Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

They walked through Vinohrady into New Town, nursing a bottle of Becherovka they bought at a convenience store. Rockefeller trailed slightly behind, as if he might attack at any moment. Tee wanted to ask for a little longer, at least, but he didn’t dare. The sun set quickly. The alcohol tasted like pine trees. “Christmasy,” he said, recalling the drink from New Year’s.

Rockefeller’s shadow would sometimes stretch from a streetlamp and engulf Tee’s. Six and a half feet.

By the time they reached Wenceslas Square, they’d both “pulled an elephant,” as the Czech saying went. The lights spun. They stood beside the National Museum with the wide legs of the Elysées-like boulevard below them. People still went to clubs, still talked in the streets, still made plans for tomorrows. Tee stood before a monument to the protesters who’d burned themselves. “You think they got what they wanted?” he asked. He wished to empty his container for good, return everything he’d taken, set the past on fire.

“Where we are going?” Rockefeller said. “Dark is coming soon.” He stumbled a little. He thumped his hand on Tee’s back to catch himself.

Tee stumbled, too, and turned quickly. But Rockefeller was wiping his face. Tee pretended he hadn’t forgotten to breathe. He took the bottle from Rockefeller and said he could still smell the flood.

The roads wound them into Old Town, where the fireworks had whizzed over his half-naked body and a beautiful woman had waved at him. In the square, couples sat on the benches around the statue of Jan Hus, who’d been burned at the stake as a heretic. Prague turned villains into heroes, and vice versa. “Pavel told me a joke about the presidential flag once,” Tee said. The slogan on the flag translated to “Truth will win,” but without one accent mark, it would be “Truth belongs to the winner.”

“Why you are staying here?” Rockefeller said, taking back the bottle.

“You were my friend,” Tee said. Was.

When they came to the front of the Rudolfinum, Tee turned left along the river. He kept feeling objects hurtling at his back. He resisted the urge to duck. He pictured Katka in the nothingness of her coma, searching for a way out. Did she hear him and her mother and Pavel and Rockefeller outside?

Rockefeller muttered loudly to himself. The sky was dark and the streetlamps seemed to get brighter and brighter. The scent of sewage and cleaning missions clung to the air. Tee coughed, his throat sore with chlorine. If only the river had been chlorinated earlier. Ahead was the Charles Bridge. The swollen Vltava roared. Several mechanical cranes perched on the bridge. One of them dipped into the river and fished out a tree trunk, and someone clapped.

Tee walked under the Old Town bridge tower and over the water. Both sides of the bridge were lined with statues. He recognized St. Jan of Nepomuk by the oiled bronze of the plaque, well worn by superstitious hands, by the drawing Katka had done for him during the flood. Rockefeller tipped back the Becherovka, and Tee ran to rub the saint who promised to return him to Prague. When he reached the statue, though, he wanted more than a return. He felt the smooth plaque under his hand. The river swept below. He pulled himself up as if Katka was still in her tree above and Rockefeller still at the bottom.

“What you are doing?” Rockefeller said. “You are tourist after all.”

Tee heard the murmur of bystanders. He balanced on the lower tier of the statue and tried to reach higher, away from the chorus. “You touch him and you always come back. He’s the saint of swimmers.”

“Is only legend,” Rockefeller said. “And is not to climb.” He tugged Tee’s pant leg. He said the Church had de-sainted Jan. The tongue from the Vltava had only been a piece of brain, maybe not related, and the murder had been political.

“That can’t be true,” Tee said, but Rockefeller had no reason to lie. The hair at the peak of Rockefeller’s head was starting to fall out and it stuck up as if he were too tall even for mirrors. One big hand wrapped around Tee’s ankle. The throng on the bridge clamored. “Now,” Tee said. “Do it now. Drown me.”

The water below was dark and loud. Rockefeller’s other hand clasped Tee’s back. Tee imagined haunting the river after his death, calling people back to Prague. He sucked in air and prepared for eternal swimming. But Rockefeller was pulling him down, not pushing him over. Tee tried for a second longer to cling to the statue, to stay up, to start to fall. Rockefeller was too strong.

On the bridge Tee steadied himself, then walked quickly away as he heard cheers. They thought he had been rescued. He snatched the bottle off of the wall, where Rockefeller had left it, steadied himself again, and took a long pull. Rockefeller followed and drank with him.

Tee slumped onto one of the benches and wept.

In Boston, in the rehabilitation center, Tee would try to figure out what had happened to him. From an article in the Prague Post , he learned that Rockefeller was in jail — described as “a former proponent of the Velvet Revolution whose parents are suspected Communists.” Pavel’s new series of paintings made its way to New York, but Tee didn’t care to see the “groundbreaking” works.

As his balance improved, he was cleared for a day out. His parents took him to the Cape for the afternoon, as they used to do when he was little. He walked along the beach and remembered colliding with a random white kid as they both ran for a seagull. The boy had started to cry, and the boy’s father had come up and demanded to know where Tee’s parents were. Tee had pointed at his parents at the top of the beach, but the man hadn’t believed him. The man had scanned the crowd, and then had seemed suddenly to pity Tee. He had shouted for his son to follow, and had turned away. The boy called Tee a Chink as he took off. Tee had made his way back to his parents and had asked them why the man didn’t believe him. His parents could have told him then, perhaps, about his birth mother, but his father had given the old sticks and stones line instead.

What had that pity been? Had the man recognized the similarity between his father and him, and seen no mother? Or was their skin color enough that the man couldn’t see the similarity at all?

A conch shell glinted on the beach, and Tee reached for it and toppled into the water. His mother rushed in and pulled him out. She said the Cape might not have been the best idea.

Back in the rehab center, Tee sat in the library and tried to hear the twanging he’d heard before, to call the ghost woman to him with his imagination. The door opened. It was the man with the old war wound. When the man asked what he was doing, Tee decided to tell him the truth. The man said he often saw people. He’d even learned to accept it when they shot at him, to imagine the bullets passed right through, though really, they lodged in his guts and jiggled like coins as he walked. And then, as if that had conjured her, the woman glowed past the door, her nose small and her cheeks like a short cliff dropping down to the pool of her mouth. Tee thanked the man, and ran after her. “Katka,” he called, but as his voice trembled and his legs held steady for once, he knew it wasn’t her.

That night on the Charles Bridge, the last moments Tee could remember in Prague, he had cried on the bench and Rockefeller had rested a hand on his shoulder. Then Tee had either blacked out, or the force of the impact had blacked him out. He remembered Rockefeller’s hand, flashes of a Czech hospital, not the one Katka was in, his father’s ear against his chest, the long flight home. He imagined what Rockefeller had been thinking. At some point Rockefeller had understood that his promise could not be undone. Maybe as they drank too much and pitied themselves, Tee said that Rockefeller was a fraud, never a friend to Pavel or him or anyone. Or maybe Pavel called and asked if it was over, or called about Katka. Rockefeller swigged the Becherovka, and as he brought his hand down, he saw how easy it could be, and he surprised himself by cracking the bottle over the back of Tee’s head.