Praise for The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

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 yard below, 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 golden-crossed windows. We had a hedge of dirty-gray, nine-floor apartment towers, tiled on the outside like the insides of water closets, the yards between them dotted with the toy-size white huts mysteriously designated “trash-collector”—they stank ferociously, but we still liked hiding there, in between the large trash cans, big enough that if you crouched, no one could find you; and it was in the dark intimacy of that stinking refuge that I learned how girls pee. The girl’s name was Marynka, and she wore bright, fire-engine red leggings. Since I could not believe my eyes, she kindly permitted me to investigate by touching the wet furrow between the tiny flaps; I must have had the instincts of an experimentalist already. Experience is experience, even when it’s gained behind a dumpster. Nothing is wasted.

Lolly must have been running late: her cup and the spoon she used to stir her coffee tossed willy-nilly in the sink, the squishy grounds in the rusty-brown filter still warm in the coffeemaker. The bowl with unfinished muesli she left on the windowsill makes me go all warm and fuzzy, and I catch myself smiling: I know she stood here, eating, looking out the window into the well of our yard, as she always does when she eats alone. Walking around the kitchen like this, retracing her steps—it’s like pulling on a still-warm robe she’s taken off and left hanging invisibly in the air; you can wrap yourself in it, you want to rub your cheek against her, Lolly. And the smell—the waft of her perfume lifted off the pillow where she slept, warm with the sweet, yeasty, bread-dough smell of her body—it follows me around, grows stronger by the window where she stood, washes over me at the door where she put on her boots. I press my fingers against my nose and inhale a slightly different version of her—a sharper, saltier tinge like the smell of seaweed drifting in from a distant beach—draw it in, and hear myself moan, unwittingly. What a joke! I’m like a dog left in the house alone, nosing his way around, looking for his master. When she first began staying the night, I did exactly what a dog would do after she’d left: I burrowed into her bathrobe and went back to sleep until she returned. The only social gesture I could muster was to call the office and lazily lie to them about feeling under the weather—I’ve no idea whether they ever bought the excuse, delivered as it was in a blissed-out drone; and I didn’t care, and when you don’t care, you’re always ahead because no one can do anything to you. I’d lounge in my nirvana bed until noon—sleeping, waking, dozing off again, marveling joyfully at the change of light and the objects in the room that seemed unrecognizable once they’d responded, like salient creatures, to Lolly’s vibrating presence—and never had the guts to tell her about it. But it was then, actually, that I started having these dreams.

In the daytime, they fade, melt, sink under the surface like shards of cracked ice floes. They’re all thin around the edges; I lose the plot, only grasp the biggest pieces, stacked on top of each other but disjointed like pages from different chapters caught by a single wayward staple: the black Opel Kadett, some sort of place like a hospital, the spatula or whatever it is, the white-sheeted torso. Normally that’s how it is with dreams, especially when your mind is stuffed fuller than your in-box, and you wake up like someone slammed your face against a table: not this again, damn it, can I please think of something else? But these dreams, they were different from the get-go. First of all, they aren’t just a fantastical reworking of whatever happened the day before; they’ve no relationship to anything I could ever have personally experienced. No déjà vu whatsoever. As best I could articulate this to Lolly—because it is always when I talk to her that I can best verbalize my ideas, even when it’s the operational principle of a thermionic generator or something else she has no clue about—these dreams feel like I’ve been put inside someone else’s closet, and I’m looking at a stranger’s clothes, hung around in strange order. What I see and manage to remember certainly means something to someone out there, but I myself feel like the person who accidentally got plugged into someone else’s phone conversation.

“Do you mean to say,” Lolly then inquired, frowning and biting her lower lip in concentration, “that you are seeing someone else’s dreams?”

“No, that’s the thing, that’s their other distinction: it’s more precise to say that I’m dreaming someone else’s consciousness.”

“Meaning?”

