Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

Once Tee lay still, Rockefeller remembered the graveyard. Now he was the attacker, the Americans. He poured the rest of the alcohol on Tee’s face to wake him. He shook Tee before noticing the slack neck, the head rattling. He was unable to take it back. He searched for Tee’s cell. When he turned it on, missed calls flashed by. He pressed the call button over the first person on the list, the last person Tee had called, his father, and said Tee was hurt, badly, without explaining why or how.

Then he called emergency. Or did he call emergency first, even before thinking through the consequences? That when they saw the body, they would know what he’d done. They knew bodies, the language of bruises and cuts and attempted murder. The doctor would know, as soon as they got to the hospital. Rockefeller might have to tell them himself, to give Tee the best shot of waking quickly. Rockefeller pictured the café never finished, but even if he was the type of person who could attack Tee, he couldn’t leave Tee in the aftermath.

The ambulance arrived, and the paramedics lifted Tee onto the stretcher, as Katka had been lifted. The moon yawned through the clouds for an instant and disappeared again. Rockefeller got into the front seat, feeling sorry for himself. Maybe on the way, the medics recognized the signs of an assault and called the police. When the ambulance arrived at the hospital, a squad car waited. Rockefeller gave up then, or thought that if he accepted his punishment, he wouldn’t be such a monster. Or he even tried to tell them he had found Tee like this. Maybe he took responsibility only at the last moment, since Pavel would not be satisfied if the injury was an accident.

Rockefeller gave his statement, not fumbling his words, not blaming Pavel, and the policemen guided him to the car. He turned and bowed his head, and they slapped the cuffs on him. They might even have said he did the noble thing, taking Tee to the hospital instead of running away. He needed to hear this: he needed to know he wasn’t the Secret Police of his youth, as he had always carried the guilt of his parents’ politics and the guilt of sending them away. He had always wanted forgiveness even more than freedom.

Tee’s father hopped the first flight out. He arrived in Prague in the morning and filed charges before taking his son home.

In the rehab center, Tee wrote and wrote. Sometimes he would imagine a library fished from the flood, ruined books that only had meaning for the people who’d lost them. He would try to rewrite the stories he’d scribbled in the margins of those novels from the Globe, but he would grow so tired trying to remember that he would fall asleep with the typewriter on his lap. He would leave memory behind for dreams. The pages he wrote turned increasingly to his father in Korea. The sun and the sand and the spa. His father waiting for his birth mother to appear at lunch and lift his hand to her belly. When she started showing, had his father denied Tee was his? His father was always a coward. Yet Tee had reason to believe his birth mother had made his father brave. His father had brought Tee back to Boston, saving a Polaroid of her for her son. He had kept her image beside him, as present in Tee’s face as a never-ending film, as a story told and retold.

In the rehabilitation center, Tee took care to protect his head, to rest if he felt tired. Time was less like a locked house. He remembered what day it was, and that days passed in a line. For the most part, his parents, too, seemed to let time pass. They had quit complaining about each other, whether for his sake or their own. His aunt, his father said, was getting genuine psychiatric help. Tee was learning not to draw attention to his psychoses. He could make his past appear before him, but at least his visions never spoke, or hurt anyone.

The Monday the rehab center finally released him, his parents took him to dinner. He suggested the fortune-telling restaurant in Chinatown, only it had gone out of business. They ended up down the street at a Thai place. They sat under a mounted sailfish and discussed Tee’s future. He would stay with his mother until the house sold. His father had bought an apartment in Somerville. His mother had her new job and exercise program and even new habits — she rolled her shoulders now, whenever Tee said something that gave her pause. His father had finally given up on Hollywood. Tee would go back to school next fall. As they told him how much they loved him, he wondered where all the desperation of the past year had gone, as if he were the only one who recalled the film and the divorce and Prague. His father cupped Tee’s cheek like a puppy’s. His mother brought out a cake and lit candles. Tee’s container filled — for a moment, he couldn’t tell where he was. He saw the shadows on Katka’s face as she was dying, or in the darkness of the flood, or perhaps in a dream, and he remembered the feeling just before he fell out of her tree, that she had something more to say.

Back in his childhood home, Tee found The Giving Tree on a bookshelf in his mother’s bedroom. She still had her favorite children’s books there, ones they had shared when Tee was a boy. His mother, Katka’s father. What was it about this tree that made it a parental favorite? Katka had given Tee everything — her apples, her branches, her trunk — in only a few short months. He missed her with a cinching pain in his lungs.

At the end of the story, the boy the tree loves is an old man, and the tree is a stump. The man uses up everything, both the tree and himself, on a life the reader never sees. Tee put the book back on its shelf. In his bedroom, he stapled a line of yarn to the floor to keep practicing his balance. Online, he would find a list of symptoms common to head trauma: poor memory, poor attention to detail, poor decision-making, impulsiveness, disorientation, language problems, inability to understand when spoken to. How many of these symptoms had already been his before the flood?

Each time Tee went over to his father’s apartment, he wondered if he might find the walls covered in drawings again. But somehow his father had figured out how to stop his fixations. His father would ask what Tee was writing — and Tee admitted that he was writing fiction, that he had to change his story to have any hope of figuring out what it was.

It was the Sunday after his release, Tee would remember, that his father dropped two manila folders on the coffee table between them. Tee felt something about to float through the door. In the first folder was a thick stack of paper. “Thank you for letting me read your stories,” his father said. “But I want to know the truth. Can you tell me what really happened to you in Prague?”

Tee said as far as he knew, he’d gotten a head wound and ended up back in Boston.

“I’ve been receiving something in the mail,” his father said after a moment. In the second folder were two envelopes addressed from Prague.

Immediately Tee could smell rain. He asked what was in the envelopes, who had sent them. Then he took a deep breath. “Katka,” he said mostly to himself, “is dead.”

His father raised an eyebrow. “They’re letters from the guy who did this to you. Rockefeller. His English isn’t great. I was going to wait to show them to you, but your mom didn’t want me to hide anything.”

“Is Katka dead?” Tee asked.

“You’d better look for yourself.”

Tee fingered the slits from the letter opener. The envelopes were addressed to his father. How had Rockefeller found the address? Pavel must have found it on the Internet.

Tee opened the first letter and read slowly. Rockefeller apologized. Can I saying sorry? he wrote. I was too much into my head. I didn’t see I was doing wrong. He thanked Tee’s father for flying on short notice. In the first letter, Katka was still alive, still in her coma, fighting the bacteria. Tee started planning to return. In the second letter, she slipped away. Rockefeller said Pavel was painting her one final time, and despite their anger, Tee should see the painting; Pavel and Tee should forgive each other. The letter was dated eight days earlier.