Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

“You didn’t leaving Karlín,” Rockefeller said. “Even after warning?”

“Sure,” Tee said, “it’s my fault. He hates me, I guess. But Katka doesn’t.” Like at the desk, though, his certainty left him. “What did they say? Is she going to be all right?”

Rockefeller shook his head.

The nurses craned to see the Asian against the giant Czech. “Forget her,” Rockefeller said. Then he pinned Tee’s arms, for a moment, before letting go with a grunt. Tee’s biceps tingled. The strength in those fingers. “You are only kid.”

White light shone off the walls and there was the cutting scent of bleach. Tee bit back tears. Rockefeller ran his hand through his bird-nest hair. Neither of them budged — until the doctor came in and said Katka was asking for Tee.

Katka’s doctor shuffled from side to side and said that the operation had at first seemed successful, but in fact the bacteria had already spread. He’d cut away as much infected tissue as possible. Now her organs had become a problem. Her liver and kidneys were shutting down. He continued in medical terms that hung in the air uninterpreted once he left. Tee wondered if the poor bedside manner was busyness or Katka’s translation.

He stood on one side of her bed, Pavel on the other, Rockefeller in the corner behind the artist.

The wound was open to the air, since the gauze would have stuck to it. The debridement had sliced her calf down to a thin layer of muscle around her fibula. Her knee above looked like the head on a stick doll. She said the doctors didn’t think cutting off her leg would help. The bacteria were in her bloodstream and her body couldn’t handle the stress of an amputation. The bacteria ate away a lattice of flesh all the way up to her thigh, exposing muscle wrinkled like cauliflower. Pavel covered his mouth. Tee choked. Sweat beaded on Katka’s face with each breath.

Tee wanted her to explain. She’d only had a scratch, a tiny cut closed with six stitches. He’d rushed her to the hospital twice where the doctors should have easily healed her.

Pavel wiped a tear with his shoulder. Behind him, Rockefeller shifted in place as if to warm up for a sport. It was a small room, but at least she had it to herself. She sat up slowly.

“I will explain everything,” she said in English. “It is not your fault, Tee.”

She switched to Czech, though Pavel said he could understand. As she talked, Pavel’s eyes became thin lines. Tee imagined what she said. She didn’t love Pavel, she’d made her choice with a clear mind. She would be fine. He should leave. She and Tee were going to tend a garden, buy a pet, far away.

But as she went on, her blue eyes clouding with a half-visible gray, Tee imagined she was telling Pavel she regretted leaving him. She’d made a mistake.

Tee should have learned more Czech. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. Her sharp cheekbones were sharper, the skin caved in. Her hands inched up her stomach. When her nails clicked together, he felt for the second time that day a sense of déjà vu. Her brown hair flowed neatly off the back of the pillow — she’d been able to think of this detail, to remember how she looked.

She exhaled a long breath, and at the end of it, she said, “Yes. I am going to be okay. But if I am not, I do not want any of you hating each other.”

Tee could feel Pavel concentrating on translation.

“Do something for me,” she said as electrical sounds echoed somewhere.

She shut her eyes for a moment. The smell of her leg burned in Tee’s nose, itched his throat. She gestured Tee closer. Pavel turned and grunted from his chest. When Tee’s ear was above her mouth, she whispered: “I want you to have that life.”

“Which life?” he asked. He wished she would bite him. He lowered his ear.

“It is time to pretend.”

Pavel clinked his casts on the metal rail. “I love you,” he said in English, maybe so Tee would understand as well, so Tee would feel jealous, which he did, at how natural the interruption seemed. Husband to wife. Rockefeller stepped around the bed. One big hand fell on Tee’s shoulder. Tee shrugged it off.

“Come,” she said then. “All of you.” As if they were her three children.

“Stop acting like you’re eighty and have cancer,” Tee said.

He held her hand. She brought his palm to Pavel’s fingertips, which stuck out of the cast. The cold rough plaster. Holding them together with one hand, she reached her other for Rockefeller. Pavel grimaced. Tee heard a faint swallowing sound. Katka’s shivers traveled into her wet hands. The room was silent and bright, too bright, and Pavel pulled his cast away and pounded the call button.

A nurse entered and waved them out. Tee wished he could have hit that button for Katka. She needed to rest and prepare for another surgery.

Rockefeller squeezed her hand and exited. Tee wanted to kiss her good-bye. He glanced down at her white, dying leg, so dull and detached from her red mouth, her blue eyes, her brown hair flowing off the back of the pillow. Pavel glared, his hair a snarl of lighter brown, waiting to be the last inside. Tee bent over her — but she shook her head.

He stopped inches from her face. He smelled the acrid wound. He didn’t want to give Pavel a private good-bye. The nurse pressed his back, her hand disembodied, like it had come out of thin air. Katka smiled, a new wrinkle in the corner of her left eye.

“He can stay, Tee,” she said. “They let family stay.”

Rockefeller said he had something Tee needed to see, so Tee agreed to stop at The Heavenly Café on the way to the house in Malešice. Tee couldn’t think straight, his thoughts on Pavel alone with Katka, on her ruined leg.

The mall was about to close. They climbed the dead escalator to the second floor, and Rockefeller took a key from a cord around his neck and opened the café. It was clear why Tee was there. A mural covered the back wall, painted by Pavel’s casts.

At first Tee couldn’t tell what caused the pressure in the back of his head. The casts had made thick bands of yellow and blue and green. Wide black borders outlined everything like comic-book characters. The curves of Katka’s body had become the curves of rushing water. Pavel had painted the flood. The debris in the water looked like the debris of the café. A swimmer rested in the bottom-left corner, emitting rays like an underwater sun. It seemed innocent enough, but Tee’s container slowly filled.

Rockefeller said nothing. Tee kept staring until the swimmer, or the urgency with which Rockefeller had led him there, or the timing — after leaving Katka in the hospital — struck him with terrifying clarity. He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s me, isn’t it? Pavel painted me at the bottom of the flood.”

Rockefeller moved around beside the mural. He was still taller than the painted body in the corner. Tee’s body.

“Why are you showing me this?”

Rockefeller said the artist had asked him to make this happen. He played with his lapel. “If I am hurting you,” he said, “then Pavel will forgive me.”

The resignation in those eyes was like two immovable rocks. “You would do it?” Tee said. He backed away. “What now? Should I call the police? The embassy?”

“So now you leave from Prague.” Rockefeller crossed over the slabs of concrete. His corduroy jacket clung too tightly to his wide shoulders, as if it was concealing wings. Here, Tee thought, in The Heavenly Café, was the Angel of Death. He wished to make a joke.

“She’s dying soon,” Rockefeller whispered when he was even with Tee. “You cannot staying here.”

Tee planted his leg. “She’s not dying.” He remembered his father’s call in September, to say that his uncle had died, the buzz of finality. Tee didn’t feel that now. He forced himself to memorize the mural, and he remembered his palms: an early death or a coma. In his apartment, Katka had taken one look at the molten pewter, and cried. “How could you say that?”