The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

ever granted him such absolute power over her, there was something forbidden in it, almost terrible and therefore magnetic.... As if to confirm his insight, she kneeled in front of him, and he trembled—he gathered his essence into her soft, lamb-lipped mouth, ecstatic in her near-piety, as if performing a mystical rite of worshipping the power she herself was summoning forth from his loins, and the power came, stronger, more lasting than he could ever imagine, greater than himself.
    For a while he ceased to exist—brushing off the feeble whisper of her warnings, he passed into dark un-memory, guided by the singular, indomitable urge to move forward, deeper into the supple smelt of burning lava that lapped at the red-hot dome of his skull; and this was impossible, incredible, intolerable, an ungodly sweet dying in arrested time, where there was no light, only the fiery darkness, at which he cleaved and pounded, a subterranean smith, until suddenly the darkness squeezed itself around him into a blissful quintessence of gratitude, a tender ring, like a soul-rending kiss, squeezed—and relaxed, and again, and again, until he could not take it any longer, and at the very instant he fired his handgun with a single triumphant cry and the shot-through body collapsed onto the ground, the darkness shuddered and gathered around the two of them into a dazzling fiery contour—a ring of electricity made manifest—and he fell supine onto the bare dirt floor breathing hard, face in the moonlight, and marveled, now completely conscious, that nothing hurt. Nothing, really, sheworried for nothing—a happy, acute calm made his body ring like a well-tempered bell. Gently—amazed slightly at the heretofore hidden, untapped reserves of affection inside him—he ran his fingers over her shoulders; now her presence next to him was pleasant, it made him want to talk to her, stroke her, to keep what they’d experienced with them.
    “You are a sister of mercy indeed—time to request you be recognized by a Headquarters’ decree: For selfless work at healing the wounded!”
    After a pause, she answered, but not with a joke; her voice called back altered, somnambulic (a sound that filled him anew with the happy knowledge of his might), “I would like to die now...for you.”
    “Fie on you, bite your tongue—don’t say that!”
    But still he felt flattered.
    “No, love, it’s true...that would be best. Because it’s never like this.”
    He was still reveling in his new condition. “You know, I don’t feel tired at all,” he said, and then suddenly realized what she’d just said: not only he, but she too had experienced it for the first time—the fiery contour of electrical current stood before his eyes. “So you saw it, too?” He felt her nod silently more than he could see it, and instantly fretted, as men are wont to, over his newly gained property: “How do you know about this? Who taught you?”
    She understood his anxiety and whispered straight into his ear, before licking off a drop of his sweat, like a cat, which sent another luxurious tremble down his spine.
    “I haven’t known anyone for two years.”
    This made him happy—it meant Orko wasn’t a contender—but it still wasn’t enough.
    “And before?”
    “Let’s not talk about that,” she asked of him, somber like a well-mannered child. “Listen.” She sat up with a heavy sigh, smoothing her skirt over her thighs again in the dark. “I know we will all die...”
    “Everyone dies. Haven’t you heard?”
    “That’s not what I mean. The war is over. You can’t seriously believe that the Alliance will want to fight Moscow? No one can take any more war.”
    “We can,” he said. His own words resonated, made him shiver, listening, like an echo of a distant march. In different circumstances, this talk would’ve raised his suspicion, made him wonder if it weren’t a MGB provocation, but at that moment he truly loved her—for helping him articulate the simple truth, the mere knowing of which filled him with intoxicating pride, like in that Ólzhych poem he’d loved since his Youth Assembly days: “It fills you to the brim, this breathtaking thrill / Commanding your body and spirit / That death enters humbly and bows at your door, a handmaiden, baffled and timid.”
    It’s true what you say, girl, everyone’s been broken, all the powerful, armed-to-the-teeth states wet their pants halfway through, let a half-victory be their cowardly prize, the