“Um, how do I put it...it doesn’t look like a dream—more like a memory, a very vivid, visceral memory, with touch and smell—only I am absolutely certain that whatever is happening has never happened to me. I know it’s not my memory.”

One undisputable advantage of living with a reporter is that with time, thanks to her extraordinary skill of patient questioning, she trains you to explain yourself with great coherence and in perfectly clear language, plus your vocabulary expands to such unprecedented levels that sometimes people think you’re the one who writes for a living. So, here’s the picture—stuck in my mind after I dreamt it a least a dozen times: a forest in springtime, tree trunks spotted with sunlight, the smell of wet bark and sap, a very green smell, and the man walking in front of me is dressed in a gray-blue military uniform with a Schmeiser over his shoulder, only his belt is not made of leather, for some reason, but woven, with stitching. We are walking through the forest “goose-file”—somehow I know that’s what it’s called—and this sturdy peasant back, girded with its woven belt, is the last thing I see when a dry stutter explodes from behind the trees; something shoves me hard in the chest, and everything goes black. After that, I don’t remember anything—it’s gone like a piece of paper in dark water. A bit later, after she’d had a chance to confer with knowledgeable people—she knows more experts in various fields than the State Reference Library, all she has to do is pick up the phone—Lolly, excited as Sherlock Holmes on a case, reported that such woven, stitched belts do, in fact, exist, and have for quite a while—as part of the US Army uniform. You see, that’s what I mean—how would I ever know that?

“Okay, what about that Schmeiser? Are you sure it was a Schmeiser?”

“Absolutely, and the forest looked very much like our forests here, not the American woods, and more than that—in my dream, I knew what everything was called, not just the trees but even the bushes: thorn apple, heather, juniper.”

“Well, that actually doesn’t surprise me at all—you could have picked those up somewhere, in passing, like when you went hiking with your mom when you were little, the time you climbed Goverla, and then just forgot...”

“But by this logic, is it the same with the American uniform: I knew it once, then I forgot? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

In response, Lolly arranged her face into one of her proprietary contortions: one lip thoughtfully pursed, brows scrunched together, eyes like a pair of tiny pointy horns—“the silence of the wolves” it’s called, when she runs out of arguments but doesn’t want to admit defeat (she also has “the silence of the lambs”—with big, piteous eyes, when she’s begging for mercy)—and, of course, as always, I had to laugh and hug the little imp. But I also had to wonder: Heck, what if I had seen a uniform like that somewhere before, like on one of those shoddy posters in military prep classes? We’re all Cold War children after all, and those with technical education especially—all groomed to work for our dear ol’ military industrial complex, which, may it rest in peace—met such inglorious demise that I’m the last one of our class who still, at least on paper, counts in the ranks of our profession, although others never relied on it for their bread and butter, and it’s good they didn’t because it wouldn’t get you a single dry a crumb now. I’m lucky I liked playing with Uncle’s cigarette holders when I was a kid—who knew I’d start a business out of that, ha!—but I still remember the u-es-es-arr’s terrible military secrets, like the fact that the diameter of our noodles matched the caliber of our bullets, and that our cocoa factories were engineered to switch to manufacturing gunpowder in twenty-four hours, so why shouldn’t some rotten layer of my collective unconscious spit up a long-forgotten detail about those dirty imperialists we were so keen to fight?

A logical explanation, to be sure, but I didn’t like it: it was inelegant. It lacked insight, an inspired suddenness of association that makes everything click together like pieces of a puzzle, with no loose ends left untucked. I can certainly ignore my gut feeling here—no matter how loudly it screams that what I saw in my dream is someone’s death as it did, in fact, happen—but I’m still physicist enough to know what makes a good, true solution, and that, Lolly, is elegance; a single inspired maneuver that puts everything into place.

“I understand,” Lolly sighed, giving me the lamb look. “It’s not only your formulas that work like that.”

“That could very well be true, but you know what else? Now that you mentioned Goverla, I’m convinced it was a Carpathian forest.”

