The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

about how he is the one shaping that life, without inviting me to join him on mutually advantageous terms. Apparently he sees no contradiction here, no cognitive dissonance this time: he simply dives instinctively into the current that, at the moment, lifts him from the shallows with minimal losses—while keeping his controlling interest intact, of course. One can be quite certain—he’ll double-cross his FSB crew, too. And pull his money out of the scheme right in time—he will take my advice.
    When someone turns to truisms, it’s a sure sign that it’s time to wrap up. Life goes on, most certainly, who could argue with that? I look at the man across the table from me (
I thought him strong. Someone capable of determining the fate of many. The embodied dream of an eternally rightless nation of its own, native force that would protect and defend them...
) and feel my lips curl, as if in a mirror with delayed reflection, into that same meaningful smirk of the loony-bin nut: I know where I’ve seen you before. But you—you don’t know me.
    He expected absolution, and my silence unsettles him.
    “By the way,” he says, pretending he’s just now thought of it, “how are you doing money-wise—have something to live on?”
    Now it really takes all I’ve got not to laugh in his face. Bless your cotton socks, you could’ve thought of something funnier! Or is that it—he can’t?
    “Don’t worry. I do have someone to keep me.”
    Then what is it you want, you fucking bitch?
his eyes all but scream, hating me. Any rejection of money, in his system of coordinates, is equivalent to blackmail, and my behavior points at some hidden threat that he absolutely has to neutralize—and without delay.
    “Not R. by chance?”
    So he knows about R., too. That’s no surprise, really, since he had contacted the channel’s management and assembled a file on me; a pile of dirt on a future partner is also part of the controlling interest package.
    “No,” I shake my head. “Not R.”
    “If you wanted, I could buy your pictures from them...the ones of you with R.” And he grins, as if he’d seen them himself.
    And if he had?
    “I don’t give a damn, Vadym.”
    The amazing thing is that I don’t, in fact, give a damn. And finding out that the new management of the channel has armed itself with the pictures that R had taken of me in various revealingposes (and didn’t he say to me back then, “Don’t be so sure!”) utterly fails to produce the effect Vadym counted on. I just don’t care—and that’s it. As if it truly weren’t me—as if I hadn’t been the one sprawled naked under the flashes, with a strap-on, smeared with sperm. You can wallpaper your whole office with those pictures if you feel like it, boys—you won’t get to me.
    “They wanted to cover their bases,” Vadym explains, not yet believing that the bullet he’s been saving for so long has missed by so much. “In case you decided to make a fuss about that
Miss New TV
show...”
    Aha, so my dear ol’ boss must’ve really felt compelled to hustle, bless his heart. He threw everything he had to plug the hole in his wall. I wonder what kind of story about me he intended to spin based on those pictures? Actually, come to think of it, I don’t wonder—not even a little bit. Don’t even feel like flexing my imagination in that direction.
    Instead, something completely different occurs to me—with the same dreamlike ease, as if someone else had determined my actions and all I’m supposed to do is leap off the cliff—a plunge, arms at my sides, head first like a swallow, into the dark-blue abyss below...
    “If you really want to thank me for the consult, Vadym,” I measure out a pause with just the right dose of sarcasm, “then there’s something else you can buy from them for me.”
    Happily, eagerly, he pulls his BlackBerry from his coat pocket and personally writes it down, running his stylus over the screen—he’ll do this, he promises: the materials for my unfinished film, for
Diogenes’ Lantern
, yes, that one. Working title—“Olena Dovgan.” He really will do this for me, I’ve no doubt—he’ll rescue Gela and all my other Dovgans from that vipers’ nest: look at him perk up, his hands suddenly moving with an unusually solicitous busyness. It’s hard for him to believe that he’ll get away from me so easily, that he can buy my silence so cheaply: I will never again speak of why Vlada died. What we both know will