The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

accident), and no one would ever know—this haunted me for a long time afterward—whether in the last split second before impact, as the Beetle flew into the ditch, Vlada was shaken awake in time to realize what was happening (Long enough to be terrified? To scream? To feel the pain? To hear the sound of her own bones crushing?) or if she’d woken up already on the other side, trying, unsuccessfully, to rub her eyes and slowly coming to realize that she no longer had eyes nor hands to rub them with. (This would be better—so much better that I spent many months convincing myself that that’s exactly what happened.)
    “I killed her,” repeated Rep. Vadym, face frozen into a bizarre half-smile, as he sank, fat and red (Vlada, small as Thumbelina, had always preferred large-scale men), into the ottoman; his shirt had come undone and a patch of high-quality underwear stuck out; a bottle of Courvoisier stood on the rug at his feet, and he held his glass with both hands, mechanically swirling his drink and repeating his mantra—“I killed her, I killed her, it’s my fault, I should have been in that car”—and this grotesque teddy-bearishness of his was the hardest to take, especially when paired with what he was saying, so inconsistent with reality, so discordant with what had happened—like the sound a razor blade makes on glass—as if he’d been cut and pasted here from a different movie altogether. I thought he was beating himself up for having let Vlada go alone, that he was crushed with the desperate realization that if he’d gone with her, she would’ve lived—and it was hard to argue with that—but it dawned on me that he was not feeling guilty about Vlada so much as feeling sorry for himself. It took all I had not to scream at him, Shut up!, even though he was not really speaking to me, or asking anything of me, and would’ve been asking the same question if I weren’t there, would ask his drink, and the ottoman on which he sat: “Dear Lord, how am I supposed to go on living?” And then with a precision amazing for his size, he put the glass down on a coaster and hid his face with his hands, half-moaning and half-mumbling something completely incomprehensible and leaving me to stand there helplessly and stare at his fingers splayed against his baby-pink bald head like a bunch of sausages.
    It wasn’t duty that brought me speeding to his damn nouveauriche apartment on Tarasivska—just finished, with a penthouse, and a glass roof—I hadn’t come to comfort him or to meld with him in shared grief; there was something else I wanted: I was watching him like a slowly darkening mirror that still held Vlada’s image, to find on him still-warm bits of her presence from the day before and pick them off him, like lint, to see him—as I realized I’d begun to do—with her eyes, something I’d never done before, when he was just a boyfriend (that’s how Vlada referred to him,always in English), not her lover, not her man, her boyfriend; that’s why, on some level, my mind put check marks of approval against his underwear, and the unexpected delicacy of his movement as he put the glass down—a quick
aha
, so these paws with sausages for fingers know how to be sensitive—and noted also his dry eyes—Vadym poured much more into himself than he let out, a sign of healthy virile appetites, of a vigorous bladder and other organs (once, when the two of them came over, we spent five hours sipping Courvoisier, but he never once got up to go to the bathroom; Vlada always said they had a great physical relationship, she wouldn’t have said anything if it weren’t so, so her insomnia had nothing to do with that). But it wasn’t like I’d run there to appraise him for an auction and grade his condition either; these things flashed in my mind at random, in double-exposure, I felt neither distaste nor sympathy for this man, and when I told him it was not his fault, I did so not because I felt sorry for him but solely out of respect for Vlada’s death, which belonged to her and her alone, and must have been woven according to the unique design of her lifetime. As for Vadym, I instantly and irretrievably cast him the role of the banana peel on which people in old movies slip at fateful moments and crash to their deaths, but real life, unlike movies, sets up its fateful moment long before any banana peels make themselves available, and that’s why Vadym’s mechanical screeching—I killed her, I