I really don’t want to go shower and wash off her smell, even after I eat. “Sloppy McGrimes!” Lolly teases when we eat breakfast together: nice natty girl that she is, she won’t take a sip of her coffee until she’s showered and put on her underwear at least—she doesn’t understand what it’s like for me when she’s so squeaky clean. Stop, right now.—I’m afraid that is not possible.—Where’s your willpower?—Gone, never to be seen again.—Maniac!, but raspy, tender already, eyes misty, my sweet girl, white undies slip down like a flag of surrender, and then she whimpers softly like a teddy bear, and it makes everything inside me turn, all over again. “You know,” she said one morning—after we made love like that in the middle of the kitchen and she sat there on her chair so totally, unbearably mine, languorous-luxurious, with her hair wet at the roots, and contemplated her lazily parted thighs—“you know, men are so doglike in their instincts: always in a rush to mark a woman as their territory.” I could only mumble something back at her then, like a happy idiot, and didn’t feel jealous until later, when I could think again, remembered the barn door after the horse bolted, as Granny Lina would put it. Although, really, what’s there to be jealous of? Her memories? Please. Only for some reason, when a woman hears a man say something like “You women are all the same,” she triumphantly interprets it as more proof of her being right—“See! I’m not the only one.”—and a man, by contrast, gets all worked up over the mere possibility of just being one in a lineup of previous offenders.

But hey, I know my way across this minefield; I’m not one of those morons who ask something like, “How many did you have before me?” I’m not one to ask questions, period. Lolly and I mapped out our sandbox a while ago sharing bit by bit, scoop by scoop, the things that were most important for the other to know; I even shook hands with Sergiy, her ex-husband, once at a large party, and I remember I almost liked the guy—he had an open face and a boyish smile that must still work wonders on women—if not for his handshake: limp like a dead fish, like all the air had been sucked out of him a long time ago and he keeps dragging his shell around because these burdensome social obligations force him to do so. An aging boy, one of many.

The one thing I really wanted to know I went ahead and asked—“Why did you split up?”—but never got an answer, split up and that’s all, as if that in itself was the answer; it certainly was the only answer she needed, and she didn’t feel like coming up with another one just for me. Okay, that’s her right, what can you say? Worse when she lets something slip, a phrase, or a reference, something that sounds sentimental, nostalgic, and when I jump in—sometimes a bit too sharply, I’ll admit—before she goes all doe-eyed reminiscing—sure, that one, the guy that you went to the Baltic sea with, the one who taught you to eat lobster—she’s stunned, every time, “Did I tell you that?” She doesn’t remember. Fortunately, the number of love stories in our lives is finite. (And I still don’t know how to eat lobster, pick at it like a retarded monkey, no fun at all, just more trash on my plate.) The number of stories is finite, but the number of memories is infinite, and that’s a big difference—Lolly mentioned that man because she thought of something completely different from what she’d told me about him before, and that’s why she’s always surprised: the lobster had nothing to do with it. She doesn’t remember, but I can see it all perfectly: the broken red shell on a white platter, the plump, juicy half of a lemon with the lobster’s ravished flesh, the ecstatic licking of fingers, the plastic bib the waiter solicitously supplied shamelessly splattered with juices—to eat a lobster it’s almost a sexual act, if you know how to do it, of course, and I’m not even talking about the smell that lingers above that table—softly salty, so much like the smell of my girl herself, which, naturally, may not be something that occurs to her at that table at all, but most certainly occurs to her companion if they’d spent the previous night together and if he is not a complete idiot...okay now, that’s enough. I’ve no business in her memories. Especially since she wasn’t talking about the lobster this time at all, and the number of memories is infinite. Like natural numbers—a countable infinite set. That’s the thing.

