The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

ocean where at different depths different currents begin to form, some stronger, some weaker. This is your chance to ride the one that’ll take you to the top. Later will be too late. And you, I’m sorry, won’t be getting any younger either.”
    Knocking the last stool from under me. Bingo.
    “So, do think about it. I, by the way, might be able to put someone with your experience to good use.”
    So this is what we’ve taken our sweet time getting to. All this was mere exposition for the main plot, and the plot comes now—plain as nails: I am being bought. I am unemployed: naked and available. On the block.
    And for some reason, I’m terrified. Inside, a sickening chill blasts just below my breasts—as if
they
have come for me. (Who? The human figures with wolf heads I imagined were behind the door of my bedroom when I was little, Goya’s monsters, mad paramedics, machine-gunners with dogs?) As if all my fears that until this instant had been scattered across my life like shadows on a sunny day rose at once and stood to their full height, leaned all together against an invisible divider and flipped my life to the other side—and now it seems there has never been anything in it, except these fears, not a glimmer of sunshine. Catacombs, dungeons. An artificially lit cave. (Someone will throw the switch now—and it will turn dark, and I’ll never find my way out of this darkness; I will remain here forever, for Vadym to do with as he pleases.)
    “I mean that show of yours, about unknown heroes,” he says suavely. “Diogenes’ something...”
    “
Diogenes’ Lantern
.”
    “Oh yes, lantern. Was he the guy who went around with a lantern looking for a man? Not bad, only you got too clever there; you gotta keep it simple for the common folks. But the way you created those heroes out of nothing—that was awesome! Super professional work.”
    “Thank you. Only I wasn’t making anything out of nothing. They were all amazing people—every person I ever made a show about.”
    “Whatever. You know how to package a person—how to turn some Joe Schmo into a cult figure. You’ve got, as they say, the sales pitch. I still remember your show about that priest who keeps an orphanage and how those retarded kids call him Daddy...”
    “Not retarded. There was only one kid with Down syndrome.”
    (The boy with Down syndrome was already a grown, stout, wide-shouldered youth with the cognitive development of a two-year-old—he laughed, pushed to grab on to the shiny eye of the camera, and hooted, again and again, the same line from a VV song, “Spring comes! Spring comes! Spring comes!”—and somehow was not in the least bit repulsive to look at, made so, perhaps, by the presenceof the priest who adored his charge with a real fatherly tenderness, as though he could see in him something invisible to the rest of us. “Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord,” the priest said, and it came out sounding especially beautiful somehow, so that I, the sentimental cow that I am, got all teary-eyed: every creature born to this world has the right to live and be happy praising the Lord, and what ever made us think that some of us are better, and others are worse? And then I remember that Vadym has a son from his first marriage—from that woman who lost her mind, and he sent the boy to study in England: to an orphanage, one could say, only of a different kind, a five-star one. Whom does that boy call Daddy there?)
    “And are you aware of the fact that later, when the local elections came around, three parties fought each other for that priest’s endorsement?”
    “Can’t be! I’d never...”
    “Exactly. You’d never. You made him a public figure, a moral authority. Who was he before you discovered him? Just another ragtag village priest, without voice or power. And then you made your show—and he’s a spiritual shepherd! Pilgrims from the whole region mob his church; bigwigs roll up in SUVs, bringing their children. We’ll do as Father says! And you say it wasn’t out of nothing!”
    “You have a strange way of looking at things, Vadym. My role was not at all as critical as you see it.”
    “Oh, stop it. Modesty, as a friend of mine says, is the shortest path to anonymity.” Vadym pauses to give me the opportunity to appreciate the joke and when he doesn’t get a reaction (my head’s humming like a power substation), winks at me: “And you were a star! And could remain one.”
    “You want me