The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

has cracked, opened a hole, given under his new weight. The power that had held him above time has left him.
    Adrian Ortynsky, alias Beast, registered as a Fachkursen student at the Polytechnic, also Johannes Weiss by other papers, also Andrzej Ortynski. Twenty-three. Invulnerable. Elusive. Invincible. Immortal.
    And, in this very moment, fully and clearly conscious, he is about to die.
    His death has already set out for him; it began its countdown to their rendezvous precisely ten minutes ago. How long before it runs out—hours, months, years—doesn’t matter; he and death are out to find each other and
will
rendezvous as certainly as lovers who’d set a date.
    TICK...TICK...TICK...TICK...The beast inside him reaches for his throat (how defenseless the moving pulsing bulge under his fingers, how easy it would be to crush the cartilage and shred the tendons), throws his head back at the snow-swollen sky, and bares its teeth as though to show his perfect mandibles to the invisible dentist somewhere above.
    He may have seemed to be screaming—but mutely, without noise. Or laughing—also without noise. A single living soul under the war’s November sky, with his face turned up. The dead can rarely enact such a feat; only the luckiest of them fall down face-up, because, yes, even death has its share of luck to give to its chosen few. The rest die with their eyes down, into the ground. Into the ground.

Kyiv, April 2003
    A hospital? White coats, no, not coats, more like white sheets wrapped around people’s torsos, very strange...it must be a hospital.
    A black Opel Kadett—very fancy—black uniforms, black shiny peaks on uniform caps—Where are they taking me?
    Wake up, Adrian.
    The vision slips away, as if sucked through a dark tunnel, grows smaller, shrivels into a tiny dot, and is gone.
    To lie a little longer with my eyes closed, listening to the noises around me, feeling out the room like a blind man, inhaling its familiar scents: this is my room. The bed—empty; my arm, when I reach out, falls as if chopped off onto a crumpled pillow, nothing else. I hear myself growl in protest, and the noise wakes me up completely: this is my voice. Eyes still closed, I think beyond the doors, listening in my mind to the hallway, the bathroom, the kitchen. All quiet. I am alone. There should be a clock on a bedside table on the other side of the bed; I can reach it with my other hand. Wow. Lolly must’ve dashed out before dawn. Of course—she’s got the early morning show today. Which I have already missed. Slob. Darn it. What is it with me and sleeping these days?
    Inside my head like the smarting trace of a needle: the black Opel Kadett full of foreign officers (What uniform
is
that?), a woman in a white coat, or rather a sheet wrapped around her body; a spatula, or what do you call it, being boiled in a shallow metal dish.... To heck with it, shake it off.
    Outside it’s raining, a nice spring rain that brushes the trees and the grass with a gentle lisping noise. Open the balcony doors and breathe deeply: the air is warm, moist. Beautiful. In the yardbelow, a smattering of tiny bubbles spreads like a new skin over a silver Mercedes that has a tiny flag on its parliament-issue license plate; my trusty Volkswagen huddles behind it like a village accountant next to the Terminator. The Mercedes’s Representative owner lives next door—a quiet type, must be really new, first-term, not a real politician yet.
    I know where he lives because someone broke into his flat last year, and the cops went door to door, thorough as plumbers, and had everyone sign a piece of paper stating that we saw and heard nothing. They were the ones who told us, spilled the beans on the Rep., so to speak. Before, when the family from the first floor was robbed, no one came to ask any questions whatsoever; the folks simply put iron bars on their windows. Now, when you’re coming home late at night, the sidewalk is divided into regular squares of golden light from their grated windows, like a medieval fortress. You’d think kids would like playing in that light—they’d be fairies, or kings, or knights with their fair ladies—only kids don’t pretend things like that anymore. And they should be in bed anyway, which is too bad. Somehow thinking of the kids makes me feel sad—I don’t know if it’s because I’m not one of them anymore and can’t make good use of the fairytale stage, or because when I was little we didn’t have such