The thing is, toots, you cannot ever tell yourself fully and completely to another person, no matter how close you are, even to the one with whom you mix your breath by night and share the world by day. I don’t know; maybe identical twins can do it, but only for a while, as children.... It’s like finite and infinite sets: regardless of how they depend on each other, the first one will have a limit, and the second one will not. End of story. Instinctively, you try to help things along by adding as many shared experiences as you can; you make the woman you love a constant witness to your life—hoping, vaguely, for a purely arithmetical advantage, for strength in numbers: to have the sum total of hours lived together outweigh that of the time spent without the other. (And why hours? Why not minutes, or seconds, or milliseconds? How long does it take you to experience something, to pick up an impression, a feeling that would morph somewhere in the deep dark mines of your subconscious into a memory I have no hope of accessing, like chlorophyll into coal?) Only it’s all for naught—Love’s Labour’s Lost, as Grandpa Shakespeare wrote. (Am I right, Lolly? Do you appreciate my English?)

The math doesn’t work for the simple reason that even the events we experience together (Remember the time we went to buy our first desk lamp at The Guiding Light, and you were so taken with those tri-jointed arms, playing with lamps all over the store, folding and bending, and I was trying to explain the advantages of halogen bulbs over the incandescent ones, and you listened like a straight-A schoolgirl, so attentive you let your little mouth open a bit? And later, after we left the store with our purchase—not something with a jointed arm, but a totally different, stylish one with a heavy chrome column—you asked just as enthusiastically, on that same brainwave, without even changing your voice, “Didn’t that salesman look like a mole?”—and all I could do was stare like a slow-witted goat, not knowing what to say, because the very fact of that salesman’s existence had escaped me, let alone what he looked like.), all those things we live through together, Lolly, leave each of us with discrete memories, and the number of these is also infinite.

This, if you think about it good and hard, can drive you nuts. I did go a little crazy with this idea back when I was a student: let’s say we have two infinite sets, say of natural and real numbers—how are we supposed to compare them? Which one is “less” and which one is “greater” if they are both potentially endless? It’s just like that with us—we have two infinite sets: one is the number of all your memories (X) and the other, the number of memories you share with me (Y). Mind you, there’s also the concept of a set’s power, as when every member of Y directly corresponds to a member of X, but not the other way around; this means X is more powerful than Y. Example: I remember that there was a salesman at The Guiding Light—that there had to have been one!—but not whether he looked like a mole, a camel, or an ox. And even if I spend the rest of my life holding your hand—which, of course, would cause certain inconveniences—X would still be more powerful than Y, and no feat of my imagination would help me see the man the way you did. So.

Eggs, that’s what I want.

What if this is the elemental essence of love: Having a person who shares your life but remembers everything differently? Like a constant source of wonder: world not just there, but given to you anew every minute—all you have to do is take her hand. Sometimes, even often, the same idea occurs to both of us at once, and we finish each other’s sentences—“that’s just it, exactly, that’s what I just thought”—thrilling us as if we’d just found a secret door in a shared home, but I bet had we tried to write out our individual trains of thought, separately, and then compared notes, we’d see we weren’t thinking the same thing at all—only about the same thing. The difference is obvious. X remains more powerful under all conditions. That’s why it is so rare for two people to dream the same dream.

But they do, don’t they? Late Granny Lina told about the time in Karaganda, where they’d been deported, when she and Gramps dreamt the same thing on the same night: that the ice had cracked on the river and all three of them—she, he, and my eight-year-old dad—leapt from one ice floe to the next, holding hands, until they made their way to the shore, where they could see a white house on the green slope, the table draped in a white cloth and set for a meal out on the porch. Gramps then said, “Looks to me, Lina, like we’ll be going home soon”—and later it turned out that it was that night (or almost that night) Stalin died, and in about a year they did go back.

