The Hundred-Year Flood

by Matthew Salesses

  When his father came back, two days later, Tee drove his mother’s SUV to the hotel. His father stepped into the hall, closing the door behind him. “You won’t let me in?” Tee asked. They talked for a minute about the thermal spa in Oregon, until Tee said, “What are you hiding?”

  Inside, penciled movie frames covered the walls, sweeping drawings of towers and eyes and a plane broken in a field. The drawings curled up the walls, almost to the ceiling. Tee wondered how his father had reached up there. He stared for a long time. Was this how a person lost his mind? Only his family could have recognized what his father had drawn. The old fixations. After the crash, when his uncle’s death received minimal coverage, his father had called the local news stations and begged them to see his point of view—their personal tragedy lost in the scope of the towers. As Tee studied the drawings, he remembered being painted in Prague, his doodling on napkins and coasters. What was his connection to these walls? To his father? They shared no genetics, yet he felt as if these frames could be running in his own mind. He couldn’t let them.

  His father dropped his chin and whispered an apology, as if what he should be sorry for was re-creating what had happened, not what had happened itself. Tee was the adult now. Their roles had switched. He was bringing home the boy who had run away. Except his father had been kicked out.

  “You know your mom checked your auntie into an institution?”

  Tee opened the closet, expecting to find more sketches. “Was it easy?” he asked. “To love someone else? Your brother’s wife?” Only clothing, hung neatly for a long stay.

  His father twitched his long nose, raised an eyebrow.

  At the wake, Tee’s aunt had run to the urn screaming that she should be inside, it was all her fault. No one had restrained her. Then everyone had.

  “Were you happier with her?” Tee asked, pulling down a suit.

  “I’m still your dad,” his father said.

  “Was she happier with you?”

  Finally his father sat on the bed, shivering in the air-conditioning, in April. Tee tried to imagine the guilt of causing a brother’s death. But his father, as always, was in denial.

  “The hangers aren’t mine,” his father said.

  Tee threw everything on the floor, a heap of creases. His container emptied. “Since when have you worried about what’s yours or not?” he shouted. He thought for a second of the closet full of paintings of Katka, the feel of the thick brushstrokes under his fingers, the shadow in the hall.

  As they packed and erased his father’s drawings, Tee held his tongue. His father was confused. It was like the week his father had lain in bed, speaking gibberish, after having his wisdom teeth removed, like a teenager. Dry sockets and codeine. Tee was nine. His mother mixed milk shakes. His aunt came over. One morning his father stared into the room and said hello in Korean, Annyeong haseyo, and they all turned to see who it was, he seemed so sure. Another time, he looked at Tee’s aunt and said, “Zoe.” His aunt reddened. Tee’s mother smiled and asked what she could do. It had always been like that with his father: you never knew where you stood.

  On the drive back to the house, the suitcases banging in the trunk, a plane flew low overhead. His father said his uncle’s hangar had been sold.

  Tee had stacked the boxes he’d saved from the yard sale in his father’s office; he moved his father in among his old things. His mother stared from the hall and clicked her teeth together. His father’s cheeks hung like a bulldog’s as she listed what she deserved in the divorce. She rapped her nails against the wood with each item. Car. House. Peace of mind.

  Each time Tee entered the office, his father had sketched another scene across the walls. “Memory lives longer than anything else,” his father said. He turned and seemed to breathe in the pencil, then rested his forehead where the projection screen had hung, in the same spot Tee had put his hand. “You can’t change it.”

  “But you can change your life,” Tee said.

  “I’ve been paying for you to stay in Prague,” his father said, rubbing his neck.

  “But now you don’t have to. Now Uncle Hi will.”

  Around two o’clock in the morning, Tee went downstairs for a glass of milk and paused on the bottom step. Something glinted under the porch light. The door was open. He heard a muted swear. The glint was the tripod to his father’s camcorder. For a moment it stuck on the threshold; then, with a grunt, it was gone. Tee didn’t move. If he did, seeing his father run away would become real. He imagined his father waving at the house one last time before getting into the car. In front of Tee, on the hardwood floor, a white square of paper fluttered. The shutting door had kicked up a tiny wind. The note said his father was taking his share of the inheritance to Hollywood.

  When Tee called the next day, his father said Tee just couldn’t understand. That, perhaps, was true.

  On his last day in Boston, Tee e-mailed his adviser that he was abandoning his thesis. A hundred pages on the poetry of an Age? He was turning to older stories, stories people had told for centuries. Compared to the culture of revelation (in poetry, in the news, in life), myth was constant. As an afterthought, Tee cited his uncle’s death. He needed more time to move on. His adviser couldn’t question that.

  Later Tee thought maybe a disappearing act was the one trick their family had mastered.

  At the airport, his mother laid her palm on his chest and said, “Your father.” She chewed her lip. Tee remembered tugging a yellow sundress, trying to pull her into the waves on the Cape. She’d dipped her whole long body under—he searched for her yellow blur. When she popped up, far from shore, he waded out, scared she would leave him. But later, on the drive home, he had wished to swim like her. Able to stroke out and reach the distant side.

