The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

before it vanishes into the chatter, into the thick of all other thoughts that came with it and now crowd inside my head like a drunk party in a small living room; shove them aside, look for the one that flashed, not quite whole, snippets of conversations with Lolly. Associated Press pledged assistance to the deadcameraman’s family...Ukraine in deep dark ass again, because how can a country demand any sort of investigation of anyone else if it routinely whacks its journalists right at home, and cuts their heads off for good measure, like scalp hunters...Lolly once drank with Taras, may he rest in peace, at some TV-people party of theirs...to the guy in the tank, the gleam of the lens may have looked like a signal for enemy fire, war’s war, God damn it, or as some insist, it looked like a sniper—only why would a sniper be a threat to a tank?...the Americans have really gone nuts in Iraq this time around, keep shooting their own like they’d had their heads spun around, as Granny Lina would say, Well, shouldn’t have gone a-hunting after those desert demons, should they?; our boys said they lost their wits like that when they were in Afghanistan.... Where the hell is my aftershave? I always put it on this shelf, where did she put it? I hope the Rep.’s ride isn’t blocking the driveway, better to just call a cab...phone numbers for Taxi-Lux and Taxi-Blues, damn it, I’m late and the redneck with the cuckoo has nothing to do at the office but add zeros to what he wants for it. A close-up of a weeping Latina reporter in a white T-shirt, it’s blazing hot in Baghdad, the coffin with Taras’s body being loaded onto the plane, and one of the guys who’d sat with him in the hotel bar just the night before holds the camera steady, and even if he’s crying, too, no one will see his tears, because his eye is the camera, and it’s outside him, external, impersonal, and pure...Stop. Stop, stop. Here it is; I’ve got it...slow now, easy, don’t lose it.
    The image of the tanks on the bridge that Taras captured on film and that now runs on every channel—that was the last thing he saw in his life, right? The last memory fixed by his mind. Only he had a camera in his hands—he was lucky (that’s so wrong to say!) to have the whole world see the last thing he saw before he died.
    Question: What would happen to that last shot captured by his consciousness if he hadn’t had the time to transfer it from the retina of his own eyes onto that other one, the mechanical eye of the camera?
    A camera can be turned off. It can be set to play. A camera is a very simple device. But where does it all go from your own, human eyes if it’s you who’s been turned off?
    Why do we choose to believe that it all just disappears, fades into nothingness with the person? Because there’s no play button? But we don’t get to watch it when the person is still alive just the same. No matter how close we are, how intimate, we’ve no way to glimpse that footage, as I have no way of entering Lolly’s memories. But it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
    The back of the man ahead of me, in the uniform with a woven belt, the dry rattle from behind the trees—and blackness.
After that—
blackness. This picture, this last picture, with the back, the grass and the underbrush, the thorn apple and heather and juniper, the sun bunnies on the tree trunks, the smell of humid earth and soggy greenness—where does it go? To what posthumous vault?
    The black Opel Kadett with the unknown army’s officers, the spatula boiling in sparkly bubbles, the stairs phosphorescent in the moonlight, the woman’s voice keeping a methodical count of our orgasms...I am not mad I tell myself as I try to suppress the shakes; I am not mad. Calm down. I’m not mad. I’m just watching someone else’s footage.
    Made by a dead person who didn’t have a camera.
    He doesn’t care that I don’t deal in
that
kind of antiques.
    I know this is true because I am shaking. The puzzle has fit together, no loose ends. Dreadfully simple, elegant really, as it ought to be with the right solution. The only thing missing was this basic, obvious premise: the footage kept in one’s mind does not disappear. And why would it? Just because a man didn’t happen to have a camera? Please, the camera is incidental; all it does is prove that the film is there.
    Just like
these
dreams.
    The absolute, inviolable certainty that I am right calls up, for a moment, the half-forgotten