“Gosh, I turned my ringer off. Thank you, Yurko.”
She glances at her cell. Of course, it’s Adrian. Unhappy Yurko retreats out the door. How strange that she forgot Adrian existed. That she keeps forgetting about him—as one forgets about one’s own arm or leg. She picks up her phone and calls him.
“Aidy?”
“Lolly?” His voice bursts with unmediated delight, as it always does when they haven’t talked for a while, even for a little bit. For an instant she feels the imprint of his hard member, like a silk-covered rock, in her hand and a blast of Adrian’s smell (Cinnamon? Cumin?) hits her with such forceful nearness that she must sit down on the edge of the desk, squeezing her free hand, unconsciously, between her legs. Lolly was the name she was called when she was little, before she could roll the r in Daryna, but Adrian didn’t know this; he derived the name anew from doll—my doll, dolly—Lolly in keeping with the childishness of his love’s language, a characteristic shared by many openhearted men. He couldn’t conceive of being embarrassed by it either, and at first she resisted, feeling uneasy—I’m not a doll!—but the Lolly that hadn’t been heard for thirty-odd years must have worked its magic, overcoming the momentum of her experience and confirming, once again, the nearly metaphysical expedience of everything Adrian did, as if he had, in fact, possessed some secret knowledge about her, which called for respectful obedience on her behalf, and perhaps it was precisely because he sensed this, that he always called out his Lolly! so triumphantly, like a young dad who’s just picked his firstborn’s name and is thrilled with the sound of it. And still it unnerves her a little, and the thought that a stranger might witness this shameless profession of his bliss makes her want to put a hand over his mouth—he could be at his office, in a cab, or a store, or wherever.
“Where are you?”
The question sounds like she’s worried, and that’s how he interprets it, which makes her feel a little guilty, as if she’d toyed with him on purpose, so she tries to focus and listen diligently as he explains how he finally made it to his unpronounceable department at the university where he is still considered to be working on his dissertation, but didn’t catch the head of his committee, and the secretary promised the boss would be back soon, and he wasted almost an hour drinking a pot of coffee with that hen—except that Adrian doesn’t call her a hen because he never says anything negative about anyone unless absolutely necessary, and even when it is urgently and critically necessary, limits himself to a remark about the subject’s one unattractive deed and does not generalize, while Daryna, on the other hand, has long nourished the suspicion that the department’s secretary has the hots for Adrian and uses every chance she gets to enjoy his company; it’s really shocking what girls will do these days (for fairness’s sake Daryna admits that before she was Daryna Goshchynska, a national news anchor, she herself was not above making the first move with men she liked, but this was ancient history, so shrouded in the mists of time that it doesn’t placate her now). While Adrian talks, she blinks mechanically at her reflection in the glass—now her usual screen image, only badly lit and with a cell phone pressed against her ear.
Vlada and Adrian—they’re separate drawers, parallel channels of her consciousness: she and Adrian met when Vlada was already gone. And now she feels no urge whatsoever to introduce them in her mind to each other—it’s a new era, a new calendar. PV, Post Vlada.
Artem, now he knew Vlada. And, Artem marked the beginning of Olena Dovgan’s story for Daryna (she smiles at the flashback to the humble basement where the story began and her compromised pose at its inception); Adrian appeared after that, in the second act, so to speak. Artem is now in the past, too, and is unlikely to make another appearance in her life, as if he’d played the role he’d been assigned and left the theater. For a split second, Daryna feels woozy, lightheaded, as if she’d soared above the flow of time on a giant swing and looked down on it from above, like from that enormous Ferris wheel in the park when she was little, reeling every time she reached the very top, where she could see as far as the horizon—Was she scared to face the whole world at once, alone?
There was something illicit about that bird’s-eye view of life, of what seemed then like the whole world, like the view from the top of the Tower of Babel; it was something not permitted, something that a human being was not meant to tolerate for more than a slipping tail of an instant—and now she is slipping just like that, unmoored by a sudden meteoric convergence, in her mind’s eye, of people scattered throughout time and space, with no connection to each other that a normal, ground-level view could discern into a single, meaningful design, a complete picture, a vista. A mere flash of a vista, really, because the very next instant the picture disintegrates, scatters, just before Daryna grasps a single line from Artem—through Dovganivna—to Adrian and remains sitting on the edge of the desk with a vision cooling like sweat between her shoulder blades: the sudden knowledge that everything around her is threaded with these lifelines, and a hundred, a thousand of them run invisibly through her and into other people’s lives, but to discern and comprehend the pattern they draw—a picture so grand, so magnificent, that a single glimpse of it fills you with knee-buckling awe—is impossible if only for the single reason that the lines extend way beyond your chopped-off field of vision, beyond the frame of your life, your short, damn it, short years, threading together people from different centuries—let alone generations—different ages, finding them further and further apart, so far apart you could never see them. This living fabric knits and weaves us together, flows, shifts, loops, and passes, and we have no hope, with our meager few decades of allocated time here, of leaping from its midst to see it from above and discern its infinitely scattered pattern, more intricate than a star map, but we all rub together unknowing—the living, the dead, and the not-yet born—who knows how many of us, and what chimerical knots have conspired to have her sitting here with the voice of the man she loves in her hand—and she can’t even see why she loves him, why him and not someone else?
“Hello?” the man in question says gently, as if carefully patting her awake; he has sensed a thinning of attention on her end of the line, a transition, as he would put it, from the solid to the plasma state. “Lolly? Are you there?”
“Uhu… Aidy, do you remember the ontological proof of God?”
He snickers—not because the question strikes him as absurd, and not because it comes out of the blue, but because any surprise coming from her delights him inordinately, still. She wonders how long this will last.
“I used to, but I can’t just give to you off the top of my head. Why?”
“I think I just discovered it.”
He laughs out loud, laughs at his clever girl, his tireless inventor. He’s happy to find her in a good mood.
“I’m serious. There must be someone who sees the entire picture—the whole thing, from above. Like from the Ferris wheel in the park. Only not just right now, this moment, but all the time.”
This sounds exceptionally stupid; it’s been a while since she proclaimed anything so inane with such heartfelt conviction. Like a schoolgirl, really.
“Oh, you are so smart!” But he agrees, he agrees preemptively with whatever she wants to say. As long as it makes her happy. As long as there’s peace and quiet and good counsel—with the only acceptable exception of her moaning in the bedroom on the king-size bed with a Moroccan silk comforter. He likes it when she moans—“don’t stop the music” is what they call it.
For a moment, Daryna is filled with such anguish as if someone has pushed her out of a rocket ship into open space and cut the cord: nothing, nothing, and no gravity. She is alone.