It’s different, of course, in that I wouldn’t want to share a dream like that with Lolly for all the tea in China, thank you; a dream like that is a glimpse of the future when the same danger haunts both. It’s borne of a forced intimacy, when you’re being squashed into each other by outside forces, melded into a single mind because you’ve got nowhere else to go. That’s some kind of marital bliss, right there. Who knows how they’d fare in normal life. But what if the threat comes from inside, not from the outside? What if it’s enough that my girl’s memories are an infinite horde, and I have no way of knowing which one of them will turn against me?

By contrast, these dreams of mine have become a kind of a shared secret—the kind that married couples have. I’ve never been married before, so I love stuff like this, probably more than she does; I think it’s so cool that she wants to remember these dreams, writes some of them down, generally treats them with the utmost seriousness, like a homegrown Dr. Freud. I’m the same with her cycles—always keep track of them in my mind, so that I can reassure her whenever she worries for no reason. She is pretty good, though; she really studied psychology. When they had the course, she said she spent the entire semester in the reading room, bingeing on specialized literature, even talked her way into an internship at an asylum: first, because the kid must have itched to find out exactly how she got left without a father, but also, I bet, because she was not without doubt—what if something was really wrong with him, the diagnosis not a sham? As a result, what she knows about the discipline goes way beyond the usual intelligentsia erudition, which is, by itself, vastly beyond my grasp—all I know I learned from my sales practicum; I’m a self-made psychologist (“psychomite,” as Lolly says). It must have been because of her that I’ve grown to love these dreams. Because they are not just mine, but ours, together.

Although truth be told; they are no one’s, and there isn’t much to love about them, either.

They just stick in my mind like burrs.

Last night it wasn’t the death in the forest (and not so much death, as the back of that guy with his Schmeiser), no, there was something else equally unnerving. All these dreams are unnerving—not in their mood, but in their stories. Inside the black Opel Kadett there are people in unfamiliar officers’ uniforms, up in front, to the left, and to the right of me; I’m in the back seat, and they are taking me somewhere because I’m a suspect in a murder, but I know that I’m not in any real danger, that it’ll all resolve itself somehow. Another image: must be a doctor’s examination room in a clinic because surgical instruments are being boiled in a small metal pail on a spirit lamp; I can see very clearly the tiny bubbles as they rise to the surface and burst around the tools like sparks.... And there was a woman there, the one wrapped in a white sheet; I don’t remember what she looked like—in the next frame she gets up and walks somewhere with me, down a low-ceilinged corridor, to a ladder, phosphorescently white in the moonlight, where I lean her against a log wall and raise her skirt.... Darkness pulses with widening concentric circles of fire, and a slow female voice, impassive like voice-over, says, “It’s never like that, it never happens like that—twice out of three times in a row.” This feels piquant. The woman must know such things. Of all things, an erotic dream this one is not. I feel nothing. Not just nothing approximating an orgasm, but nothing at all. Not a thing. I only register the facts, as an outside observer: two fiery contours and it’s never like that, apparently, twice out of three times. And how is it, then? With Lolly, I see all kinds of things, but no fiery circles that I can recall.

That’s another thing all these dreams have in common and the reason I thought of them as something alien from the very beginning: unlike regular dreams, they’re utterly emotionless. No joy, no fear, no anxiety, no arousal, nothing—only stories; the colors, smells, sounds, the feel of things—all there, no problem, all senses amplified like when you’re high on something, but the emotions are missing. If these are, in fact, memories, they must come from a disconnected brain. A zombie. The raving of a severed head, as Granny Lina would put it.

