The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

air.
    And how could I tell him now?
    “You probably oughtta go to bed, Aidy,” Dad determines sympathetically, having interpreted my slowness in his own way. “You go turn in, and I’ll play around for a bit longer.”
    As if I am still the eight-year-old boy who lost his mother, and he, who promised to be both Mom and Dad, is wishing me a good night standing in the door of my bedroom—before he goes back to the kitchen where he will stay up late solving the problems in the take-home math exams for well-connected students, the main source of supplementing his engineer’s wages. At eight, Icould not yet understand that his promise to be both Mom and Dad meant not remarrying—and he did not remarry, he kept his word. Granny Lina did implant in him some of her generation’s unbendable resolve.
    I would give anything to be able to hug him right now—to grab him in a bear hug and hold him close, my lonely, aging dad, who has podagra and diabetes and smokes too much, and has a wheeze in his chest, and flakes of dandruff on his jacket (when we went to film in Lviv last year it was Lolly who noticed it, said to me: you should tell your dad about anti-dandruff shampoo)—if he were here, that’s exactly what I would do, although our family has always been sort of ashamed of any displays of male sentimentality. Grandpa and Dad, caught in a fit of tenderness, would at most ruffle my hair, or slap me on the shoulder, meaning, it’s all good, pal, hang in there! And if he were here, it would’ve been enough, after we hugged, to slap him on the shoulder in silent understanding: it’s all good, old man...so he would know that I’m here for him, that he can count on me.
    I know I’m not a very good son—although I’m considered to be good because I regularly send him money. But a good son—that’s not money, or even taking care of one’s father when he begins to need help. It’s having the balls to accept your father’s legacy and everything it means and make the honest payment for it with your own life—without trying to jump off that train. Maybe it takes time. Maybe it takes years and years to
become
a son—biology alone doesn’t cut it.
    “I only asked you about this,” Dad explains apologetically, as the vision I had of him in his spot of light over in Lviv, backed by the bookshelves with old magazines and dusty pennants (pennants! I remember them now—the pennants! and the trophies—the trophies Mom won—that’s what’s up there on top!), now goes out of focus before my suddenly moist eyes, “because this Ador must somehow be connected with Gela, so I thought maybe Darynka could use it.... It might be important...and I don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman.”
    “Probably a man,” I force myself to say. He doesn’t need to know anything; let him sleep easy (sleep, one little eye, sleep, the other). “Or. must be Orest, no?”
    My voice sounds normal. Almost.
    “Nope, can’t be,” Dad perks up. “If it’d been Orest, it’d be first! Grandma kept the same order of initials throughout; she’s always had ironclad order in everything! First the name, then the last name. Or. has to be the last name, but this Ad.... could be anything—Adam, Adela?”
    “Adrian,” says someone else for me, in my own almost-normal voice—and I feel the unleashed word fly through the receiver like a rock thrown into a deep well, an incredibly deep well like a dark shaft...
cutting the air with a whine, and while I, above the curb, wait
for the sound of it hitting the water, cold goose bumps crawl up my legs...
Whoosh
!
A splash, bubbles, circles on the surface of the water, a slowing down of movement,
a change of medium, a passing into another time, “Forgive me, Adrian.”
Crackle, houlin, laik wind in ze wires.... Clicks, and somesin laik laik mashin gun shutin...
    Miss Yulichka. Comrade-in-arms, my right hand, Mata Hari...
    A fluctuation of air is all it is, I say to myself. Sound is simply fluctuations of pressure that fade exponentially because they cannot last forever: the first law of thermodynamics. The fluctuations cannot remain because they are not recorded on physical media—not anywhere. There is no virtual, open-access audio library of once-sounded voices out there. One cannot welcome visitors to a museum of children’s secrets.
    I know all this. But I also know that “Ad.” is him. Adrian. The one after whom I was named. My godfather, in a certain sense.
    I just know it, and