The Hundred-Year Flood

by Matthew Salesses

  Tee was still in the river beside the canoe. She reached between them. In his hoodie, she felt like a second Tee. She was one of her kind, the most American she would ever be, the last American left in this hundred-year flood. She was an identity rising to the surface, as she’d seen him on New Year’s. The canoe rocked lightly as he climbed in beside her, and the water dripped off his nose. She managed a smile, and then a grope of fear reminded her that water was unsafe, and she passed out.

  XIII

  Two other canoes pulled even on either side. The rescue workers gestured for Tee to switch vessels. Katka shut her eyes. Tee shook his head. “Ne. I’m staying with her.”

  The men waved insistently. Tee picked a coaster out of the water—somehow, the objects he’d thrown into the streets days earlier had bobbed up in the flood like echoes.

  One of rescue workers said, “You must go other canoe. Many things in Vltava. Hardly go around them.”

  “Please,” Tee said. “I am with this woman.”

  Their canoeist, a young Czech with a hooked nose, said, “No go, no go.”

  “Too much dangerous,” the other man said. He reached between the canoes and took Tee’s arm, at first gently.

  Tee called Katka’s name. She didn’t stir. He had the brief fear that the strain or emotion had made her pass out, but as the yank on his arm unbalanced him, he was forced to shift into the second canoe to keep from falling into the water.

  “Will she be okay?” he asked his new canoeist.

  “What is on her foots?”

  “She really loves those boots,” Tee said. “Do you think she is okay?”

  “Why not she is okay?” the canoeist asked, paddling them through filthy water.

  Tee soon saw why he had been asked to move. When a tree tipped over into the water, the canoes barely swerved around it. The extra weight would have made turning more difficult. A group of workers anchored the trunks underwater as they struggled like ships trying to reach the sea. Tee asked his canoeist where they were going.

  “Wait,” the man said. A wash of clothes caught on the bow. One of the other men picked off the clothes with his paddle.

  “We need to go to a hotel.”

  “We go near Náměstí Republiky,” the man said. “We will put you on ground.”

  Tee looked for Katka: she lay in the same pose.

  Farther down the river, half of a roof bobbed up. The red-brown shingles had blended in with the brown water, and now were only a couple of yards away. He scooped the river out with his hands, to help them turn.

  “Do not,” the canoeist said, spraying Tee’s back as he passed the paddle expertly from one side to the other.

  Tee continued scooping. The shingles could be scales on the rising back of a sea monster. The outer two canoes split off in slow arcs, and Tee splashed at the water. He pictured the roof flipping over the canoe and sliding over his head like an underwater coffin. Something slapped his back. The paddle.

  “Not helping.” The man pointed with the paddle and waited for Tee to stop. Tee sat on his hands. He wanted badly to be with Katka. Her head still lay against the lip of the other canoe. Her canoeist didn’t seem to care that she wasn’t waking.

  The roof carried toward them, individual shingles swirling beside it. All Tee could do was wait. Either the canoe would make it past, or he and Katka would be separated.

  The roof seemed to speed up, until it was feet away. They would have to jump out, or they would get hit and fill up slowly. Tee had Katka’s cell in a plastic bag down his jeans. She would wake somewhere else and he wouldn’t know how to find her. The paddle seemed to bite into the water, bite into the water, and then finally the shingles scraped along the side of the canoe, as they made it past.

  Tee checked over the side for a puncture. When he turned and gave a thumbs-up, the canoeist rolled his eyes.

  A glint of blue from the other vessel. Katka blinked awake.

  They paddled down into the edges of the Jewish Quarter, where the man said the damage was not as bad. In Karlín the sewage systems had caused the current, and the smell, but in other areas buildings hadn’t collapsed, the flood wasn’t so high or so strong. As they turned in the direction of the Powder Gate, a small black shape darted past. Almost like a seal.

  The three other canoes turned off after it, and the men shouted.

  “Seal,” Tee’s canoeist said.

  The seal swam around outstretched hands and circled one of the canoes, playing. “How did it get here?” Tee asked, though it must have escaped the zoo.