Without Lolly, that’s what I would’ve thought, most likely: I’m losing it. So what if it feels good—feels like a glimpse of another world, like in the mountains, when you can suddenly see a distant valley from between the peaks—loonies dig their trips too, no? But Lolly already told me—very firmly—no. She said they are incredibly unhappy, those people, except the ones who go through manic phases, but those spells don’t last very long before depression sets in again. This did not describe me at all, and she also told me to quit messing with things I know nothing about. She said it almost like she was offended, like I strayed into someone else’s misfortune, a very limited-access territory. Like it was a privilege I didn’t have. Sorry, toots. This I understand; I’m not a knuckleheaded lobster-eater eager to take a pretty reporter for a ride around Benelux (the Be and the Ne may be out of my reach, but a nice vacation in Croatia is very much in the offing this summer—Lolly doesn’t know yet, I’ll tell her in another week or so)—I know there must be some dark things in her memory, especially where her father is concerned, dark and heavy like boulders that she piled into a wall around herself, a fortress of self-preservation locked even to me. A closed subset of memories we’ll say—literally and figuratively. Alright, if that’s the deal, I don’t mind. And I still feel a pang of something, funny human creature that I am: like if I were a full-blown lunatic I’d be more interesting for her, more heroic or something...as if it really mattered to me to stake a claim on whatever part of her life she’d cordoned off for her father—who, let us be completely accurate, was not really mad either, so you, Lolly, need to re-examine your self-appointed position as the Crazy People’s police. Every man has a right to his own lunacy. Or something like that. You bet I’ll exercise mine every chance I get.

The bacon nice and crisp. Crack-splat, crack-splat, crack-splat—three eggs into the pan and the kitchen instantly fills with assertive hissing. An inquiry into the fridge yields cucumbers, a disheartened bunch of radishes, and a few shoots of chives. Life, ladies and gentlemen, is not all that bad. Add the Chumak mayo (buy Ukrainian!) and we’re a chop and a toss away from a Vitamin Salad, a happy throwback to the era of geriatric socialism. Oh, wait a minute, I’m lying—there was no mayo in socialist stores; we relied on farmers-market sour cream. When we were students, it took a special trip to the Theater Café on the corner of Volodymyrska, on the spot now occupied by the five-star condo high-rise, for the marvel called “egg under mayonnaise”: a hard-boiled egg garnished with a teaspoon of mayo. Best bite you could take with a drink. If I ever decided to go into the restaurant business, I’d have a hard-core period place, fierce eighties. I’d call it something appropriate, like Caféteria or Obshchepit, Shcherbytsky’s as a last resort, but still, no fads, no frills, no vulgar falsifications like that Co-op chain that’s “co-op” in name only. No siree, we’ll do it right, and we’ll be true to the last archaeographical detail: rickety tables on duralumin-tube legs, always with a piece of folded paper under one of them so you don’t spill your borsch; forks and spoons of eternally greasy bendable aluminum, no knives in sight, obviously; and for the napkins in the middle—plastic containers repurposed from the office-supply inventory loaded with hand-cut little squares of dense smooth paper, the kind that goes transparent under the lightest touch, catching your fingerprints better than the cops. On the menu, aside from my favorite Vitamin Salad, of course, we’d have mystery cutlets breaded with prickly stale crumbs, to be served with blue-hue mashed potatoes; fried hake with steel-colored, weapon-grade noodles; pelmeni with vinegar; borsch; and dried fruit compote, always with a dark-brown layer of silt, most likely of plant origin, on the bottom of the glass. Oh yes, and the chopped beet salad. Glasses of the thick-walled, octagonal variety, vodka with beer, and the puzzle of “a choice of desserts” for dessert, represented most often by a sizeable pile of sugar-dusted chopped dough appealingly called Finger-Licks—when I came to Kyiv, in my first year at the university, which, not to spoil anyone’s breakfast, also happened to be the Chernobyl year, I lived almost exclusively on these Finger-Licks until I figured out how to cook. For old times’ sake, I’d serve “eggs under mayonnaise” too, but only when I got really sentimental, as the spécialité du jour.

