The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

reactions I do experience are peculiarly physiological—pain, nausea; the emotional machinery seems unplugged, as if my body has taken on the entire burden of this conversation and I, myself, am playing no part in it. As in a dream.
    Wait. What dream was like that?
    The pause is getting long (a commercial break without content, the screen burns vacant, and someone’s money is going down the drain as the purchased airtime ticks on: TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...).
    “What do you say?” Vadym gives up. Gives up first. So I am stronger than he is. And Vlada intuited it correctly when she painted me a maiden warrior to the accompaniment of “The Show Must Go On”—she had the right instinct: to seek in me the fulcrum she needed to leverage this man up and free herself from under him. It’s too bad I proved such a coward back then, got scared, flailed, and clucked “I’m not like that!” I did not recognize, I couldn’t see. Could not see anything, stuck my head in the sand: I
needed
everything to be just fine in Vlada Matusevych’s life—for my own peace of mind. I, too, betrayed her; I’m as guilty as Vadym before Yushchenko. I ran. I deserted. I abandoned her.
    What I’d most like to ask Vadym right now is whether he has seen those photos in her archive—the ones of the two of us, me in the witchy makeup, in the style of the early Buñuel heroines, Vlada with the bloody lipstick smeared across her mouth. But I won’t ask him this: even if he had found them, he wouldn’t have seen anything in them. And would not have understood anything.
    So I ask something completely different—what he least expects to hear. “Why me, Vadym?”
    And he looks away.
    “Why did you choose me, of all people?”
    (Softer, someone at my side seems to prompt—softer, more intimately, less steely...)
    “Money like that could buy you any of the super-popular faces from the national channels,” I rumble low like a cello or a bandura, an intimate, chest-deep timbre (of course, the voice is key, folks knew it all the way back in the time of the fairytale in which the wolf runs to the smith,
smithy-smithy, cast me a voice
—how’s that not an electoral technology?). “My show’s not that popular, it wasn’t even in prime time, never made the top ten...”
    “People trust you,” he answers simply. He has chosen to be sincere. Good move.
    “Oh. I see. That’s nice to hear.”
    A pause. TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...
    “And that’s it? That’s the only reason?”
    “Well,” he smiles wide, his most charming smile yet, “that and then again—we’re family, aren’t we?”
    We
would be
“family” if I agreed. That’s what he’s after—this is it, finally. We would, and the trafficking would vanish between us—delete, delete. Vlada would also disappear—the Vlada I remember. Vadym would’ve bought her from me, together with her death. The way he’s already bought her from her mother, and is now buying her from her child.
    Now, this is really slick. Not just slick—it’s awesome, it’s brilliant, it’s all but enough to have me sitting here stunned, breathless, with my jaw dropped again: regardless of the ends a man’s intellect is pursuing, the sight of said intellect at work is always as irresistible to women as female beauty is to men. I applaud you, Vadym Grygorovych. What was it he said—“history is made by money”? It’s only logical that this should apply to the history of an individual life as well—all one needs is to choose his witnesses well. Buy the right witnesses, as in any decent lawsuit. Becauseevery story is ninety-five percent about who does the telling. And he knows that I know this. And I know that he knows that I know...
    For an instant, I short circuit, a spasm grips my throat, and I am blind with hatred for this self-satisfied face with its pink-lipped mouth lined with white ice-cream residue—but the hatred, too, is somehow
not my own
: I watch it inside me as though I were filming it. Somehow now I need to switch to his language—and I find I do speak it; I know how they talk, these people.
    “I understand you, Vadym. Now look what we’ve got here. You say people trust me. If I agree, then after all these...interesting experiments of yours, one thing is certain—they won’t trust me any longer. Even if I commit ritual suicide, samurai-style, right on camera, people will say—eh, a publicity stunt. I won’t make any more heroes; I’ll have to retrain. You say