  “They need catching it or could die,” the canoeist said. “Three others gone, too.”

  Four seals somewhere in Prague, or swimming to other cities and countries, miles from the ocean they were seeking. Tee wondered about the rooster that used to wake him.

  “They killed elephant earlier,” the canoeist said. “So not—” He closed his fingers around his throat.

  The seal slipped beneath the bow. “But elephants can swim,” Tee said. His mother had taught him this.

  “That elephant not.”

  His mother had taught him about animals, like dolphins, whose breaths were not automatic, who had to choose to breathe.

  In the distance, another building buckled into the flood, and Tee half-expected an elephant or some other beast to wade toward them. He had the feeling that the building had been theirs, the one they’d left, and they’d barely lived. He pictured his father’s wall-drawings, the faint trace of pencil, despite their erasure.

  When the two canoes slid up onto the cobblestone of an inclined street in the Jewish Quarter, Katka’s face was drained of color. Tee stepped into the water and helped her out of her canoe. She leaned her long body on him as if she’d broken a leg.

  “Find a hospital,” she said.

  The canoeists called good-bye and pushed off. Tee ignored them. “What’s wrong? We got out.” As if maybe she hadn’t realized.

  “Please.” She pressed against him. He felt her forehead—she was burning hot. She couldn’t walk. The plastic bags, still tied around her legs, sloshed with sludge water. How much did he understand then?

  He pulled from his jeans the two plastic bags with his clothing and three books and their cell phones, and slung them over his shoulder. He called a taxi service, but the woman who answered said that the streets were closed. She struggled to make herself clear.

  “All right,” he said. “I got it. How far do we have to go?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Close.”

  He didn’t know if she meant close by or closed. She hung up. Later he would be surprised she was still working. It reminded him of the rooster in winter.

  He helped Katka down Truhlářská toward the Powder Gate and Náměstí Republiky, dread accumulating in him with each step, like stones in the pockets of a diver. Only a few other people were out. A woman in tiny jeans said something in Czech and Katka replied, wincing. Then a man appeared and pulled the woman away. “Help us,” Tee pleaded. But it was each couple for itself.

  As they moved, Katka seemed to improve. She limped beside him, not needing his arm for a short period, then needing it again. They closed in on the square. They managed a couple of hundred feet.

  “What happened?” he asked whenever she leaned harder.

  Finally she said, “It was Pavel.”

  “How? What did he do to you? Your leg? You’ve been hurt for how long?”

  She looped his arm around her waist. “There is a hospital here if it is not closed.”

  He eased her along the wet cobblestone and tried not to ask questions she clearly did not want to answer. “A little farther,” he said. “Did he hurt you to stop you from leaving him?”

  The black top of the Powder Gate seemed to tongue the dark clouds. Katka laid her head on his shoulder. He walked as flatly as he could. As they drew nearer, the do
me of the art nouveau Municipal House, then the mural under the dome, then the ornamented facade blocked their view of the Powder Gate. Katka grew heavier on his arm. Finally she groaned and teetered into him, and he caught her. Her eyes had shut. She’d passed out again. He would have to carry her.

  He’d kept her inside as the water rose. He’d waited until buildings fell. He was why she was in Karlín in the first place.

  Overhead a helicopter flew by, and he feared his thoughts.

  He looked for the hospital, but couldn’t find it. He sat Katka down and lightly tapped her cheeks. She didn’t stir. Where was he supposed to go? He felt his container fill, with the flood, or with tears, or with the rain they’d thought could hide them. He wished to go back to New Year’s, empty properly this time. He shook her, and she nearly slipped into the street.

  “Tell me where the hospital is!”

  He lifted her, lengthwise, across his arms. He couldn’t carry her for long. His plastic bags shifted and he readjusted them.

  Seven streets fed into Náměstí Republiky. One led to the hospital. He hurried down the first. She was so tall; he should exercise more. People stared, and he said, “Hospital. Hospital.” He knew the word in Czech but couldn’t remember it. It stayed just out of reach.

