The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

closet: bosses of all kinds, administrators, directors, princes of tiny local fiefdoms, all performing their greeting rituals for me—television’s come!—in their offices. They click through my mind frame after frame like a newsreel from a military parade: the suits—gray, charcoal, black pinstripe, gray herringbone (one such bundle of tweed with suede elbow patches still calls me, keeps inviting me out to dinner)—rise energetically from behind their desks cluttered with telephones; a front-desk Mashenka brings in the coffee; and, after a short prelude, every one of them turns the conversation to his monumental contribution to one thing or another, blows himself up into a hot-air balloon, bigger and bigger, ready to fly up to the stratosphere, and stoops, and bows, and fawns over his goods. And then there were the high-fliers, the unacknowledged geniuses, the inventors of perpetual motion machines, and the victims of incredibly convoluted intrigues who couldn’t wait to fill my poor ears with assurances that their story was the one that was going to make me famous world over (the breed that, fortunately, has collectively diverted to cyberspace with the arrival of the Internet, like water finding a break in a dam).
    Lord, how many of them, in my years of work on TV, danced around me like savages around an idol, with tambourines, hollering, flowers, and toasts—all to sway me to turn them into the fantasy heroes they wished to remain in people’s memories? Like electrons wrenched from their natural orbits by some tremendous explosion, all these people, even when they managed to find perfectly good places for themselves in this world, kept smoldering with the secretconviction that those places were not really
theirs
, and that they were really meant for a
different
, amazing and remarkable, life, which had either been taken away from them or was not yet apparent to everyone else—and that’s why they needed an apostle, an advocate, a sculptor with a mass-media chisel who would help bring out the contours of the masterpieces hidden in the shapeless bulk of their biographies, someone who would chisel away everything redundant, and reveal them to the awestruck and speechless world.
    They’ve always been swarming around me, these wrenched-from-their-orbit electrons who dreamt of becoming simulacra. Only I used to treat their presence as an inevitable cost of doing business—like the dark side of the moon, a gloomy shadow that trails every vocation—this was just what you got for being a journalist, you couldn’t help it.... Now, when my own center of gravity has shifted, under Vadym’s assault, onto this other, dark side, I see for the first time, in close-up,
the way
the whole army of them, with Vadym at its helm, sees journalism; it turns out they weren’t the shadow at all—they were my profession itself, its essence, its bare and hard core, cleared of all extraneous layers:
advertising
.
    Not
information. Not the collection and dissemination of the information that helps people develop their own views, as I had believed until now. (To journalism students at the university, when they asked me what my gold standard of reporting was, I always said, watching their young faces turn puzzled and surprised, Chornovil’s underground
Ukrainian Messenger
, which he published in the 1970s—I can name no reporting more chemically pure than that.) But in fact, my shows are in the same class with commercial breaks: I am an advertiser; I advertise people. Others advertise beer and sanitary pads with wings, and I advertise people. Shape them into attractively packaged legends. That’s my specialty.
    And that’s all there is to it, as Vadym says.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Twenty-five grand,” Vadym says. US dollars. A month. Until the end of the election campaign. And sits there looking at me, eyes narrowed. (What color
are
they?)
    I must be really good at advertising people. I am also, it would appear, good at controlling my face before the camera: he doesn’t seem to be able to read anything from it.
    Looks like he is a bit disappointed.
    “Hotel California” is ending; I hear the last chords. My head is pounding so hard that muscles throughout my whole body reverberate with pain. And inside—it’s empty; the fear’s gone. It’s the strangest thing: I am taking this round—compared to the previous one, in my boss’s office—incomparably more calmly, as if it were all happening to someone else. The