Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

Katka’s mother looked back at Tee from the doorway and said, “I can see she must love you, but I hope you did not do any what her husband says.”

“It’s all my fault,” Tee said.

She smiled as if she didn’t understand him, and followed Pavel into the hall.

When they were alone, Katka’s voice broke down and she said hoarsely, “I cannot concentrate.” She closed her eyes and seemed to disappear for a moment. Her cheeks trembled, the loose skin of a balloon. When she returned to him, she was old, far older than their fifteen-year gap. He saw again the new wrinkle at the corner of her eye, and he could hear the snap of teeth as the disease swam beneath her surface, like in his dream. His fingers went to her cords absentmindedly.

“I am going to die soon,” she said, her voice getting stronger again. “I know you do not want to hear that, but I am going to die soon. Do you understand?”

His vision blurred, and he held the railing so he wouldn’t fall.

“I knew all along,” she said, “you were going to be the end of Pavel and me. I only thought it would be sooner.”

As his eyes refocused, death was present at last. He remembered her on the stairs behind him as they tried to get on the roof, the mismatched sounds of her steps, he realized now. You will keep me safe , she had said. She had trusted him.

“I do not know why I cannot forgive you,” she whispered. She seemed to push her breath out with her voice. “In the end we were going to be with each other with or without a flood. You should have let us leave.”

He wanted to throw up. She had waited until he couldn’t respond, and now, after she said she was going to die, she accused him.

For an instant, surrounded by the beeping of her machines, he wished they had never been together. He wanted her to be with Pavel. He wanted to say it was her fault — that first time, she had kissed him and he had refused. He wanted her to live forever, without him. He wanted to say he didn’t need her to accuse him. He wanted to hate her because she was alive somewhere, and he couldn’t go to her, not hate her because she was dead.

She muttered in Czech. He wouldn’t realize until later that she was saying she loved him. “Let me say good-bye to my husband,” she added in English.

Tee wanted to stay. But he knew he had to do this — for her, and even for Pavel.

In the hallway he said, “She wants to talk to you,” and lowered his head as if she’d chosen her husband in the end. Rockefeller walked back with three cups of coffee. Pavel took one and went in. Tee sank to the tile beside Katka’s mother and cried. She waited for him to speak, but a piece of glass was lodged in his voice box and would cut into it at a single word. Inside of him, his organs squeezed like a fist. His chest shuddered.

Finally he forced himself to say something. “It is my fault,” he whispered.

Katka’s mother sucked in her breath and said, “It is never fault of who claims it.” But Tee crossed to the other side of the hall. He couldn’t look at her. He had killed her daughter.

A dozen sobs later, Pavel shouted for help. Katka had slipped into a coma.

The doctor gave Katka four days. Tee returned to the hospital each morning and slept in the bed in Malešice each night, while Pavel stayed by her side. Rockefeller gave Tee the same four days. Tee had hoped that Katka’s last words would appease Pavel; of course, they did not. Maybe the coma foretold in Tee’s palms was Katka’s. As the floodwater drained, it revealed billions of dollars of damage, eleven people dead, hundreds of thousands homeless, buildings that had survived wars now in danger. A chemical plant had leaked chlorine gas that caused scratchy throats, as if the city had caught a cold. Karlín was still off-limits.

In Katka’s hospital room, Pavel glared without talking. Katka’s mother cried tears saved up over a decade of regret. In the house in Malešice, the mural haunted Tee’s dreams. He woke sweating and looking for Rockefeller’s shadow. Rockefeller never seemed to sleep. Tee lay awake in Katka’s bed until early morning. He had carried through the flood two notebooks, some clothes, and his cell phone in a plastic bag, while she carried her disease. He turned off his cell, turned off the outside world, tried to turn off the fluttering inside him.

The first day of the coma, he felt as if invisible strings hung in the air, wires of life, and if he tripped the right one, she would sit up. He waved his arms above her and ignored Pavel and Rockefeller.

The second day, he waited until Pavel went to the bathroom, and then he bent in and kissed her. Her mother patted his back, or weakly struck him.

The third day, he held Katka’s hand and told her everything he could think of, not caring how stupid it sounded, from his first memory — flying in his uncle’s plane — to the last thing he did before coming to Prague — praying, embarrassedly, with his mother, both of them wanting new lives. He told her he wished he’d been able to talk to his uncle, not just to try to change his mind, but to tell him he had meant something important, at least to Tee. Pavel grumbled, at first, but eventually gave up, later speaking to Rockefeller in the hall. Her mother tugged at her sleeves and whispered her own good-byes.

Tee found himself staring longingly at Katka’s hands, hands that had explored every inch of his body. Those rainy days, she’d seen him exposed — like the inside of a flower as the petals peel away. Now her fingers seemed the phantoms of those petals, the history of his exposure in her skin. He couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t stand to go back to before her touch.

The third day, he murmured her name again and again, for a moment forgetting when he’d done the same with his birth mother’s name, in the woods. For a moment Katka was the only Katka there. No distortions in the closet, no ghosts.

The third day of the coma, as he and Rockefeller left the hospital, Rockefeller said, “So what are you deciding?” Tee wanted to be hurt. He suggested they go for a beer. He remembered the night he’d invited Pavel and Rockefeller for drinks, with Ynez.

They went to one of the randomly numbered pubs around the city, and Tee drank quickly, tipping back Krušovice, trying to drown out all the possible harm — his head still somehow seemed more frightening than reality. They sat next to the window, and endless strangers passed by, refugees of the flood. Their dull bodies warmed under the light of streetlamps.

“What was the Revolution like?” Tee asked after the first beer.

“I knew that once,” Rockefeller said, bags under his eyes. “But now is different. Once, when Pavel saying we did nothing, we not causing Revolution, I did not believe him.”

“Now, what, you believe in fate?”

“I am believing freedom comes in end, but each of us aren’t free.”

They were silent for a minute, and Tee recalled that first evening he and Katka rushed up to his apartment in the rain, the inevitability. “You don’t have to do this,” he said.

He went for another beer. At the bar he thought about slipping out and finding a hotel that still had vacancies. How far would he have to go? He spun the coaster on the counter. When he looked up, Rockefeller was there.

“I have to,” Rockefeller said. “Please leave.”

Tee couldn’t let Katka die without him, though — even his father had claimed that right of his birth mother. Rockefeller ordered a slivovice. Tee’s breaths shortened. He sucked through the foam on his beer.

When Tee said there was a choice, Rockefeller said, “I chosen Pavel.”

With the third beer, Tee realized Rockefeller’s resolve was never going to soften. Tension rolled like a ball, hard and smooth, through his shoulders. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I have to do something before the end.” Rockefeller thudded his empty glass on the table and sighed. As they left the bar, Tee heard a man say one of the seals from the zoo had managed to swim to Western Europe. But once there, it had died of exhaustion.