Done right, with the walls painted shoulder-high in green oil paint, some vintage-scary posters, light bulbs in only half the lights, and a guaranteed half an hour before a waiter acknowledges your existence—basically, with a full immersion into the period atmosphere—a place like that couldn’t keep people out if it wanted! And not just Western tourists, although that’s a gold mine right there. I’ve got to sell it to someone. How about that character with the silver Mercedes, next door? I can’t believe no one has done it yet—boys must all be embarrassed about their valiant Komsomol youth; they all want new and foreign stuff, some weird fruits de mer and Château-de-Fleur, they’re all gourmands from Konotop—not much better, really, than the hillbillies in the old days, who all craved high-shine East German dressers and made room for them by getting rid of old hand-painted chests and Petrykiv step stools. The grandkids would now give anything to have those back, but tough luck, it’s all gone. Now we have to buy classic Kyiv china back from Europe, import our own stuff, and not just the china. And still every auction is packed with the French Empire; it sells like pancakes, and dudes bid each other out of sight, ’coz that’s how cool they are, and it makes me want to say—brother, be yourself, whenever did your granny ever lay her eyes on French Empire? Why are you buying someone else’s past? Now a genuine Shcherbytsky’s setup I could supply in a blink—heck, it’d be the hottest thing in town! It’s bound to come around sometime in the next twenty years anyway, so what are we waiting for?

Anyway.

No sooner do I settle in front of the TV and stuff a heaping, steaming, awesome forkful of eggs and a bite of warm, crusty wheat toast into my mouth than the outside world mounts a surprise attack: the phone rings. Screams like it hurts. Should have set the answering machine to pick up.

“Gud mornin, Adrian Ambrozich.”

It’s Yulichka, my busy bee—already up and running the office, bless her heart. If only the sweet soul could find it in herself to speak Ukrainian, so I wouldn’t have to lose ten seconds of my life every time this Adrian Ambrozich comes up and I have to merge him with myself (which is, at the moment, chewing). Some clients, aware of my principled distaste for patronymics (“Oedipal complex,” I usually explain, kidding, of course, but many still get somber in the face, and go “Oh, sorry, sure thing...”) pitch something totally outrageous, like “Mister Adrian”—somehow they think it’s the Russian equivalent of saying “sir” in Ukrainian. It’s ridiculous and ungrammatical, but really popular—another post-Communist hybrid, like my salad, only far less appetizing. So why should a man have his breakfast interrupted?

“Adrian Ambrozich,” Yulichka is clearly excited because she doesn’t even apologize when I mumble with my mouth full—“I hev some hick here, from a villadzh, somevere next to Boryspil, he brot a Swiss knaiv, from var-taim, with a small so, in gud condishn. He ses at home he hes a kukoo clock end a walnut wardrobe, used to be his grandpa’s, he sed.”

Whoa! No authentic cuckoo clocks have been sighted since about a year ago; Bray has scrubbed the market clean of them, no prayer for small fish like me. Is this for real? Yulichka certainly has the nose, that’s the main reason I hired her. Walnut ward-robe—that could be anything, but we can’t let this redneck out of our sight!

“Hold him there, Yulichka,” I hear myself say in Russian. Wow, I didn’t think I could: that’s what money does to a man—and not even money yet, a mere providential waft of it in the air. Makes me think of Les’ka, we were at the university together: she and her husband went into the gas business under the tutelage of some Petya from Moscow, and later Petya turned out to be gay and would come visit every time he got the itch for Les’ka’s hubby—Les’ka would move out to the guestroom then. Do not judge so ye will not be judged, indeed.

At the moment, though, Yulichka couldn’t care less about what language we’re speaking: We’re both breathing hard on our ends of the line, like a pair of lovers (like with Lolly before dawn, I think, irrelevantly).

“I meid him koffi.”

“Good job,” I say in Ukrainian, having regained my self-control; she does know what she’s doing. “Keep him entertained for just a bit longer, I’ll be right there,” I almost add “just let me take a shower.” To heck with the eggs, leave the pair of warm golden eyes to grow cold on the plate, but I have to shave at least—I can’t very well roll in all stubby! Have coffee at the office: I sourced me a mean espresso machine, no shabbier than Bray’s.

