Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

The tram went through Wenceslas Square, where a number of drunk youths crowded on, and she thought about her husband, rubbing his casts together in the rain. It was a simple decision, she thought. She felt the press of Tee’s hands on her waist. Tee had climbed the tree after her; Pavel had tried to knock them down. The best Pavel could manage anymore was a painting of Tee.

A man on the tram leaned in and asked if she was okay, and she wiped her eyes and said, “And what would you do if I am not?” He turned away.

She got off the tram in Karlín and walked along the street toward Tee’s flat. She remembered him coming to the hospital to check on Pavel’s wrists — she’d tried to love only her husband, but as she walked away, she carried Tee with her, like a word on the tip of her tongue.

Later, in his apartment, when they lay on the floor beside each other, cooling off and turning transparent, like a glass slid out of a kiln, he turned on his side and went quiet. He pulled off his shirt, rolled his socks off his feet. He needed to say something but couldn’t. Through the doorway to the bedroom, she caught the shape of Pavel’s Golem on his chest of drawers — the same statue? She ignored the pain in her leg that returned as the endorphins from making love faded. She waited, and knew they should leave, but decided not to say so until he talked himself out. Tiredness soaked through her, as wet and heavy as the rain. All day she’d been leaving: one place for another, one lover for another, one generation for another. She wanted to stay, she didn’t want to go anywhere that held even the threat of her husband, but she also knew they had to get out of Karlín.

He touched the five chicken-pox scars on his chest. Then he spread her fingers out with his own until their two hands formed five little steeples, like in a children’s rhyme he couldn’t quite recall. He moved her fingers over the scars and she stretched her fingertips to align with the dots. “What is wrong?” she asked.

When her hand moved, he told her about his birth mother’s photograph, how he’d caught the two diseases in the woods, trying to share as much as he could. He said when he was fifteen, he’d found his mother alone in his room — his adoptive mother — staring at the photo. “I discovered it under your socks?” she said. “You have her eyes, at least?” She seemed about to add something more, to explain that lingering “at least,” but his father’s car hummed in the drive. She dropped the photo and sucked her lips between her teeth. He felt his container filling. After she left, he threw the photo away in the bathroom, so she wouldn’t find it in his bedroom again. He thought she was angry with him, or heartbroken. He worried that she might think he cared more about his birth mother than about her. But he was also ashamed to be caught, ashamed that he’d been looking at the photograph night after night. Later he dug it out of the trash can and hid it in a wallet he never used.

He told Katka he’d made his birth mother, in his mind, into a woman who wished to leave Korea; he’d made lives for her in which she met foreigners and fell in love. He said, “I wanted my birth to be planned, I guess. I wanted to be born out of love. Even if that meant my birth father had broken her heart by the time I was born.”

He held Katka’s hand over his chest again. “Now I know I had nothing to do with love. I found out today — yesterday. My mom sent me an e-mail. She didn’t even call. My dad never adopted me. He slept with my birth mother.”

He rubbed his face on his shoulder. “How could I not have known?” he asked. “We look similar. Mom said I used to ask about my adoption when I was a kid, and later, I just stopped.”

Katka swerved her boots across the floor, and grimaced. “Go on,” she said when he paused. He shook his head.

“I don’t have anything else to say,” he said. “Dad used to say the instant he saw me, he knew we were family. He used to say that all the time. I thought his love was a choice.”

She said, as if reading his mind, “Your life is your own.”

“Yes,” he said. “But only if you admit what you’re doing. I went to the same college as him, I left my mom behind, I got into an affair. I didn’t even realize, until now, that I was replaying my past.”

“You have not got into an affair,” she said, her eyes red. “I have done. And it is not an affair. I left him.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “It’s not the same.” But the words died in his mouth.

“You are an asshole if you think you are just replaying something with me.”

A feather caught in his throat. The rain echoed around them, drumming on as the sun rose. He lay with his back flat on the floor, and after a while, she rested her head in the crook of his arm. The hardwood was cool as he smoothed his hand over it, but there was nothing to hold or stow or take.

She listened to him talk about affairs as she pictured the progress of the flood, how high and how far into Karlín, and where they and her husband and Rockefeller were in it. It would have been easier for his father to abandon him, but she didn’t say this. He shifted over and knelt above her. He felt the same desire she’d felt, to lose himself in making love. He kissed her and slid his hands under her. Her skin tightened. She would forget, eventually, the times Pavel had lifted her in his arms — on their wedding night; out of the Bay of Angels, on their honeymoon in France; up from the dust, her fingers around his casts. Tee laid her down on the bed and tried to take off her boots, but she brought his hands to her chest.

When they finished, it was day. The sun shone through the window and her hips ached pleasantly. She tried to think about the flood, but she couldn’t concentrate. He slept with such whimpering relief that she couldn’t keep her eyes open, either. She knew she should wake him and say they must leave, but she longed for sleep. She longed to sleep beside him.

He pretended to sleep until she slept, and then he slept lightly enough to hear the knock on the door. He dressed and went to answer it, not wanting to wake her and still in his dream. He’d been running through his parents’ house and had fallen between the slats of hardwood into a strange land he knew was Korea but which looked like the half-formed set of a movie, full of uncompleted machines.

At the door, a policeman spoke firmly in Czech. Tee wondered if he was being arrested, before he remembered the flood. A train rumbled in his mind. He felt in his pocket for his cell and saw the message from Rockefeller: Send her to husband. Tee remembered being brought home by an officer, once, when he was seven, for shoplifting. His father had said, “He’s not my kid. Better take him to jail,” and Tee had felt lost and drifting, as if he really was at the wrong house, instead of how he should have felt: confined, like a prisoner.

He heard a sound in the hall behind the policeman, but nothing was there. He hadn’t seen the ghost once since — when? Since he knew Katka was his alone? If the water did rise and cut them off from the rest of Prague, they would be unreachable, even from text messages, even from e-mail, even from their pasts.

“ Nerozumím ,” Tee said, waving his hand. “ Nerozumím .” What did he look like to the policeman? A half-white foreigner who couldn’t be bothered to learn Czech. Tee kept the door closed enough so the policeman couldn’t get a foot inside.

The man lowered his hands to the floor, saying, “Vltava, Vltava,” and lifted them, faster and faster, up his body. He pointed to Tee. “You.” He drew the level of his hands up over Tee’s head and blew out his cheeks as if to hold his breath before he drowned.