The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

duplicitous: on one hand he is, most certainly, the help, a whipping-boy runner, but on the other he does command a dose of respect, as a carrier of secret information, which the gods themselves, for lack of time, cannot master. So in this way, he has an upper hand on the gods, and who knows how he’ll decide to play it, and that’s why one has to be careful around professionals, as one had to be around soothsayers and witch doctors in the Middle Ages. One must listen to a professional, especially when he or she delivers a warning, and Vadym is very much listening, my cello call streams straight into his yawing ears. “A
professional
is born the moment he learns to sense the strength of his materials. Learns to intuit the limits of his pliability. Working any substance is always a contract, like with a living being—up to here I burn you, oxidize you, mold you, and you go along with it. As long, of course, as I am not trying to make knives out of glass or teapots out of paper.”
    “More to the point,” Vadym breathes.
    “Just think about what I said.”
    A professional’s language, just like that of a soothsayer or a witch doctor, must be obscure enough to elicit respect. A political technology, as Vadym says.
    “Think how much more complicated this becomes when your material is people instead of brick.”
    A pause. Loud breathing. TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...It feels like I’m working through an algorithm that’s been preprogrammed into me—I barrel ahead without hesitation, without thinking, with a speedy, dreamlike ease, hitting every open target.
    “These people are hacks, Vadym. These professionals of yours. They’re puppet masters, snake-oil peddlers. Taking on a scheme as farfetched as this—to win elections in someone else’s country by means of massive PR campaigns aimed at someone else’s electorate—that’s as bad as promising you paper tea kettles: they’re demonstrating their total ignorance of the material. It’s unprofessional, stupid, arrogant, and ignorant. You can’t treat your material like that. It turns on you.”
    A pause. Loud breathing. TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...
    “It explodes. Or cracks.”
    His face—I feel it throb, pulse inside me like a second heart—gathers again to the focal point of his nose, as if distorted by a bent mirror.
    “It’s the same with people, too.”
    TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...
    “That’s what I call reality. That which lies beyond the limit of pliability. The part that we can’t measure because we can’t see it—or only five percent of it perhaps...”
    “Five even?” he shoots back, ironically: numbers have a soothing effect on him; with numbers he’s safe, back on his own territory.
    “Five percent is the statistical deviation...in accidents, the X factor. They say there are always five percent more survivors than the theory of probability would’ve predicted.”
    The face across the table from me remains impassive, only blinks as if against the wind. How did she have sex with him—was she on top? He must be so heavy, unwieldy, like a strongbox full of dynamite.
    “Watch out, Vadym. They’ll leave you a royal mess, those quacks.”
    And, suddenly and to my own surprise, I realize instantly that this is true. That things won’t go their way. Won’t go their way at all, ever, no matter what illusions they peddle. This comes as an inexplicable certainty, unshakable, clarion-clear, as if all I had to do was speak it, and here it is, summoned, like the “Sesame” that opens a cave—it came and parted the solid rock before me; it broke the spell, and now it’s clear that things cannot be otherwise—that whatever malfeasance Vadym intended toward me is nothing but stuffy, creepy smoke, the miasma of a mind unhinged, moon-blindness that obscures everything
unyielding
, all that can’t be bought or eaten. How could these people, blinkered, and with nothing but the sewage of streaming dollars under their paws, possibly hope to bring down an entire country full of mysterious, unquantifiable life? That’s just a glitch of the matrix in their ailing heads, a mental affliction—like hell they’ll get it!
    The man across the table from me, by contrast, has no certainty of this kind, on either side of the scales, and I can see it: he is left alone at the mercy of his own mind, submerged, as if into his own miasma, into his own calculations that he is so afraid to get wrong, his snappy faculties busily sniffing over the warning