Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

Ynez read over his shoulder. “Are you supposed to be Czech in these stories?” She chewed her pen. “Are those our books?”

“If I’m trying to run away from myself,” he said, “can’t you just let me?”

“Now who do you think I am?”

He slipped her pen cap into his pocket. When he didn’t answer her, she said, “Where do pigs park? A porking lot.”

He laughed and clutched at his chest.

“It’s not that funny,” she said. She narrowed her eyes. Finally she said, “What are you afraid of? Is this about your birth mother, your birth father?”

Tee raised a single eyebrow — his father’s gesture, which Tee had copied, at first, because it made him look like a pirate. “What am I afraid of?” He told her how Pavel had stared at him that night, unblinking, before shattering the mug. He had stepped in front of her, Ynez, for fear not of Rockefeller but of Pavel. Ynez seemed confused why he should be afraid of the artist.

Tee remembered what Katka had said about lies. She had rubbed her nose and said, “This means you are telling the truth.” Then she’d rubbed his. “Your nose is too soft,” she’d said. “Do all Asians have soft noses?”

Pavel kept to his bed through most of May. The Globe filled with gossip. Rumor reported a successful surgery: two screws in each wrist, under twin casts. Tee imagined Pavel pulling up the blanket with his teeth, shivering like an addict. His fingers itching for a brush, his lips sucking for a cigarette. Each time Tee called the house in Malešice, Katka waited just long enough to know it was him before hanging up. Tee bought all the books he’d written in in the Globe and hid them under his bed.

The few expats the artist did allow over, Rockefeller invited to his apartment. He hosted dinner party after dinner party. The art dealer’s daughter, Vanessa, said the bedroom studio was a mess of clothes, dishes. She’d seen an easel, in one corner, kicked in half. Pavel wouldn’t let Katka touch it. Vanessa said she had lit cigarettes and placed them in his mouth; he’d nearly bitten her. She had gotten the feeling he wanted to. “Jára Cimrman lit his cigarettes with lightning,” Tee said. No one mentioned the specifics of the attack.

In the Globe the staff sometimes went quiet when they saw Tee coming. Once, he overheard a woman with a book on Pavel’s art say she was buying it because the artist was going crazy. Someone she knew in the Czech art world had gone by the house in Malešice, and Pavel had shouted for a full hour about certain young artists borrowing culture from the Americans, as if he blamed her friend and was about to stab him through the heart with a paintbrush. The cashier glanced in Tee’s direction. But Tee knew Pavel couldn’t lift a brush; that must have been embellishment. After the woman left, the cashier asked if Tee was okay, as if he was the one to be pitied, not Pavel. Ynez crept closer to hear his answer. Tee said the book the woman had bought was a good one.

One afternoon, while Tee killed time in an Internet café before work, he found an e-mail from his father. A link to a blog, of all things. Finally in Hollywood , his father wrote. Apologies to my wife. Must get this film made or die trying. Heck, it’s my best attempt to forgive myself.

A couple of days later: Had lunch with a film guy. I drew him a picture of my brother’s crash. If only he knew everything I knew, he’d back this movie in a second. Why doesn’t anyone see things as I see them? If you’re out there, pray for me.

Tee wondered if his father meant him, or maybe his uncle.

Finally Tee set a date with Ynez at the Cuban-Irish bar in New Town, O’Che’s, where they stood no chance of running into Katka or Pavel or Rockefeller. They sat under the arched ceiling in the back, beside a stained-glass window of Che Guevara. Ynez asked what had taken so long; couldn’t he tell she was waiting for him? He remembered his aunt and uncle babysitting once while his parents saw a movie. Half-asleep, he’d heard his aunt enter the master bedroom. Drawers squeaked open. Then his uncle’s footsteps came upstairs, and the room quieted. Tee had tiptoed across the hall and heard the bed squeak. What had his aunt found that she’d tried to erase through sex?

