Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

Tee didn’t know. He let the rhythm of the clacking keys and the answering echo of the letters fill his head. He loved that sound of causation, of the tap tap tap making the words exist. Before he touched the keys, there was nothing but white space. He typed until he needed to stretch, to get the voice of his father out of him, to get out of Korea. He was far from his birth land, a country he knew nothing about. He knew nothing about his father’s relationship with his birth mother. He walked down the hall to the nearest window. The trees outside the rehab center, real trees, rustled in the wind. There was going to be a storm. He listened for the sound of rain or river, thinking about the iterations of names, Charles River, Charles Bridge, and the steady flow of water accumulating until it reached an ocean, or a sea, a place where it would be swallowed up by more of itself. In Korea his father had found a thermal spring deep beneath the ground, and turned it into pleasure baths. His father had broken a leg and decided to take Tee home. Had he broken it to save a hidden life, a life he might have changed for, if Tee’s birth mother hadn’t died? If she hadn’t died, where would Tee be now?

Not until after Prague, when Tee was in a hospital himself, in Boston, could he ask the nurses and doctors the questions he’d wanted to know about Katka. “What would you do if a woman came in from a flood with a cut on her leg?” They humored him. They said they would examine the leg, check for a fever, and determine if the wound was infected, which, in a flood, it might be. Then they would put her on antibiotics and send her home.

“How could you tell if it was infected?” Tee asked. A fever, or redness, or swelling, or loss of blood pressure. Or sometimes they said, “Thomas, you need to rest” or “Thomas, I’ve answered that question a dozen times already. Do you remember?”

He asked what kind of antibiotics they would put her on. A wide spectrum. They would take a culture to find out what she had.

He asked would they really send her home. They would, unless the cut looked very bad and they saw signs of NF or other serious diseases.

He asked what signs they would look for. They asked why he was interested, and he shut up, or occasionally he pressed on. The leg might be twice its size, or beet red and the skin eaten away, or filled with pus.

He asked about NF. Necrotizing fasciitis, flesh-eating bacteria, rarely found. More common was sepsis, bacteria in the blood that could lead to shock.

He asked again about sending the woman home. If someone thought she had one of these diseases, the doctor might keep her overnight. Or sometimes, when Tee asked, they noticed his shifting eyes. Sometimes they grew awkwardly quiet. They would say, probably she would be sent home, especially if the hospital was busy, as in a flood. Or they would politely ignore him, which was easier, and simply do their jobs.

In Náměstí Republiky, the doctor did almost exactly what Tee would be told a doctor should do. The cut was stitched and dressed, Katka shot with antibiotics and prescribed a number of pills which Tee managed to get from the basement pharmacy.

When she took off her boots, her wound showed, at last, red and irritated, giving off a heat of its own. But not nearly as bad as he’d imagined. A nurse took a culture and Katka spoke to the doctor in Czech. They checked her fever, and it wasn’t high enough to keep her there, so they sent her home to return if needed.

Tee imagined Pavel pushing Katka over into the glass coffee table, or smashing a window, or throwing something sharp. He didn’t ask. They stepped out of the hospital and back into the square, Katka in hospital slippers, and they went through the options. The hospital had mentioned the university shelter.

“We could try it,” she said.

He pictured a mass of people disturbing her rest.

“We could check hotels.”

But he said what she knew, that the hotels would be booked by earlier evacuees.

“You were right,” Tee said. “We should have left before.”

She didn’t suggest the house in Malešice. She didn’t remind him she had a bed of her own. He knew himself where they had to go.

When they got there, the house was empty. Where was Pavel with a flood outside? Tee insisted on sleeping on the floor. Without discussing it, they faced the painting of her toward the wall, and she fell asleep instantly, her leg wrapped in gauze under the sheets. He blinked awake every hour or so, afraid that Pavel would return. The doctor had said her leg was infected. Tee had promised her safety.

He woke to her moans. He climbed out of the pit of sleep until he was back in her house. He pinched his neck to get his blood going, and knelt beside her. When he lifted the blanket, heat sighed from the wound. He wondered if he was still dreaming. Her calf was bright red, an apple dangling from her knee. As if he could slip the fruit out from under her skin and tuck it into his pocket. “God,” he said. “We have to go back to the hospital.”

She said immediately, “My leg.” She reached down, and when her fingers brushed the gauze, a cry escaped her. She gasped and cried — both at the same time. He searched the plastic bags for his cell. There were nine missed calls, all his mother. He dialed emergency. He held the phone for Katka, his hand trembling, and he worried that he would hurt her ear. She managed their address and a few details in Czech.

He asked if she needed water, ice. He would get some ice. “I’ll be back in ten seconds. Ice will help.”

He hurried into the kitchen. Thankfully, the power was still on. As he counted down — ten, nine, eight — he let himself cry. He took a bag of peas from the freezer, and returning, he heard her muffle a moan.

He hovered the peas above her calf. “This is going to hurt,” he said. When the bag touched her skin, she wept haltingly, deep wet breaths. Her hand reached for the peas and then stopped. She bit her lip. And he heard a door open.

The ghost, he thought hopefully. But he knew it was not.

She swiped the peas off her leg, gulping air. He waited for Pavel — when Pavel walked in, he thought cruelly, the affair was over. Her husband had kept her safe through a revolution. Her husband had made her art.

“I should have listened to you,” Tee whispered. Then the doorway filled with the giant frame of his neighbor. Tee’s back twitched, anticipating a blow. Why Rockefeller? Had the artist asked Rockefeller to stop by? Had they made up?

When Tee looked again, the door was empty.

“They are going to cut off my leg,” Katka said. “What if they have got to cut it off?” She’d noticed nothing. But he could smell Rockefeller’s sweat despite the sour gauze.

“No one’s going to cut anything off.”

“Tell me it will be all right,” she said.

He said: “Remember, stepping in shit is good luck.”

She frowned, and he realized it sounded like a joke. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ll be together. The doctors will fix it.”

After another fifteen minutes, they heard the ambulance. Tee hoped Rockefeller was far away now. He said he would go out to meet the EMTs, since it would be faster.

The ambulance parked on the curb. Two paramedics got out without the stretcher, and Tee shouted and pumped his fists up and down at his sides. He ran forward and pointed to the van and mimed again. Minutes wasted.

Back in the bedroom, he rocked on the balls of his feet as they asked Katka questions, as they touched her forehead and lifted her onto the padding. They carried her outside. Tee climbed into the ambulance beside her, but one of the paramedics waved him out. “Who—” the man said. Tee squeezed her hand. She said something in Czech to convince them.