A catch, finally! Man. About time—been scraping by on small stuff for years already, junk, bric-a-brac, whatever I can find, totally like that runaway goat from the nursery rhyme, as Lolly recites, “Ran past a stream—snatched a gulp to drink, ran past a trash heap—snatched a bite to eat.” No way to run a business, really. But now if I could take a spot at a good show, Doroteum’s coming up, for one, with a few really nice pieces.... Alright, stop it, enough daydreaming—go already!

Turning off the TV—like clearing the table: erase the picture. Salad into the fridge, the egg dregs glowing with protein—into the mouth after all, albeit on the run, plate into the sink—and I’m in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, with the water splashing and the Gillette buzzing as happily as a bee on my face, when my mind suddenly registers, grants access to the footage that was on TV while I talked to Yulichka, the ochre-and-mud vision of Baghdad that’s been on every channel for the last couple days: far below, a bridge in the clouds of sand or blown-up brick dust, and a thread of American Abrams tanks crawling onto it, out of palm-tree greenery, from left to right—from the distance they look like a pride of monstrous prehistoric turtles. This turns out to be the last shot filmed by one of our own—Taras Protsiuk, Lolly knew him—from the balcony of the Palestine Hotel moments before the first turtle, which had already begun to turn its turret toward the camera, fires, and the next shot every TV channel in the world shows is one of Taras’s dead body, face down on the concrete with his legs folded under him and arms thrown wide, no longer holding his camera. The sound—I can’t remember if I heard any sounds. The guttural menacing growl of the tanks as they rolled onto the bridge—did I hear it on TV, or somewhere in my mind, after the dry rattle of the machine gun, in that dream last night?

I go cold all over. I stand in the middle of my bathroom, on the mat, barefoot and stripped to my boxers—and shiver. Something’s short-circuited. Something—an idea—illuminated everything in a flash, and I must find it again, hunt it down and catch it 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 dead cameraman’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 sweetness—that blissful, triumphant unclenching of brain cells that used to come in abundance from lab research and that can never be fully replaced by the satisfaction of a well-done business deal, no matter how complex the scheme. Nothing to write the Nobel Committee about, to be sure, but the thrill is just the same—and perfectly sufficient. The world can be explained. Specifically, somewhere out there lies buried a humongous, immeasurable—infinite, that’s it—vault, an archive of things once witnessed, of footage that wants to be watched. How, by whom, those details are not important. This, one must admit, is a comforting thought. An idea that offers a man, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, a shot at non-lonesomeness (that’s a Lolly word). As in: my memory, in its entirety, I bequeath to Daryna Goshchynska/Adrian Vatamanyuk (choose one). Okay, maybe not in its entirety; that may be too much, but wouldn’t this make for a great sci-fi story? I’m full of ideas; I’m shedding ideas this morning. Spawning. A morning of high ideation. A high-yield morning. I’m Ideating Adrian. Mister Adrian Ideatov. No, better, like an emperor—Adrian the Idea Bearer. Wow. Watch out, Boryspil redneck, I’m gonna get your clock and your little cuckoo, too!

Snickering at myself (no one else to snicker at in the empty apartment), I rub into my cheeks a pleasantly cool squirt of silky Egoist (never did find that aftershave)—soon as I get to the office, I’ll desire a double espresso from Yulichka. Pull on a brand new, just-out-of-the-plastic, crinkly Hugo Boss shirt—a T-shirt won’t look respectable enough—snip off the hateful plastic whiskers that stick in the seams where labels had been attached, straighten cuffs, admire the package; cool and style all around, good to go to Sotheby’s, or to a Swiss bank, yes, definitely, Sotheby’s first, then to the bank to unload the cash—and then it finally catches up with me, like late-night heartburn, this very simple, little tail end of my earlier idea, sudden and undeniable like a door slamming into a face: Why me?

Sweet Jesus, why me? Why did he, the one that gets shot in the dream, whoever he was, choose me to sit through his archival reels—if I didn’t ask for it?

And, while we’re at it...who was he?