In the bar, Tee noticed the noise of other Americans, the bravado. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said, scratching the lip of the table. “You’re right, I should have noticed.”

Ynez said, “You’re starting this date with ‘It’s not you, it’s me’?”

He ordered shots of absinthe. Just be a tourist , he thought. Someone who can take things or leave them. Ynez modeled how to wet the sugar and light the spoon on fire, waiting out the flame before stirring sweet into the bitter licorice liquor.

The bar blurred at the edges. “Why did you choose this place?” she asked. “It’s awful.”

Outside, as they walked toward the night tram, he pulled her into him. She stumbled against his chest. A tenor sax whined over Wenceslas Square. It rained.

“For someone with a fear of abandonment,” she said when he covered her with his body. Then she stopped, one heel catching against the cobblestone.

“Is that what I have?” he asked, his heart pounding.

In her bedroom he pressed his face between her breasts, breathing her in. He would not be his father, not drive people away and pretend he was the one who’d left. He didn’t have anything to deny or atone for. But he kept premeditating his kisses. Beside her ear, under her chin, in the hollow of her throat.

She dug her nails into his back. “What are you staring at?”

She had a girlish room, unembarrassed by stuffed animals. He realized he was looking for the ghost.

“Fuck me,” she said, surprising him.

He twisted awkwardly and slid off the bed. She sucked in a sharp breath. He bit his lips and felt for the pile of clothes with his foot in the darkened room. When she pulled the comforter over her head, he carried the pile into the bathroom.

He lay in his bed that night cursing himself.

The next day, Tee climbed over the railing in Vyšehrad and sat on the cliff above the Vltava. Sailboats struggled to tack against the wind. Back in the ruins, a little boy knelt in the prayer maze, eyes closed. When the boy left, Tee walked into the center. He found a tiny blue thimble, just big enough to catch a drop of rain.

The tree was a magnificent sugar maple at least a century old. “It makes the garden come together,” Katka had said, meaning garden in the British sense. The maple reached up from the middle of the yard like a many-fingered hand beneath the green glove of leaves. It was weeks after Pavel’s attack. A neighbor had called Rockefeller for help in the middle of a party, and all the guests had gone down to Malešice together. Katka balanced on a branch twenty feet above the ground, in the tree because of her husband.

Later she would tell Tee how Pavel had gotten the paintings out of the closet, somehow, and into the bedroom, how she had found him in the middle of them, as Tee had been months earlier. She had been cooking lunch. Pavel asked her to move his art into the kitchen. He often had strange requests for his work. She set the canvases in four rows, the painted sides to the wall, protected from the splattering gulaš. When she was done, he stood in front of her and kissed her.

Out of nowhere he lodged one cast against her chest, already holding her back, and with the other cast, he tipped the largest painting into the stove. When it caught fire, he kicked the canvases out of the house and into the wet grass. He was lucky he hadn’t burned down the neighborhood.

Beneath the tree, Tee didn’t know where to look: what was left of the paintings smoldered nearby; Katka’s white limbs shone through the leaves as she swayed in the sway of the wind; Pavel yelled below, stomping in a bathrobe; the other guests pulled bottles from pockets and predicted a storm; the neighbor stepped back, rubbing his cheeks; Rockefeller yanked his jacket off his wide shoulders and beat at the dying flames. Tee guessed a storm would only affect Katka’s grip. The art was beyond saving. The already damp ground had contained the blaze. The smoke itched in Tee’s eyes, and when he wiped them clear, there was a second glow at the base of the tree. For a moment he thought he had been wrong and the tree was about to light up. But then the glow became a foot, as if the tree had flipped upside down and was about to walk away. Tee wiped his hands on his shorts and stepped forward, and the foot disappeared. Tee reached for the lowest branch, putting the ghost out of his mind. He swung a knee over. Katka waited in the middle of the branches, one place Pavel’s casts could never reach her.