Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

Afterward, they lay naked, staring out at the rain-scratched sky, hoping the storm would last. He traced a finger down her thigh, and she shuddered and said again, “Tell me something about you that no one else knows.”

He opened his palm as if to wave hello. And then he knew what he could tell her.

“I heard my fortune once,” he said, “after my Korean friend translated my birth mom’s last words. My dad had said it was a name: Kang Seul Peum . But what it meant was ‘river of sorrow.’”

He had left his friend with the words shattering in his lungs. “There was this restaurant in Chinatown someone had told me about, where a woman told the future. One look and you believed her. That woman said the break in my life line meant an early death or a coma, and my love line was so deep, I would never let anyone go.” He brought Katka’s fingers to his sternum.

“See these five scars on my chest? After the fortune-telling, I called my mom, remembering when I was six and almost died. Chicken pox and pneumonia. I had thought of my dad as saving me. A priest had come to say the last rites, and my dad stopped him. I guess I thought of it like adoption, a second time he kept me alive. But Mom said she was the one who made him go in that day, that Dad had thought I was a goner.”

They made love again. The ghost stomped around in other rooms. He could hear it banging in his kitchen, but he didn’t care.

In the morning, Tee worked up the nerve to stop by the Globe. He’d been skipping his shifts. A man with horse teeth sat at Ynez’s desk. The expats in Prague changed weekly.

“Tee,” the man said — he was Irish.

“Do I know you?”

“I’ve heard of you. There aren’t many Asians in Prague who come in here.”

“I’m American.”

The man winked. “Didn’t know the word Asian would ruffle your feathers.”

“Maybe you could take a message?” Tee had wanted to apologize to Ynez, but now he didn’t know how. What message could he possibly leave?

“I heard you were with that artist the night he got beat,” the man continued as if Tee hadn’t spoken. “You and that big oafish lad who comes into the café, Rockefeller. Countrymen of yours, wasn’t it? I hear that artist is plotting against you lads.”

Later, Tee called back on his cell.

“You should talk to Ynez,” a new voice said.

“I want to.”

“Except she doesn’t want to talk to you. She quit two days ago.”

A cruel trick.

Tee wondered what Ynez had said when she left. He should have felt better to know that she was moving on.

After he hung up, he studied the objects in his dresser drawer: the blue thimble and the piece of the statue from Vyšehrad, the pewter Golem from the house in Malešice, the husk of the rocket from Old Town Square, the Pilsner and Budvar and Staropramen and Gambrinus and Krušovice coasters, two shot glasses, a few matchbooks, pencils and pens, stray buttons, an empty photo frame, a crumbling brick, a rabbit’s foot from God knows where. Was this what he filled his container with? Or was it simple proof of where he’d been?

He spread the objects out on his bed. He remembered the shavings from his uncle’s beard, the ash and bone in the urn. He remembered the Easter after he was accepted to Boston College, when his aunt had told him about her freshman year, the first time any of the adults in his family had ever talked openly about sex. Suddenly she had touched her cheek and said sex was all an act — she still dyed her hair every month, for men — and as she turned toward the living room, he was aware of a vulnerability he had never known before, in anyone. “All of this wanting and wanting,” she’d said, nearly crying. “All of this not knowing what you want.” At first he’d been embarrassed for her, trying so hard to connect with his youth when he couldn’t help feeling put off by her sexuality. Later he’d been unable to shake the feeling that they had shared something, that she was keeping some secret for him, and he owed her.

In his bedroom in Karlín, Tee felt something, or someone, behind him, but he didn’t turn around. He had locked his door. He picked up a red matchbook from Rockefeller’s apartment. It advertised a Museum of Communism: PRAY WE DON’T CATCH YOU AT ANOTHER MUSEUM. Why would Rockefeller go there? Tee struck a match, and singed the edges of a piece of notepaper, as his mother had taught him to do once to impress a girl. Ash rubbed off on his fingertips, dusted the bed. What he was doing was not safe. He blew out the flame. In the center of the burned page, he sketched two eyes. He recalled the legend of Straba, who cut off the ears of his masked enemy, only to find, upon returning home, that the ears belonged to his wife.

That night before Katka arrived in the rain, Tee wrote in his notebook about Korea. As if telling her about the fortune in his palm had cleared up something about the past.

When Dad took the job in Pusan, he sent letters to Mom. He must have been trying to change. Soon, wasn’t Mom sniffing the brown envelopes, imagining the Pusan beach and the hot springs beneath? But it wasn’t long before the letters stopped. She would run at night, looking up at the windows and picturing windows in Korea. 2 months until he wrote again. Then the return address bore a hospital cross. She tore the envelope in her hurry, but he only had a broken leg. The end of his letter she reread again and again. He offered her what they had lost. A baby. When she called the number he’d given, what did she ask — why did he stop writing and where did he find a half-white baby? how much did he love her? did he already love the baby, me? He was in the hospital, had been in Korea just 6 months, after 2 quick trips to settle the contract. He said to make up her mind.

Over the last two weeks of July and the first two weeks of August, it would rain all but nine days. The storms would come and go, rarely lingering. The river would swell and rise up the embankments, but no one worried about a flood. Tee and Katka took no notice of warning signs, coming and going with the storms.

After they made love that first evening, he walked her down to Křižíkova station. He held a black umbrella over her and fought the guilt washing in in the wake of desire. They descended the escalators to the metro as a train rumbled by. The wind from the train stung Tee’s eyes. Squinting, he saw a pink shape fly out of her hand and onto the tracks. She’d been holding her rain-soaked socks, and the wind had caught one. She’d let it go. Tee started after it, and a horn rang out. A second train flew up on the heels of the first, with closed doors, and after twenty seconds, went on.

“You looked like in your paintings,” she said as the train departed, “rushing for a piece of clothing.” She held the other sock behind her. The one on the tracks was gone.

“What are those ghost trains? I see them go by with their lights off and their doors shut.” His ears buzzed with the rasp of the horn.

“They are for training drivers. Two people a month kill themselves in the metro. They step off the edge and get run over.” He pictured this. Holding hands with her and stepping out over the tracks as a train crushed to a stop. “You have got to practice.”

As they hugged good-bye, he knew that the next day would bring her back. He offered his umbrella, but she said she wouldn’t be able to explain where it was from. He anticipated the next train, hoping for another dud. She plucked some wet fuzz off her shirt, and his hand went out to catch it.

“Do not worry,” she said, and smiled. Then she reached out and pinched his wrist.

Later he realized she could have said she had bought the umbrella. Maybe she was afraid to have anything of his in her house.