  That same day, he remembered now, they had stopped in Hyannis for their favorite ice cream, his father’s and his. His mother had gone ahead. A group of tourists passed by, laughing about something, and his father pulled Tee into an alley. Tee couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary about them. What frightened him was that his father cupped his face and whispered, “I will never let anyone take you,” as if one of them was going to try. When his mother found them, she said, “I guess you told him.” But afterward, nothing changed.

  Now his mother’s palm fell away from Tee’s chest. The brown of her freckles deepened. “Don’t be like him,” she said. “Don’t disappear. And don’t forget who you are.”

  On the plane, he cupped his cheek and imagined his father, then rested his hands on his chest where his mother’s had been. His much darker hands, the hands of a foreign diplomat, perhaps, of a Korean farm girl. Tee had the brief thought that he should go farther east and never return.

  CHAPTER 2

  GHOSTS

  I

  In September 2002, after his father flew him back from Prague for good, Tee would stand at the window in Massachusetts General Hospital and stare out at the river for hours. At night he dreamed of floodwater. He smelled something rotting in the distance. For an instant he caught a woman’s silhouette behind the frosted glass that separated him from the hall. Then, on the floor, a pair of boots glowed. When he picked up the boots, water poured out of them. The door was locked. He couldn’t reach the woman, though she couldn’t have gone far. The room felt smaller, or was closing in; he hadn’t noticed how small it was before. He would wake screaming his own name, as if he stood outside with the woman and couldn’t save himself, as if the water was inside him. Even after he woke, a ghostly calf curved around his door again and again.

  In August, in Prague, the flood would seem a surprise, though storms came and went for weeks beforehand. Police and firefighters raised steel barriers along the embankments in Old Town but left the Karlín district unprotected. On the news a former construction worker warned that buildings in Karlín could collapse, built too quickly—with unfired bricks. An analyst predicted deaths and lawsuits.
The city surrendered its boundaries. Citizens defended museums and places of worship with sandbags. In the rain an evacuation was ordered, but people thronged to bridges and riverbanks to watch. Sections of sidewalk buckled like tiny tectonic plates. Trees tipped over in the oversaturated soil and had to be tethered like barges. Metro lines were shut down too late to protect them. The river washed parts of other cities into Prague. The river pulled down levees, then buildings. The river washed parts of Prague into other parts of Prague, then into the rest of Europe.

  From where Tee watched in his second-floor apartment, the flood made a high brown sea just below his window. He smelled the sewage in the water. He wondered how he had let himself miss the signs. How strange the way we wade into disaster, step after step, not realizing how far we’ve gone until we’re drowning.

  Just before the flood, Katka had asked about Korea as the raindrops formed fat planets against the windowpane. Her finger followed the streaks across the glass.

  “A Korean friend told me once about his visits as a kid,” Tee said. “Everyone looked like him, but he still didn’t belong.”

  Katka touched her temple where her skin met her hair. “No one your age,” she said, “feels like he belongs.”

  This was the same woman who had cursed at the Thai massage parrot. How did she really see him: his quick black eyes, the scar on his chin that toughened his boyishness, his flat cheeks and curved nose, the cream in his brown skin that seemed to make white people touch him without realizing. He was a believer, as Pavel had painted. In college he had listed ambitions: get a girlfriend, be a writer, drink more water, fall in love. He had believed in the kind of weight that could drag whatever fluttered in his throat down to more comfortable depths—a someplace or a someone.

  Katka smoothed her hair, and he said, “You don’t know what it’s like to be adopted. People see you as who you were at birth. But you’re not that person.”

  At that point, the flood was still weeks off. He opened the window and caught rain in the cup of his palm. Katka pulled his hand in, and for a moment, he thought for some reason that she would lower her lips to the water and drink. She splashed his face. He pulled back in anger, but her grin conquered him.

  When Tee got back to Prague, in April, he holed up in his apartment for several days before he was scheduled to work again. He talked to Ynez on the phone, and asked for some time alone. He had bought a Czech art book before he left, and he dog-eared the pages on Pavel’s paintings. Distorted versions of Katka. He would go out, he decided, when he could look at those paintings and not think about his father and his aunt. Finally he called to ask Pavel and Katka to drinks. Tee wondered what Katka had told her husband about that morning in the closet. Hopefully nothing. Katka said Pavel would go for drinks, but she would not. She added nothing else. “I’ve realized something,” Tee said. She hung up.

  That night, Pavel and Rockefeller met Tee and Ynez at a bar in Vyšehrad with a flying horse on the sign. Tee told them about the impending divorce. Rockefeller told awkward sympathy jokes and Pavel was stony. “Now who will raising you?” Pavel asked, as if Tee was still a little boy. Though she didn’t have to, Ynez said Tee would raise himself. They ordered round after round. Ynez told a joke about a man who sprays his lawn for tigers. But there aren’t any tigers around, says his wife, and the man says, See? It’s working. After their sixth round, Rockefeller asked about the inheritance. His intimidating bulk, which had once saved Pavel at a political rally, pinballed around the bar. At one point he gripped the edge of a counter built into the wall, and the wood creaked in his hand. Tee stepped in front of Ynez. He hummed to cover up the sound of the wall cracking. “Why people always disappointing?” Rockefeller moaned.

