The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

rested and fresh as a daisy, and the pressure—to go to sleep, damn it, and right now—only sends my nerves into overdrive. Classic insomnia, the professional ailment of Ukrainian entrepreneurs. Most of my colleagues have given up the fight with alcohol (three fingers of cognac before bed—and you sleep like a baby, Igor assures)—and some have moved on to sedatives, which is no good at all. And the ones who deal in really big money call in even heavier artillery. Things keep going this way, and people at parties will soon be asking each other, who’s your dealer, the way they now ask, who’s your stylist?
    So we’ll go visit that cuckoo dude tomorrow, alright. I checked the map—it’s really not that far at all: right after Boryspil, after the exit to Zolotonosha. Zolotonosha, such a nice name—means gold-bearing. Dude was a gold mine indeed. A Klondike of adude. The same stretch where Vyacheslav Chornovil crashed—and Vlada. Still no one knows if it was an accident, or if he was murdered—that was also right before the elections, exactly five years ago, and the old camp general, as they called him, was rumored to be thinking of running for president.
    That story looked bad, it looked really, really fishy: a KAMAZ truck knocks the car with the future presidential candidate off the road and then vanishes into thin air—that’s textbook Russian. And it was right after that, it seemed, that things went south in general—as if with the death of the camp general, an important spring finally snapped in our society, and we lost, as Lolly puts it, the strength of the material. The journalists didn’t bat an eye at the time. I remember one rookie even made a big boo-boo in the media when he wrote something along the lines of, good timing for the old man to die. If he’d hung on much longer, he’d have risked becoming a caricature, like a retired Don Quixote—which looked bad, like a young high-flyer’s dancing on an old fart’s grave—and not long after that, the rookie himself crashed, only without any KAMAZs involved: he and a buddy of his smashed into a tree when they were driving home drunk from a nightclub. Fate, you could say, really rubbed that one in. Better to refrain from dancing on graves as a general principle.
    What was that joke my banker told me? This lady has to walk through a cemetery at night, and sees a man, and asks him to see her to the gates. No problem, he says. Thanks, she says, I’m really scared of dead people. Sheesh, he replies, surprised, why would you be scared of us?
    That’s not as silly as it seems. I’ll have to remember to tell Lolly the joke in the morning.
    Not scared, no. But we’ve pushed them completely off our radar, the dead—we’ve come to ignore them, plain and simple. And it’s not sitting well with them, looks like. In the old days, people knew how to live with their dead, invited them into family homes for Christmas and so on.... One dreads to think how many have been added to the other side in the last century—the deadthat no one mourned. One can very well imagine they’re about ready to revolt against us. A mass uprising, the Great Revolution of the Deceased. What if they do rise up from the graveyards one sunny day and take to the streets?
    One thinks such happy thoughts in the middle of the night, doesn’t one?
    We should buy flowers when we go tomorrow, put them on that spot on the highway. I wonder if it’s even marked in any way....
    Better go make myself another cup of that chamomile tea. Now I know why old people drink it—they also suffer from insomnia.
    Suffer indeed. At this very hour.
    The thought puts me on my feet. All this piddly shit you do, waste your life on, only for your own family there’s never enough time...I’ll just go ahead and call, right now. Why not?
    I shut the bedroom door behind me (sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other), and do the same with the kitchen door, turning the light above the table way down, so it doesn’t shine into my eyes; I noticed this a long time ago: people speak softer in low light, instinctively keep their voices low. Two closed doors and a hallway between me and my girl—I don’t have to worry about waking her.
    Man, I smoked the hell out of this place! Rooms where people smoke a lot and for a long time, especially when warm, smell not of cigarette stubs or smoke, but of decay: not quite of cadaver yet, but of the stage right before that. A unique whiff of rot: it instantly calls up,