The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

he’s just received, weighing whether it merits a revision of his well-composed, multilevel equation, or if it can be brushed off, deleted, in which case he would also have to delete me as an authoritative source right along with it, and that’s more difficult. I am still a professional and, once I’ve been offered a certain amount of money, I can’t be crossed off the books just like that. They are held hostage by their own money and the hyperreality they have created; these people are physically incapable of admitting that something they paid for, or were about to pay for, could turn out to have no value whatsoever, because this would mean they’d been had, and that, by definition, can never happen to gods.
    The man across the table from me is throwing sparks, at this moment, like a faulty telegraph wire—a short-circuit, a cognitivedissonance: he must accept one of two things—either he’s just fucked up royally with me, or he is looking at the prospect of fucking up even more royally in the game I just refused to play—and that’s it, a dead-end; this dilemma has no solution within the framework of his system.
    And now I
remember
—as if a new picture finally breaks, easy and free, independent, onto the surface of the one I persist in keeping steady before me with a superhuman effort of my throbbing brain—a picture that has spent the entire evening fighting its torturous way up through my long-suffering mind: a déjà vu, the recognition of a once-seen, completely different face—sharp, eagle-nosed, and thin-lipped, protruding like a wolf’s snout with close-set eyes—but it doesn’t matter that the face is different, because now I know
where
I saw it before. It emerges in my memory now, a giant dark mass, like a whale surfacing, bringing with it the image that I’ve been groping for, blindly, for so long—
that dream
of mine, the one dreamt two weeks ago, on that wild night—the night that would not end, as if Aidy and I lived several lifetimes in that single night, on the verge between dream and wakefulness; my beloved tried to run after someone, shouted that he had to kill the traitor, and I was his land, the moist, sloshing darkness that kept him afloat.
    I don’t remember how many times we made love. I was exhausted. I was plasma. I was a runny mass; he melted me completely, down to the most secret nooks and crannies. I was dying and could not die, and then it finally came, and I saw death with my own eyes and recognized it, the white flash of it that I’d known once before: a thousand searchlights aimed at me, a new sun exploding in the depths of the cosmos, the birth of a new planet. After a night like that one could go a year without sex. No wonder I hadn’t felt like any for two weeks already, that’s never happened to me before—it was as if we opened the doors to something beyond that night, and that otherworld poured into us more than we could hold, and, aside from our all-night vigil of lovemaking, all that stayed with me were fragments of our conversations whenwe lay, in the ebbs, spent but still in each other’s arms, and kept mumbling things, interrupting each other like drunks, desperate to scoop up and somehow hold in our words what was already seeping back behind the door. We were dreaming the same dream; the magnitude of memories is finite—the girl in a sailor suit, Aunt Lyusya with a sack of western flour, the childhood secret abandoned in the yard in Tatarka, Aidy’s notes on a pack of Davidoff cigarettes about blood in Kyiv and women who would not cease giving birth—but these were all just words, impenetrable and flat like lids, and the other dimension we had glimpsed beyond them was already hidden from us again. And although in the morning I, too, carefully wrote down all the details I managed to retain, the entirety of it had hopelessly and irrevocably disintegrated.
    But now it surfaces again, to prove that it didn’t disappear at all—it bobs up for a single, short sliver of a moment, in the fully renewed, searing sharpness of color it had that night, as if I were looking through a camera zooming swiftly in, framing the night, the woods, human figures cut out from black cardboard, set against a blood-red fire, and right there, smack in the focal point—got it!—a protruding, stern, and stiff face, like a wolf’s snout, not so much handsome as commanding with the sculpted perfection of its features, with eyes purposefully narrowed to Tatar-like slits,