Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

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.

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.

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.