conclusions as a famous Frenchman, Vadym regains magnanimity. “That’s what I’m telling you. Just then, when you didn’t believe me, you said, Hollywood, and that’s perfectly normal, that’s a normal reaction. It’s harder now to believe the truth than something made up. Any truth is the result of so many