  One person quickened her step. Another flipped open his cell phone. The police, Tee thought, that man is calling the police. What did Katka and he look like, in their wet clothes with the plastic bags on Katka’s feet and hanging on his arms? He should have removed her bags, at least.

  He backed away from the man, who shouted and started after them. Tee carried Katka as fast as he could. The man hesitated, but didn’t follow.

  Tee went around the corner of the Municipal House and eased Katka back onto the ground. He untied the bags. His chest hurt. His head was a fist. He wanted to take off her boots and know for sure, but there was no time. A doctor would have to do it. Burns maybe, blisters cracking up and down her leg. “Wake up,” he said. He shook her shoulders. Nothing. He pinched her. Nothing. He emptied the bags of water on her face, instantly regretting it.

  She flinched, and her eyelids fluttered against each other, and he said, please, please. Until she had come back.

  “Tee.”

  “Just tell me where the hospital is.”

  “Hybernská. I can go on my own.”

  He already had her in his arms again. Another street sign, on another building. Then she slapped his chest and told him to put her down, and for an instant she was so much her commanding self again that he did. “Are you okay?” he asked. The city seemed all a gritty brown and her eyes incredibly blue.

  She grimaced and led him around a corner where a sign for Hybernská was hidden. He would never have found it. As they limped toward the hospital, his cell phone vibrated. Probably his mother—she would have heard about the flood. But only Katka mattered.

  CHAPTER 5

  MEMORIES OF WATER

  I

  In Boston, in the hospital and then in the rehabilitation center, Tee’s parents visited together every other day, an effort he tried to appreciate. On odd days, they alternated. When they came together, they would drill him on the date. His OT made him write the date at the end of each session, chronicling his confusion. With his mother, Tee talked warily about the future—she made plans, got a new library job, put the house on the market. With his father, Tee played memory games. Often he forgot the rules, moving twice in a row even when his cards didn’t match. He would remember Katka’s uncharacteristic competitiveness. His father would point to the difference in the cards, as if the mistake was in the pictures.

  Tee walked farther and farther on his own. He wanted to look for the ghost woman without being judged when he fell. He kept checking his watch to be certain the hands moved. One morning she seemed to be reading in the rehab library—he saw her silhouette in the picture window. But inside was only the Korean girl who believed she was losing her memory, though she was not. Her memories didn’t seem right to her. She tapped the seat beside her, and spoke spell-like English. She wanted to know if Tee was Korean. He didn’t know how to answer. To him, Korea was another abstract noun. He asked about Busan, but she was from Seoul and hated the beach. When she asked why he never learned Korean, he stood and browsed the shelves. He borrowed an anatomy book, and stayed up late that night tracing over tibia, fibula, femur, patella, quadriceps, peroneus, soleus, gastrocnemius. He found the cerebellum and amygdala in the brain, where the staff had claimed they were.

  When he looked out the window now, he read the potential for storms. In one of his recurring nightmares, he stood under a clear sky while something—water or blood—dripped on his head. The worst dreams were the ones of the flood, watching Katka jump from the windowsill, unable to save her yet not wanting to wake and lose her twice.

  One day he found a puzzle in the media room. With every piece, he would forget what he was making. When he finally finished it, it wasn’t what he’d thought it would be.

  As he walked around the rehab center, the ghost popped up in unexpected places: going out the emergency exit, passing through the fish tank, getting a drink of water. He wondered why it had disappeared during the flood in Prague. Was that disappearance meant to help or to hurt him? Why was it back now? In his mind, he kept turning over the same stones. Under which was the truth?

  He should have cared more about Katka. He thought back to the paintings. What had the artist and the artist’s wife really seen in him? A boy propping the door for himself, then letting it shut.

  He still didn’t know what Pavel had meant by that, yet he could remember it when he forgot so much else.

  He walked with his father through the four atriums. “What does it mean if someone says you hold the door for yourself?” he asked.

