Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

“You have to go before she goes,” Rockefeller said.

They went to Pavel and Katka’s house to sleep, unable to return to Karlín. Tee took the bed. He wanted Rockefeller to know he wasn’t running away. Rockefeller said nothing. He’d been silent since the café. When Tee stripped down for a shower, he saw that his father had called again, sometime since the hospital. He hadn’t felt the vibration.

He stepped into the shower Pavel and Katka had used for a dozen years, at times surely together. As the clean water washed off the smell and grime of the flood, he imagined them in the hospital. Pavel glowing that she had rejected Tee’s kiss, Katka’s palm clammy on his bicep. Maybe Pavel expected Tee, at that very moment, to be drowning. To his wife, Pavel apologized. He had never purposefully hurt her, though that didn’t make it any better. He would suck the poison from her leg if he could. She was sorry, too. She said Tee had caused the infection. Tee hadn’t listened.

Pavel and Katka would fall into their old rhythm: painting, posing. She could say, your art, your art ; and he would say, Jára Cimrman will always be our hero ; and they would share that secret laugh.

When Tee was dressed in the clothes from his plastic bags, he found himself standing beside the back of the giant canvas. He turned it around. Katka’s yellow ripples. That painting seemed the opposite of the mural in the café: her bright immortality, his dark drowning. Then he remembered the other painting Pavel had done. He searched the room, and then the closet, but he couldn’t find it. In the closet, he looked through the door ready for the ghost. If it was ever there. A wind shook the curtains, and he noticed one window was cracked.

When Tee went to bed, Rockefeller was still pacing the living room. Tee set his phone alarm for five A.M. and lay awake to the heavy footsteps.

In the end Pavel’s friendship had been worth more to Rockefeller than money, and Tee didn’t want to bribe anyone ever again. If Katka died, Rockefeller would attack Tee — that was the deal? And when Katka recovered? What then?

Tee wondered if his uncle, or his mother, had ever plotted revenge. Maybe his uncle had planned to crash his plane with his father in it. Maybe his mother had planned to run away and start a new family. He imagined his mother tracing a finger over his father’s nose, late at night, then over her adopted son’s. The same shape. On another night, she compared the noses with a ruler. She snipped locks of their hairs. But no, she said she didn’t have proof.

His father must have met his birth mother on one of the two initial visits, before he took the job. He was walking absentmindedly, comparing Korea to a film about Korea that he had watched before he left, when a skinny woman broke away from her friends. She wanted to practice her English, or she was curious about foreigners. Her tongue flicked to the three dots at the corner of her mouth, and he invited her to the hotel he was going to work for. He handed her a business card, making up his mind in that instant.

Tee felt the need to call his father, picturing that obsessive gaze, those hangdog cheeks. He weighed his cell in his hand. Rockefeller was still moving around on the other side of the wall. His father’s number glowed in the dark room. They hadn’t spoken since Tee’s trip back to Boston, since his father’s trip to California. The thought crossed Tee’s mind, though he pushed it away, that his father could offer advice. How to be with a married woman, how to stave off the backlash, emotional and physical. Or at least how to accept it. Tee thumbed the call button.

As if his thumb had reached out, the screen flashed. He listened to the ring. He felt his throat closing, a fist for an Adam’s apple. When he hung up, he could breathe again.

In Tee’s dreams, Pavel and Rockefeller pushed his face into the fissure in Katka’s leg. He could smell the sewage in her cut, the festering bacteria; he could see the disease chomping after her cells. Slowly they tipped up his feet, and he slid inside. He tried to swim away through her blood, but the mouths of the disease followed him, biting at his heels. Finally he realized he was asleep, and he tore himself out of the dream, though the feeling that he was inside her remained. In his daze, he could make out a tall figure beside the bed. The moon was trapped behind rain clouds, and the room was almost black. Then he knew who it was. He didn’t know if Rockefeller could see him, too, see that he was awake. The giant body seemed like only a collection of shadows. Neither of them breathed. Then Tee whispered, “Rock?” and the shadows slowly receded.

Tee and Rockefeller got to the hospital first thing in the morning, after a silent cab ride. The smell in Katka’s room, forgotten by a shower and a night’s sleep, sent Tee into a coughing fit.

Pavel stood on one side of the bed. A woman Tee didn’t recognize stood on the other. Katka lay between them, grinding her teeth. The IV dripped into her veins and machines beeped loudly. Pus stained the sheets around the wound.

Tee stood on the woman’s side, not next to Pavel. Rockefeller stood on Pavel’s side, near the door. The woman extended her hand to Tee. “I am Kateřina’s mother,” she said. All at once he saw Katka’s high cheekbones and blue eyes. Her mother spoke English well, though in a clipped manner, as if still addressing her abusive British husband.

Pavel must have called her. Tee noticed Katka’s discomfort. He shook her mother’s hand and asked if the doctor had been in to say when Katka could leave.

“Who are you, then?” her mother asked Tee. “You are from China?”

“A friend,” Tee said, telling himself not to react. Pavel grunted, but added nothing.

“The doctor said she is lucky to survive night and still talk now,” her mother said.

Finally Katka spoke rapidly in Czech, then seemed to lose her train of thought, then started again. The strange gray from the day before filmed over her irises. Her hair still hung off the back of the pillow. Had she put it up again or had she not moved all night? Tee wished she would give an excuse for why she hadn’t kissed him the day before. What she did say equally thrilled him.

Pavel banged his casts on the railing of the bed, and Katka reached across her mother for Tee’s hand and said, “He is my American lover,” in English.

Tee remembered how she had pulled him away from the Thai massage parrot in Old Town. She was always giving him his self back. She mumbled something else, which Tee couldn’t understand, and her mother made a little hiccup of surprise. Rockefeller mumbled in Czech and left the room.

“Just because you never took a lover, Mum,” Katka said, “does not mean I should not.” Pavel banged his casts on the rail again.

Katka’s mother rested her hand by her daughter’s neck and said something in Czech that didn’t sound like disagreement, and Katka’s grip tightened on Tee’s fingers. Her skin was wet and cold. He rubbed her hands warm. Pavel rocked on his heels, and then he was waving his casts around. He shouted in Czech, and her mother stroked her head, perhaps comparing her son-in-law to her late husband. Small split-open mounds stuck out from Katka’s infected thigh like rotten peaches half-buried in her skin.

Katka waited for Pavel to finish. Then she shouted back, her face ghosting away its color. Footsteps rushed down the hall, and Pavel cried. Only a day had passed since Katka was a calm peacemaker, holding their hands together.

At last she lowered her voice. Her mother went to intercept the nurse. Pavel scratched his casts against his pants. He moved for her hand, and she brushed him away. She muttered relentlessly, until he rubbed his eyes with his shoulder and stepped outside.