  Pavel pounded the counter, shattering his mug. Tee went quiet. The bartender waved an imaginary paintbrush at the shards. Rockefeller said, “Katka,” and what Tee seemed to recall were the words for love and art. Ynez reached for Tee’s hand, but he shook her off and swept up the glass with a Staropramen coaster.

  Pavel’s eyes narrowed, and he dug a thumb into Tee’s arm. “Is maybe good you go away,” Pavel said. Tee stumbled, confused. He didn’t yet know how resistance built up in Prague secret by secret, symbol by symbol. But he had noticed the calf slipping out the door. He sent Ynez home and returned to Karlín alone.

  In Boston, when Tee woke from his flooded dreams, he would try to follow the ghost over that threshold into reality. He would try to remember when he had first seen the ghost. Was it that night, drinking with Pavel and Rockefeller and Ynez, but not Katka? Or was the ghost the same as the shadow in Pavel and Katka’s house, the shadow he had seen from the closet?

  After drinking in Vyšehrad, Tee woke to Rockefeller pounding his door. Pavel had gotten into a fight with a group of Americans. At the time, the ghost was quickly forgotten.

  Tee had to imagine what happened. He didn’t know for sure. Pavel and Rockefeller left Vyšehrad and gambled at a Herna bar in Malešice until four A.M. They crossed the street to the Flora mall, where they had chosen a storefront for their café, and balanced on the steps, in the dark, smoking. They spoke English—they liked then to practice running their tongues around the flat alien sounds in inflated iambs, as if each word were a stone. It was their third language after the Russian forced on them as children. Rockefeller blew out a long stream of smoke and said they would call the café “The Heavenly Café.”

  “I thought we calling it in Czech,” Pavel slurred. He was having second thoughts about New York. He knew Katka was right: he should focus on his own country. He had the feeling that Tee was in love with his wife. It had just come to him, that night, watching Tee turn down Ynez.

  That was when Rockefeller said Americans were the only ones who would buy Pavel’s art now. Pavel tossed his cigarette down a grate and cursed. Once, Rockefeller had risked arrest to hang Pavel’s art around Prague. As the sun rose, Pavel stumbled away from his friend. Over his shoulder, he called Rockefeller a blbec. It wasn’t Rockefeller funding the café. Pavel walked down beside the Flora cemetery with his hands in his armpits and waited for Rockefeller to follow. A thin shadow stretched toward him—but not from behind, from out of the graves ahead.

  Pavel wanted a fight. Urine gushed against a gravestone, and Pavel rushed in, shouting about respecting the dead. He must have seen only one American, not three. In the dark, in his drunkenness, was he fighting Rockefeller, or Tee, or himself?

  The sun rose over the marble headstones. The three men surrounded him. A fist cracked his ribs. A fist hit him in the neck. Pavel screamed. He sobered immediately. He screamed his name, at first, hoping that they would recognize it or that Rockefeller would come. They shoved him onto a gravestone. When he tried to brace himself, his wrists struck hard. The first wrist, perhaps, broke then. On the ground, he screamed that he was a painter, as if realizing what he stood to lose. They beat him until he went quiet—or they heard him and his screams told them what to break.

  He grabbed a leg and someone stomped his second wrist. He gave up and lay still. Only after the three men left him did Rockefeller step from the shadows. When the giant body approached, Pavel feared another attacker. He only recognized who it was as Rockefeller cradled him like a baby.

  In September, in the hospital in Boston, when his parents’ visits ended, Tee would sit in bed with a lap tray and an old automatic typewriter they’d brought him, and search the past. That attack on Pavel had led (somehow) to Rockefeller attacking Tee. Tee had found two rules to fates: one) if you hurt someone, that person will eventually find a way to hurt you back; and two) if you want anything, you have to hurt someone to get it.

  One night Tee saw the ghost dart past his open door through the corridor to the bathroom. He pushed into the hall just in time to catch a ratty jean jacket and a black knee-length skirt, both unfamiliar. As he hurried after the woman, he could taste a change in the air, as if she had slipped a key under his tongue. The hall fi
lled with rain. He tried to make the floor stay the floor. From somewhere he heard an instrument twanging—like the mouth harp his father had given him on his eighth birthday. But what he thought about was Katka and Ynez and Pavel and Rockefeller. Who are you, he asked in his head. Let me see you.

  The bathroom was empty, except for him. In the mirror shone the five chicken-pox scars on his chest, the white bandage around his skull.

  II

  The morning of Pavel’s attack, Tee took a taxi to the hospital. Katka met him in the hall. Her brown hair hung unbrushed, and she wore a black coat over a boxy dress. She took a step toward him, then stopped and wiped her hands on her coat. “He doesn’t want to see you.”

  Tee’s head split, a Red Sea of alcohol. “Rockefeller wouldn’t tell me everything.”

  She said Rockefeller had hidden nearby and let Pavel get beaten.

  “He said he couldn’t do anything.”

  She stood just out of reach, shaking her head, yet waiting, as if to give Tee a chance to say something to bring her to his arms.