  “You mean just, you open the door?” his father said. He was growing a beard like Tee’s uncle’s. Did he even realize he was doing this, taking a cue from the dead?

  “Just, you open the door?” Tee repeated.

  “If you’re holding the door for yourself, that means you’ve opened the door and are about to go through it.”

  Tee wondered if that was what Pavel had meant, the confusion just English as a second language. But Pavel had said the person behind Tee was Tee himself.

  The next time his mother visited alone, it was a Sunday. She was wearing a yellow sundress he recognized but couldn’t place. She dragged him to mass in the center’s prayer room, where once a week a priest stopped in from a local parish—most likely for the extra collection. Tee knew how meagerly belief paid. He wanted to ask his mother to interpret Prague, but he felt paralyzed by her desire to heal him. She held his hand. The mass was a mass of remembrance. The priest called out names of the dead and tolled two heavy bells. As the bells harmonized, Tee’s breaths slowed. Beyond the tolling he sensed the pressure of an expanding silence, as if the bells were ringing in the ocean at high tide. He wished his uncle were there, as if the priest had said “Hi” in greeting, not as one of the names. His uncle would have known what to tell him. Tee had always thought “Hi” was a good name for a pilot. But maybe his uncle would have been a better phone solicitor, or customer service rep, someone who had to keep his feet on the ground and listen. He was a good listener, which he had claimed helped him read the weather. When the tolling faded, Tee followed his mother back to his room. She asked what was on his mind, but he kept hearing the bells, the chanting of names, and then the silence.

  II

  One night, after his parents had come and gone, Tee lifted the typewriter onto his lap tray and tried to write about Korea. He wondered how his father and his birth mother had communicated. When they went out to dinner, how did people treat him, the foreigner who couldn’t even understand the woman he’d impregnated? Was she sad? Happy? His father must have felt far from her then, from the baby and her. Though later, when her ribs hurt and she couldn’t breathe, she
pulled him in with a closeness he’d never experienced, as if the physicality of their bodies could steady them.

  Tee wrote, for a while, about sympathetic pregnancy, which he had learned about from one of the other rehab patients, a woman whose husband had left her after their baby died. He wrote about his father taking on his birth mother’s hormones and desires. Would his father have been that kind of man? His father grew rounder, too. He felt hungry and hot and emotional, too. Slowly he saw that this was a symptom of love. He stood at the mirror, rubbing his belly, his body comprehending what he did not. In the hospital they listened to the whir of Tee’s heart like the motor of an airplane. The baby was always there, always directing them with a hidden, mysterious force.

  Tee wrote that when his birth mother was so big she could barely move, his father brought leftovers from a hotel party. She met him on the stairs, having waited up for the food. He lifted the bag to his nose and sniffed it, teasing her. But then her cheeks flushed and she lost her balance. He saved the food first, thinking of the baby ever ravenous, and almost missed her. She fell on top of him. At first he thought she was going into labor. He had one leg braced where the stairs met the wall, and he felt the snap as her weight landed. In that moment, maybe he sensed what the future held—he would snap everything to save what was inside of her.

  Tee didn’t know. He let the rhythm of the clacking keys and the answering echo of the letters fill his head. He loved that sound of causation, of the tap tap tap making the words exist. Before he touched the keys, there was nothing but white space. He typed until he needed to stretch, to get the voice of his father out of him, to get out of Korea. He was far from his birth land, a country he knew nothing about. He knew nothing about his father’s relationship with his birth mother. He walked down the hall to the nearest window. The trees outside the rehab center, real trees, rustled in the wind. There was going to be a storm. He listened for the sound of rain or river, thinking about the iterations of names, Charles River, Charles Bridge, and the steady flow of water accumulating until it reached an ocean, or a sea, a place where it would be swallowed up by more of itself. In Korea his father had found a thermal spring deep beneath the ground, and turned it into pleasure baths. His father had broken a leg and decided to take Tee home. Had he broken it to save a hidden life, a life he might have changed for, if Tee’s birth mother hadn’t died? If she hadn’t died, where would Tee be now?