The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

involved reduced to a source of comforting insight for a friend in need, as in “I know exactly what you’re dealing with, I’ve gone through the same thing, but see, I made it, and so will you”—I simply missed the alarm, failed to receive the signal, or, more precisely, ignored it like background noise: such signals, apparently, are only recognized by cretins like myself in deep hindsight, after the funeral, when all the heaving and sighing and shaking of heads adds up to a critical mass and reveals thatsuch signals fell around the deceased in her last weeks like hail. How could we all have missed them, under what collective curse?
    “Would you believe it, I can’t sleep,” she’d said on the phone, as if extending an invitation to marvel together at this unusual phenomenon, but at two in the morning the tireless gurgle of her voice bore into my ear like a subcutaneous irritation because I had to get up at six for a live session and was close to falling over as I moved around my apartment, bumping into furniture, half-aware of packing my bag, with the phone against my ear that seemed to be slowly mashed into a bloody mess as she dripped, “I have this idiotic fear, like, if I fall asleep, I will die.... ”
    “Vlada, you’re simply overworked,” I said, for the sixth time in the last hour, “nothing comes without a price; you’ve had a hard year, leave it all and go on vacation somewhere far away”—thinking that the newly elected representative also needed some resting, since apparently he had no way of helping a woman fall asleep and was turning into one of his brethren who get from stress to stress by drinking their way through a sea of alcohol, only to be diagnosed with erectile dysfunction by age forty—and Vlada was still babbling, unflinchingly, that yes, I had a point, and they were already planning a trip to Dubai, or Abu Dhabi, one is cheaper and the other more accommodating, and which one she’d recommend in case I decided to get away, finally, too, until I had to plead for mercy and howled, “Vlada Matusevych, would you please shut up and let me get away for the four hours I still have?!”
    She laughed—a short, erratic flute scale, strangely melodic but suddenly awkward, as if she just then realized that she’d been keeping me up, and unsettling, too, because I also felt awkward for having flaunted my sleepiness to a friend suffering from insomnia—and it felt like I’d left her to fend for herself at night in an unfamiliar place. The laugh stuck in my ear like water, except that it did not, like water, seep warmly into the pillow as I slept through the short hours, and I woke still hearing its silvery echo, which, should I have had the wits to stop and listen to carefully, would have spelled out another warning signal—a sign that myoutburst, which had slipped out of my grip like an ax falling from tired arms, had cut an invisible cable from the great edifice that is life, and it shuddered in response. In Vlada’s tinny laugh, high like a taut string’s ear-splitting response to an errant touch, razor on glass—that’s the dissonance that the four hours I still had must have sent into the widening, humming circles of infrasound vibrations that were already swirling around Vlada, because the truth was that at that point, I had many more hours left than she had; hers were countable, hers were slipping away, hers were almost drained to the bottom, but neither of us could have known it then.
    And three weeks after that she did fall asleep—precisely as her late-night fear warned her not to—in the middle of the day, in her car, on the highway to Boryspil, on her way to meet her agent who was flying in from Frankfurt with her paintings; he insisted he’d given them to her and they parted at the airport; but when Vlada’s overturned Beetle, crumpled like a tin can around her body, which was speared, hard, by the steering wheel, was lifted from the ditch and cut apart, there were no paintings in it, neither in the back seat, nor in the trunk, and, of course, one could assume that the car was robbed after it had crashed, or one could indulge a swarm of far worse and entirely outlandish suspicions about the accident, of which the only one that retained any vestiges of common sense, and thus could keep the living from losing all of theirs, was the idea that Vlada had fallen asleep while driving and the car had swerved off the wet highway (it had been raining just before the