The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

down...”
    Daryna freezes. Adrian can feel her thoughts as clearly as if it were his own brain being bombarded with electric shock; another instant and he’ll lose it, let it rip; only his worry for Daryna helps him to keep his cool.
    “But don’t you know that you had the duty to call the police and the ambulance? What if she were still alive, inside that car? Consult the Criminal Code, ma’am!”
    At the mention of the Criminal Code the woman shudders but does not back down.
    “Well, it was all just skittered ina mud!” She takes a new angle, now pleading. “Just think, that’s a whole load of trouble. If we hadn’t took it, it’d of been ruined anyhow!” she’s finally found her lifeline. “It was rainin’ so hard you couldn’t see your hand, right, Vasya? If it’d laid there some more, the paint would of come straight off. This way, I saved them pictures, you see.”
    She steps up to the canvas and runs her hand over it, with a sense of ownership, as if smoothing out a rug she’s selling, and shoots Adrian a sly sideways look (unlike her husband, she intuited Adrian’s status right away). In different circumstances, Adrian would have smiled at this—just watch her go!—but at the moment he is in no mood for comedy. The yokel catches on, too.
    “If you want to take this picture, I won’t mind...what about you, Galya? Let ’em take it, right? We don’t need it dat much. Only how do I know you’re telling da truth? Can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing whatever he fancies.”
    Adrian understands they’re now haggling. The pair has realized they’re in trouble, but will keep kicking until the end, to try to get out with some sort of gain for themselves—if I can’t eat it, at least I’ll bite it. They don’t know how to be any other way; otherwise, they’d be as “mighty insulted” as that poor bastard that drank the poison for Colorado beetles. Only these guys won’t go drinking poison—they love life too much.
    And that’s when Daryna begins to laugh. She is not hysterical, nothing like that, she just can’t help it: the redneck’s last sentence, together with his offended look, gets stuck inside her and keeps spinning there, producing, with every turn, a new wave of raging hilarity—“can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing whatever he fancies”—and she is shaking with laughter like a loose-bolted old truck on a dirt road; she is a rattletrap of unglued muscles and tendons, oh my goodness, wiping tears—rewind and rewind, again like contractions or vomiting, “can’t just anyone come over”; she can’t breathe, and the thing is the phrase loses none of its effect with repetition; it remains, to Daryna, insanely funny, and she cannot stop, even though no one else islaughing, and she herself could not possibly ever explain what’s so funny about it, but God, she’s about to burst—her panties are wet already, and tears are running down her cheeks like streaks of rain down a windshield; the redneck and his wife are a blur in her eyes, “can’t just anyone come over and start grabbing”—and she jumps to her feet, shaking her head and choking on a new fit of laughter, waves at Adrian, meaning, it’s fine, she’s fine, she’ll be back to rejoin the company in just a minute, she just has to laugh it all out....
    At this moment, the one who cannot
not
be watching the two of them through the mangled, swollen, and poster-clogged eye of her painting on the wall must clearly see Adrian and Daryna caught together, at once, in a lightning-quick flash of déjà vu.
    As Adrian watches Daryna dash out the door, grabbing her purse on the run, he recalls a recent scene exactly like this one, at The Cupid—a stunning coincidence, like a repetition of the same movement in a dance, almost a rewind, but not quite; something has changed, because something always changes, and the elements of “then” and “now,” so brightly lit in our awareness, though they do call back and forth to each other with all their apparent congruity, like a repetitive geometric design, are still never one hundred percent identical. This time, Adrian realizes, there’s no need for him to run after her—she really will come back in a minute, as she said she would; she is fine.
    Daryna’s déjà vu, however, comes to her as a direct extension of her negotiations with Vadym the night before—still warm, still swirling in her mind in shreds of dirty foam: in the yokel and his