The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

killed her—was irksome and offensive: it disgraced my proud and independent Vlada by claiming agency in her life, it reeked of yellowish newspaper clippings, which were, no doubt, to appear very soon, scandal-mongering vultures must’ve caught the whiff of offal already and begun circling around the house, tomorrow there’d be flocks of them, see if you can hide from the flashes then—but this was also something one had to survive one way or another, and it would all happen later, in the noxious weeks when her death would be deboned, quartered, and roasted with different sauces in a breathless recipe contest broadcast to every household in the nation, until the thing got so frayed and worn that even my heart stopped seizing every time Isaw her portrait and the portraits became just pictures of a famous person, an entry in a
Who’s Who
.
    In those first few hours, there was only one thing I needed, and that’s why I came to Vadym’s apartment and sat there with him, as he vacantly drank the cognac that refused to do its work, while Vlada lay somewhere on a freezer shelf with a tag tied to her toe—I couldn’t shake off the pesky and senseless idea that she was
cold
there and kept shivering myself, ripples of sudden chill shimmying up and down my skin just like that time in the Passage during our interview, when Vlada shape-shifted for an instant into an acolyte on the eve of his vows, someone destined for other-worldliness, only now the chill would not stop; I could not get warm and kept going back to the cognac, and every sip I took, instead of warming me lodged in my chest, solid and unyielding, like the steering wheel—and the only thing I wanted, the thing I came for, was to confirm, right there and then, that Vlada had been happy with Vadym. If I had that reassurance, I’d feel better; I’d be able to craft the horror into some semblance of meaning, like if she herself had showed up and said, with a resolute bounce of her bangs, I’ve no regrets, you know? None, you have my word.
    Again I washed up in her apartment just as I always did in moments of panic and confusion—I’d come looking for comfort that only she could give, in the very apartment she’d left the day before, and then gotten into her sunshine-yellow Beetle. And then slammed the door shut.
    Later, someone must’ve rung the doorbell, or come in, or Vadym finally had to go to the bathroom, because I was left alone in the living room and stood next to the uncurtained window watching a dense, fluorescent Gauloise-pack blueness quicken and solidify outside; during those days, all colors appeared painfully saturated, all lenses focused in all directions at once, and my eye kept tripping on utterly irrelevant frames—on the way to the cemetery out the car window a pair of dogs, one spotted and the other black and shaggy, rolled on a pile of lacquer-glossy wet leaves; and on the subway bridge, as the funeral procession passedunder it, a homeless man with a patchwork tote, bowed against the low-hanging sky—with the kind of sharpness that also happens when you’re in love and every randomly arranged instance, once it falls into your sight, swells, rounds, and breaks off like a distinct drop of water; so, maybe it’s only in love and death that life becomes truly visible for us. Through the window, amid the fluorescent blue, I could see children playing on the sidewalk across the street, sharp moving silhouettes, black cutouts, with only their white sneakers flickering in the dusk like dying lightbulbs; in the foreground an old woman in a tiny knit hat, swaddled like a cabbage in many layers of clothes, searched slowly, with mesmerizing, dendritic stiffness, through the trash cans; and then, very slowly, as if filmed with speed-ramping, a car crawled by, a dark Mazda with blazing lynx-like headlights, and as I stood there in the raincoat that I never did remember to take off, I saw myself from outside too—someone painted into this creaking, straining, but
still unfolding
picture, and also saw, with the same piercing clarity, that Vlada was no longer part of this continuous time. We were being separated by its implacable flow; its forceful tug, so palpable at that moment, dragged me—now only me—blindly along and left Vlada behind, in the yesterday, marooned in the past as though on an ice floe, and the widening gap between us was rapidly filling with a roiling, rushing surge of new frames of life without her. I watched this flood