Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

“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.

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.